English'Referring It'and Its Chinese Realizations

Starting from a contrastive study of the respective roles of English 'referring it' and its Chinese counterpart 'ta (它)', this thesis aims to discover how the English 'referring it' is realized in Chinese and to find out the factors that influence the choice of its realizations. Through our study, we have found that it can be realized not only as'ta (它)' but also as some other forms, namely, '(?)', 'zhe (这) / na (那) ', '(?) + NP',and 'zhe (这) / na (那) + NP'. In terms of types of cohesion, it is of personal reference while its Chinese realizations cover personal reference, demonstrative reference, and lexical cohesion. This shows that English and Chinese somewhat differ in their referring systems and the corresponding referring words in the respective systems are not identical in meaning and usage.Based on Ariel's Accessibility theory, this thesis probes into the degree of accessibility of the various Chinese realizations of 'referring it' in an attempt to find out the factors that determine or influence their choice. We find that in terms of the degree of accessibility, it is fixed, while its Chinese realizations vary from one form to another.Among all the types of the Chinese realizations of 'referring it', '(?)' possesses the highest degree of accessibility. Even though 'ta (它)' is also a high accessibility marker, it is lower than '(?)' in the accessibility degree for it is larger than '(?)' inphonological size (attenuation). The employment of 'zhe (这)' or 'na (那)' as the realization of it is heavily influenced by the textual or psychological factors.Relatively speaking, '(?) + NP' and 'zhe (这) / na (那) + NP' have the lowest degree inaccessibility among all.Base on the above discussion, an attempt is also made to see how the findings could be applied to E-C translation.