A Comparative Study Between English And Chinese Long-Distance Reflexives From The Pragmatic Perspective

In recent decades,the logophora problem of the long-distance reflexives has always been the hot topic in linguistic field.The thesis mainly adopts Huang(2009)and Liu's(2010)theoretical framework.The author applies the minimal discourse-internal protagonist,understanding and generation rule,and logophoricity phenomenon of long-distance reflexives theories to analyze English and Chinese long-distance reflexives.The author makes use of the examples of the long-distance reflexives and it picks out the reflexives that are bound within the local domain.The comparative study is carried out by different distribution among the antecedent of English and Chinese long-distance reflexives,the logophora pattern of English and Chinese long-distance reflexives and the generation way of English and Chinese reflexives.Through the comparison,the main findings are as follows:there are three types of distribution of the antecedent:the subject position,object position and modifier position.Among them,the thesis finds out that the antecedents of English and Chinese long-distance reflexives are encoded as subject antecedent in most cases since the deistic center always points to the subject.In this point,English is as the same as Chinese.Besides,as for the object antecedent,Chinese is also as the same as English because the long-distance reflexives can both point back to the object antecedent.In terms of the third type,English long-distance reflexives can either be the modifier of the subject or it can be the modifier of other components.While in Chinese,the antecedent of the long-distance reflexives can only encode the modifier of the subject position as its antecedent.Then,from the logophora pattern,Chinese typical and general logophora pattern account for the majority compared with English.At last,there are two types of generation expressing as single-layer and double-layer generation way of structure.The single-layer generation of English and Chinese bears more similarities.And as for the double-layer generation structure,English double-layer structure is more complicated to understand because the continuous application of the pronoun,the nominal phrase,and the compound "Pn-self' form a more complicated context.In conclusion,the thesis aims to prove the efficiency and scientificity of the pragmatic theory.Just because the natural data are still not enough.There are lots of disadvantages in the thesis.Furthermore,the analysis about the distribution and properties of English and Chinese reflexives from the syntactic perspective still bothers the author.If the further analysis can be done based on abundant theories and data,it would be better to make an elaborate research on the logophora problem of English and Chinese long-distance reflexives.Also,the research would be more scientific and efficient.