A Cognitive Approach To The Resolution Mechanism Of Indirect Anaphora In English News Reports

This thesis is a study of indirect anaphora (IA) in naturally-occurring English news reports within a cognitive framework, aiming at exploring the nature of IA and providing a resolution mechanism for it.Compared with direct anaphora research, the literature on IA study is relatively limited. Syntactic and pragmatic approaches to IA cannot give an adequate explanation of the characteristics of IA. Cognitive approaches to the exploration of IA have also been adopted, but there is still a lot to do on the perfection of the cognitive mechanism of IA. In view of the limitations of the earlier studies and the characteristics of IA, the thesis has proposed a resolution mechanism, formed within a cognitive framework by integrating the topic/focus model, the schema model and the principle of Relevance. The proposed mechanism assumes that context provides cues that activate a schema which becomes the mental domain for IA resolution. The interpretation of IA is the integration of the anaphor into a proper schema, rather than a matter of simply two-entity (the antecedent and the anaphor) correlations. Therefore, the selection of a proper schema is crucial for interpreting IA. It is worth noting that the proper schema should be the one activated by the expected antecedent.In this study, IA is classified into stereotypic and non-stereotypic anaphora according to the degree of stereotypicality of the relationship between the antecedent and anaphor. For our purpose, the thesis collects 200 IA instances extracted from major English newspapers and periodicals, which are classified and analyzed in detail with the proposed resolution mechanism. It is found that the proposed resolution mechanism can be applied to both stereotypic and non-stereotypic IA instances. The major difference is that in stereotypic IA, as the schema activated by the antecedent stands in stereotypic relation with the anaphor, the proper schema can be easily achieved via people's encyclopedic knowledge; whereas in non-stereotypic IA, the relation between the proper schema and the anaphor is temporarily established, thus the establishment of the proper schema relies heavily on textual information and inferring capacities.It is hoped that the present paper will not only enhance the research in the area of anaphora resolution but also provide an alternative for understanding IA from the cognitive perspective.