Cognitive Inference In Bridging Of English And Chinese: A Contrastive Study

The starting point of this dissertation is a contrastive study of bridging phenomenon inboth English and Chinese. Bridging is one of the language phenomena that most frequentlyoccur in verbal communication. The term 'bridging'was first introduced by thepsycholinguist H. H. Clark in 1977 to describe the process by which the existence of areferent which has not itself been explicitly mentioned is inferred from something that isexplicitly mentioned. Ever since then, there has been an enormous amount of research workon bridging reference in the last three decades. There have appeared substantial and fruitfulresults given by scholars or experts in this field from different perspectives. In recent years,there is also some active research on reference assignment and bridging reference in China.After giving a brief survey and analysis of past research on bridging both abroad and at home,this dissertation, benefiting a lot from some of the current relevant findings and approaches,tries to explain the phenomenon of bridging in English and Chinese based on relevance theoryand theories of cognitive models. The ultimate goal is, through a profound analysis andcomparison of the experimental results from English and Chinese materials, to develop theuniversal significance of relevance theory, explore the existence of a deep-level similarity ofhuman cognition, and confirm a hypothesis that during the process of understandingutterances in verbal communication, no matter whether it is conducted by native speakers ofEnglish or native speakers of Chinese, human cognitive inference ability that relies oncognitive models plays a very important indispensable and even sometimes decisive role. Thebridging process provides important guidance for contextual assumptions, contextualconstructions, even the resulting overall utterance interpretation and may put some restrictionson them as well.