A Contrastive Analysis Of Personal Reference In English And Chinese Narrative Texts

Reference is one of the most concerned topics both in philosophy and in linguistics. In semantics and philosophy, reference means the relation between a name or other referring expression and its referent, although sometimes the term is used for the referent itself. Philosophical problems arise over how expression can point beyond themselves to their referents or be about something. This phenomenon also arouses the interests of linguists from different fields such as semantics, syntax, pragmatics and cognition as well. Their theories are powerful in explaining some referential expressions, but they all manifest some disadvantages in one way or another. Briefly, philosophers are mainly concerned with the relationship between the linguistic entity and its equivalent object in the real world, and seldom meditate the referring relations between items within language. Chomsky's theory depends too much on formalism, and ignores the communicative function of languages. Pragmatic inference can not be formalized purely with several rigid rules as Levinson claims because many other factors have to be taken into account, such as context, knowledge-based inference. Cognitive linguists studies referring expressions from the viewpoint of psychology. But the models of cognitive study mostly emphasize the research of isolated entities: a sentence. McCarthy and Carter (qtd. in Xu Jiujiu, 2003) believe that "the moment one starts to think of language as discourse, the entire landscape changes, usually, forever". The systemic functional linguists, Halliday and Hasan (1976) investigate reference right this way. They regard it as a cohesive tie in language. Their point of view has great impact on the research of the category both at home and abroad. The present thesis just focuses on personal reference, as it is the mostfrequently used one in comparison with other types of reference. It is of high research value in that it plays a vital role in realizing text coherence and passage transition and in making expression concise and precise. In the decades of years after the theory was introduced to China, many Chinese language researchers (Lu Shuxiangl979; Wang Li 1985; Liao Qiuzhongl986; Chen Pingl987; Hu Zhuanglinl994;Zhu Dexi 1999; Xu Jiujiu 2003) devote themselves to the study of personal reference, and have made great achievements. But it is noteworthy that most of the research is concerned with the theoretical development itself, rather than the application of the theory to empirical analysis. Besides, their studies are conducted on texts in its broad sense, and there are few studies applying the cohesive theory to a specific genre of language. The present study attempts to make a contrastive analysis of English and Chinese personal reference in a special type of literary genre: narration, because of its rich adoption of personal referential expressions. At the beginning of the thesis, a systematic study is done on the definition of reference (or anaphora in some theories). Then a literature review is made by introducing different approaches of research on personal reference, and some comments are also given. In the following empirical analysis, we collect eight famous novels written in English and their Chinese renderings for the convenience of statistical analysis. To ensure the randomness and comparability of the choice of the data, 4000-4500 words are chosen in each novel. Through a detailed statistical analysis of personal pronouns, reflexives, zero reference and relative pronouns, we find that personal reference in English and Chinese differ a lot in property, frequency and usage. (1) The most prominent difference is that on a whole personal pronouns are not so frequently used in Chinese as in English. (2) As for reflexives, the two languages have significant difference in frequency of occurrence and distribution. (3)There are some other important devices closely related to personal reference that writers always adopt in sentences' continuity. Chinese writers tend to use noun phrases so as to avoid the ambiguity caused byfrequent changes of topics. (4)In addition, zero reference (or zero anaphora) is quite common in Chinese, but rarely seen in English. (5) In English, there is also a unique device concerning personal reference—relative pronouns, which is a compensatory device in English for conciseness. This thesis also attempts to explore the reasons that lead to these differences. Firstly, those differences are closely related to the characteristics that Chinese language is paratactic and English language is basically hypotactic in nature. Secondly, Chinese is grammatically a topic-prominent language, which makes the use of zero reference possible while English is a subject-prominent language and subject is closely bound to the predicate by various grammatical constraints. Thirdly, English and Chinese have their own devices indicating personal references to cater to their features respectively and display their unique feature in one way or another.This is only a micro research on personal reference in English and Chinese narrative texts. We hope that it will contribute to the English and Chinese learning, especially to the training of translators.