The Anaphoric Devices in Chinese and English Discourse: A Study with Special Referenceto Chinese LDRs vs.Their English Equivalents in Translation Data

This article presents a contrastive study of the anaphoric uses of Chinese longdistance reflexives (LDRs) and their English equivalents in CE/EC translation data and the motivations for their uses.The findings suggest that there is a noticeable dissimilarity in anaphoric production: other things being equal, a Chinese LDR can be but an English pronoun is generally used to create discourse anaphora.Specifically, Chinese “ziji” is largely encoded grammatically as an English pronoun, due to the fact that Chinese speakers are apt to take the protagonist’s viewpoint and use the simplex reflexive to establish an anaphoric linkage in discourse, while English speakers tend to take the observer’s viewpoint and use a pronoun to set up such a linkage.Similarly, Chinese “xziji” is also largely encoded syntactically, as an English pronoun.This is probably because Chinese speakers would prefer to highlight a discourse entity with this complex reflexive.