| As a social semiotic, language basically has two functions, the ideational, which construes patterns of experience and logic in the natural world and inside our mind, and the interpersonal, which enacts social relations between people. But it is the textual function of language that enables these meanings to form texts in language. That is to say, the textual function organizes not only message, but also interaction into a unity of text. We all know that coherence is a criterion to distinguish texts from non-texts. When we talk about text coherence, we consider it as textual continuity and global unity as a whole. For the purpose of analysis, we divide text coherence into ideational coherence and interpersonal coherence according to Halliday's three meta-functions of language, i.e. the ideational, interpersonal and textual.Many linguistic researches, particularly studies of semantics and logic, tend to emphasize the ideational function of language: language as the symbolic representation of an external reality. (Gregory, 1978: 49) Most of the previous and current researchers are more concerned with experiential coherence in text, neglecting interpersonal coherence. The present M.A. thesis is intended to probe into text coherence of the interpersonal meaning from the social-semiotic perspective and it aims to provide readers with definitions of coherence, with insights into interpersonal cohesion hi English texts, and with association of text with its context of situation.The first chapter gives a general survey of the past research on coherence and the interpersonal meaning of language, and locates the purpose of the present study as a contribution to discourse analysis on Hallidayian Functionalism. In this chapter, the significance of the subject and its relevant research questions are put forward.Chapter two probes into the theoretical bases underlying the present research. Firstly, the definitions of coherence and the interpersonal meaning are reviewed and compared. All the linguists agree that coherence is a semantic concept. Some regard it as linear relations within the text. Others consider it as cognitive inference resorting to the context. Halliday defines it as cohesion within the text and consistency between text and its context. Therefore, interpersonal coherence refers to the interdependence of interpersonal meanings within the text and the consistency between the interpersonal meaning of text and the tenor of discourse.Based on the theoretical investigation in chapter two, chapter three covers 5 kindsof interpersonal cohesive devices of the exchange structure (adjacency pairs and mood parallelism), subject chain, modal repetition, lexical connotation cohesion and tone pattern from the perspectives of speech function, the speaker's point of view, power, evaluation and attitude respectively. The first three are grammatical, the fourth is lexical and the last one is phonological. Cohesion refers to such sense relations as co-ordination, co-reference, co-extension, co-orientation and co-occurrence. The patterns of parallelism, chain, synonymy and antonymy, iteration, adjacency pair organize such interpersonal items as mood, subject + finite, modality, lexical connotation and tones into interpersonal cohesion.Chapter four is concerned with the consistency between the total interpersonal meaning of the text and its contextual component-tenor. In accordance with the three functions of language, Halliday presents a situational construct of three contextual variables of text: the field of discourse which corresponds to the ideational meaning, the tenor of discourse which corresponds to the interpersonal meaning, and the mode of discourse which corresponds to the textual meaning. The focus of this chapter is to explore the role of tenor and mode together played in interpersonal coherence.After a fairly thorough discussion in the previous chapters on cohesion within text and consistency of text with its context, chapter five tries to develop a model for interpersonal coherence. This cha... |
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