Study of the pronoun 自己 / ziji as a means of cohesion in the text of modern Chinese

Li Mei

The article is devoted to the study of the Chinese pronoun 自己 ziji (oneself / himself) and its inter-sentence connection function in the text. The pronoun 自己 ziji points to pronouns or essentials already mentioned earlier. It has a mobile syntactic distribution: it acts as a subject, an object, or as a definition for a verb and a noun. In addition, it generically names a subject that has not yet been encountered in the context. The syntactic specificity of the Chinese pronoun 自己 ziji indicates that it has the dual attributes of an anaphora and a pronoun. The relevance of this article is determined by the identification of the syntactic function of the Chinese pronoun 自己 ziji and the influence of its anaphora on inter-sentence connection. The study of inter-sentence means of connection underlies the formation of a natural connected text in Chinese. The novelty of the study lies in the fact that the Chinese pronoun 自己 ziji has not been sufficiently studied in the Russian linguistic tradition, which causes ambiguity between the original Russian language and its Chinese translation, within the framework of literary translation. As a result of the study, the author comes to the conclusion that the pronoun 自己 ziji is a very important inter-sentence means of connection.

Keywords:reflexive pronoun, 自己 ziji, inter-sentence connection, means of text cohesion, anaphoric function, Chinese text.