The Metonymic Mechanism Of Cohesion And Its Contribution To Textual Coherence

Since the study of language began to shift from words, sentence to discourse in 1970s, new ideas and thoughts have emerged in an endless stream. Those that most catch our eyes are the theories of cohesion and coherence. After the publication of Halliday and Hasan's book Cohesion in English in 1976, cohesion and coherence became hot topics in discourse analysis. Cohesion was widely welcomed and accepted as a well-defined and useful category for the analysis of texts above the sentence, while coherence was regarded or even dismissed as a vague, fuzzy, and rather mystical notion. However, the past two decades have seen a considerable shift in orientation, and, in particular, a fundamental rethinking of the concept of coherence. Linguists have explored coherence from different perspectives such as semantics, pragmatics, psychology and even cognitive linguistics, and correspondingly various theories of coherence were constructed.However, none of the above theories are perfect. Halliday and Hasan's Cohesion and Coherence theory and some other traditional coherence theories, share a common disadvantage, that is, they limit their study to linguistic forms. Schemata, frame, and script theories describe the mental process of the discourse receiver in their construal of discourse, which overcome the shortcomings of traditional coherence theories, but they couldn't offer us a detailed description of the cognitive inferential process of the communicator, and hence they couldn't discover the cognitive inferential mechanism of human being in the process of text construal as well as that of text production. And accordingly, they have limited explanatory power to some linguistic phenomena.In the last decades, with the advent of cognitive linguistics, it is generally believed that metonymy as well as metaphor is more than a linguistic device; rather it is seen as a reasoning and inferential process. Metonymic concepts are part of the ordinary, everyday way we think and act as well as talk (Lakoff and Johnson 1983:38). Compared with metaphor, metonymy receives less attention. Actually, metonymy is more original, namely, language is metonymic in nature (Radden and K(o|¨)vecses 1999). Metonymic thinking plays a central role in theinterpretation and generation of discourse. All researches on metonymy agree that metonymy is based on the relations of causality and contiguity, thus it is capable of providing a complete theory to explain discourse cohesion and coherence.In the thesis, based on the metonymic theories by Radden and K(o|¨)vecses and other cognitive linguistics, we try to analyze the explanatory power of metonymy in explaining discourse cohesion and coherence within the framework of Al-Sharafi's viewpoints on textual metonymy. We focus our attention on the interpretation of the metonymic processes underlying the reader/ hearer's comprehension of discourses by a discussion of the metonymic relations and the metonymic operating mechanisms underlying cohesion in different English texts.Our study shows that the metonymic model in the Idealized Cognitive Model (ICM) and the salience principle can explain lexical cohesion and that the metonymic relationships in the textual model of metonymy, and some other metonymic operating mechanisms such as reference point and frame theory have some explanatory power for reference and ellipsis. Our study also shows that the metonymic mechanism of cohesion theory is quite helpful for text interpreters to get a better understanding of textual cohesion and coherence in English texts.Lastly, on the basis of the analyses of the three kinds of cohesion, we plan to widen our research scope by analyzing more cohesion phenomena in English texts so as to further the interpretation of cohesion and coherence from metonymic perspective.