A Comparative Study Of Indirect Anaphora In The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer And Its Chinese Translation

Indirect anaphora,as a special type of anaphora,attracts extensive attention in recent decades.Based on the data of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer written by the American famous writer,Mark Twain,and the Chinese version translated by Zhang Yousong,this thesis aims at searching for the similarities and differences of indirect anaphora between the two languages and finding out the reasons for the similarities and differences.There are a lot of researches on indirect anaphora in the past.In syntactic linguistic level,linguists concentrated on the definition and description of indirect anaphora;in pragmatic linguistic level,linguists illustrated the relationship of anaphor and its antecedent with Relevance Theory;in cognitive linguistic level,scholars paid more attention to the accessibility of anaphor and its antecedent.Most of the previous studies on indirect anaphora focused on the description and interpretation of the language phenomenon indirect anaphora while few comparative study of indirect anaphora between English and Chinese based on actual data were conducted.According the cohesive function and the definition of indirect anaphora from previous researches,all the cases of indirect anaphora are picked out in both English The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and its Chinese version.The cases are classified into three kinds and compared respectively:(1)a comparison of nominal indirect anaphora between English and Chinese,(2)a comparison of demonstrative indirect anaphora between English and Chinese,(3)a comparison of pronominal indirect anaphora between English and Chinese.By comparatively analyzing the distribution of the three kinds of indirect anaphora in English and Chinese respectively,we find that:(1)the similarities and differences of nominal indirect anaphora between English and Chinese:In terms of number,nominal indirect anaphora takes the majority place both in English and Chinese data;in terms of semantic relationship,the indirect anaphor and its antecedent mainly bares the relationship of part and whole relation;in the process of translation from English to Chinese,only 53.3% of the English nominal indirect anaphora remains nominal indirect anaphora in Chinese,7.2% of them are translated into demonstrative indirect anaphora,22.1% of them are translated into noun phrases with determiners such as his,her and so on,which is beyond the category of indirect anaphora,17.3% are translated into non-definite noun phrase or words of other parts of speech.(2)the similarities and differences of demonstrative indirect anaphora between English and Chinese:The number of demonstrative indirect anaphora is less than nominal indirect anaphora both in English and Chinese.According to the analysis,demonstrative indirect anaphora in English is less than that in Chinese.In English,indirect anaphora with proximal determiner and distal determiner words is nearly the same while in Chinese,indirect anaphora with proximal determiner is more than that with distal determiner.In the English-to-Chinese translation process,demonstrative indirect anaphora remains well.Among all the 66 English demonstrative indirect anaphora,49 of them remain indirect anaphora,accounting for 74.2% and 37 still remain demonstrative indirect anaphora,accounting for 56.1%.(3)the similarities and differences of pronominal indirect anaphora between English and Chinese:Pronominal indirect anaphora is a controversial kind.By analyzing,this thesis holds that pronominal indirect anaphora exists but it is extremely rare.In the English to Chinese translation equivalence data,pronominal indirect anaphora appears correspondingly,that is to say,pronominal indirect anaphora almost remains the same in the English to Chinese translation process.(4)the reasons for the similarities and differences:The reasons for the similarities and differences of indirect anaphora between English and Chinese and for the remaining or disappearing in the translation process from English to Chinese are various: from the micro perspective,it is influenced by the non-subject statue of indirect anaphora in cohesive devices,the discourse features,translator's translation style and the guiding ideology of translation;from the macro perspective,one is the differences of thought between China and western countries,and the other is the differences of the way of discourse organization.In general,indirect anaphora in English The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and its Chinese translation are analyzed and compared in this thesis with exhaustive quantification statistics.It reveals the cohesive function of indirect anaphora and reflects the similarities and differences of indirect anaphora between English and Chinese,and the underlying reasons are also explored in the thesis.The findings of the thesis makes up the deficiency of indirect anaphora in comparative study based on actual discourse between English and Chinese and enriches the study of indirect anaphora.At the same time,the research on the differences between two languages provides reference value for bilingual translation.