Indirect Anaphora And Its Pragmatic-cognitive Study

The determination of the referents of anaphoric expressions is quiteessential in interpreting natural discourse and is gaining more and moreattention. Indirect anaphora is a special kind of discourse cohesion device,which is a relatively new field in linguistic study.Indirect anaphora is a kind of linguistic phenomenon in which ananaphoric expression cannot find its corresponding antecedent in discourse.There is no direct co-referential relation between them, thus indirectinference is employed to determine the referent. Though researchers both athome and abroad have studied it from various perspectives such as those ofsyntax, pragmatics or cognition, the elaboration of the pragmatic-cognitivemechanism behind this phenomenon is far from being perfect, among whichone of the biggest limitations is that they cannot explain how thepragmatic-cognitive inference is conducted.Based on the previous studies and the characteristics of indirectanaphora, this paper puts forward a pragmatic-cognitive mechanism forindirect anaphora interpretation by combining the scenario theory and therelevance theory. This scenario-relevance approach can well explain howpeople understand the implicit information in indirect anaphora.The whole paper is composed of five parts: Chapter one gives a briefintroduction of the definition, classification of anaphora and indirectanaphora. Chapter two is a review of earlier studies on anaphora and indirect anaphora. It discusses the evolutional process of anaphora studyfirst in terms of syntax, then in terms of pragmatics, finally in terms ofcognition. Both the contributions and limitations of the studies are discussed.Chapter three is a thorough presentation of the identification, syntacticclassification, conditions, semantic relation and constraints of indirectanaphora. Chapter four discusses the scenario theory and the relevancetheory and puts forward a pragmatic-cognitive interpretation mechanism bycombining the two theories. Chapter five applies this scenario-relevanceapproach to the analysis of discourses. Through various kinds of example inEnglish discourse,we find that whether there is stereotypical ornon-stereotypical relation between indirect anaphor and antecedent triggeror not, this pragmatic-cognitive mechanism can provide a successfulinterpretation for indirect anaphora with one or more than one antecedenttriggers.