Cohesive Devices In Virginia Wolf's Stream Of Consciousness Novel The Waves: A Systemic-functional Perspective

After the publication of Cohesion in English by Halliday and Hasan in 1976, studies on cohesion and coherence have caused great interests of many linguists and they have become the focus of attention among linguists. Many theories have been proposed from various perspectives to study categories and characteristics of cohesive mechanisms as well as relevance of cohesion and coherence.The Waves, which is one of the masterpieces by the eminent English female novelist Virginia Woolf, is a great representative of stream of consciousness style. A lot of scholars abroad and at home have studied its writing techniques, language style, and traits of figures from a lot of different perspectives, such as sociology, aesthetics, philosophy, ecology and so on. However, the ultimate concern of discourse in stream of consciousness style is to give a faithful demonstration of human's mind flow so they are regarded as unreadable and incoherent. And the systemic and comprehensive study of cohesive mechanisms in the novel has not been done yet. As a result, this thesis is an attempt to analyze cohesive ties in The Waves in order to provide convenience for understanding its semantic coherence.From the perspective of systemic-functional linguistics, this research is conducted by collecting and comparing data to discuss the distinct features of cohesive ties in The Waves from lexical-grammar, transitivity, mood structure, thematic progression pattern and context. At lexical-grammatical level, the variation of places and events is showed by the application of meronyms, collocations. And the first and the third personal reference, amounting to 53% and 30% separately, reveal the shift of narration target. And spatio-temporal conjunctions, especially"now", indicate the plot development. And information is transferred by material processes, occupying 64.5%, as well as relational and mental ones, occupying 17.8% and 10.6% respectively, at transitivity level. Moreover, at mood structure level, the declarative mood, whose distribution is high up to 95.1%, is employed to develop the plot while the imperative and interrogative mood, whose distributions are 2.2% and 2%, to supplement it. Lastly, two types of deviations in the text's thematic progression model, the leaping model and the complementing model, make the plot seem to be unorganized and various.The Waves unfolds its implicit plot by its specific systems of mood and transitivity which take declarative mood and material process as the principal thing separately. And the alterations of figures, places and events in its plot are revealed by the employments of the first and third personal reference, meronyms and collocations. At the same time, the spatio-temporal conjunctions and deviations of thematic progression model in the novel tells the trend of its plot development and texture coherence. The analysis of data indicates that the unique cohesive mechanisms exercised in the consciousness-steam novel The Waves interact to realize the leaping, multidimensional, loose and open features in its semantic coherence. Its various and leaping structure of text meaning and development is also the result of its contemporary social background. This study can help readers to understand in depth the structure arrangement, cohesive mechanisms and semantic coherence. And it also confirms the feasibility of cohesion and coherence theory in studying stream of consciousness texts from the perspective of systemic-functional linguistics.