| Indirect anaphora (IA), as a crucial component in anaphora study, has not received as much attention as direct anaphora. The antecedent and the anaphor in IA are not in a co-referential relation, which poses much difficulty for the addressees to infer the expected antecedent. Studies of anaphor resolution are conducted in syntax, pragmatics, and cognitive perspectives. However, none of these perspectives could provide a satisfactory and thorough explanation on IA. As the most prominent feature of IA is its definiteness, the present paper focuses on definite IA resolution in particular, aiming at finding out a new mechanism for definite IA resolution for news texts.Building on the statistic results on the definite IA instances in English narrative discourses in Wang Jun (2004), and on the on-line instances.collected, the author intends to make a comprehensive analysis on the definite IA in news texts.Based on the comparison and analysis, the author finds that definite IA distributuion differs in narrative discourses and in news texts. A cognitive resolution mechanism is proposed for definite IA for news texts on the basis of frame theory, a spreading activation theory of semantic memory and relevancy theory. The central idea of the mechanism is that in definite IA resolution in news texts, the topical frame plays an indispensable and essential role in finding the expected antecedent, which is quite different from the resolution proposed by others for other genres. The readers'background knowledge on the topic of the news text determines, to a large extent, the interpretation of definite IA instances where the anaphors are closely related to the topic. While in other instances, the linguistic context rather than the physical context helps to find the antecedent. |
PDF Full Text Request