A Cognitive Analysis Of Personal Referential Choice In Chinese Narrative Discourses For Children

Anaphora, one of the most fundamental language phenomena, is regarded as one of the central issues,so the study of the phenomenon in English has a long history in a variety of disciplines.Researchers have analyzed anaphora phenomenon from various distinct theoretical perspectives—syntactics, semantics and pragmatics, and got the conclusion that it touches upon multi-constraints.This thesis is anchored in Ariel's accessibility theory and based on the fundamental concept of accessibility. We take an analysis about the choice of personal reference in Chinese narrative discourses for children, with the combination of qualitative and quantitative methodology, by focusing on two research questions. These two questions are how personal referential expressions are distributed in narrative discourses? What are the factors influencing the choice of personal referential expressions in a discourse?Accessibility, the psycholinguistic concept, borrowed from psychology, which refers to the relative ease or convenience of retrieving a linguistic or memory unit from the structure of memory in man's brain. According to Ariel, the degree of accessibility of a discourse entity's mental representation corresponds with its activation in man's memory and the reason why varying referring expressions are used lies in different accessibility marked to the addressee. The accessibility degree of referring expressions is determined by the three encoded principles: informativity, rigidity and attenuation. So varying referring expressions can be arranged in a marking scale whose accessibility is from low to high. Ariel summarizes four factors contributing to the assumed accessibility status of anaphoric expressions as distance, saliency, competition and unity. Afterwards, she classifies competition and saliency as the saliency of antecedent. According to Ariel, we analyze the collected data from the three factors: distance, saliency and unity. Distance is measured by the semantic units between an anaphor and its antecedent; saliency, depending on whether the antecedent is a topic or not; unity, resting on whether the antecedent and the anaphor are within the same frame, point of view or segment.Through a close observation and detailed analysis of concrete Chinese narrative discourses for children, I get the following conclusions. Firstly, in short distance environment, the choice of personal referring expressions tend to switch from lower accessibility markers to higher ones, mainly switching to zero form or pronouns; in long distance environment from higher accessibility markers to lower ones, that is, an overwhelming majority of personal referring expressions change into NP and to pronouns occasionally. Secondly, in Chinese narrative discourses for children, the shift of topic is one of the reasons that affect the accessibility of referents thus trigger the switching of personal referring expressions. The shift of topic is caused by the insertion of one or more new entities (competition), switching of time space, shift of semantic framework, which trigger the topic shift, thereupon a lower accessibility marker tends to be used. Thirdly, unity affects the choice of personal referents mainly through three channels: shift of frames, shift of point of view and segment. The choice of personal reference from frame shifting, point of view and segments without common meaning tend to change from high accessibility ones to low accessibility ones. When a pair of anaphoric forms they are in the same segment, the personal references tend to switch to high accessible referential expression form.At any rate, there is a principle working that the choice of personal reference reflects the degree of accessibility, which corresponds to different statuses within memory.