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While anaphoric pronouns have been a hot spot of discussion, little ink has been spoiled on cataphoric pronouns, which occur less frequently both in English and in Chinese. This paper aims at a tentative analysis of the cataphoric use of pronouns in English and Chinese to reveal certain similarities as well as differences between these two languages. 1. Introduction English possesses a fair number of pronouns that take their interpretation from some other part of the sentence or discourse, as in the following example, in which the anaphoric device is in boldface and the antecedent, from which it takes its interpretation, is italicized: (1) Two boys stood near a jeweller’s shop. They saw a man break its window and steal all the watches. They ran after him because they took him for a thief. As the example shows, the pronouns are co-referential with the preceding Lexical NPs, i.e. the antecedents. However, the antecedent is not always placed before, as in (2): (1’) Near him, Dan saw a snake. The placement of antecedent suggests a difference between anaphoric pronouns (AP; as in (1)) and cataphoric ones (CP; as in (2)), that is, those that look back in the text for their interpretation and those that look forward for their interpretation. The pronoun makes too large a category to be explored in this paper. Therefore, my analysis will be within the scope of personal pronouns, including the nominative (“they”), accusative (“him”, “her”, “it”) and possesive (“his”, “her”, “its”) cases. Also, only the third person is involved here, because the first and second person forms are normally interpreted exophorically, directly referring to the person or object in the situational context. Cataphoric pronouns are found both within and across sentences. For the former cases, they are subject to specific constrains; and for the latter, they contribute to certain stylistic features . These are the major aspects to be studied in the following parts, compared with the Chinese equivalents respectively. 2. Cataphoric pronouns on the sentence-level 2.1 Constraints in English 2.1.1 Cataphors in formal sentences ---- a GB account The fact that cataphoric reference occurs less frequently per se suggests that cataphor is under more strict constrains than anaphor. To find out what they are, first we will see some examples from Quirk (1985). (2) Before hei joined the Navy, Geraldi made peace with his family. (3) Melville well knew that to the men who sailed in heri, a whaleri was anything but a pleasure boat. (4) On hisi arrival in the capital, the Secretary of Statei declared support for the government. (5) As soon as hei heard the news, Johni passed out. Observing the above sentences proposed by Quirk, we could find something common . That is, all of them contain a subordinate clause where a pronoun appears and refers forward to the full lexical NP in the superordinate clause. It seems to us that a pronoun can be used as cataphor IFF it is contained in the subordinate clause, which is initially positoned. This condition is clarified by Quirk in his A Comprehensive Grammar of English as “Cataphoric reference generally occurs only when the pronoun is at a lower level of structure than its antecedent”. Here “level” refers to the levels of branching on the tree diagram, which can be simplified into a scale towards a lower position in the construction structure of the sentence: Sentence → Clause