A Comparative Study Of E-C Demonstrative Pronouns From The Perspective Of Discourse Reference

Demonstrative pronoun belongs to the basic category of languages and has high frequency of use both in Chinese and English.As the most original and basic means of demonstration,it is the very need to make a contrastive research of E-C demonstrative pronouns.Based on Halliday and Hasan’s cohesion theory,this thesis chooses“这/那,这些/那些”and the semantically corresponding“this/that,these/those”as the subjects of study,aiming at discussing the differences and similarities between them from the perspective of discourse reference.The author firstly chooses the news about politics, military, culture, economy, life and entertainment from the People’s Daily and the New York Times in May 2015. And after a preliminary screening and retrieval, the author selects 40 Chinese news and 40 English news which have appropriately the same length. Then the author makes a descriptive analysis about E-C demonstrative pronouns with the help of Antconc 3.2.1w. We find that the form of determiner + noun is used more frequently than it is used alone both in Chinese and English; The singular form of demonstrative pronoun is used much more frequently than its plural form both in Chinese and English. We also find that “这/那+X”is used much more complicatedly than English demonstrative pronoun; the Chinese proximal demonstrative pronoun is used much more frequently than its distal demonstrative pronoun, while which is not completely true of English; in“这/那+X”pattern, X can be a singular noun, plural noun and an uncountable noun,while “this/that” can only be used with a singular noun or an uncountable noun, and “these/those” can only be used with a plural noun.Then we compare the anaphora and cataphora functions of E-C demonstrative pronouns in detail. When comparing anaphora, we find out whether in English or Chinese discourse, the anaphora and its referent should be in the same sentence or have one or sometimes two sentences between them. And when the anaphora serves as a modifier in a sentence, the anaphora and its referent are generally in the same sentence or in the adjacent two sentences so as to keep a close discourse distance. When the anaphora serves as a head, the anaphora is usually located in the following sentence. Such a discourse distance is conducive to achieve the discourse coherence and easily to be understood because of its high availability.In English, “this/that” can be used both as cataphora and anaphora, while “这/那” can only be used as anaphora and only when combined with dashes, colons, noun phrases and other language compositions it can be used as cataphora. The E-C demonstrative pronouns can not only make the discourse coherent and cohesive, but also have unique stylistic effects in discourse. To sum up, there are mainly the following two stylistic functions: focusing function and suspending function.In the communication activities, the addresser depends on several factors to decide on which demonstrative pronoun is appropriate. Finally, we can conclude the distance concept expressed by the English demonstrative pronoun is much more in line with the actual distance of space and time than that by Chinese. The choice of Chinese demonstrative pronoun may be much more influenced by the psychological factor. And the reason may lie in that Chinese and English belong to different language families, which leads to great disparity in word formation, sentence structure, grammatical system and cultural background, etc.This thesis can help the language learners to understand the fine differences between E-C demonstrative pronouns from the perspective of discourse reference. And the study inspires language teachers to put much more emphasis on the discourse. Therefore, it will guide the language teaching and translation.