A Cognitive-metonymic Approach To Anaphora In English News Reports

This thesis is a study of anaphora in English news reports from the cognitive metonymic perspective, aiming at exploring the nature of deep anaphora and providing a cognitive metonymic approach to both surface anaphora and deep anaphora in order to analyze and account for the cognitive process of assigning the referent in surface and deep anaphora.The study of anaphora has a long tradition and many researchers have studied the anaphora from various perspectives such as linguistics and psychology. In traditional view, anaphora is considered as a syntactically controlled co-referential relationship on language's surface level. According to the cognitive point of view, it refers to a psychologically salient entity out of the surface level of language. As cognitive linguistics develops, it is applied to the interpreting of anaphora. Accessibility Theory, within the cognitive framework, proposed by Ariel, provides a systematic scale of accessibility marker. But it only can apply to surface anaphora not deep anaphora. As Hankamer and Sag (1976) holds, anaphora can be classified into two types:surface and deep anaphora. Qin Hongwu (2001) further divides deep anaphora into antecedentless anaphora, zero-pronoun anaphora and ambiguous anaphora.Metonymy attracts more and more linguists'attention nowadays, and is considered as part of people's everyday way of thinking. Many researchers develop various cognitive theories of metonymy, such as Gibbs (1994), Fass (1997), Radden and Kovecses (1999), etc. One of the most important theories is Al-Sharafi's (2004) cognitive semiotic approach to textual metonymy. In this theory metonymy is assumed as a process to account for text cohesion and text coherence. The other noteworthy theory is Lakoff's (1987) idealized cognitive models (ICM). Radden and Kovecses (1999) holds that ICM can interpret metonymic processes best. That is to say, metonymy occurs within ICM. Besides, Radden and Kovecses also indicate that there are three realms metonymy cuts across, which are the world of things, the world of events and the world of forms.Deep anaphora is pragmatically controlled and it cannot be interpreted by syntax but must be explained within cognitive realms. Thus, a cognitive metonymic approach is proposed to analyze the anaphoric phenomena and illustrate the cognitive reasoning process of assigning the referent in the data.In this thesis,200 deep anaphora instances and many surface anaphora instances are collected from major English newspapers and periodicals. The 200 deep instances are classified and analyzed in detail by the proposed cognitive metonymic approach.The proposed approach reflects that the more steps of cognitive reasoning the addressees need to take within ICMs, the more difficulties are involved in the assigning anaphora. It is found that the cognitive reasoning used for assigning the antecedent of deep anaphora needs more effort than that of surface anaphora. As for antecedentless anaphora, in comparison with surface anaphora, assigning the referent of this type of anaphora needs more steps in cognitive reasoning. As for zero-pronoun anaphora, the referent of anaphor is found to be the easiest for addressees to assign. But if the antecedent of zero-pronoun anaphora is implicit, it needs more effort to determine the assignment of anaphora than it with explicit antecedent. For ambiguous anaphora, it needs much effort to assign anaphora in order to avoid misunderstanding.It is hoped that the thesis will not only broaden the research of anaphora from metonymic perspective but also dedicate to determining the assignment of anaphora in the comprehension of the English news text. An alternative for interpreting anaphora from metonymic perspective is also hoped to be useful for the future studies.