A Combined Study Of English Cataphora And Its Translation: From Cognitive And Function Perspectives

Personal reference is widely used in communication and plays an important part in discourse cohesion. Thus it receives more and more attention both at home and abroad. Cataphora is the marked equivalent of anaphora. There is even a dispute on whether there is cataphora. Restricting the study into sentence and affirming there is cataphora, this paper applies van Hoek's theory and offers a combined analysis on cataphora from perspectives of syntactic, functional and cognitive. From the study, we find: 1) The left cataphoric clause in both English and Chinese simple and complex sentences has a same function, which is that this clause acts as a background clause to the whole sentence. 2) When translated into Chinese, the original cataphoric pattern (P+N) results in some changes, with some sentences translated into anaphora and some other into cataphora. In all, there are 8 patterns of referential relationship in Chinese versions. When coreferencial relationship is broken in the process of translation, some adjustments are made. These findings exert great influence on contrastive linguistics and translation.The conclusions are based on a data of 72 cataphoric sentences, collected from 3 English novels, and their Chinese versions. The English sentences are, according to syntactic structure, first divided into simple and complex sentences, the latter further divided according to referential relationship between the clauses. The functional analysis of cataphora is based on English examples and their Chinese versions. In Chinese versions, we summarize 8 patterns of referential relationship for the original P+N pattern, which are P+N,N+P,N+(?),(?)+N,P+P,N+N,P+(?),N. Detailed analysis is offered explaining various reasons for these changes. In this paper, 5 are summarized. They are: 1) The effect of Europeanization in modern Chinese: In ancient Chinese, there was no 'real' third personal pronoun. With the rising of Europeanization, more and more writers and translators accept pronouns; 2) Subject-prominence vs topic-prominence: English is a subject-prominent language while Chinese is a topic-prominent language. There is a topic chain in Chinese. These different characteristics justify the different frequency of zero pronouns in English and Chinese; 3) Repetition of full nouns in Chinese and English: Reference and substitution tends to be frequently used in English, whereas repetition is more likely to be used in Chinese; 4) Possessive pronouns in Chinese and English: English is a language that attaches much importance to parataxis, while Chinese is a relatively hypotaxis language. The Chinese characters can express meanings through their hieroglyphic features and Chinese grammar is quite flexible. As such the pronouns, especially possessives, are often omitted in Chinese; 5) Discourse context of the cataphoric sentence: Whether a sentence is at the beginning or in the middle of a paragraph has much to do with co-reference pattern. When we translate English cataphoric sentences into Chinese, we need to pay close attention to the discourse context, which calls for frequent adjustments in co-reference relationship.