A Cognitive Contrastive Study Of The Indirect Anaphora In Contemporary English And Chinese Poetry

With the study of anaphora has been constantly deepening by international linguists, anaphora becomes one of the hot topics of the modern linguistics, and refers to a universal expression in the languages of the world. With the profound study of anaphora, it is regarded as a grammatical means of the language, and there is no expection in English and Chinese. It is a novel trend for the modern linguistics to study anaphora from the perspective of cognitive linguistics which holds that metonymy is not only a simple means of rhetoric, but also a mode of thinking based on the people’s daily experience. According to the thoughts of cognitive linguists about metonymy, this thesis aims to combine metonymy with cognitive reference point to explore the phenomenon of textual anaphora.Most scholars focused on direct anaphora, but have paid more attention to indirect anaphora in recent years which is few noticeable researches than direct anaphora. The corpora about anaphora are generally collected from stories, narrations, or argumentation, not from poetry because of restrictions of rhyme, number of words, format, etc, which often destroy the formation of anaphora. However, poetry is an indispensable part of literature with a need to study indirect anaphora in contemporary poetry. Therefore the indirect anaphora in contemporary poetry is chosen as the object of study in the present thesis, which will expand the traditional genre of indirect anaphora and contribute to a more comprehensive research for indirect anaphora.Poetry is a kind of special style whose language often violates people’s conventional way of expression. Therefore, the theory which applies to the textual anaphora can not fully explain the anaphora in poetry. In the light of this, this thesis selects the metonymy from the perspective of cognitive linguistics to conduct a horizontal comparison to check the differences in the distribution and the process of translation strategies of anaphora from cognitive mechanism within the brain and explain the phenomenon of indirect anaphora in the contemporary English and Chinese poetry, which conincides with anaphora interpretation mechanism based on conceptual connection. Thanks to the study of anaphora by scholars in different fields, the author, with the help of the cognitive reference point, made a contrastive study on indirect anaphora in English and Chinese contemporary poetry with the integration of anaphora, cognition, contrastive study and empirical study systemically and profoundly, aiming to provide readers with some help to improve their proficiency in reading and writing of peotry.