Cataphoric Pronouns------ A Comparison between English and Chinese [2]
论文作者:佚名论文属性:短文 essay登出时间:2009-04-15编辑:刘宝玲点击率:9050
论文字数:5000论文编号:org200904151849433199语种:中文 Chinese地区:中国价格:免费论文
关键词:ComparisonEnglishChinesecataphorsrhetoric device
→ Phrase → Words → Morphemes
Therefore, while the antecedent is placed in the main clause, the pronoun “he” in (2) is a constituent in an adverbial clause, “her” in (3) a relative clause, and “his” in (4) appears as part of the complement of an initial prepositional phrase.
The condition of subordination well explains why co-refrentiality is valid in “Jacqueline thinks she understands me” but not in “She thinks Jacqueline understands me”. (“She” and “he” must be understood as referring to two different people.)
While laying down the principle of subordination, Quirk points out that there are exceptions. “In journalistic writing, in particular, there is occasional use of cataphoric pronouns which appear in non-inferior positions.”
(6) Failure of hisi latest attempt on the world record has caused heavy financial loss to the backers of daredevil balloonist Felix Champi.
This simple sentence, in which the level of “his” is no lower than that of “John”, is clearly a derivation from Quirk’s account. Taling sentences like the following into consideration, we will find “exceptions” go far beyond journalistic writing.
(7) His mother loved Johni/j.[1]
Various proposals have been formulated to account for sentences like this, among which Reinhart’s c-command model is the most successful. It essentially states that, if the first branching node dominating the pronoun within the syntactic tree also dominates the full noun phrase, corefrence is ruled out. The c-command condition has since been incorporated as pricinple C into the Binding Conditions, which are at the core of the GB theory. The Binding conditions include three parts:
A. An anaphor must be coreferential with a NP (in its local domain) that c-commands it;
B. A pronoun must be disjoint with the NP (in its local domain) that c- commands it;
C. A referential expression must be disjoint with all the NPs that c-command it.
Among these three conditions, C is most closely associated with my discussion in this paper, from which two sub-principles can be deduced:
a. If αc-commandsβ, they must be in disjoint reference;
b. Ifαdoes not c-commandsβ, they may or may not be co-referential.
(In fact, these two are two sides of the coin, in a complementary distribution to each other. The optionality of b which invloves pragmatic factors will not be covered in this paper that is intended for a general syntactic framework.) Now, with the syntactic conditons, we can probably explain the cataphoric reference in situations other than subordination.
Referring back to example (7), I will give another sentence below with similar construction for comparison.
(7’) Hei loved Johnj.
(7) Hisi mother loved Johni/j.
By intuition we can figure out that in (7’) “he” and “John” cannot refer to the same individual. To achieve co-refrentiality, it should be revised as “He loved himself.” Or “John loved himself”, because the reflexive pronoun, typical of the anaphor, must be bound by its antecedent. (See condition A.)
The following tree diagrams are sketched out to reveal their respective syntactic structures.
Hei loved Johnj.
Hisi mother loved Johni/j.
The two NPs in the sentence are circled to foreground their positions in reference to each other. The tree diagram for (7’) shows that the NP “he” c-commands the VP node and its inferior nodes, thus c-commanding the NP “John”. This relationship of commanding accounts for the disjoint refrence betwe
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