The Features, Classification, and Functions of Event Anaphora in Chinese News Discourse

Abstract

In the corpus of modern Chinese news discourse, there exists a phenomenon of referentiality involving verbal elements, referred to as event anaphora. Its connotations exhibit distinct differences from similar concepts such as event nouns, cohesive connections, and deixis. This paper investigates the inherent distinctions of event anaphora from three perspectives: structural types, sentence components, and the frequency of reference. Additionally, incorporating discourse and stylistic considerations, the study offers three explanations for biases observed in statistics: the stylistic inclination of "this," the referential target and objective mechanism of the object, and the information structural impact of the frequency of reference.