A Study On Discourse Coherence Of The Old Man And The Sea From The Functional Perspective

The beginning of discourse study was dating back to Zelling Harris' article “Discourse Analysis” in 1952.From then on,discourse analysis has been attracted many linguists' attention.And many theories are proposed to study it from different angles at home and abroad.Till now,the most influential theory was Halliday's systemic functional grammar and his theory was widely used in discourse analysis.As for discourse analysis,discourse cohesion and coherence are two aspects that of great importance,and the kernel of discourse analysis is discourse coherence.Based on Halliday and Hasan's cohesion theory,Zhu Yongsheng's thematic progression theory,and Zhang Delu's analysis of conditions of discourse coherence,this thesis tries to analyze Hemingway's famous novel The Old Man and the Sea from the perspective of systemic functional linguistics.Under the assistance of the software AntConc3.4.4w,the study adopts statistics,case study,and combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis to analyze systematically the implicit and explicit coherence factors of the novel and then summarize the novel's structural features.The result shows that Hemingway uses a variety of cohesive devices and thematic progression patterns,combined with context to achieve the goal of coherence in the whole novel.About cohesion,the quantity and frequency of the five cohesive devices have been analyzed from the aspects of grammar and lexical level.The statistic shows that the most frequently used cohesive device is reference,especially the personal reference,and conjunction takes the second position,and then repetition,ellipsis,collocation and substitution in sequence.As for thematic progression patterns,this thesis adopts several typical passages from the novel,and analyze four patterns deeply,and then explores the relationship between thematic progression and discourse coherence.The statistic shows that as its simple and repeating theme,the parallel pattern ranks the primary place,and follows by continuous pattern and alternative pattern,the seldom used one is concentrated pattern.At last,in terms of context,the thesis analyzes the context of culture and context of situation with examples to show its role for constructing the coherent text.The study also proves Hemingway's simple and concise words,profound thoughts and vivid images,reflects his unique writing style,that is,iceberg principle.Because of the limitation of the time and personal ability,this thesis fails to analyze all the coherence factors systematically from implicit and explicit aspects,but it indeed provides a new vision for literary study.Meanwhile,it is a meaningful attempt to study literary works within the functional perspective.