A Contrastive Analysis On Third Personal Pronoun Endophora In English Abstracts Of MA Theses In CNKI And PQDT

Endophora refers to the phenomenon that writers often make use of words or phrases to substitute previous or post antecedents. It is mainly divided into anaphora and backward anaphora/cataphora. Earliest researches on anaphora are executed by some philosophers and logicians. From 1970 s, anaphora has been a hot topic in the field of linguistics. Scholars at home and abroad try to discover approaches to anaphora identification from different perspectives of syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and cognition. Though there are some disputes on cataphora’s legality, the author proves its existence and goes further to form her steps of cataphora identification by revising what is proposed in previous researches on anaphora identification.Halliday and Hasan maintain that anaphors in most cases are played by personal pronouns. Since the comprehension of third personal pronouns and discourse is closely interconnected, to contrast the usage of endophora in English abstracts of MA theses both in China and western countries, third personal pronouns are stressed in this research. In addition to their similarities and differences, deep reasons are explored by tracing back to the Economy Principle of Language and Thought Patterns.In this research, two databases are adopted to collect English abstracts(CNKI short for China National Knowledge Infrastructure and PQDT short for Pro Quest Dissertations and Theses Full-text Database); the tool of Edit and Find in Microsoft Word is employed to mark third personal pronouns; specific steps of endophora identification are proceeded to find out antecedents of third personal pronouns; the software SPSS 17.0 is used to do quantitative analysis.Research results show that in same number of English abstracts selected from CNKI and PQDT, total frequencies of third personal pronoun endophora are not significantly different, resulting from human’s laziness and a tendency to search for Economy Principle of Language. In addition to similarity, the author discovers that there exists significant difference in antecedents of anaphors. Antecedents in CNKI are more easily identical with key words of theses. As for deep reasons, the author resorts to the divergence of thought patterns. Chinese people are inclined to a synthetic pattern and more likely to repeat key words of theses while western people are inclined to an analytic pattern and more likely to guide readers to experience the overall thesis instead of frequently mentioning key words of theses.This research can provide some implications on theoretical and practical facets. Theoretically, as a contrastive analysis, it can enrich the existing literature on third personal pronoun endophora. Practically, similarities and differences discovered can be conducive to teaching English abstracts in academic writing.