Anaphoric Reference Forms in Wilde’s The Happy Prince and Swift’s a Modest Proporal

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Not only in the real life language but also in the languages of literary texts referential forms, providing coherence in both oral and written discourses, are used. The present study aims to compare the use of the reference forms in Happy Prince (1888), a short story written by Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), and in A Modest Proposal (1729), an essay by Jonathan Swift (1667-1745),). The study examines the similarities and the differences between the uses of anaphoric references in both texts. Quantitative analysis of the story and the essay shows that both Wilde and Swift mostly made use of pronouns as anaphoric reference to provide cohesion in their narratives, however, the use of the definite articles and the demonstratives is less frequent. There were no “such+a(n) noun” or “such+plural noun” references in the narratives. When compared with previous studies on the subject, it is observed that the use of personal pronoun is dominant in both this study and in previous studies.

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Discourse analysis , short story , essay , English Literature , reference forms

Journal Of Graduate School Of Social Sciences

8

Journal Of Graduate School Of Social Sciences