The Cognitive Interpretation Of Indirect Anaphora In EST

Indirect anaphora (IA), as a special type of anaphora is gaining more and more attention. Compared with direct anaphora, indirect anaphora have no explicit antecedent co-referring to it, therefore it requires the readers to find out the relationship between the indirect anaphor and the prior information in a text. After discussing of the strengths and weakness of the theories, the author makes a conclusion of the theories about how to interpret indirect anaphora, and improves a mechanism to interpret the relationship of the antecedent triggers and the indirect anaphors. With the mechanism, indirect anaphora in 60 EST texts which are chosen from New York Times and Science and Technology Review is studied with the purpose to find out whether there is relationship between the distribution of IA and EST texts, to see what the characteristics of IA in EST texts are and to make a further inference of the effects of IA oh the EST understanding.After a meticulous comparison of the collected data, certain relationship between the distribution of the IA and the EST texts is found out and some characteristics of IA in EST texts are generated as well. Based on the findings of the previous cognitive studies and the analysis of the indirect anaphora in EST, the thesis finds out that indirect anaphora is a universal phenomenon although it is less than direct anaphora in number. It is crucial to the understanding of EST texts. So some suggestions are given to the understanding of EST texts in order to help readers to understand EST texts successfully.