| In the recent decades, anaphora has been considered as a cohesive device in research by linguists both at home and abroad. Anaphora can be divided into Direct Anaphora (DA) and Indirect Anaphora (IA). Compared with DA, IA is a relatively complicated anaphora phenomenon, in which there is no explicit antecedent co-referring to the anaphor. To find the relationship between the indirect anaphor and the antecedent information in IA is very important. Many scholars try to find an appropriate mechanism to interpret anaphora, from the early Chomsky's Binding Theory and Grice's Pragmatic Theory to cognitive approaches such as Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory, Minsky and Fillmore's Frame Theory, and Ariel's Accessibility Theory. Though they are not the special theories to interpret IA, they all made contribution to the study of anaphora. But these theories are neither directly devoted to IA nor applied in the analysis of IA in particular discourses.The subject of the study in this paper is IA. The author conducts a qualitative and quantitative study of IA with a cognitive framework which consists of a resolution mechanism and a cognitive approach of IA. They are all established based on the previous studies. IA in news editorials is subtly used, making texts concise and persuasive. The data are collected from 20 English news editorials in New York Times. The author uses the improved mechanism and cognitive approach to do analysis and research, trying to find the distribution features of IA in English news editorials. This research sets up a classification of IA based on IA's internal relationships, and carries out a statistic analysis, which helps to bring a better study and understanding of the IA in English news editorials.Based on Wang Jun's (2004) IA research model, the paper proposes an IA interpretation mechanism and research approach, and it modifies Wang Jun's 8 IA stereotypic relations, including Whole-Part, Parallel Co-occurrence, Entity-Function/Attribute, Action-Target/Tool, Action-Result, Action-Place, and Entity-Material. Entity-Material is a found new stereotypic relation in this study. The author puts the proposed mechanism and the cognitive approach into application of researching IA in English news editorials. After a meticulous statistics and analysis, the internal relationships of IA are explained and the distribution features in English news editorials are concluded. The statistics shows that IA is not a rare phenomenon in English news editorials. Among the IA cases, most textual distances between the antecedent information and indirect anaphor are distributed in the same sentence or the same paragraph, which means most IA cases'textual distances are short. The rate of IA with stereotypic relation is much higher than that with non-stereotypic relation. According to the refined stereotypic relations, the number of IA cases with Whole-Part and Parallel Co-occurrence takes up the largest part. These distribution features are determined by the functions and characteristics of English news editorial. And the new found stereotypic relation broadens the original refined stereotypic relation system.The present study is intended for a better understanding of IA phenomenon in English news editorials, attempts to enrich and develop the cognitive study of IA, and provides English learners with pedagogical implications and reading strategies. |
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