Cataphoric Pronouns------ A Comparison between English and Chinese [6]
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:9049
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
icate that both English and Chinese use cataphoric pronouns as a sort of rhetoric as well as cohesive device in discourse. This provides a good argument against s Halliday’s view that pronouns make no contribution to textual cohesion .
4. Conclusion
To wind up the loose ends, first I will give a brief review of the whole paper.
Personal pronouns, including the nominative, accusative and possesive cases, are widely used in cross-refence. As contrast to anaphors, they are called cataphors when referring forward to certain lexical NPs. Cataphoric pronouns are found on both sentence and discourse level.
The first part of my paper deals with cataphors within sentences, which are subclassified according to formality of the utterances. In formal sentences, cataphoric pronouns occur in quite limited circumstances, subject to Chomsky’s Binding Principles. While in familiar ones, they serve as grammaticalized cataphors and a part of “rheme” in the information structure, which is accouted for by functional grammar. The corresponding Chinese pronouns, while showing similarities, are different in many aspects, among which the frequent use of zero-cataphors is the most striking.
In the second part, I have studied cataphors across sentences. My study shows that in both English and Chinese, the co-refrential role of cataphoric pronouns contributes to cetain stylistic effects as well as textual cohesion.
On the basis of the above analysis, it can be concluded that cataphoric refrences are never marginal cases for cross-refrence; instead, they are widely used in English and Chinese, constrained by certain conditions, syntactic or pragmatic. The use of cataphoric pronouns can be a strong support for language universality. Meanwhile, the aboundance of zero-refrence in Chinese points to Chinese as a parataxis language, as contrast to English, which is generalized as hypotaxis.
[1] The marker “i/j” suggests “his” and “John” may or may not be co-refrential.
① This seems to be an evidence for Levinson’s “scale”, though it is set up for anaphoric readings:
Lexical NP > Pronoun > φ
Disjoint-------→co-refrential
1.Under some circumstances in English, zero cataphor can also occur as an alternative to pronoun.
E.g. Before he joined the army, Gerald made peace with his family.
Before joining the army, Gerald made peace with his family.
Since this is a short paper, such cases will not be touched upon in length.
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