A Cognitive Study Of Anaphora In Legal Text

Anaphora is a kind of language phenomena occurring in almost all kinds of texts.It is used to refer to the initial introduction of some entity out of the surface level oflanguage. Anaphora performs the different roles in all branches of linguistics. Assuggested by Ariel, who researches into anaphora from the cognitive perspective, thereason why the speaker or writer tries to use different types of referents in his/her textis that he/she aims to show to the hearer or reader the different accessibility of theentity. Thus when it comes to the function of referential expressions, accessibilitymarker shall take its appearance. Accessibility refers to the degree of difficulty orconvenience of dragging some memorizing unit from the brain’s memorizing systemin the process of people’s producing and understanding some language or memorizingunit. Combined with its cognitive role, anaphora in this paper is analyzed with respectto the legal text.The legal text is a special type of legal language in its logic arrangement, tightstructure and high formula. In order to convey legal information and reach legalintentions, legislators use all kinds of cohesive devices to have the legal textunderstood, among which anaphora is an important type. Anaphora in the legal textcan be classified into three types, namely noun phrase anaphora, pronominal anaphoraand zero anaphora, and zero anaphora is the one that appears at the highest frequency.This dissertation highlights on the forming mode of all the three types of anaphorawith some elaborations on zero anaphora.As a commonly-used cohesive device, anaphora performs different functions indifferent kinds of languages, namely grammatical function, lexical function, syntacticfunction, and textual function. Apart from the application of the anaphora in the legaltext, various functions of anaphora are analyzed in this thesis. More importantly, theinterpersonal function is also discussed in this thesis for the purpose of achieving thebest effect that the legal texts are fully understood and put into practice. At the same time, the characteristics of the three classes are discussedrespectively with respect to the legal text. Then the author studies several given legaltexts to find out the mechanism of the application of anaphora in the legal text. Theinterpretation of anaphora is related to the explicitness of the subject and theconceptual meaning of the sentence. At last, a figure of cognitive mode of theresolution of anaphora with respect to accessibility based on the previous researches iscarried out to resolve anaphora in the legal text according to Lyons’s explanation ofanaphora(Lyons,1977).