Abstract

This paper discusses stylistic variants for Verb Phrase(VP), V' and V anaphors in English and Japanese and finds some common features between those English and Japanese anaphors by dealing with the hierarchy of stylistic preferability among (i) expressions with full anaphors, (ii) those with zero anaphors where the ellipsis occurs with the auxiliaries like do and desu and (iii) those with lexical anaphors like do so, do it/do that in English and their corresponding ones in Japanese, and by observing in which style the anaphors occur or in which situations they often appear pragmatically. As a result, in both English and Japanese, I propose four types of stylistic hierarchy for the anaphors according to contrastive elements from different types of sentence construction. The hierarchies in four types are quite similar in both languages except that repeated verb anaphors which are related to cognitive identification are considered one of the best expressions in Japanese. They are proved by the examination of the frequency of the anaphors in use in spoken style, informal written style and in formal written style. Each of the characteristics of zero, lexical and full anaphors of both languages (as well as repeated verb anaphors in Japanese) reflects on their frequency of VP, V' and V anaphors in the three styles.