A Contrastive Study On Endophoric Reference In English And Chinese Short Stories

Cohesion is one of the most concerned topics in discourse analysis, as the most important grammatical method in it, endophoric reference is not only the loader of text cohesion and coherence, but the all-round entrance to the text organization and textual interpretation. So the study on the endophoric reference could reveal the specific nature of different languages.This thesis is an attempt to explore the different use of endophoric reference in Chinese and English short stories from three perspectives, i.e. the personal reference, the demonstrative reference and the comparative reference. We first collected 100 short stories, after examining they are approximately of the same length. Second, 40 (20 Chinese and 20 English) short stories are obtained by randomly selected from these 100 short stories in order to help conduct a quantitative study. Finally, in the light of Halliday and Hasan's cohesion theory, endophoric devices selected from the 40 sample short stories are compared and analyzed.The dissertation demonstrates that there are similarities and differences between the endophoric reference in Chinese and English short stories, and it proves that there are significant differences between the mean frequencies of personal and demonstrative endophora, upon which we draw our conclusion:1. There exists a high frequency of reference in both English and Chinese short stories, yet there isn't much distinction between them in the typology of reference.2. As the English language is basically hypotactic, and Chinese has the tradition of being paratactic, the two languages have different preferences for using specific devices, that is, endophoric is more often used in English than in Chinese. The frequencies of personal pronouns and demonstrative pronouns in English are much higher than those in Chinese; zero anaphor is a unique coreference form in Chinese text, and repetition is much more used in Chinese than in English. In addition, English comparison has a morphological change while Chinese does not. At last, Halliday's proximity principle of demonstrative pronouns in English is not alwaystrue of Chinese and English.In addition, the study illustrates from one perspective the subtleties of language use in Chinese and English short stories, and it also makes some theoretical and practical contributions to the Chinese and English learning and teaching, especially to the training of translators.