| Textual coherence, traditionally speaking, is determined by the surface structure oflanguage elements and cohesive devices. It is such a significant but vague and complexlinguistic concept that different schools of linguistics from home and abroad have proposeddifferent methods in analyzing it. In spite of that, textual coherence still remains to be aneverlasting argument. Based on the previous achievements in defining coherence and with thedevelopment of cognitive linguistics, many scholars begin to study textual coherence fromcognitive perspective, and have made great contributions to this field.(Halliday and Hasan,1976; Jacobson,1978; Widdowson,1978; Van Dijk,1979; Hu Zhuanglin,1994; Zhang Delu,2003)Textual coherence, in this thesis, refers to the correspondence of cognitive model,experiential structure and conceptual world between text producers and text interpreters.(Halliday&Hasan,1976) Compared with other cognitive linguistic theories, such asmetaphorical theory, image schema, categorization, cognitive model, and so on, iconicitytheory has drawn less attention. Among the scare iconicity-related researches, most of themhave been done on phonological level, lexical level, syntactic level, but few have been doneon textual level. Moreover, when it comes to the subject of textual coherence, previous studieshave paid little attention to the application of iconicity theory to the coherence of news text.Therefore, the present thesis aims to make a tentative analysis of coherence in news text fromnews-interpreters’ perspective trying to find out how textual coherence is realized in news textby means of iconicity principles.Iconicity, first proposed by the philosopher, Charles Sander Peirce, refers to a naturalsimilarity or resemblance between the form of a sign and the meaning of a sign.(Peirce,1940) According to different criteria, different scholars classify iconicity differently.(Pierce,1940;John Haiman,1985; Givon,1989; Newmeyer,1998; Shen Jiaxuan,1993; Wang Yin,2001)This thesis is mainly based on the framework proposed by Nanny&Fischer. They classifiediconicity into two categories: imagic iconicity and diagrammatic iconicity (1999). Accordingto Nanny&Fischer, the former iconicity refers to the “direct”, one to one relation between thesignifier and the signified while the latter iconicity refers to more abstract and more indirectrelation between the signifier and the signified.(Nanny&Fischer,1999:12) In order to suitthe present research, the author, on the basis of the previous studies, makes a littledevelopment and divides the iconicity into four categories：namely sequence iconicity,distance iconicity, quantity iconicity, and markedness iconicity. As for sequence iconicity, theauthor will subdivide it into temporal sequence iconicity and logical sequence iconicity. Asfor quantity iconicity, research in this thesis will probe it from two aspects: local accumulationof information quantity and global distribution of information quantity.100pieces of real authentic English news texts from China Daily and New York Times onEnglish websites are selected as research data for the present study. During the process of dataanalysis and discussion, it can be found that the organization of news text mirrors theexperiential structure of human mental world according to different principles, such as thesequence of events occurrence, the distance of events participants, the quantity of information,and the markedness of news elements’ arrangement. The correspondence to human conceptualworld indicates that the news-interpreters share the same background knowledge withnew-producers, which makes news-interpreters easy to understand the real intention ofnews-producers. According to Brown and Yule (1983), news text can be interpretedcoherently as long as the organization of news text corresponds to the experiential structure orcognitive system of their mental world. Therefore, the coherence functions of each type oficonicity principle can be respectively achieved in the process of interpreting the selected data.And it comes to the conclusion that iconicity principles can perfectly account for therealization of the coherence in news text.Despite theoretical and practical significance this study has gained, being a tentativestudy, this thesis is just a preliminary step in this field, and further studies are still neededafterwards. |
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