On Discourse Construction In English Conversation

Conversation is the basic mode of speech exchange system of human being. The systematic analysis of English conversation originated in the second half of last century, many scholars have contributed their efforts to daily conversation, such as Sacks who advanced a set of rules of turn-taking, John Austin who proposed speech act theory and Grice who put forward the theory of conversational implicature.Based on the above-mentioned traditional modes of conversational analysis, the thesis attempts to analyze the cohesive and coherent links in discourse construction through the analysis of a large number of English conversation examples from a new perspective—an emphasis on both intra-linguistic factors and extra-linguistic factors. English conversation is constituted by means of cohesion and coherence. Coherence exists in the deep structure of a discourse, and the unity of meaning of discourse is achieved by logical inference. Therefore, besides overt cohesive devices, this thesis also tries to explore the logical connection of conversational discourse, that is, to study discourse construction of English conversation from extra-linguistic aspects. The author attempts to indicate how English conversational meaning is constructed on phonological level (intonation), conjunctive level (discourse markers), and who also explores the issue from the functional perspective (transitivity, mood and register). By means of these devices, the listener can understand the real intention of the speaker in daily communication. In addition, the construction of a coherent discourse should also rely on context. Context is the necessary external condition to...