| Anaphora is a phenomenon in which a linguistic expression (usually an abbreviated one) is always used to refer to another linguistic expression (usually appearing in the preceding text and occasionally occurring in the proceeding text) in the same text (Xu Yulong 2004). The former linguistic expression is called anaphor while the latter antecedent. Anaphora is a key topic in discourse analysis. Any language has its particular linguistic devices which can be applied to substitute certain element appearing in the previous text. Anaphora is an important grammatical device of textual cohesion. Among the cohesive devices discussed by Halliday and Hasan (1976), anaphora is an important one.In cognitive linguistics, metaphor tends to occupy a prominent position and attracts the attention of researchers, while metonymy is taken to be of lesser importance. Actually metonymy is more original, namely, language is metonymic in nature (Radden and Kovecses 1999). Metonymy is a partial mental reflection. People can speak and think metonymically. Metonymy allows us to focus more specifically on prominent aspects of what is being referred to, such as a person, and an object or an event. Metonymic concepts are part of the ordinary, everyday way we think and act as well as talk (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 38). Now that metonymic language is an important thinking mode of human beings, we can apply metonymic thought to interpreting anaphora in English texts.In the recent decades, studies on anaphora have constantly attracted the attention of many linguists and become their research focus. As to the notion of anaphora, researchers home and abroad have given different versions which all cover the relationship between the anaphora and its antecedent. For the classification of anaphora, they also have different viewpoints. We are to make a discussion about NP anaphora, pronominal anaphora and zero anaphora in this research. Just as Fox (1996) puts it, "the 1980s is the blossoming period of anaphoric researches". Various linguistic fields have made deep researches onanaphora from different perspectives and aspects. Among the researches, there are Chomsky's syntactic studies on anaphora, Halliday and Hasan's functional studies on anaphora, Levinson's pragmatic studies and Van Hoek's cognitive perspective on anaphora, etc. However, foreign scholars have done few researches on the mapping effect of metonymy on anaphora, except for the relevant researches by Langacker, Nunberg, Jakendoff and Warren.Based on the framework of metonymic theories by Radden and Kovecses (1999), according to Al-Sharafi's (2004) viewpoints on textual metonymy, we construct a "textual model of metonymy" to analyze the effect of metonymy on constructing anaphora and the explanatory power of metonymy on NP anaphora, pronominal anaphora and zero anaphora so as to further the study on anaphora. The author constructs metonymic mechanisms for each of the three kinds of anaphora respectively and exemplifies all of them step by step.This study shows that the metonymic model in the Idealized Cognitive Model (ICM) and the salience principle can explain NP anaphora and that the metonymic relationships in the textual model of metonymy have some explanatory power for pronominal anaphora and zero anaphora. This study will not only be a complement to anaphoric researches, but it will also be helpful for text interpreters to get a better understanding of textual cohesion and coherence in English texts. It may also guide the teaching of English listening and writing.Lastly, as to the future prospects of this study, on the basis of the analyses of the three kinds of anaphora, we can widen our research scope by analyzing more anaphoric phenomena in English texts from metonymic perspective so as to further the interpretation of anaphora in terms of its working mechanism, features and cohesive power. |
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