| As a new discipline, the origin and development of text linguistics complies with the demand of people for a deeper understanding of language and a further exploration in the field of linguistic researches. Language study should not simply be confined at the sentential level, and should not only fix its attention on the research of sentence structure. On the contrary, it should go beyond the domain of sentence. To conduct a research upon the function of sentence in discourse, and to make a probe into the language utilized in communication, this has become the common understanding that almost all linguists reached nowadays. From the very moment text linguistics comes into being, the research in this discipline has been put under a favorable condition of constant renewal and development. In the field of discourse analysis, new ideas and thoughts emerge in an endless stream. The ones that most catch our eyes are the theories of cohesion and coherence. While after the publication of Halliday and Hasan's book Cohesion in English in 1976, the notion of cohesion was widely welcomed and accepted as a well-defined and useful category for the analysis of text behind the sentence, coherence was regarded or even dismissed as a vague, fuzzy, and "rather mystical notion" (Sinclair, 1991). Coherence, as a significant and mostly used term in the field of discourse analysis, is still not fully elaborated in its connotation and extension. Coherence can be achieved in many ways, among which metaphor is a hardly attended one. On the one hand, discourses embracing metaphors find favor in rhetoricians' eyes for its vividness, expressiveness, and vigorousness. On the other hand, such discourses are also hard for people to interpret as coherent due to their queer expressions and lacking obvious cohesive devices. This demonstrates that, when considering the two sides of metaphor-rhetorical function and discourse function, people usually pay much attention to the former, but hardly do they take the latter into their vision of research. Both coherence, the foundation of discourse, and metaphor, the pervasive phenomenon, all call for an interdisciplinary,multidimensional, and multi-level research. This thesis attempts to probe into the role metaphor plays in the construction of discourse coherence, with the application of blended space theory, an achievement of cognitive semantics. Therefore, the thesis seeks to reach a dynamic and cognitive interpretation for discourse coherence from a new perspective.This thesis first introduces the cognitive mechanism of blended space theory. During the argumentation, the thesis starts from the glossary of basic concepts, and explains the important cognitive process of conceptual blending. Conceptual blending-often called blending-is a set of basic and pervasive mental operations for combining cognitive models in a network of mental spaces (Fauconnier, 1994), viz., partitions of speakers' referential representations, used to construct meaning. It is dynamic, supple, and active in the moment of thinking. It interacts with other general cognitive operations. This thesis further demonstrates the close relationship between blended space theory and mental space theory. It points out that, during the contextual construction of discourse meaning, the hearer should also be capable of blending various mental spaces other than simply constructing mental spaces online, for the sake of understanding the intended meaning. The thesis also explains the core elements of blended space theory, including two kinds of frame networks, blending processes and their demonstration, optimality principles and pressures. In this section, the thesis points out that blended space theory is a powerful cognitive model in online meaning construction.In the third section of this thesis, the thesis introduces another crucial linguistic phenomena-metaphor-into argumentation. It briefly surveysthe history and development of in western studies on metaphor according to different methods and domains of research. This thes... |
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