Semantic And Discourse Analysis Of The Dialogue In The Republic With Corpus

The Republic of Plato becomes the most classic work as its discourse structure-dialogue. Dialogue with myths and allegories, forms the unique style of Plato’s The Republic, which has the outstanding difference with logical style of common philosophical texts. In The Republic, the dialogue is used to be the discourse construction method to explore the truth, and it is also the interactive communication of the thoughts. The argumentation of concepts and philosophical speculation plays an important role in The Republic, therefore this thesis will have the analysis of discourse cohesion of the dialogue in this work. Based on the research of the dialogue, Plato’s philosophical pursuit and life opinions can be recovered and understood.For the methodology of this thesis, it intends to study the activity process of dialogue and communication dynamically, with the combination of corpus-driven method and discourse analysis by analyzing high-frequency words, keywords and vocabulary collocation with the help of "WordSmith Tools". With corpus-driven method, this thesis aims to add quantitative analysis to qualitative analysis, in order to supplement close reading and analysis of texts, not to deny them. With the quantitative analysis, we may grasp the text as a whole effectively and explore how to realize concept generalization and philosophical interpretation eventually.The research of this thesis is based on the interpretation of dialogue pattern and content, the research probes into the whole context, including semantic model and discourse model. For the dialogue pattern, it covers two "levels", which are from the analysis of dialogue pattern and exploration of dialogue content. The dialogue is different from the real conversation, which is imitation of real conversation and a special case of real conversations. For the dialogue content, the real relation between the "capital justice" and "lower justice" is to support each other and control mutually instead of realizing the "capital justice" first and then the "lower justice". From the semantic model and the keywords, it can be proved that the whole work is based on "life" and "people" which are close to the readers, pointing to the theme of "true" and "good" until to the mental level. From the perspective of semantic value, the semantic construction model of the whole work is a reflection of Plato’s thoughts, which is from the basic material level to the spiritual level, and then realizes the best life with "true" and "good" to establish the ideal state. From the perspective of discourse analysis, the ten books in The Republic cover different themes which are comprehensive but relevant to each other tightly, from the injustice to the justice, then to the justice in the inner soul until to the climax of building the ideal state, then back to the real state, and at last end with the myth of hell. The whole discourse context presents a parabolic model which has its ups and downs, and adds more literary and dramatic color. It is the parabolic model that predicts the difficulty to gain the truth.