A Contrastive Study Of Four Types Of Reference In The Use Between English Orations And Their Chinese Translations

Text analysis, as an effective way of linguistic study, has received growing attention from linguists and flourished ever since. Halliday&Hasan's theory of cohesion (1976), the most representative achievement in this field, gives a detailed and sufficient account of the English cohesive devices including reference, and has thus aroused a keen interest in cohesion. Reference, as an important type of cohesive devices, refers to the relationship between certain items in a language which can only be interpreted by reference to something else. Reference is of high research value in that it plays a vital role in realizing text coherence and passage transition and makes expression concise and precise.It is noteworthy that most of the contrastive text analyses were conducted on text in its broad sense, and there were few studies applying the theory of text analysis to a specific genre of language. Besides, studies in this field prefer employing written language as their primary analysis material rather than spoken language, so the results acquired in the previous studies need to be further confirmed by the other types of texts. Oration, as an important communication way, is playing more and more significant role whether in the daily life or international communication. The present study attempts to use oratorical texts as the data, in the hope that its dual characteristics of both written and spoken modes may help reveal as many differences between English and Chinese as possible, which is a beneficial try to apply the fruits of text linguistics into the researches on translation and stylistic. Besides, in the translation class, what the students usually translate is restricted in the broad sense of texts, while the oratorical and the other high level text translations are great challenges for them. The present study chooses the oratorical texts in order to attract more attention to the high level texts in translation teaching and practice.The author firstly chose 20 texts of English orations and 20 their Chinese translations from the one book. Then, based on Halliday & Hasan's cohesion theory and Xu Yulong's quantitative textual contrastive analysis method, the thesis uses oratorical text to conduct a contrastive analysis of the English and Chinese reference systems. The results show there are many differences of the reference devices in the number, usage and frequency between English orations and their Chinese translations. Generally speaking, there are much more reference items in English texts than those in Chinese. Although its occurrence numbers are very small, reference in Chinese is very flexible and is always realized by zero reference or repetition. The other findings are: (1) the first and second person forms are more frequently used than the third person forms. Personal references tend to be used exphorically rather than endophorically; (2) there is no significant difference in the use of third personals between English oratorical texts and their Chinese translations;( 3) there is great difference in the use of demonstrative reference between English oratorical texts and their Chinese translations. There exists no simple one-to-one correspondence between this/that and"这"/"那", since the definite article"the"in English has no equivalent in Chinese. Chinese near demonstrative"这"has a much greater functional load than the English near"this"and at least some of the functions performed by"that"in English in referring to something distant are realized in Chinese by the near demonstrative"这". There is no one–to-one correspondence between"this/that"and"这/那";(4) the difference in comparative reference between English and Chinese lies in particular comparison. Particular comparison in English is realized through comparative degrees of adjectives and adverbs, while Chinese usually realized through adding or deleting words to express the same meaning; (5) there is significant difference in the zero reference between English orations and their Chinese translations. The most frequently occurring of personal pronoun and the topic chain in English are always appeared in the forms of zero personal in Chinese.