Accessing Indirect Anaphora In Lilian's Story

Anaphora has always been a hot topic of discourse analysis because it is an important cohesive device. Traditionally, the interpretation of anaphoric pronouns has been explained by grammarians using a theoretical model which assumes that a reader of a text needs only to find a nearby more explicit antecedent mention of the referent. But it cannot account for the case when the pronouns do not have any nearby prior antecedent.In this thesis, the present researcher intends to use Ariel's Accessibility Theory to interpret indirect anaphora in text. Accessibility Theory has been used quite often in reference solution, because it has provided a seemingly conventionalized rule between referring expressions and the degree of the different kinds of context retrieval. After a brief introduction of accessibility theory and indirect anaphora, the present researcher analyzes the 3rd person pronouns in the English short story - Lilian's Story, trying to work out a processing procedure of indirect anaphora interpretation. The present researcher first classifies the indirect anaphora into two kinds, considering the knowledge involved in the text processing, the general knowledge and the text-specific knowledge; then within each kind of category, she further analyzes the indirect anaphora with respective related knowledge and by employing accessibility theory; at last, she finds out that the interpretation of indirect anaphora is possible and gives out a hypothesized processing procedure of indirect anaphora. From this research on indirect anaphora, the present researcher comes to the conclusion that, to interpret the indirect anaphora, both the reader's cognitive work and the linguistic facilitating device are essential. Although the reader's inference work counts a lot in the process, it is the willingness to search for coherence that directs the reader to confirm the correct antecedent. That is where the accessibility theory values and also the aim of this thesis.