A Systemic-functional Analysis Of Cohesion And Coherence In Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland interwinds the incredible imagination with rational common sense together through Alice’s dream, which is the big milestone in children literature of golden times in the latter half of the nineteenth century. With Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland becoming more and more popular all over the world, scholars abroad and at home have paied much attention to this piece of works from different perspectives, such as from the perspective of literature, translation, culture, teaching, pragmatics and so on. Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar is a kind of discourse analysis theory with strong practicality and applicability. While framing this theory, Halliday has certain guiding aims in mind, one of which is to construct a grammar for the purpose of text analysis. Among others, cohesion and coherence is one of the most fundamental and vital features of discourse analysis. Cohesion and coherence have aroused great interests and further study of many linguists. Therefore, this thesis attempts to make a comprehensive interpretation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, based on Hu Zhuanglin’s model of cohesion and coherence from the perspective of systemic-functional linguistics to shed new light on understanding its semantic coherence.This thesis argues that guided by Hu Zhuanglin’s model of cohesion and coherence, the major cohesion and coherence ties, causes of their application and discourse meaning formed by those cohesion and coherence ties are studied respectively at socio-semiotic level, semantic level, lexical level, syntactic level and phonological level. The socio-semiotic level is mainly explored in terms of context; the semantic level is manifested through transitivity and conjunction; the lexical level is examined through lexical cohesion and reference; structural cohesion and theme structure at the syntactic level are applied here, and phonological level covers information structure and sound pattern.Based on the discussion and analysis, this thesis gets the following findings. First, at socio-semiotic level, context in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland affords a great deal of information about the meanings that are being communicated and establishes a certain material background, that is, the immediate situation of the story, social reality and historic culture and so on. Second, at semantic level, material process in transitivity is applied mostly to depict a prototype character characterized by activeness, curiosity and carefreedom for readers and reflect the development of the fantastic adventures; verbal process and relational process come next to describe the strange dialogue and the strange relation between Alice and the wonderland; additive conjunction occupies the most adding the sense of compact plot. Third, at lexical level, the emphasis of the fantastic effect is showed by repetition and synonymy; and the third person reference reveals the shift of narration target to illustrate the shift of plot. Fourth, at syntactic level, clausal ellipsis satisfies the demands of the simple language for children to easily understand, and the rapid tone in conversation; multiple theme, parallel model and compound model present clearly the linear development route of plot. Finally, at phonological level, information structure follows a Given-New-Given-New model making Alice’s adventures like information waves with ups and downs; the wide application of sound pattern not only strengthens the beauty of language expression but also highlights the humorous fantastic subject in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland step by step.This study demonstrates that Hu Zhuanglin’s model developed from Halliday’s theoretical framework concerning discourse cohesion and coherence is applicable and explanatory in analyzing children literature. And it is found that the skillful organization of the cohesion and coherence ties used in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and the interaction between the discourse meanings produced by each cohesion and coherence device promote the fantastic subject in its semantic coherence.