A Comparative Study On Chinese And English Accessibility Markers In Different Styles

Accessibility is a notion borrowed from psychology, which refers to the degree ofpromptness to recalling a linguistic unit from human memory system. A linguisticform is said to be accorded with a higher accessibility when it takes less mentaleffort for human beings to understand, and, conversely, it is said to have a relativelylow accessibility.Enlightened by Xu Yulong (2000b), this thesis aims at examining the Chinese andEnglish referential markers in terms of their accessibility in different styles bymaking chiefly quality analysis.The thesis is divided into seven chapters:The first chapter introduces the concept of the term "accessibility", the research donein this field, the structure and the purpose of this thesis.The second chapter briefly introduces the accessibility theory, which constitutes fourparts: accessibility and memory structure, accessibility and context, accessibilitymarking scale and the factors influencing accessibility.Chapter Three, Chapter Four, Chapter Five and Chapter Six are devoted to thecomparative study of the Chinese and English referential markers in description,narration, exposition and argumentation respectively. The model for analysis in eachof these chapters is the same: First, make classifications of the different referentialmarkers in both Chinese and English and then analyze the linguistic materials withauthoritative translations obtained (very few pieces of material without translations).English referential markers fall into four types, namely proper names, definitedescriptions, demonstratives and pronouns. Chinese referential markers fall into fivetypes, namely proper names, definite descriptions, demonstratives, pronouns andzero forms, for zero form is a very frequently used type of referential marker inChinese.Chapter seven makes conclusions about the research done in the previous chapters.