The Cognitive Analysis Of Anaphoric Repair Cao Yu's Chinese Drama Conversations

Anaphoric repair, one of the most fundamental language phenomena, is regarded as one of the central issues .the study of the phenomenon in English has a long history in a variety of disciplines. Researchers have analyzed anaphoric repair phenomenon in English from various distinct theoretical perspectives, and got the conclusion that it touches upon multi-constraints, however, the study for Chinese is so limited, so this thesis is anchored by Ariel's accessibility theory and based on the fundamental concept of accessibility, we take an analysis about the mechanism and process of anaphoric repair and the referential choice in repair sequence in CaoYu's Chinese drama conversations. Altogether 52 instances of anaphoric repair from CaoYu's Chinese dramas were collected for our analysis. The thesis takes a conversation analytic approach to anaphoric repair in data analysis, with the combination of qualitative and quantitative methodology, by focusing on two research questions. These two questions are how anaphoric repair phenomena are distributed in conversation discourses? What are the factors influencing the choice of referential expression forms in conversation discourses?Accessibility, the psycholinguistic concept, borrowed from psychology, which signals the relative ease or convenience of retrieving a linguistic or memory unit from the structure of memory in man's brain. According to Ariel, the degree of accessibility of a discourse entity's mental representation is associated with its activation in man's memory and the reason why varying referring expressions are employed lies in different accessibility marked to the addressee. The accessibility degree of referring expressions is governed by the three encoded principles: informativity, rigidity and attenuation. So varying referring expressions can be arranged in a marking scale whose accessibility ranges from low to high. Ariel summarizes four factors contributing to the assumed accessibility status of anaphoric expressions as distance, saliency, competition and unity. Afterwards, she classifies competition and saliency as the saliency of antecedent. According to Ariel, we analyze the collected data from the three factors: distance, saliency and unity. Distance is measured by the semantic units between an anaphor and its antecedent; saliency is depending on whether the antecedent is a topic or not; unity is resting on whether the antecedent and the anaphor are within the same frame, point of view or segment. Through a close observation and detailed analysis of concrete Chinese conversation discourses in Cao Yu's dramas, the following conclusions are drawn.Firstly, it should be noted that the reparanda in Cao Yu's dramas can almost be evenly divided into pronominal forms and non-pronominal forms, the pronominal forms is 46%, while the non-pronominal forms is 54%.the less informativity, rigidity and more attenuated reference forms tend to be repaired by more informativity, more rigidity and less attenuated expressions in the anaphoric repair phenomena of Cao Yu's Chinese drama conversations.Secondly, the choice of the referential expressions is influenced by distance, topic and unity. In short distance environment, the choices of referring expressions tend to switch from lower accessibility markers to higher ones, mainly switching to zero form or pronouns; in long distance from higher accessibility markers to lower ones, that is, an overwhelming majority of referring expressions change into NP and to pronouns occasionally; in Chinese conversation discourses in CaoYu's dramas, the shift of topic is one of the reasons that affect the accessibility of referents thus trigger the switching of referring expressions. The shift of topic is resulted from the insertion of one or more new entities (competition), switching of time space, shift of semantic framework, which initiate the topic shift, thereupon a lower accessibility marker tends to be employed; unity influences the choice of referents mainly through three channels: shift of frames, shift of point of view and segment. The choice of reference within the same frames or point of view or segment with common meaning tend to alter from low accessibility ones to high accessibility ones. When a pair of anaphoric forms is in the shift of frames, point of view or segment without common meaning, the references tend to switch to low accessible referential expression forms.On the whole, repair of pronominal forms is approached from the cognitive perspective. It is found that this type of anaphoric repair results from either the discrepancy between the speaker's assumption and the listener's assessment of the accessibility status of the referent, or the speaker's ignorance of its accessibility status in the listener's brain. On the linguistic level, repair of pronominal forms is indeed a type of repair sequence in which a higher accessibility marker is repaired by a lower accessibility marker. Finally, a cognitive model of anaphoric repair is advanced for a comprehensive and synthetic interpretation of repair of pronominal forms.