A Contrastive Study Of Anaphora In English And Chinese Narrative Discourses

Anaphora is an important cohesive device to maintain coherence in both spoken and written language. It has been one of the hottest topics in linguistics as well as in other fields such as philosophy, artificial intelligence, machine translation and so on. During the long history of the study of anaphora, many scholars have done researches both theoretically and empirically. However, we have found few contrastive studies among the uses of anaphora in English narrative discourses produced by native English speakers and Chinese EFL learners, and in Chinese narrative discourses produced by native Chinese speakers, whereas such a kind of contrastive study will be helpful both in EFL teaching and EFL learning. So the author attempts to do a contrastive study of anaphora used by native English speakers, Chinese EFL learners and native Chinese speakers.The aim of this thesis is to present the similarities and differences of the uses of anaphora used in narrative discourses produced by native English speakers, Chinese EFL learners and native Chinese speakers, and help Chinese EFL learners understand and use anaphora better in their production of discourses. As anaphora is one of the major cohesive devices to establish coherence in discourse, and cohesion is widely considered as an important source of text coherence, the author will do this research in the theoretical framework of cohesion and coherence.The materials in this research are 400 narrative discourses. 100 narrative discourses are produced in English by native English speakers. 200 narrative discourses are produced in English by 200 Chinese EFL learners in which 100 are high proficiency level learners and 100 are low proficiency level learners. The other 100 narrative discourses are produced in Chinese by native Chinese speakers.In this research, the author compares the uses of nominal, pronominal and zero anaphora in the three groups of discourses respectively and then work out the percentages of the three kinds of anaphora and their sub-categories. By significance testing of percentage difference, the author can draw the following...