A Cognitive Study Of Discourse Coherence

Since Halliday and Hasan published Cohesion in English in 1976, the relationship of cohesion and coherence has been widely argued and discourse coherence has been concerned by an increasing number of linguists. Recently, with the rapid development of cognitive science, the quantity of researches on discourse coherence adopting cognitive approaches has increased. After the literature review, it is found that some analyses are relatively subjective and inconvenient to operate due to the restriction of material types. Therefore, this thesis selects a stream-of-consciousness novel as study case. Its free style can make the analyses more objective. In addition, many studies of Mrs. Dalloway focus on its literary features. Although there are several studies involving discourse coherence, they emphasize the texts themselves without exploring the inner cognitive mechanism when Virginia Woolf constructed the coherent discourse. Thus, there are three research questions of this thesis:(1) How does Virginia Woolf construct the coherent discourse in Mrs. Dalloway?(2) What rhetorical devices are adopted by the author to achieve coherence?(3) What cognitive mechanism of coherent discourse construction can be induced?This study is designed in light of Langacker’s reference-point and dynamicity theories. Under the guidance of embodied view, the thesis studies the construction of coherent discourse on macro facet in the dimensions of physical time and space. Furthermore, it analyzes the significant function of possessive construction, metonymy, pronoun antecedence relationship and topic construction on micro facet. Ultimately, the cognitive mechanism of discourse construction is induced and abstracted based on those two facets.The results show that coherence is inherited in human cognitive capability, which is based on the basic cognition of time and space. The cognitive mechanism of constructing coherent discourse is to do differential to story or thought level by level. Firstly, physical time and space form a coordinate system and each point(X, Y) in the system is a potential reference-point or target. The author “cuts” the story or thought into mutually linked fragments. The “cutting points” and the direction of mental access are determined by practical needs. Then, the author does differential to every fragment again and “cuts” them into sentences or clauses with possessive construction, definite article, metonymy, pronoun antecedence relationship and topic construction. These rhetorical devices help these sentences or clauses achieve coherence according to reference-point and dynamicity theories. The more efforts the author makes during construction process, the easier the reader gets the coherent meaning during comprehension.