A Study Of The Coherence In English Poetic Discourse From The Perspective Of Event Cognitive Model

Regarded as the core study of discourse analysis,coherence has caused hot discussions among linguists and scholars both at home and abroad.As a peripheral member of discourse coherence,the poetic discourse is very different from other discourse types both for its simplest wording containing rich meanings and its lack of overt cohesive devices.In other words,it is hard for readers to fully appreciate a poem by merely depending on noticing its overt cohesive devices and surface structure.On the contrary,in order to fully appreciate a poem,it requires people’s bodily experiences and cognitive mechanism on the one hand,activating relevant encyclopedic knowledge on the other hand.Hence,the unique structure and the obscure meaning of a poem push the poetic discourse into the spotlight of linguists.By retrieving previous studies about discourse coherence,this thesis summarizes some findings in the field of systematic-functional linguistics,pragmatic linguistics and cognitive linguistics.Although there are much research and studies on this line,relatively few studies about poetic discourse coherence are conducted.What’s more,cognitive studies about poetic discourse coherence from the perspective of Event-domain Cognitive Model(ECM)(王寅,2014)remain to be further explored.By means of integrating quantitative research into qualitative research,the present thesis attempts to build a corpus of selected English poems(CSEP)(including50 British poems and 50 American poems)and employ the ECM theory(王寅,2014),as well as apply three principles of facilitating discourse coherence(the guidance of an Event,the correlation of conceptual elements,the conformity of pragmatic inference)(王寅,2011;熊维俊,2010)to resolve the following questions:(1)In what ways can the Event-domain Cognitive Model interpret and build English poetic discourse coherence?(2)Whether ECM Theory has universal applicability in interpreting and building English poetic discourse coherence?The present research consists of six parts:Chapter one mainly introduces the research background,objectives and significance,research questions and the organization of the thesis.Chapter two is about the literature review.Concept of discourse and coherence,as well as previous studies about discourse coherence will be demonstrated.Meanwhile,an overview of studies about poetic discourse coherence will also be involved in this part.Chapter three puts forward the theoretical framework.Detailed information about Even-domain Cognitive Model(such as the working mechanism and application of ECM theory)(王寅,2014)and three principles of facilitating discourse coherence(王寅,2011;熊维俊,2010)will be expounded.Moreover,this part will also present the possibility and feasibility of employing ECM theory to analyze poetic discourse coherence,thereby illustrating how the present research conducts empirical analysis in more detail.Chapter four mainly concerns the research methodology.A brief introduction of qualitative research and quantitative research will be illustrated.What’s more important,explicit description of the design,purpose,content,size and annotation of CSEP will be presented and explained clearly.Chapter five is the core of this thesis.With corpus data collection and analysis,this thesis provides an explicit explanation of the 100 English poems in CSEP from three dimensions.Altogether there are 28 kinds of tagged marks with 4424 times.Meanwhile,based on ECM theory,all the tagged marks are classified into four categories of devices.The first category includes <1B>,<2B>,<3B>,<1B> & <2B>,<1B> & <3B>,<2B> & <3B>,<1B> & <2B> & <3B>;the second category includes <1A>,<2A>,<3A>,<1A> & <2A>,<1A> & <3A>,<2A> & <3A>,<1A> & <2A> & <3A>;the third category includes <1F>,<2F>,<3F>,<1F> & <2F>,<1F> & <3F>,<2F> & <3F>,<1F> & <2F> & <3F> and the fourth category includes <1I>,<2I>,<3I>,<1I> & <2I>,<1I> & <3I>,<2I> & <3I>,<1I> & <2I> & <3I>.In particular,the thesis summarizes six top and important tagged marks: “<1B>,<1A>”,“<2B>,<2F>”,“<3B>,<3A>”.First,this thesis conducts corpus data collection and analysis,and then the six top and important tagged marks are selected for a thorough study.Chapter six summarizes the main ideas of this thesis and the major findings,the implications and the limitations.In general,based on ECM theory,this thesis conducts a study on English poetic discourse coherence qualitatively and quantitatively.Hopefully,this research might enrich studies about English poetic discourse coherence and the application of ECM theory,and it might be suggestive to later research of poetry writing,discourse teaching,reading comprehension,Chinese and English writing and teaching and so forth.