A Contrastive Analysis Of Personal Reference In English Narrative Fictions And Scientific Writings

Since the publication of Halliday and Hasan's Cohesion in English(1976),many researches have been done on cohesion theory.In Cohesion in English(1976),Halliday proposed the concept of texture.Cohesive ties are part of texture forming component in the linguistic system.Cohesive ties consist of reference,substitution,ellipsis,conjunctions and lexical cohesion.In the system of reference,personal reference has been used most.Based on cohesion theory and corpus linguistics,this thesis devoted to the contrastive analysis of personal references in English narrative fictions and scientific writings,trying to find out different usage features of personal references in these two types of writings,and the reasons lying behind.Corpus-based quantitative and contrastive analysis is the main research method being adopted.Statistics show that personal references are largely being used in English narrative fictions.In English narrative fictions,the third person references as a whole is being used mostly,next are the first person references and second person references. Compared with personal pronouns and possessive determiners,possessive pronouns are rarely being used.Among all the personal references,the third person pronoun he ranks at the first place.The general human indicating reference one and its possessive determiner one's are least being used.While in the scientific writings,because of their unique style,vocabulary and grammar features,personal references are being used not that much.Among all the personal references in scientific writings,the most frequently being used items are the non-human-indicating third person references it and its.And the female-indicating third person referencesshe,her and hers are being rarely used.