Invisible Network Of Discourse Coherence

Speaking or writing requires people to express a clear concept or topic by certain organized structure. It is not only the requirement of successful communication, but an essential feature of coherent discourse. Discourse coherence is thus an important notion in discourse analysis. It means the semantic relatedness or unity of discourse. Just as Halliday and Hasan(1976)puts: "a text is best regarded as a semantic unit; a unit not of form , but of meaning".Since the publication of Cohesion in English in 1976 written by Halliday and Hasan, people began to explore the phenomena of cohesion and coherence. And cohesion is paid more attention. A cohesive discourse always has certain cohesive device. Cohesion is a manifestation of certain aspects of coherence. What produces coherence is the semantic or functional relation that implies in the deep structure of discourse. It is an invisible network for the discourse organization. So it is necessary for us to make a comprehensive study of the discourse coherence for the aim of achieving successful communication. In this paper, the author explores the phenomenon from the perspectives of linguistics, semantics, pragmatics and psychology. The structure of the paper goes as follows:Chapter one introduces the notion of coherence, points out that coherence is an important feature of a discourse. It can be explicit, which is cohesion, and can be implicit, which means the underlying relatedness of meaning. It also stresses the importance and necessity of making a comprehensive analysis of this phenomenon.Chapter two discusses explicit coherence: cohesion. It gives arough description of the cohesive devices from the grammatical, lexical and phonetic aspects, and points out that cohesion is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for coherence. It is just a factor contributing to coherence.Chapter three probes coherence from a semantic perspective. Semantic coherence may be local and global. Local coherence means the semantic relationship between successive sentences of a discourse. While global coherence represents the relationship between sentence meaning and the macrostructure, or the topic of a whole discourse.Chapter four analyzes pragmatic coherence. In this chapter, theories about Co-operative Principle, Conversational Implicature and Speech Acts are introduced. Discourse processor may flout the Co-operative Principle, or make inference from implicature, or to do things with words to realize language functions. It also points out that context plays an important role in the interpretation of discourse. Without it, a discourse could not have its pragmatic value.Chapter five examines coherence from a psychological perspective and points out that coherence is a mental representation. In producing and comprehending a text, interlocutors collaborate towards coherence, negotiating for the common ground of shared topic, thus towards a similar mental representation. During this processing, the mind would employ knowledge schemata to map a scenario for the interpretation of text.The conclusion summaries the contents of this paper, and points out the limitations and problems that remain to be solved. The author's hope is also presented.