1。3 Research questions 

The central point of this essay is the shift from a deictic word to anaphoric form, which is so common that can be easily found from our daily English conversation。 Here comes an example: 

[1] Tom: What’s this? 

Jerry: It is a book。

In the example [1], the demonstrative pronoun “this” is a typical deictic word and the personal pronoun “it” is a typical anaphoric form。 And we could find from this small but common dialogue that the deictic “this” used by Tom was not maintained by Jerry when he gave the answer。 Instead, Jerry substituted “this” with anaphoric “it”。 This kind of shift from deictic “this” to anaphoric “it” is the focus of this essay。 This essay aims to answer the question of why and when this kind of shift should occur, and also explain the intention and function of applying the shift。

1。4 Structure of the study 

This essay consists of five chapters, namely the introduction, the literature review, the comparative and contrastive study of anaphora and deixis, the shift from deictic “this” to anaphoric “it” and the conclusion。  The introduction mainly introduces such basic information about this essay as research backgroud, aims and significance and research questions etc。 The second part reviews the previous reasearch findings on deixis and anaphora。 In the third chapter, this essay compare and contrast deixis and anaphora to find out their similarities and differences。 Then comes the central part of this essay, in which the extensive analysis will be made。 In the fourth chapter, this essay will analyze and explain the shift from deictic “this” to anaphoric “it” through four models, each representing a distinct perspective。 Finally, the conclusion part will present the summary and pedagogical implications of this essay, and the limitations and further research will also be discussed。 

2。 Literature review

2。1 Review of the study of anaphora 论文网

Anaphora is an important concept for different reasons and on different levels: firstly, anaphora indicates how discourse is constructed and maintained; secondly, anaphora binds different syntactical elements together at the level of the sentence; thirdly, anaphora presents a challenge to natural language processing in computational linguistics, since the identification of the reference can be difficult; and finally, anaphora tells some things about how language is understood and processed, which is relevant to fields of linguistics interested in cognitive psychology。

In terms of the use of anaphora, it can be pided into intrasentential anaphora and discourse anaphora。 Thus, some languages in the world carry a switch-reference system, which can act as a natural 'bridge' between pure intrasentential anaphora and pure discourse anaphora。 This essay will mainly focus on discourse anaphora。

In the study of discourse anaphora, one of the most important issues is the anaphoric distribution in discourse, which is concerned with the choice or selection of particular anaphora at a particular point of discourse。 It seems that in principle a set of anaphoric forms can be chosen from to “correctly” refer to an entity。 In fact, in the actual realization of use, these forms are by no means all “right”。 Thus, during the dynamic formation of discourse, a particular “appropriate” anaphoric expression from that set has to be selected from time to time。 (Huang Yan, 2000)

Anaphoric distribution in discourse is so complicated that it also involves pragmatic, cognitive and structural factors。 At present, there are mainly three approaches to discourse anaphora, namely topic continuity model, hierarchy model and cognitive model。 That is to say, according to the topic continuity model, anaphoric distribution in discourse is claimed to be primarily determined by the continuity of topic, hierarchical structure of discourse according to the hierarchy model, and by cognitive factors such as memory and attention according the cognitive model。