A Cognitive Semantic Approach To The Study Of Anticipation In Simultaneous Interpreting

This thesis is a tentative study on anticipation in simultaneous interpreting (SI). Itis a case study and it is a qualitative and descriptive one. Supported by CharlesFillmore’s frame semantics and Mona Baker’s ideas on collocation, the study is aimedto find out the relationship between frames and the process of anticipation.The process of SI is one in which the interpreter renders the source language intothe target language at almost the same speed with the speaker (王海冰,2009).Different from consecutive interpreting, SI allows the speaker speaks withoutinterruption. Simultaneous interpreting involves multiple processes, both sequentialand simultaneous (Jiang,2013:74). The process is best presented by Daniel Gile’sEffort Mode: SI=L+P+M+C. That means the interpreter needs to cope with multipletasks (listening, speech production, memorizing, and coordinating) at the same timeduring SI, which put the interpreter under high pressure. Anticipation, like sentencechopping, repetition, omission, summarization, and any other interpreting skills, isvery important in SI, because anticipation helps reduce the interpreter’s pressure fromhigh workload, and thus, to some extent, helps the interpreter better coordinatemultiple tasks simultaneously. Therefore, there is a necessity to study anticipation.Frame Theory, which is an important branch of cognitive semantics. Charles JFillmore, the first person to introduce Frame Theory into linguistic studies, maintainsthat frames are “structured background information”(2003:263), and “should betreated as an essential component or accompaniment of word definitions”. A frameconsists of many components, or sub-frames, which can trigger and be triggered.Likewise, the interpreter makes anticipation during SI according to his/her cognitivestructure. The interpreter infers something from the information he/she has alreadyreceived from the speaker. Anticipation can be regarded as a process of one sub-frametriggering another. This process involves a trigger and a reactor: if sub-frame Atriggers sub-frame B, sub-frame A is the trigger and sub-frame B the reactor.Therefore, the author uses Frame Theory as a cognitive semantic approach to studyanticipation in SI, hoping to find out the relation between frames and anticipation,which is the major question this thesis tries to answer.To answer this question, the author uses Mona Baker’s ideas on collocation. When one sub-frame triggers another, the whole frame will be activated and othercomponents in the frame will also be made available automatically. How theinterpreter makes choices among reactors is another question the study tries to answer.Collocation, which explains the tendency of certain words to co-occur, is one way tointerpret the interpreter’s choice of inference.The method of the study is qualitative and descriptive by analysis andcomparison of the cases chosen. The material the author is going to use is BanKi-moon’s live communication with netizens on Sina Weibo. The author is going touse a time axis to display the ear-voice span (EVS) of the interpreter. Focusing on themale interpreter’s performance of anticipation, the author is trying to figure out thetriggers and reactors by looking at the time axis, and further discover the relationbetween frames and anticipation.