A Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Demonstratives From A Functional Perspective

The present thesis is devoted to a contrastive study of English and Chinese demonstratives from a functional perspective. As we know, semantically, this corresponds with S, both as proximal demonstratives; that corresponds with IP, both as distal demonstratives. When used as exophoric reference to indicate the concepts of space and time in the real world, this/that and ii/IP have no much difference between them. But when used as endophoric reference in text, things tend to be complicated. For example, i?can be used, sometimes, to refer to the event that has just happened, the indication of which, in English, is often realized by that, i^ can also be used by the speaker to refer to something said by his interlocutor, while in English this indication is almost always realized by that. Many linguists have noticed this phenomenon and tried to give some rules to account for this. Among them, Xu Yulong's study can be said to be a striking one, in that for the first time, the concept of psychological distance is applied in the contrastive study of English and Chinese demonstratives. To account for the above difference between English and Chinese demonstratives, his generalization is that Chinese demonstratives are more affected by psychological distance than English ones when indicating distance in text. Psychological distance, in Chinese, affects the indication of three kinds of distance: spatial, temporal and textual (here textual distance is only used in its restricted sense, that is, the distance between dialogues in text. In fact, since the three kinds of distance are made within the text, all should be viewed as under the greater category of textual distance); in English, it seems to affect the indication of future time only. Not agreeing with what Xu has found, the present thesis aims to prove that psychological distance exists in both English and Chinese demonstratives when spatial, temporal and textual distances are to be indicated. It's hard to say which language is more influenced by psychological distance. For no matter in which language, English orChinese, the function of demonstratives is always a complex problem.We will use Halliday's theory of cohesion as the theoretical foundation of our analysis. The thesis consists of five chapters.Chapter One: Introduction. Introduce the current situation of the field, point out what the thesis aims to do and its practical value.Chapter Two: A contrastive study of the systems of English and Chinese demonstratives. In this chapter, we consider how the demonstrative systems of both languages are defined in each language's traditional grammar.Chapter Three: A contrastive study of English and Chinese demonstratives from a textual perspective. In this chapter, we shift our attention to the concept of cohesion, an essential component of Halliday's theory of functional grammar, to discuss how demonstratives work in text.Chapter Four: A functional interpretation of the difference between English and Chinese demonstratives. The chapter on which most of our efforts are placed is composed of two sections. The first section is a review of Xu Yulong's contrastive study of English and Chinese demonstratives. The second section is the writer's own findings, which aims to complement and revise what Xu has found.Chapter Five: Conclusion. Summarize what we have found about the contrastive study and point out its practical value in translation and language teaching.