earticle

영어

The purpose of this paper is to analyze English backward pronouns with the discourse-functional view of language after the survey of the syntactic approach. The purely structural approach to the backward pronouns cannot explain many backward anaphora phenomena because the backward pronoun is primarily a discourse-functional matter. Therefore, it should be analyzed in terms of discourse-functional factors which deal with linguistic communication. It is examined that there are some communicative factors in determining backward pronoun coreference. The discourse-functional factors of the backward pronouns discussed in this paper are as follows: firstly, the information concepts such as given and new information, theme and rhyme, and presupposition and assertion; secondly, the content of the sentence; thirdly, the tightness and looseness between main and subordinate clauses; finally, the reported ways of discourse such as direct discourse, indirect discourse, semi-indirect discourse, and point of views. This discourse-functional approach can capture the semantic-pragmatic properties of English backward pronouns and can solve some problems raised in the purely structural analysis. It is considered that the discourse-functional approach is useful and necessary for the determination of backward pronoun reference, but it is not a unified theory. So, a unified framework in which all the functional explanations are interrelated with each other will be the task to be further researched in the future.