A Cognitive-metonymic Study On Anaphora In English Political Speeches

This thesis studies anaphora in English political speeches from the cognitive metonymicperspective, aiming at exploring the important function of anaphora in English politicalspeeches and try to set up a cognitive-metonymic model to analyze the anaphoric phenomenaand illustrate the cognitive reasoning process of comprehension of anaphora to help peopleunderstand anaphora well, furthermore, have a better understanding of English politicalspeeches.Anaphora is a linguistic phenomenon in which a linguistic expression, a word or a phraserefers back to another word or phrase which appears earlier in a text. The former is calledanaphora while the latter is called antecedent(Xu Jinglong2004). Anaphora is one of the mostimportant devices in textual cohesion. In the recent decades, more and more scholars focustheir research on anaphora. Although the anaphora phenomenon seems simple and common inour daily life or text, it is a complicated liguistic phenomenon. As for the definition ofmetonymy, there are various versions at home and abroad, while they all concern the relationsbetween anaphora and its antecedent. The classifications of anaphora have many versions.Hankamer&Sag (1976) classify the anaphora into surface anaphora and deep anaphora whileChen Ping (1987) gives the classification of NP anaphora, pronominal anaphora and zeroanaphora. In order to analyze better, this thesis adopts their classifications to analyze surfaceanaphora, NP anaphora, pronominal anaphora and zero anaphora.Various researches on anaphora have been done from different perspectives with thedevelopment of cognitive linguistics. For example, Chomsky’s syntactic studies, Halliday&Hasan’s functional studies, Levinson’s pragmatic studies and Van Hoek’s cognitive studies onanaphora. etc. However, there are few scholars who have done researches on the effect ofmetonymy on anaphora from the cognitive pespective, expect for the relevant researches byLangacher, Nunberg, Jakendoff and Warren.With the development of cognitive linguist, metonymy is treated as one of people’s mostimportant thingking. More and more scholars have paid attention to metonymy and proposevarious cognitive theories of metonymy. Radden&Kovecses’ metonymic theory is amongthe important theories in which they think metonymy cuts across three realms, the realm ofthings, the realm of concept and the realm of forms. Another important theory is Lakoff’s (1987) idealized cognitice models (ICM). Besides, Al-Sharafi’s(2004) textual model ofmetonymy is treated as a process of accounting for text cohesion and coherence.On the basis of framework of metonymic theories by Radden and Kovecses (1999) andthe ICMs by Lakoff (1987), according to Al-sharafi’s textual model of metonymy, this thesisset up a cognitive-metonymic model to analyze surface anaphora, NP anaphora, pronominalanaphora and zero anaphora, making an supplement to Ariel’s Accessibility Theory. Theauthor set up metonymic mechanisms for each of the four types of anaphora, using examplesto explain them.The collected examples in this thesis are all from American Presidential InauguralAddresses in which the anaphoric phenomena are classified and analyzed by thecognitive-metonymic model. This model reflets that the cognitive reasoning of anaphora mustbe taken within the ICMs. It is found that the cognitive reasoning in understanding deepanaphora takes more steps than that of surface anaphora. Metonymic relations occur in deepanaphors. NP anaphora can be illustrated by the salient principle within the ICM due to thepart(s) for whole or part for part relationship. The pronominal anaphora and zero anaphoracan be analyzed with our model with the metonymic relationship such as FORM FOR FORM,CONCEPT FOR FORM, etc.This thesis will broaden the research of anaphora from the metonymic persperctive andprovide a effictive way to comprehend anaphora in English political speeches. By analyzingand understanding anaphoric phenomena better, addressee can comprehend the Englishpolitical speeches well.