A Contrastive Study On Endophoric Reference In English And Chinese Fables

Study on cohesion and coherence of text is the important means for text analysis. Since Halliday&Hasan put forward the cohesion theory in1976, many scholars in linguistics have paid much attention to the cohesion of text and made some researches on this theory from many aspects. In the book Cohesion in English written by Halliday and Hassan, there are five types of cohesive devices, namely reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion. As one of the major cohesive devices, reference plays an important role in text coherence. At home, many scholars have tried to make some contrastive studies between English and Chinese texts from the aspect of cohesion theory. Most of these studies focus on the general contrast between English and Chinese and only a few make specific contrastive studies on these cohesive devices based on a specific literary genre. Different genres have different characteristics which may lead to the different use of cohesive devices in texts. In addition, previous studies on demonstrative reference mainly focused on the contrast of "this/that" and“这/那”,which neglects the contrast of other demonstratives between English and Chinese. According to the cohesion theory, this thesis makes a detailed contrast between the English version of Aesop The Complete Fables and its Chinese translation on reference device by means of qualitative research and quantitative research. By analyzing the similarities and differences of reference device between English and Chinese, the thesis aims to offer some referential opinions to English and Chinese teaching, writing and translation.Because exophoric reference has no use in text cohesion, the focus of the study is on endophoric reference which performs cohesive role. In the first part of the main body, the thesis makes a qualitative contrast on endophoric reference found in English and Chinese texts. In the second part, quantitative contrast is made on the frequency of endophoric reference by the use of manual counting and program calculation. Then possible reasons for the differences are explored briefly.The results show that both English and Chinese fable stories employ the three types of endophoric reference:personal reference, demonstrative reference and comparative reference. In English and Chinese personal references, there is much direct speech in the fables, so first person and second person also play an important role in cohering the texts. English can express personal reference by morphological changes, while Chinese needs to tend to the corresponding lexical means. Besides, relational pronouns in English sometimes can function as personal pronoun to perform the cohesive role. In demonstrative reference, English has definite article "the" which doesn’t exist in Chinese, so zero anaphora and“这/那”in Chinese come to function the role of "the". When referring to proximity of nearness and distance,"这/那" in Chinese is not only influenced by space and time, but also influenced by mind. Except these, demonstrative reference in English and Chinese can be coordinate with each other. In terms of comparative reference, particular comparison in English can be realized by the comparative degree of adjectives and adverbs which is not possible in Chinese, while Chinese often use some syntactic structures to achieve comparative reference. As to the frequency contrast, there is no big difference between English and Chinese comparative reference. But English has much more personal reference and demonstrative reference than Chinese. On the contrary, Chinese has more zero anaphora and repetition of nouns. On the whole, these differences are influenced by different linguistic characteristics. English belongs to morphotype of language which is hypotactic and it can express meaning by morphological changes. Chinese belongs to semantic type of language, which is paratactic and it has no abundant morphological changes. So lexical means and syntactic structures are often used for text cohesion in Chinese. Besides, different thinking models between English and Chinese determine that English is a linear type of language and Chinese is a screw type of language.