A Cognitive Approach To Indirect Anaphora Resolution In English Poetry

As an important means to establish coherence in discourse, indirect anaphora is gaining more and more attention from the academic community. In the early and traditional research on indirect anaphora, scholars put emphasis on the syntactic level. With the development of linguistics, they come to realize that indirect anaphora resolution is more a mental process than a pure syntactic linking, and cognitive and pragmatic factors must be taken into consideration.In order to present the special features of indirect anaphora instances in English poetry and demonstrate the significance of the present study, the author borrows the statistical results of indirect anaphora instances in English narrative discourses analyzed by Wang Jun in his doctoral dissertation for comparison. From that, the author obtains some valuable findings.The creative poet tends to avoid conventional ways of thinking. Poetic language usually violates or deviates from the generally observed rules of language. All these are conducive to achieving extraordinary poetic effects, but at the same time, exert great influence on the representation of indirect anaphora inevitably. Consequently, some very useful principles and theories, such as the topic/focus model, the scenario model, the relevance model, frame theory, comparatively-privileged associative strength and so on appear to be powerless to indirect anaphora resolution in English poetry. The author suggests that such a linguistic phenomenon can be desirably explained in light of Conceptual Blending Theory. Connections are established between or among the mental spaces, formed by all the possible antecedents in the process of mapping and blending, which provides strong evidence and basis for one antecedent to be the deep antecedent for indirect anaphora resolution, although its relation with the anaphor is not obvious.