The Study On Referential Shift Of Modern Chinese Personal Pronoun

In the normal conditions,the forms of personal pronoun have a corresponding relationship with their objects which the personal pronoun point to.But there exists a phenomenon about the form of personal pronoun deviating their referential objects during the practical use of the language.We refer to this phenomenon as "shift reference of personal pronoun".The thesis aimed to explain the reason how does the listener understand the referential shift is still scarce.In this paper,we Firstly,classify the usage of referential shift into the 22 types based on the naturally spoken Chinese corpus.Secondly,in order to reflect the usage of shifting types in our spoken Chinese,we take statistical data analysis on distribution of shifting types by screening the corpus,and get the frequency of usage.Thirdly,we will have a discussion on the motivation of referential shifting according to the theory of interpersonal function of systemic-functional grammar,and reveal the pragmatic functional reason of usage of referential shifting through the analyzing on language environment that shift occurs.At last,we utilize the concept of cognitive context within the relevance theory,to explain the reference after the shifting occurs from the view of addressee's comprehending.The study shows that the emotive function,politeness function and other pragmatic function are controlled by the interpersonal function;the usage of referential shift applied by speaker is a strategy to adapt the context of the current conversation;The pragmatic function gendered by referential shifting could be regard as a functional motivation,that is,speaker use the referential shifting as a means for the purpose of achieving the pragmatic intention or conversational effects;there are two steps in the process of comprehending the referential shifting,firstly the hearer need to find out who is the speaker,then the hearer need to find out a target that conforms with the relative traits exemplified by the speaker,some factors needed to be considered include the intention of speaker,contest of utterance and optimal relevance between the contextual information and reference of personal pronoun.The listener could understand the meaning of referential shifting through seeking for the optimal relevance between the designating by personal pronoun and contextual information.