A Study Of Anaphora Ambiguity Of The Personal Pronoun "TA (Male)" In Simple Sentences

Anaphora has been one of the central research topics of linguistics since 1970s; however, the study on anaphora ambiguity of third-personal pronoun within simple sentences is still very limited. Based on the Three-Plane Theory, this thesis examines the issue of anaphora ambiguity with such research methodologies as induction, deduction, formatting, subcategorization and context reconstruction, focusing especially on five aspects, i.e. distribution of anaphora and antecedent, cause of ambiguity, the common types of ambiguity, affected factors of anaphora as well as methods of disambiguation.The paper mainly consists of five chapters.Chapter I introduces research background, including research object, methods sources of corpus, achievements and inadequacies of previous research. Following this is the significance and purpose of the present research.Chapter II provides a comprehensive discussion of the distributions of anaphora and antecedent in syntactic structure. Firstly, the author sums up the Semantic direction characteristics and some common direction types of "Ta" according to the etymology of Chinese third-person pronouns. After that, the author analyses respectively the syntactic distribution regularities of "Ta (male)" and antecedent, summarizing their possible modes of combination within the same sentence so as to provide basis for the induction of ambiguity types and discussion of judging principle in the following part.Chapter III analyzes the main research object of this thesis--anaphora Ambiguity. At first, a summary of the common syntactic structures of anaphora ambiguity is made on the basis of the analysis of distribution in Chapter Ⅱ. Then, the author discusses the cause of ambiguity and factors affecting ambiguity judging from four aspects—syntax, semantics, pragmatics and cognition. Affirming the function of syntactic judgment factors, this part also raises some questions according to concrete examples, which anticipates the study of specific methods in the next part.Chapter IV centers on methods of disambiguation. This part starts from syntactic analysis methods, introducing methods of disambiguation while simultaneously pointing out the anaphora ambiguous situation which cannot be explicated by those methods. Then the author analyses these special ambiguity phenomena with such methods as syntax, semantics, pragmatics and cognitive psychology. At the end of this chapter, the author tries to put forward a "four-step selecting method", proposing that the method of comprehensive system should be employed to resolve the problem of anaphora ambiguity.Chapter V makes a summary of the innovation points and inadequacies of this thesis.