A Comparative Study Of The Reference Of The Third Person Pronouns In English,Chinese And Korean

This thesis stands at the point of view of text linguistics and bases upon the cohesion theory proposed by Halliday&Hasan, through the comparative study of third person reference in English, Chinese and Korean, tries to find out the similarities and differences of third person reference used in these three languages, and then seeks to analyze the reason of those similarities and differences. Through the comparison of the corresponding examples and some statistics of the corresponding sample texts which found in English, Chinese and Korean literature text, the author have got some main findings as follow:(1) third person reference exists in all these three languages. Among them relative to Korean, the application of third person reference in English and Chinese are more frequent, and English is the most frequent one.(2) in anaphoric reference, omission of third person reference exists in all E,C and K. But in English, it is very rare; in Chinese, it is more liable to be omitted; and in Korean, the third person reference always be omitted as possible as it can. From our sample texts, we can find that relative to English, in Chinese and Korean, possessive pronouns, accusative pronouns and nominative pronouns are more liable to be omitted or represented by other linguistic form.(3) in English, the referent that occurred again, will always use the form of substitution by third person pronouns to achieve the cohesion of text. But in Chinese and Korean, especially Korean, the direct repetition of the referent is more frequent.(4) third person cataphora is quite acceptable in English, but in Chinese and Korean, it is rarely occurred in written text, only in the case that to create some special type of writing. In C and K, third person cataphora is more likely used in spoken text.