A Study Of Bridging Reference From The Perspective Of ICM Theory

The research on Bridging Reference enjoys a long tradition, during which not only the linguistic circle has had intense debate mainly surrounding this topic, but it also has been investigated from other disciplines, namely, within the psychology frameworks. As a special branch of the anaphora system, many significant findings have come out of this work, but unfortunately there is yet until now no perfect views on the interpretation of Bridging Reference. As a special kind of anaphora, it is different from direct anaphora, which refers to relationship between a linguistic expression and its intended referent not explicitly expressed in the previous context, since there is no apparent anaphoric relation between the referent and its antecedent.Among the limited literature, there are four theoretical frameworks which are the most influential in Bridging resolution. That is, the Given and New Contract, the Topic/Focus Model, the Scenario Model and the Relevance Model. But each theoretical explanation in previous studies are more or less problematic, such as failing to explain the condition that there is more than one candidate antecedent, overemphasizing the stereotypical relations and so on. Therefore, the current thesis probes into the interpretation of Bridging Reference from the cognitive perspective.Cognitive linguistics is a strategic approach, which is based on our basic experience and how we conceptualize the world. The main purpose of research is exploring into cognitive or mental structure and by analyzing strategies that in human mind, mainly on the way they store information, comprehend and produce language., among which the most interested topics are:conceptual metaphor, cognitive model, mental spaces, image and so on. Lakoff’s crucial claim is that we organize our knowledge via the special structures being called "idealized cognitive models", and the complex structure emerges both the category structures and prototype effects. Every ICM is a complex structured, which is regarded as a gestalt structure, made up of four types of structuring principles: propositional structure, image-schematic structure, metaphoric mappings and metonymic mappings, which is adopted by the author as the principles of Bridging in the present thesis. ICM approach is adopted to analyze the bridging process of bridging reference from the above four structures.Interpretation of Bridging Reference from ICM theory has never been discussed, and ICM model constitutes a central part of our model. ICM theory offers a framework to contain advantages of different approaches, but relevant studies from the ICM theory have hardly been carried out. It has strong explanatory power in interpreting bridging reference. Hence, in this thesis, the author will make the classification mainly based on the link between the bridging NP and the antecedent, they are Hyponymy relationship, Involving relationship, Action-result relationship, Meronymy relationship and Entity-Attribute relationship. The principles of ICM theory can be applied to each type of Bridging Reference account. Additionally, the present research attempts to make a comparison between scenario-based approach with ICM approach, and this thesis makes an effort to make up some of the deficiency of scenario-based approach to Bridging Reference with ICM theory.The discussion of bridging reference interpretation within ICM-theoretic framework introduces a new angle to the study of BR on the one hand, and verifies the explanatory power of ICM theory on the other. But there is no perfect theory, that the ICM approach still has a lot of problems. The number of the data based on what the distribution of bridging reference is made is relatively small, and it still needs the support of more experimental evidence on the other.