A Contrastive Study Of Backwards Anaphora In English And Chinese

In this dissertation, a contrastive study of backwards anaphora in English and Chinese texts is conducted at three major levels, i.e., clause-internal, inter-clauses, and discourse levels, with a view to casting light on the characteristics of both languages and providing some useful insights into some real problems in certain areas of language use, translation in particular.The theoretical frame of the research paper relies on a pattern of three-level theoretical support, namely,"linguistics—contrastive linguistics and translation theory—translating practice". This paper is set on the basis of van Hoek's "reference point model" Theory to bring into full play the classification of backwards anaphora suggested by Professor Xu Yulong (2004), with Zhaohong and Shao Zhihong's(2002) theory of backwards anaphora employed as an important reference.The contrastive study shows that English and Chinese differ at sentential level backwards anaphora while they share similarities at discourse level. Genuine backwards anaphora can be found at sentential level in English working as focus device to make the pronoun peripheral and introduce new referent. The prototypical backwards anaphora at sentential level in English consists of a possessive pronoun anteceded by a full noun phrase in subject position. In drastic contrast to the 61% of the prototypes in English corpus, only 0.8% examples in Chinese corpus share the same backwards structure. And it is noted that in Chinese the discourse level backwards anaphora consists of titles and subtitles takes the largest share, which amount to nearly 88% of the corpus. What is striking to note is that no genuine backwards anaphora exists in sentential level Chinese when the proposed pronoun can find its antecedent in the previous context rather than the full nominal following it.The research paper further puts forward some theoretical explanations concerning the differences of backwards anaphora between the two languages and disclose the tendency in their practical uses. Four ways of handling intertranslation are proposed: (a) to keep the backwards anaphora; (b) to use forward anaphora; (c) to use zero forms and (d) to replace backwards pronoun with repeated identification or antecedent with repeated pronoun.