Chinese Discourse Anaphora In Border Town

At the very beginning, anaphora interested philosophers and logicians. Since the 1970s it has become one of the major subjects for linguists of different schools. In these decades, linguists have explored this subject from different perspectives including the perspective of syntax, pragmatic and cognitive science.One of the central issues in the study of discourse anaphora is concerned with anaphoric distribution in discourse, and anaphoric distribution in discourse is a very complex phenomenon, involving, among other things, cognitive, structural and pragmatic factors that interact with each other. Recently, anaphora has been investigated from syntactic, semantic, cognitive aspects, however, all these theories and models mentioned above account for the phenomena of anaphora correctly in some aspects but none could satisfy all controversies.The thesis endeavors to investigate on the basis of accessibility, topic-continuity and neo-Gricean theory, the use of Chinese discourse anaphora in the novel Border Town within the framework of discourse approach and seeks for answers to the following questions:1.How are the different types of discourse anaphora distributed in Chinese discourses? 2. What factors contribute to the use of Chinese discourse anaphora? 3.What are the constraints on the use of Chinese discourse anaphora? Anaphoric expressions in Chinese context are classified into nominal anaphora, zero anaphora and pronominal anaphora. The results of this study indicate that the distribution of the above mentioned three types of Chinese anaphora is basically determined by their linguistic forms, linear distances, syntactic positions and intervening referents.Generally speaking, nominal anaphora mostly appears in the form of full repetition, and next comes partial repetition. Full repetition and partial repetition are considered to be high accessible markers, so they are mostly distributed in long distance in the discourse. But for synonyms, general words, and figures of speech, they are low accessible markers, so they mainly occur in short distance.As zero anaphora has no real linguistic forms, so the factor of linguistic forms is ignored. However, the other three elements still affect the distribution of zero anaphora. In the novel Border Town, zero anaphora takes the largest proportion when the linear distance between the antecedent and zero anaphora is short, the syntactic position of zero anaphora is subject, and no intervening referent intervenes between the antecedent and the anaphora.As to the distribution of pronominal anaphora, personal and demonstrative pronouns usually serve as establishment and shift of references, so they are mostly distributed in subject position, while reflexives are often used for the maintenance of references, and seldom appear in subject position but mainly in other non-important syntactic positions. In terms of linear distance and intervening referent, all of those three kinds of pronominal anaphora follow this principle:the shorter distance and fewer intervening referents, the more likely they will be distributed in the discourse.This study is expected to be of both theoretical and practical significance. On the one hand, the research in this thesis, which is conducted in the framework of discourse anaphora, will provide evidence for generalizability of the accessibility, topic continuity and neo-Gricean theory in Chinese context, which may also help to extend research perspectives. On the other hand, compared to the research of the novel Border Town from the perspective of literary criticism, the study attempts to analyze the novel and explore the distribution of Chinese anaphora from the aspect of linguistics, which will bring advantages to translation, and cross-cultural communication in the future.