A Cognitive-Metonymic Study Of Indirect Anaphora In English Texts Based On Idealized Cognitive Model

The study of anaphora is a classic topic in the field of linguistics.Many linguists have studied anaphora from the perspective of syntax,semantics,pragmatics,and cognitive linguistics,and they have achieved fruitful results.Quirk(1985)divides the anaphora into direct anaphora and indirect anaphora.There are many studies on direct anaphora,and little attention is paid to indirect anaphora.In indirect anaphora,the antecedent and the anaphor do not have a co-referential relationship.Therefore,understanding the relationship between the antecedent and the anaphor has become the focus of understanding indirect anaphora.Both Ariel(1990)and Chafe(1994)study indirect anaphora from the cognitive perspective.Based on the previous studies,this study holds the view that the understanding of an indirect anaphora depends to a large extent on the cognitive model in people's minds.Therefore,this thesis tries to use the cognitive theory of idealized cognitive model to explore the indirect anaphora of English texts.Lakoff proposed Idealized Cognitive Model in 1987.According to Lakoff(1987),metonymy refers to the cognitive phenomenon that expresses and explains “part and the whole” relationship within the same ICM.Metonymy makes people pay more attention to the salient part of the referent,and it has become an important way of thinking in human language and behavior.This thesis is a study of indirect anaphora in English texts from the cognitive-metonymic perspective based on Idealized Cognitive Model.The theoretical framework of this study is Idealized Cognitive Model,and the perspective of this study is cognitive metonymy.This study mainly analyzes and discusses the following two research questions:(1)What is the cognitive-metonymic mechanism of indirect anaphora under the framework of ICM theory?(2)How can we analyze and interpret indirect anaphora by using the cognitive-metonymic study under the framework of ICM theory?Through qualitative research,this thesis analyzes 41 examples of indirect anaphora published by many domestic and foreign linguists and scholars in published books and publications.It uses an idealized cognitive model and analyzes nominal indirect anaphora,pronominal indirect anaphora and zero anaphora from the cognitive-metonymic perspective.Finally,the following conclusions are drawn: Under the theoretical framework of ICM theory,the cognitive-metonymic mechanism of indirect anaphora refers to the analysis of cognitive-metonymic relationship between the whole ICM and its parts and between the parts of an ICM,it can be finally found out that ICM theory can be used to explain the indirect referential relationship between antecedent and anaphor in indirect anaphora in English textsfrom the cognitive-metonymic perspective.This thesis analyzes the relationship between the antecedent and the anaphor in nominal indirect anaphora,pronominal indirect anaphora and zero anaphora in English texts,and finds that there is a cognitive-metonymic relationship between the antecedent and the anaphor.It can be seen that the cognitive metonymy based on ICM has a good explanatory power to interpret nominal indirect anaphora,pronominal indirect anaphora and zero anaphora.