A Contrastive Analysis on the Third Person Reference in Fortress Besieged and Its English Translation

Reference cohesion is commonly found in both Chinese and English discourses but employed in different ways. Based on the English cohesion theory proposed by Halliday and the Chinese cohesion theory developed by Xu Yulong, as well as the study about discourse anaphora by Xu Jiujiu, this paper makes a contrastive analysis of the reference cohesion in the first chapter of Fortress Besieged and its English translation with the software AntConc. A systematic analysis is made about the third person pronouns in the English translation and their counterpart in the original Chinese version. In conclusion, while third person pronoun is usually adopted as a manner of reference cohesion in English, Chinese tends to omit the pronouns and resort to the so-called zero reference. This is because Chinese grammar is much looser than English grammar. Besides, in Chinese, the choice of zero reference or pronoun reference is constrained by certain elements.