| In anaphora, a special type-indirect anaphora is gaining more and more attention. Different from direct anaphora, the indirect anaphor (IA for short) can't find an antecedent co-referring to it, therefore it's worth finding out the relationship between the indirect anaphor and the prior information in a text. In this paper, the prior information is called antecedent trigger (AT for short).In the research on indirect anaphora, the current focus is not the formal ties in traditional grammar, but the mental representation and mental coherence of the text. This paper introduces Ariel's Accessibility Theory and other theories concerning I A, such as Grice's Cooperative Principle, Fillmore's Frame Theory and some current developments. The pragmatic approach finally has to find the answer from people's cognitive process. Though Ariel offers us a cognitive perspective, her research is limited in the class of direct anaphora, and she doesn't give much room to indirect anaphora. Fillmore emphasizes particularly on what the author calls stereotypical IA, and his theory is mainly applied in artificial intelligence.After summing up the strengths and weaknesses of these theories, this paper attempts to offer a unified model to interpret the relationship between AT and IA-Cognitive Frame Hypothesis. This hypothesis believes that when reading a text, the reader forms a gestalt cognitive frame that is integrated by different small frames. Antecedent trigger interacts with all types of knowledge stored in people's mental world. This interaction establishes a cognitive connection between antecedent trigger and indirect anaphor so as to ensure readers' smooth understanding of the text.This paper views the relationship between AT and IA from two perspectives. First, from the semantic relations, it can be classified into part-whole relations,presupposition of AT, action-result relations and situational meaning. Second, from the degree of cognitive effort of getting different types of knowledge, it can be divided into stereotypical and non-stereotypical relationship. In cognition, people tend to establish a link between a certain concept and other related typical concepts, and this link will gradually be accepted by the members of a community. In understanding a text, the stereotypical relationship means that the AT-IA relationship is shared by all the members of a community, and can be applied in any text. While the non-stereotypical relationship means the AT-IA relationship is not fixed in use. It is somewhat temporary. Without certain context, this temporary relationship is hard for readers to understand. For example, when we get the concept of "a program list", we tend to link it to a concert, an audience or a music hall. But the link between a program list and chickens is to be found with the help of certain contexts.As a further study, the paper makes a statistic of the first 6 volumes of Reader's Digest in 2001. These data prove the above hypothesis, and it is also found that stereotypical and non-stereotypical IA has close relationship with genres of texts. The author classifies the texts in Reader's Digest into three genres: advertisements, humor stories and expositions. The distribution of direct anaphor, stereotypical and non-stereotypical IA varies from one another.The result is:1. The percentage of direct anaphor is 77.1% in humor stories, 64.2% in expositions and 64.9% in advertisements. It's much higher than that of indirect anaphor.2. The rate of stereotypical IA(SIA for short) to non-stereotypical IA(NSIA for short) is 15.1:1 (in expositions), 6.4:1 (in humor stories) and 1:1.1 (in advertisements).In any texts, authors hope that readers can understand the text with as little cognitive effort as possible. In direct anaphora, both the antecedent and the anaphor appear in the text, so it is easy for readers to infer the relationship between them.The rate of SIA to NSIA differs in the three genres, which shows it is closelyrelated to the characteristics of genres. An advertisement aims to provide... |
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