Sok-hun Kim

Graduation Semester and Year

2013

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics

Department

Linguistics

First Advisor

Laurel Stvan

Abstract

This dissertation explores discourse anaphora in English and Korean by using a neo-Gricean pragmatic approach with corpus-based data. Very little study of Korean discourse anaphora has yet taken place at the inter-sentential level, except works looking at zero anaphor and a logophoric reflexive pronoun caki`self'. This research fills this gap by examining two types of discourse anaphora at the discourse level: discourse anaphoric patterns (by order of mention of the referent and by placement of the paragraph) and sentential anaphors. Two quantitative methods were adopted to verify the distribution and the selection of anaphora: natural data collection and a survey. First, samples of 30,000 running words from newspaper articles (for discourse anaphoric patterns) and the same size of samples from drama scripts (for sentential anaphors) in each language were investigated for each issue. Second, 20 native speakers of English and 20 native speakers of Korean were recruited to take part in two sets of a threefold acceptability survey for two types of discourse anaphora.Based on the findings, the distinct characteristics signaling the appropriateness of different anaphors are qualitatively discussed within four relevant theories: topic continuity theory, hierarchy theory, cognitive theory, and principled neo-Gricean theory. First, discourse anaphoric patterns are examined in two respects: by order of mention of the referent and by placement of the paragraph. For both mention types, it is argued that there are general vs. sequential chains of anaphoric patterns: the first type forms a general chain with in both languages, whereas the second type forms a sequential chain with , notably in Korean. Second, referential properties of sentential anaphora are accounted for in terms of degree of anaphoricity in two languages. Lastly, it is argued that discourse anaphora in both languages can be more comprehensively accounted for through the use of neo-Gricean heuristics.

Disciplines

Linguistics | Social and Behavioral Sciences

Comments

Degree granted by The University of Texas at Arlington

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