A Comparative Study on Translated Text and Chinese Anaphora

• Main Authors: Tsao I-Jen, 曹怡仁
• Other Authors: Chen Kuang-Ming
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2007
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/f5bvkr

碩士 === 國立臺東大學 === 語文教育學系碩士班 === 95 === This study aims at comparing anaphora in Chinese texts and English-to-Chinese translation texts. By Xu’s Anaphora in Chinese Texts, researcher tried to observe zero-anaphora, pronoun-anaphora and noun-anaphora through three different methods. The three methods are the reference of zero-anaphora in multi-verb sentence, pronoun-anaphora emerging in liner structure and hierarchical structure, and noun-anaphora distributed over the texts. The reference of zero anaphora in multi-verb clause demonstrates two situations: the semantic role of agent and zero-anaphora are co-referential and not co-referential. There is little dissimilarity between these two situations. Pronoun-anaphora was analyzed by liner structure and hierarchal structure. Liner structure was computed by Givon’s look-back, to compute the value of topic/ participant continuity. The average value of pronoun-anaphora in Chinese is 2.52; the average value in English-to-Chinese is 1.54. In hierarchal structure, pronoun-unit can contain ten tokens in Chinese text; however, it can only contain eight tokens in English-to-Chinese text. Noun-anaphora can be divided into five types: identical repetition, apposition, partial repetition, superordinate/ hyponymy, and figurative/ metaphorical usage. These five types noun-anaphora have been elaborated in terms of root node, position, state and role. The researcher thinks there are two reasons to explain Chinese and English-to-Chinese are alike: Europeanization of Chinese and professional translators. The researcher discussed and made suggestions based on the research findings, which might serve as reference for future studies.