Referring Expressions In Movie Taglines

Referring is a main function of language and referring expression has always been a hot topic of semantic study. Accessibility is a cognitive concept borrowed from psychology, which refers to the relative ease with which the addressee draws a linguistic or memorial unit from the mental memory system. Movie taglines include varieties of referring expressions which are convenient to collect and analyze, this thesis is to study the referring expressions used in English movie taglines from the perspective of Accessibility Theory.This thesis is based on Ariel’s Accessibility Theory, which is widely accepted by many linguists. Ariel’s Accessibility Theory describes the guiding principles, factors that affect the accessibility of referring expressions, and accessibility marker scales. This theory lays a solid foundation for the following analysis of the accessibility of noun phrases.The author collects400English movie taglines for the research, which are all selected from Oscar nominated movies and famous Hollywood films. The author makes the research by marking the referring expressions used in these taglines; then analyzes them from the perspective of Accessibility Theory both quantitatively and qualitatively, and the analysis includes the accessibility of the referring expressions used in those taglines and the influence of movie types on the usage of referring expressions in movie taglines.The main results of the research are as follows. Referring expressions with low accessibility are the most frequently used in movie taglines, while the least frequently used ones are those with high accessibility. Meanwhile, it is quite common to see two or three kinds of accessibility markers are used in one single movie tagline. On the other hand, the movie genre can also affect the usage of referring expressions in movie taglines, although only plays a limit role.According to both the results of the research and Ariel’s Accessibility Theory, the author got the following three conclusions. First, referring expressions with low accessibility are the most frequently used in English movie taglines, which is more or less consistent with Ariel’s prediction. Second, referring expressions with high accessibility are the least used in movie taglines, and the main reason is their high context-dependence. Finally, many taglines contain referring expressions with two kinds of accessibility, and some even three. That is to say, a mixture use of two or even three kinds of Accessibility Markers is quite common.