A Study On Temporal Anaphora In Chinese Embedded Clause And Narrative Mode

This dissertation is about temporal anaphora, and more specifically temporal anaphora inMandarin Chinese. We conduct an empirical study on temporal anaphora in MandarinChinese, based on the Discourse Modes Theory proposed by Carlota S. Smith, and otherrelevant theories. In our study we use a fusion of native speaker intuition and evidencefrom the data of Mandarin Chinese. The dissertation systematically analyzes theexpressions of temporal anaphora in Mandarin Chinese so as to testify the importance oftemporal anaphora as a conveying mechanism of temporal information in Chinesediscourse. The analyses are based on the combination of natural language data and theintuition of the researcher. The majority of the linguistic data come from the natural writtenChinese, including24modern Chinese novels, and the rest are introspective data of theresearcher. In the first part of the dissertation, we introduced the Temporal AnaphoricTheory and its development, and we also spent a large space on Discourse Modes Theory.The main part of the dissertation consists of two cases of empirical studies on temporalanaphora in Chinese, that is, analyses on temporal anaphora in complex structure and indiscourse context. With regard to the former subject, we take the embedded clause of theverb of attitude in Chinese as example, reaching to a conclusion that in Chinese thetemporal interpretation of the embedded clause is determined by several factors such as thetemporal location of the matrix event, the situation types of the main verbs, the logicaldomains of the temporal functional words and the contextual temporal information. As forthe second subject, we examined the Narrative mode in Chinese specifically and found thattemporal anaphora in Chinese discourse is expressed in different linguistics componentsand structures, such as the temporal control domain of temporal adverbials, anaphoricchains, anaphoric conjunctions and discourse endpoints. Another finding is that ondifferent linguistic levels, the degree of activeness with different temporal factors varies:the lower the level is, the more active the temporal factors are; and vice versa.