A Comparative Study On Distribution Of English And Chinese Accessibility Markers

Accessibility is a notion of cognitive psycholinguistics, which refers to the degree of promptness to recalling a linguistic unit from the human memory system in production an understanding of discourse. Referring expressions in linguistics refer to concrete or abstract entity noun phrase, which considering someone, thing, viewpoint and so on in discourse. However, Ariel (1990) thought the speaker or the author use different kinds of referring expressions in discourse, vital function then is identifies the different accessibility of referred entity. Therefore, referring expressions are accessibility markers for their functions in discourse.Accessibility of referring expression is always a hot point in linguistics. In current national accessibility research, the study about comparative distribution of English and Chinese accessibility markers is relatively less. While English and Chinese have at their disposal more or less the same devices for referring expressions in discourse, both languages display different preference over the choice, frequency and accessible of certain devices in the same contexts.According to Ariel (1990), the accessible of referring expressions can be classified briefly into three scales as the high, intermediate and low ones. English referential markers fall into three types, namely pronouns, demonstratives and proper names. Chinese referential markers fall into four types, namely pronouns, demonstratives, proper names and zero pronouns, for zero pronouns is a very frequently used type of referential markers in Chinese.This dissertation takes referring expressions as the object for study and proceeds with retrospect on some influential theories. On this basis, a framework has been constructed with the modern cognitive theories of Accessibility. For the sake of different referring expressions distribution, 16 proses are collected as database for the following analyses on referring expressions in English and Chinese. On the ground of the qualitatively statistical analyses, many similarities as well as disparities have been located. The similarity is: proper names are low accessibility markers both in English and Chinese proses. The disparities are: (1) pronouns are high accessibility markers in English proses, while in Chinese, zero pronouns and pronouns used in contexts without referring word interval are high accessibility markers. (2) Demonstratives are intermediate accessibility markers in English proses, while in Chinese, demonstratives and pronouns used in contexts with referring word interval are intermediate accessibility markers.