Different Strategies In The Comprehension Of Anaphora In Different Genres

Anaphora is an important cohesive device. The characteristics of reference make sentences and discourses rather concise and increase the difficulties to comprehend them. Anaphora is one kind of reference, and it has been studied for a long time in many different fields. In linguistics, the areas of anaphora research concern syntax, semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, and language acquisition, etc. But there is few research which studies anaphora and genres from the perspective of psycholinguistics. There are different types of anaphora in different genres, and the strategies which are used to comprehend them are correspondingly different. Therefore, it is necessary to find out these differences. These findings can be used in English teaching practice.The whole thesis is composed of seven parts. Chapter One is introduction, it gives a brief introduction of research background, the objectives of present study, the significance of the study, and the design of the thesis. Chapter Two is a review of earlier study on anaphora and the given/new strategy. Chapter Three presents the theoretical framework, including Halliday & Hasan's cohesion theory and Clark & Haviland's given/new strategy. Chapter Four concerns the qualitative analysis. One discourse of each genre is analyzed according to the given/new strategy. Through the qualitative analysis, the different types of anaphora and the comprehending strategies which are employed most frequently in one discourse are found out. Chapter Five makes a quantitative analysis of 25 discourses of each genre to check the findings found out by qualitative analysis. There are 75 discourses in all. Chapter Six gives the interpretation of the findings. Chapter Seven is the conclusion. It points out the limitations of the study and offers the implications for further study.There are three genres discussed in this thesis: literary texts, scientific texts and news texts, and two kinds of analysis methods are employed: qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis. According to Halliday & Hasan's cohesion theory and Clark & Haviland's given/new strategy, the following findings are found out: the strategy of direct matching is the most important one, and it is employed most frequently in texts of all three genres, especially in literary texts, but the strategy of bridging and the strategy of reinstating old information are different in different genres. In literary texts, both of them are not many; in scientific texts, compared with the strategy of bridging, reinstating old information is employed much more times; and in news texts, the strategy of bridging is employed much more times than the strategy of reinstating old information. These findings can be used to improve the teaching quality in our teaching practices.