A Pragmatic Study On The Coherence Of Essay-Writing

The coherence of texts is a frequently-discussed topic of researchers. Many scholars have studied the language phenomenon. Some analyze coherence in written texts, with most of them emphasizing the grammatical, lexical or the semantic coherence. Some examine the coherence of spoken texts. They interpret the coherence by employing the conversation analysis method. Generally speaking, the studies are not very comprehensive or deep enough.The"turning toward textual study"or"the textual recurrence"of pragmatics is the general tendency of the international pragmatics research. The pragmatic reasoning of the functional syntactic elements, the textual structure and the textual information structure, the meaning constructing mechanism of the text representation and the psychological representation, the syntactic and the non-syntactic elements of the textual acceptability, the main textual communicative system and"attached"communicative system abundantly point out the developing tendency.The pragmatic research should be widened and deepened and the explaining force of the pragmatic theories should be testified so that the functioning of them can be improved. The complementary relation of pragmatics and the text analysis should be developed and enriched. The unique dynamic feature of pragmatic research requires its analytical descriptive system to reflect this characteristic. The analytical description shouldn't just copy the traditional system and research methods. At the same time, it must be concerned about the cognitive and social cultural factors and the whole process of mutually constructing the pragmatic meaning in the interaction of the speaker and the hearers. Therefore, this research tends to analyze the text from the communicative pragmatic perspective. It employs the cross-disciplinary and trans- disciplinary natural language analyzing viewpoint, meanwhile, it also reflects the discourse-pragmatic methods and principles.Text, as a communicative occurrence, needs more suitable and concrete analysis and interpretational description in order to interpret its nature. From the socio-linguistic point, text reflects the social interactional methods. From the linguistic philosophy, text reflects the speech acts and conversational implicature. From the social semiotics point, Halliday's functional linguistics emphasizes the interpersonal, social and metafunctional functions.In this thesis, we will focus our attention on the coherence of written essays. We will adopt the DPCA(Discourse-Pragmatic Coherence Analysis)framework. The data in the study are from the classic essays of famous writers and English-learners'written essays. All the data are representative and authentic with the research value. The thesis aims at studying the coherence in the selected classic essays and learners'essays and comparing them with the further goal to find a method of deeply interpreting the coherence of texts.First, Chapter One introduces the researching background and points out the research topic and goal. Chapter Two is the literature review, in which the related theories and the relevant studies which have been done on coherence are introduced. In the review, it clarifies the history of research and academic origin and its related concepts. Furthermore, it points out that it is necessary to combine the pragmatic angle and the way of analyzing texts together to study the coherence of texts.Chapter Three is the research framework and the methodology. It mainly discusses and form the DPCA (Discourse-Pragmatic Coherence Analysis) framework. Thus, we can study the coherence thoroughly and comprehensively. Pragmatic theories involved in the thesis are mainly Cooperative Principle, Speech Act Theory, Politeness Principle and Relevance Theory. Chapter Four gives the practical study of the pragmatic coherence of the essays. First, we analyze the coherence of the classic essays and points out that the coherence of the essays embodies not only the lexical and the grammatical connection but also the semantic and pragmatic connection. And then the thesis analyzes the incoherence problems in the learners'written essays. Through the comparison on the coherence between the classic essays and the learners'essays, the author makes the discussion.Chapter Five is the conclusion, in which it points out the significance and limitations of the research. According to the research, it is clear that text is the social practice or the action. Interpreting a text with many methods and from the pragmatic perspective is helpful in mastering the dynamic feature of text interaction from the cognitive degree. Only adopting the discourse-pragmatics communication and distinguishing the pragmatic explanations on more levels of the text, can we shift our judgement on the coherence of text by interpreting it from the superficial level of the text to the syntax and the textual speech act structure, the pragmatic and the explanation on the deeper textual coherence. It also sheds light on the interpreting of the effect of the pragmatic reception.This thesis, in a more complete sense, discovers the connection between the cohesion and coherence and other texture of text such as intentionality, acceptability, informativity and situationality through enlarging the research view on the text coherence. It aims at explaining the internal regularities through combining discourse analysis with pragmatics when doing the coherence study. The research helps solve the urgent problems existing in the text linguistics and it can also help language teaching and translation.