Chomsky’s Binding Theory is the perfect representation of anaphoric study from a structural perspective。 With its concise principles and rigid logic, the Binding theory has achieved rather high correctness in predicting the possible antecedent scope within the domain of the sentence。 However, this theory is unable to address discourse anaphora。 Then Givon (1990) advocated another structural approach, topic continuity or distance-interference model, intending to compensate for this disadvantage。 However, it can only offer a predication of a possible antecedent scope。文献综述

The study of anaphora from the perspective of pragmatics is mainly represented by Levinson (1991, 1995) and Huang Yan (1987, 1989, 1994)。 They build their study on the Q-, I-, and M-principles put forward by Levinson, intending to develop a set of highly formalized principles for anaphoric encoding and solution。 Levinson’s three principles made great progress in Grice’s cooperative principle or its consideration of both speakers and addressees。 However, as Qian Guanlian (1997) argues, considering the complicated actual language uses, complicated pragmatic inference cannot be formalized purely with several rigid as Levinson claims。 Many other factors have to be taken into account, such as context and knowledge-based inference

The introduction of cognitive research into anaphoric study sheds some light on exploration in this field and also yields several convincing theories, such as Givenness Hierarchy proposed by Gundel (2012), which make us aware of the important and ubiquitous role that cognition plays in language uses。