A Corpus-based Anaphoric Study Of Personal Pronouns In MAIRs Under Accessibility Theory

Anaphora,as a branch of reference,plays an important role in the cohesion of discourse.This thesis is with regard to the anaphoric research of personal pronouns in the Maritime Accident Investigation Reports(MAIRs).The main purpose is to analyze the anaphoric use of personal pronouns in the reports,summarize the characteristics of personal pronouns and anaphora,figure out the accessibility degree of personal pronouns.Thus the maritime English learners and researchers are able to master more effective methods to interpret the reports and have a better understanding of such materials.Moreover,it is conducive to discourse composition and comprehension by mastering relevant theories and rules of anaphoric analysis and applying them flexibly.Israeli linguist Ariel's accessibility theory is mainly adopted in the thesis.Anaphoric research is carried out under the four factors influencing accessibility degree and two combining factors derived from the four.A specialized corpus is built to deal with the reports.The original files of these reports are processed,including the text and file format.The retrieving work of personal pronouns is mainly done by the software Antconc,thus to ensure that considerable amounts of personal pronouns are adopted in the reports,which is available for further research.The personal pronouns are retrieved from the corpus and analyzed manually.Those with anaphoric uses are tagged and randomly chosen as examples in the thesis.The major findings are as follows:the third-person pronouns are most commonly used while the first-person pronouns and second-person pronouns are used much less in MAIRs.Among the third-person pronouns,"she" and "her" are generally referred to the ship in maritime English.Moreover,among the principles influencing the accessibility degree of object entities,the anaphora influenced by unity principle and distance principle is more and that influenced by the competition principle is less.The combining principles are altogether adopted in a large number in the anaphoric analysis.In the future,the anaphoric research shall be conducted from multidimensional perspectives.