By adopting the linguistic criteria for distinguishing foreground and background information in narrative discourse, the present paper makes a detailed analysis of the aspect and syntactic markers in the cataphora instances in our English and Chinese data. Our data analysis shows that narrative backgrounding is the crucial factor that motivates the use of cataphora. The verification tests based on our bi?directional translationally equivalent data also provide support for the backgrounding status of the construction types in which cataphoric pronouns appear in narrative discourse.