| The present paper is a qualitative study of definite indirect anaphora (IA) in naturally-occurring English narratives with an aim to explore the nature of definiteness in IA and to provide a cognitive Resolution Mechanism for definite IA.The present paper has proposed a Resolution Mechanism, formed within a cognitive framework by integrating the Accessibility theory, the Frame model and the principle of Relevance. The proposed mechanism assumes that context provides cues that activate a frame which becomes the mental domain for anaphora resolution. The interpretation of definite IA is the integration of the anaphor into a proper frame, rather than a matter of simply two-entity (the antecedent trigger and the indirect anaphor) correlations. Therefore, a proper frame is crucial for interpreting definite IA. It is worth noting that the proper frame should be the one activated by the expected antecedent trigger (AT).Definite IA is classified into stereotypical and non-stereotypical anaphora according to the degree of stereotypicality of the relationship between AT and IA. For research purpose, the paper collects 100 instances of definite IA, extracted from 50 short stories (see Appendix II), which are classified and analyzed in detail with the proposed Resolution Mechanism. It is found that the proposed Resolution Mechanism can be applied to the resolution of both stereotypical and non-stereotypical definite IA. The major difference is that in stereotypical definite IA, as the frame activated by the AT stands in stereotypical relation with the IA, the proper frame can be easily achieved via people's encyclopedic knowledge; whereas in non-stereotypical definite IA, the relation between the proper frame and the IA is temporarily established, thus the establishment of the proper frame relies heavily on textual information and inferring... |
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