Bridging Reference In English And Chinese Verbal Communication-A Cognitive Study

Bridging reference, which permeates verbal communication, refers to the relationship between a bridging expression and its intended referent not explicitly expressed in context, but can be inferred via the addition of contextual assumptions. As a semantic concept, bridging reference has been extensively researched in the literature and significant insights have been gained through various approaches. The starting point of this thesis is a contrastive study of bridging phenomenon between English and Chinese. Bridging is one of the language phenomena that most frequently occur in verbal communication. The term'bridging'was first introduced by the psycholinguist H.H. Clark in 1977 to describe the process by which the existence of a referent which has not itself been explicitly mentioned is inferred from something that is explicitly mentioned. Ever since then, there has been an enormous amount of research work on bridging reference in the last three decades. There have appeared substantial and fruitful results 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 background survey and analysis of past research on bridging both abroad and at home, this thesis, 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 theory and theories of cognitive models. The ultimate goal is, through a profound analysis and comparison of the experimental results from English and Chinese materials, to develop the universal significance of relevance theory, explore the existence of a deep-level similarity of human cognition, and confirm a hypothesis that during the process of understanding utterances in verbal communication, no matter whether it is conducted by native speakers of English or native speakers of Chinese, human cognitive inference ability that relies on cognitive models plays a very important indispensable and even sometimes decisive role. The bridging process provides important guidance for contextual assumptions, contextual constructions, even the resulting overall utterance interpretation and may put some restrictions on them as well.This thesis, based on research findings from past studies, from the recognition point of view, concentrates on the phenomenon of bridging in English and Chinese. All the examples of this research are given in the form of a comparison between English and Chinese. At the same time, it is a tentative probe trying to develop the universal significance of relevance, and hopefully, it will also be practically constructive in helping fulfill the tasks of successful cross-cultural communications and foreign language teaching.