A Comparative Study of Subject Reference in Ancient and Modern Chinese Based on Cognitive Accessibility
According to Accessibility Theory,the usage of referring expressions is influenced by the cognitive accessibility of the entities being referred to,demonstrating a certain degree of cross-language universality.However,when viewed from a diachronic perspective,different using tendencies emerge even within the same language typology.Through a translation experiment of written narrative discourse,this study explores the process of selecting referring expressions,based on measuring dynamic changes in cognitive accessibility.Its objective is to investigate the characteristics and underlying causes of subject reference in both ancient and modern Chinese through a comparative study.The findings suggest that both ancient and modern Chinese tend to use noun phrases(NP)to refer to the entities with low accessibility,and zero anaphora(Ø)to refer to those with high accessibility,thus conforming to Accessibility Principle to a certain extent.However,compared to ancient Chinese,modern Chinese exhibits stronger adherence to Accessibility Principle,with fewer instances of Ø but more frequent uses of NP and pronouns(PRON).Modern Chinese also demonstrates reduced reliance on contextual cues but increased constraints from syntactic structure.In contrast to the ancient referring system characterized by NP-Ø distribution,the modern referring system features NP-PRON-Ø distribution,highlighting the buffering function of PRON in cognitive processing.
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