Construing Deep Anaphora In A Conceptual Reference Point-Metonymic Model

Anaphora is a dependence relation where a pro-form or an abbreviated linguistic expression refers to another linguistic expression which has been mentioned explicitly.It has two categories,the “syntactically controlled” surface anaphora and the “pragmatically controlled” deep anaphora.Surface anaphora allows only linguistic elements to be antecedents,while deep anaphora can take as antecedents both the linguistic elements and events and objects in the extra-linguistic context.As a special cohesive device,anaphora has always been a research focus in linguistics.Since 1970 s,linguists have investigated anaphora from syntactic,pragmatic,functional and cognitive perspectives.The syntactic approach is principally concerned with the syntactic correlation between the anaphor and its antecedent within a sentence.It is very vital to intrasentential anaphora while pragmatic factor is critical to discourse anaphora,which is emphasized by the pragmatic approach.It concentrates on the discourse meaning of antecedents and anaphors,and hence extricates the research on anaphora from the formalist restriction.Nonetheless,it fails to consider other categories of anaphora in natural discourse.The functional approach accounts for the cohesive function of anaphora within the text structure.However,its recognition does not adequately explore participant factors in the extra-linguistic context.Different from the previous research,the cognitive approach interprets the referent of anaphoric expression as a prominent entity in the interlocutors' mental representation.Although this shift overcomes the ignorance of mental process on anaphoric constructions,it still has certain limitations.The key notions of Ariel's Accessibility Theory are defined vaguely with no clear-cut elaboration on its four impact factors and overemphasize the significance of mental representation.Gundel's Giveness Hierarchy excessively counts on the information extracted from the text itself,seemingly disregarding the ability of a cognitive subject.Among previous studies,few has addressed the meaning construction and construingmechanism underlying the phenomenon.To illustrate the cognitive mechanism of deep anaphora,cognitive linguists resort to Conceptual Reference Point Theory.Their research on deep anaphora has connected the antecedent and the anaphor by taking the antecedent trigger as the reference point.However,they have not systematically analyzed the process of seeking anaphor,which is mainly based on semantic information and stereotypical knowledge.This thesis,therefore,incorporates the concept of metonymy into Conceptual Reference Point Theory,and hence constructs a Conceptual Reference Point-Metonymic Model to exhibit deep anaphora's meaning construction and construing mechanism.In order to systematically analyze the cognitive mechanism of deep anaphora,the author classifies deep anaphora into there groups in light of semantic relation between antecedents and anaphors,zero-pronoun anaphora,antecedentless anaphora and ambiguous anaphora.In terms of the reference point,zero-pronoun anaphora is further classified into two subcategories,zero-pronoun anaphora with the explicit referent point and zero-pronoun anaphora with the implicit reference point.According to the word class of anaphors,antecedentless anaphora is further categorized into two types,noun phrases as antecedentless anaphors and pronouns as antecedentless anaphors.Then each selected typical construction of these five subcategories is analyzed within the Conceptual Reference Point-Metonymic Model.The foregoing analysis leads to following conclusions: First,the constructing and construing process of deep anaphora can be depicted through Conceptual Reference Point network.In this network,deep anaphora is conceived as mental representation processing among certain concepts.Specifically,the activated antecedent and target respectively function as the reference points which correlate with scores of potential conceptual entities within their own cognitive dominions.Then the two reference points bridge the conceptualizer and the anaphor,thus accounting for deep anaphora through this underlying theory.Second,since certain antecedents and anaphors of deep anaphora embody the metonymic characteristics,they can be interpreted from the perspective of metonymy.The author then illustrates how metonymic chain explains the construction of deep anaphora,which not only deepens our understanding of deep anaphoric expressions,but also shows the complementary relationship between conceptual reference point network and metonymic chain.