Cohesion And Coherence In IRC Discourse

This research tries to analyze the cohesion and coherence in Internet Relay Chat (IRC, which is a kind of online synchronous chat) discourse from linguistic perspective by using cohesion and coherence theory proposed by M. A. K. Halliday and R. Hasan, and also probes into the features of the use of cohesive ties—ways of realizing text coherence which is an important factor for successful communication.The data used in this study are collected from a small group conversation in an English chatroom named American Singles.In the analysis, the author first discusses the characteristics of topic chains and adjacency pairs in IRC discourse and finds that IRC discourse is chaotic in form but coherent in meaning. Then the author adds up the cohesive ties in each turn in IRC and makes a comparison on the use of the five types of cohesive ties among IRC, face-to-face and e-news discourses in order to find out the features of the use of cohesive ties in IRC discourse.This research finds IRC discourse is coherent and for the purpose of realizing text coherence, lexical cohesion is mostly adopted, which could also achieve better effect of text coherence.This research, on the one hand, is a significant attempt to investigate the cohesion and coherence in IRC discourse, and on the other hand, proposes some advice to interlocutors on how to use the cohesive ties efficiently in IRC for achieving successful communication.