A Pragmatic-cognitive Approach Of Indirect Anaphora Resolution Based On Chinese Narrative Discourses

Nowadays discourse indirect anaphora (IA) has attracted more and more scholars’attention, but there is no scientific interpretation for it. IA can be interpreted by Topic/FocusModel, Given and New Contract Model, Hawkins’ Four Appropriate Conditions,Coherence-based Account, the Scenario Model and the Relevance Model. These six accountsgive interpretations to IA from syntax, language communication, pragmatics, discourseanalysis, psychology and cognitive science respectively. Although they have different focus,in general they have deviated or have not paid enough attention to context, neglected on-lineinstances, overemphasized the stereotypical relations, can not give adequate interpretation tocomplicated IA cases.This thesis takes Relevance Theory as the theoretical basis and proposes an IA resolutionprocedure in Chinese narrative discourse. It assumes that IA resolution is not only theconnection of surface linguistic information between IA and its antecedent, but the process ofassociation of mental entities. The data of this thesis is collected from22Chinese shortnarrative stories and10Chinese narrative essays, with315IA instances have been found.With the relevance analyzing means and the qualitative and quantitative method, these315instances have been classified and analyzed from five aspects: stereotypic and non-stereotypicrelations, semantic relations between stereotypical NP1and NP2, NP1’s form, NP2’s formand the discourse distance between NP1and NP2. In the process of analyzing, we have foundthat majority is IA in stereotypic relation; the semantic relation between stereotypic IA and itsantecedent is mostly whole-part; NP1’s form can both take the form of noun phrase, verbphrase, clause and multi-clauses in both English and Chinese. Several striking characteristicsin the data are found different from previous researches: such as most NP2occurs as barenoun in Chinese, NP1and NP2are often found in the same sentence, two groups of IA arefound in chain or inclusive relation.The analysis result of the selected data shows that when IA and its antecedent is far fromeach other, the choice of the antecedent obey the Principle of Local Interpretation; when thereis only one antecedent, the addressee only costs the least effort to obtain adequate contextualeffects, in the process of making it relevant with the context, IA resolution can be resolved; when there are more than one antecedent, semantic relation between NP1and NP2, pragmaticeffects and the syntactic position are involved in IA resolution. The process to deal with themis that the semantic relation between NP1and NP2is considered in the first place, thepragmatic effects follow it, and the syntactic position is considered lastly. Moreover, thisthesis has found that the differences between non-stereotypic relation and stereotypic relationonly lies in the degree of relevance and the source of information, but they share oneimportant common feature, namely the interpretations of them both need antecedent trigger,besides, the boundary between them are quite indistinct, thus the differences do not influencethe application of the proposed resolution procedure into IA resolution. Thus, IA resolutionprocedure in Chinese narrative discourse can be used to interpret IA in non-stereotypicrelation and stereotypic relation.