Interpersonal Coherence In News Interviews

As a social semiotic, language basically has two functions, the ideational, which construes patterns of experience and logic in the natural world and inside our mind, and the interpersonal, which enacts social relations between people. But it is the textual function of language that enables these meanings to form texts in language. That is to say, the textual function organizes not only our experiences, but also interaction into a unity of text. We all know that coherence is a criterion to distinguish texts from non-texts. When we talk about text coherence, we consider it as textual continuity and global unity as a whole. For the purpose of analysis, we divide text coherence into ideational coherence and interpersonal coherence according to Halliday's three meta-functions of language, i.e. the ideational, interpersonal and textual.Many linguistic researches, particularly studies of semantics and logic, tend to emphasize the ideational function of language: language as the symbolic representation of an external reality. (Gregory, 1978: 49) Most of the previous and current researchers are more concerned with the experiential coherence in texts, neglecting the interpersonal coherence. The present dissertation is intended to probe into text coherence of the interpersonal meaning from the social-semiotic perspective and it aims to provide readers with definitions of coherence, with insights into interpersonal cohesion in English texts, especially in news interviews, and with association of text with its context.The texts to be investigated in the present study are 42 NPR (National Public Radio) interviews in the three programs entitled All Things Considered, Weekend Edition, and Morning Edition during 2003 and 2004. The running words amount to 34169 in 3 hours and 22 minutes and 12 seconds together. The topic is constrained to the issue of Middle East and the interview is limited to single-interviewee type, that is, in one interview, there are only one interviewer and one male interviewee. There are 5...