An Analysis Of Chinese Noun Anaphora Based On Accessibility Theory

This dissertation investigated accessibility of Chinese noun anaphora on the theoretical basis of Accessibility Theory proposed by Israel linguist Mira Ariel (1990). The"accessibility"is a psychological concept and at the same time a characteristic of noun phrase. This characteristic is not decided by syntactic position of the noun phrase but by linguistic form of it. When a writer wants to refer to an entity, he may choose one referential expression to show how easy or difficult to access that entity. In different languages, the accessibility expressed by referential expression is universal (Sheng, 1998). Since Ariel (1988, 1990) published the Accessibility Theory, this theory has been drawn more and more attentions and has been applied to different language research.Anaphora is always a hot topic in linguistics. Anaphora in Chinese context is classified to zero, pronoun and noun anaphora (Chen, 1987). The zero anaphora shows no visible linguistic form; pronoun is a limited set in its lexical expressions; noun has limitless expression in linguistic forms. In present national anaphora research, the study about Chinese is relatively less; within Chinese anaphora research, noun anaphora is a rather neglected area. Previous Chinese noun anaphora researches were mostly restrained to syntactic forms of noun anaphors, this dissertation, in contrast to these previous researches, studied nominal anaphora from a cognitive aspect.In this dissertation, the Chinese noun anaphors were firstly classified into direct repetition, partial repetition, synonym, general word and figure of speech by their linguistic forms and semantic meaning. Next, referring to related experiments and Xu's (2004:18) accessibility marking principle, an accessibility marking scale of Chinese noun anaphora was hypothesized: direct repetition > partial repetition>synonym>general word>figure of speech. Based on this scale, four hypotheses were put forward. In order to test these hypotheses, 18 Chinese satiric articles were selected out as the experimental data. By calculating noun distribution in this database, part of the accessibility marking scale was confirmed. The degree of accessibility in meaning category: synonym>general word>figure of speech, and the degree of accessibility in form category; direct repetition>partial repetition, were confirmed respectively in distance level. In composite distance level, all marking scale was verified. But in syntactic position and inanimacy/animacy of antecedent categories, no valuable findings were got. This study was just a preliminary step in noun anaphora research. Owing to small size of sample, more researches are necessary to further confirm the findings in this dissertation.