| Anaphora is a linguistic phenomenon in which a linguistic expression, a word or phrase refers back to another word or phrase which was used earlier in a text or conversation. The linguistic expression which appeared previously in the text is called antecedent while the latter anaphor. Anaphora is an important topic in discourse analysis. Almost every language has its own linguistic devices which can be used to substitute some elements appearing in the previous text. Among them, anaphora is an important one of textual cohesion.In the recent years, studies on anaphora have attracted many linguists' attention and it has become their focus of research. Especially, the 1980s is the blossoming period of anaphoric studies. Various scientific fields have made deep researches on anaphora from different perspectives and aspects including psychology, artificial intelligence and linguistics.Anaphora seems quite common and widely-used in our daily life but in fact it is a complicated linguistic phenomenon. There are lots of researches within the scope of linguistic studies. For instance, 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 studies on anaphora, etc. However, there are few scholars who have done researches on the effect of metonymy on anaphora, except for the relevant researches by Langacker, Nunberg, Jakendoff and Warren. Al-Sharafi defines metonymy as a process of representation in which one word or concept or object stands for another by contiguity or causality. And based on the representational view of metonymy, a textual theory of metonymy could be developed. The cognitive linguists define metonymy as a mental reflection and as metonymic language is an important thinking mode of human beings, it can be applied to interpreting anaphora in texts. Although some linguists have already done some researches on anaphora from various perspectives; to interpret anaphora from the metonymic perspective surely can serve as a complement to the researches on anaphora especially from the cognitive perspective.This topic here is concerned with anaphora in English news texts which is a quite popular phenomenon. In order to achieve a coherent text and to express a complete thought, we have to employ various kinds of grammatical devices, among which anaphora is an important one for textual coherence. This analysis will not only act as a complement to anaphoric researches, but it will also be helpful for textual interpreters to get a better understanding of textual cohesion and coherence in English news texts.The Idealized Cognitive Model (ICM) which contains stands-for relations is what we referred as metonymic models. The study here shows that there are many metonymic models in a rich conceptual system, and they are used for a variety of purposes. The focus here is that kind in which a member or subcategory can stand metonymically for the whole category for the purpose of making influences or judgments which is quite popular in English news text.In this study, we divide anaphora into three types, that is, NP anaphora, pronominal anaphora and zero anaphora. The research here demonstrates that the salience principle in cognitive linguistics can explain NP anaphora properly and the metonymic relationships in the textual model of metonymy have great explanatory power for pronominal anaphora and zero anaphora.At last, as to the future prospects of this study, from the analyses of the three kinds of anaphora in English news texts from the perspective of metonymy, we can widen the research scope by analyzing more anaphoric phenomena in various English texts from metonymic perspective so as to make further interpretation of anaphora in terms of its working mechanism, features and cohesive power.
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