A Relevance-theoretic Approach To The Definite Indirect Anaphora Resolution In English

As a special kind of anaphora, in recent years, the indirect anaphora (including definite indirect anaphora) has been studied by many scholars. However, until now, the term used to refer to indirect anaphora (IA) remains unanimous and different schools employ different theories and experiments to probe into the resolution of indirect anaphora. Among the limited literature, six theoretical frameworks work more or less effectively in IA resolution. They are: the Given and New Contract, the Topic/Focus Model, Hawkins'Four Appropriateness Conditions, Coherence-based Account, the Scenario Model and the Relevance Model. But the application of each theoretical account in previous literature contains some problems, such as failing to explain the situation in which there is more than one candidate antecedent, overemphasizing the stereotypical relations, neglecting the on-line instances and so on. Mainly for the above reasons, combined with qualitative and quantitative research methods, the current thesis aims at the features, general distribution tendency and resolution procedure of definite indirect anaphora (DIA) in English narrative discourse from a pragmatic-cognitive perspective.The DIA resolution procedure in the thesis is proposed on the grounds of the Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1986/1995) and by reference to the Relevance-theoretic model (Mastui, 2000). Different from Mastui (2000), in the current study, the non-stereotypical relation is added to the DIA resolution procedure, and the role of cognitive context is emphasized. It assumes that DIA resolution is not simply the connection between surface linguistic cues but fundamentally a process of the association of mental entities. In this process, the relevance between the mental entities of antecedent trigger and indirect anaphor ensures the implicit coreference. According to the proposed resolution procedure, the accessibility of contextual assumption and the degree of accessibility of discourse entities in the current cognitive context are two crucial factors that affect the reader/hearer's choice of referent. Meanwhile, linguistic expressions and contextual cues trigger relevant concepts and contextual assumptions. Because it is unnecessary to choose a scenario before choosing the intended reference, if more than one antecedent trigger is accessible, the antecedent triggers with relevant scenarios and contextual assumptions will be tested in parallel in the matching process. With the matching constraints given by Relevance Theory, the candidate referent which is the most relevant to the most accessible contextual assumption will be selected as the intended referent.The thesis collects 343 IA instances and 333 DIA instances from 50 English short stories (see Appendix). By reference to the analyzing means in Wang Jun (2004a), 333 DIA instances in the current study are classified and analyzed from five aspects. Several striking features in these on-line instances which are different from many previous researches, such as the long distance between antecedent trigger and indirect anaphor, the inclusion relation between definite indirect anaphoras etc are found. On the one hand, the new features of DIA found in the current study confirm that the features of indirect anaphora found in Wang Jun (2004a) have universal meaning. On the other hand, the inclusion relation between definite indirect anaphoras is firstly proposed by the present study, which is useful for the further study on definite indirect anaphora.The proposed DIA resolution procedure is applied on the grounds of statistic results. It is found that the differences between stereotype and non-stereotype do not affect the general DIA resolution procedure, which means DIA cases in stereotypical and non-stereotypical relation share the same resolution procedure; the stereotypicality is a method to show the varied degrees of relevance between the two entities of antecedent trigger and indirect anaphor; in stereotypical relation, the relevance between antecedent trigger and indirect anaphor is text-free and ensured by the world knowledge; while in the non-stereotypical relation, the relevance which can be constructed by the text-specific information relies on certain text and reader's capability of inference.