A Comparative Study Of The Deictic Usage Of THAT In Moment In Peking And Its Chinese Counterpart

In recent decades, the basic unit that linguistic study mainly concerns has shifted from sentence to text. Cohesion is one of the linguistic approaches that can express the property of a passage "being a text", not a disconnected sequence of sentences. Reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion are five types of the cohesive relations classified by Halliday and Hasan. As one type of reference cohesion, demonstratives have been the study focus of many Chinese scholars and foreign linguists. However, the study of one certain usage of the singular demonstrative in literary works is extremely rare at home. Therefore, in this thesis, we will study the deictic usage of THAT from the perspective of grammatical cohesion based on the demonstrative reference model in Cohesion in English.Moment in Peking is famous for Lin Yutang's fluent and exquisite expression in English. It got a worldwide popularity after the first publication, and it made Lin the candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975. Up till now this novel still has great vitality, inviting more and more professional people's study and research. Therefore, we choose Moment in Peking and its Chinese version Jing Hua Yan Yun as the language material in this research.Based on a review of previous studies on cohesion and THAT, this thesis carries out a quantitative and qualitative study of the deictic usage of THAT used as a cohesive device in Moment in Peking and its counterpart in the Chinese version Jing Hua Yan Yun. Quantitative research is used to find out the distribution and occurrence of THAT with the deictic usage in Moment in Peking and its translation in the Chinese version Jing Hua Yan Yun. Qualitative research is undertaken to analyze examples in concrete types of THAT performing the deictic function.Detailed analysis leads to the following three findings. Firstly, THAT can be used as a cataphora referring to its referent in the following part of the text when it cames out the deictic function. Secondly, at the textual level, there are two kinds of similarities between THAT and its Chinese counterpart "é‚£". Thirdly, three types of differences exist between THAT and its relevant Chinese translation. Eventually, we conclude that English is hypotaxis-prominent but Chinese is parataxis-prominent may be the possible reason leading to the above differences between THAT and its Chinese translation used as a cohesive device over sentences.On one hand, findings of the study may provide some valuable supplements to the comparative linguistics. On the other hand, the remaining questions in this thesis may also shed lights on the further study of THAT.