Linguistic Means Of Participant Identification In English And Chinese Narrative Discourse

Participants, as one of the three components of transitivity system, can be defined as entities in the real world which are represented in the discourse at the lexicogrammatical level. With the flow of processes in the development of discourse, a participant may be re-mentioned again and again, thus producing participant identification chains composed of linguistic expressions of first and subsequent mentions of the same participant.The present study is an empirical contrastive study of linguistic means of participant identification between English and Chinese from the perspective of discourse, trying to find out the similarity and individuality of linguistic means of participant identification of the first and subsequent mentions of the same participant in English and Chinese narrative discourse.The participants under discussion are mainly those concerned with the six types of transitivity processes. We put forward four notions in order to clarify the relationship between the content and the form of participant identification, namely, Referential Features of Participants, Positional Parameters of the Referential Features of Participants, Linguistic Means of Participant Identification and Linguistic Expressions of Participant Identification. The combination of grammatical and textual features makes up the content of participant identification. The form of participant identification can be further divided into Positional Parameters of the Referential Features of Participants, Linguistic Means of Participant Identification and Linguistic Expressions of Participant Identification. On the basis of Martin's English system of participant identification and with a certain revision and supplement, we establish 16 first-mention linguistic means of participant identification, 8 relevantly first-mention linguistic means of participant identification and 18 subsequent-mention linguistic means of participant identification.The statistics of formal equivalence rate of English and Chinese linguistic means of participant identification based on translationally equivalent corpus of narrative short novels indicate that 97% English proper nouns, pronouns and nominal groups do not change their linguistic means in their Chinese translation, and that there exist three kinds of formal nonequivalence between English and Chinese linguistic means of participant identification: 1)English nominal groups usually have articles while Chinese do not; 2)English linguistic expressions of participant identification sometimes are omitted in their Chinese translation; 3)English proper nouns, pronouns and nominal groups sometimes may change their linguistic means in their Chinese translation. Such formal nonequivalence may be caused by the divergence in English and Chinese lexicogrammar and may also be caused by the different principles that English and Chinese participant identification chains follow upon their subsequent grammatical options to identify the same participant.Contrastive analysis of the constraining principles on English and Chinese participant identification chains based on bi-directional translationally equivalent corpus of narrative short stories shows that English participant identification chains have a pronounced tendency of following the Pronominal Re-mention Principle, the Nominal Re-mention Principle and the Nominal Resumption Principle, and that they are hardly restricted by the Participant Focus Principle (first-person narrators"we"and"I"are not taken into account).These above principles impose unnoticeable restrictions on Chinese participant identification chains. We find in our research that Chinese participant identification chains follow another principle, which we call the Nominal Reference Principle, under whose constraint Chinese nouns are used to identify all the subsequent mentions of the same participant. Noticeably, however, this Nominal Reference Principle does not restrict English participant identification chains because of their tendency to follow the other two principles (the Pronominal Re-mention Principle and the Nominal Resumption Principle). We may then conclude that the Nominal Reference Principle and the Participant Focus Principle are specific principles that Chinese participant identification chains follow.