| Coherence is one of the most important and the most complicated topics in discourse analysis. It has become one of the focal problems in discourse analysis in the recent two decades. The research on it now is in the ascendant.As we know, Halliday's cohesion theory includes lexical cohesion and structural cohesion. Lexical cohesion refers to the semantic connection between certain words in a discourse, it is a part of linguistic environment, and can be divided into three parts: reiteration, co-reference, .collocation, etc. The structural cohesion refers to the relations between one clause and another, and it can be divided into the types: substitution, ellipsis, reference, etc.It is well-known that Halliday & Hasan have made great contributions to the cohesion theory. However, Halliday stresses the function of cohesion in producing coherence too much. He claims, "Cohesion is a necessary condition of coherence." "Cohesion is the foundation on which the edifice of coherence is built (Halliday,1985:34 )". Although his theory is widely accepted by many researchers, yet it leads to many criticisms and many different comments. Moreover, Halliday failed to make a clear picture of what coherence is. As a result, many linguists have done much research on discourse coherence.This dissertation claims that coherence is not only the structural connectedness or formal concord of discourse, but also the extra-linguistic factors such as pragmatic, psychological and cognitive factors that are related to the interpretation of discourse.Discourse coherence is not only a form question, but also a semantic feature which is not determined by the text itself, but by the extra-linguistic factors which include the social cultural background, the cognitive psychological model, and the relations between the discourse and the context. The language activities occur in a certain cognitive environments, which will directly or indirectly influence or control the choice and the communication of the discourse and the choice of the linguistic forms.This dissertation includes six chapters, the main content of each chapter is as follows:Chapter One briefly introduces the main purpose, the theoretical basis, the main research method and the framework. The method of this dissertation is the combination of description and the explanation, the quantitative and qualified combination, the contrastive analysis and the inter-disciplinary method. From the point of view of functionalism, this dissertation tries to give some explanations according to the description, paying attention to both the description and the explanation, both the form and the meaning. The purpose of description is to explanation, only do we give an adequate explanation can we give an adequate and proper explanation.Cognitive linguistics claims that language is a part of cognition, it is controlled by the method and regulation of people's views. If we want to give an adequate explanation, we must give explanation to the language phenomena, and we must study the cognitive regulation. Cognitive linguistics not only describes the language facts, but also advances to the theoretical explanation, in order to explore the cognition hidden behind the language facts.This dissertation aims to do a contrastive study of the discourse coherence mechanism between English and Chinese, attempting to further the study of discourse coherence. This is a new dimension and a new area of discourse coherence.Chapter Two discusses the theory, the types the research method, the nature, the relation between the cohesion theory and the present study of discourse coherence.First it discusses the concept and the definition of the discourse. Up to now, the concept of discourse is not the same, there exist some different ideas on it. This dissertation claims that the discourse is determined not by the grammatical structures but by the semantic structures, as discourse is first a semantic unit, the length of its form is determined by the meanings. If a discourse has the following features: the cohesi... |
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