The discourse-pragmatic functions of zero anaphora in Turkish

This study investigates the discourse-pragmatic functions of zero anaphora as anaphoric patterns for the third-person human referents in Turkish written discourse. The corpus consists of 6 biography books that have been published in between 2004-2006. A discourse-pragmatic approach is adopted for the research. In the direction of explaining the discourse-pragmatic function of zero anaphora, this study proposes a hypothesis that zero anaphora functions as a presupposition trigger by encoding the referents that have been mentioned in the previous discourse. A presupposition trigger is a linguistic device that encodes given/old information, in other words, the presupposed information.In order to explore whether zero anaphora functions as a presupposition trigger in discourse, this study includes both quantitative discourse analysis and rhetorical analysis. The former analysis was conducted for exploring the distribution of zero anaphora, together with full NPs and pronouns both in discourse and syntax. The latter analysis was carried out in order to examine the relation between the use of zero anaphora and the rhetorical structure of discourse. The theoretical framework of this study is Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT) which states that the meaning of a discourse depends upon and interacts with its rhetorical structure (Asher 1993; Asher and Lascarides 2003). According to this theory, a proper analysis of discourse anaphora requires an account according to which discourse content depends on a discourse structure consisting of rhetorical relations that link together the utterances.This study largely confirms that zero anaphora functions as presupposition trigger by encoding the presupposed information. By this function, zero anaphora helps rhetorical relations update the discourse and maximize discourse coherence.