A Contrastive Study Of Chinese And English Discourse Anaphora In Legislative Language

Anaphora,as one of the most important cohesive devices of a text,can not only influence the accuracy and integrity of information transmission,but also affect the cognitive consistency and coordination of two parties in the process of communication.Many scholars have done a lot of researches on anaphora.However,most of the previous studies on anaphora have focused on the common language or syntactic level.The empirical study on discourse anaphora of legislative texts from the perspective of Chinese and English contrastive research has not been found until now.In view of this,this thesis selects the authoritative data,making a contrastive study of discourse anaphora in Chinese and English legislative texts by the method of empirical research.The author selects CPRC,BLHK and NFNEO as the data of this thesis from the website of Department of Justice Bilingual Law Information System of Hong Kong,analyzing and contrasting the frequencies of nominal anaphora,pronoun anaphora and zero anaphora in Chinese and English versions of this data through computational and manual analyses.The findings of this research reveal that there are obvious differences of frequencies of discourse anaphora in the two parallel versions of legislative texts.Specifically,(1)Frequencies of nominal anaphora in the English version is lower than those in the Chinese version.(2)Frequencies of pronoun anaphora in the English version is much higher than those in the Chinese version.(3)There are a lot of phenomena of using zero anaphora in Chinese legislative texts.While the phenomenon of using zero anaphora in parallel English version of legislative texts is not found in the data of this thesis.Based on the above findings,the author chooses some typical examples to further explore C-E translation techniques of discourse anaphora in legislative language.It is hoped that this thesis can provide an useful reference for the Chinese and English contrastive study of legislative language as well as C-E translation of discourse anaphora.