Connection In Modern Chinese Discourses

This dissertation mainly focuses on the study of connection in modern Chinese discourses. Starting from discourse analysis, we defined discourse as a "Hierarchy" and we found "Chunk" as its basic structural unit. People understand discourse correctly by combining two different ways of language processing:Top-down and Bottom-up. Accordingly, we also find two connecting relationships in the discourses, which are "Coherence" and "Cohesion". There are a lot of specific manifestations of these two kinds of relationships respectively. The objective of our dissertation is to research on the performance and function of all the connecting means in modern Chinese discourses.Chapter I is an introduction and Chapter?is a summary. Besides these two, there are five main chapters in our dissertation:Chapter II mainly focuses on the study of discourse. We defined "discourse" as a "Hierarchy". "Structural chunk" is the basic unit to analyze discourse. People organize and comprehend discourse by the combination of two different ways of language processing:Top-down and Bottom-up. We find "Coherence" by Top-down strategy and "cohesion" by Bottom-up strategy. We should integrate coherence with many factors such as discourse meaning, cognitive psychology and language context. Cohesion exists inside of discourses, it's a kind of relationship for two components to refer to each other and thus achieve mutual understanding.In Chapter?, we put forward our own connection system on the basis of former researches. We attach importance to the difference between "relationship" and "means". Furthermore, we discussed the cause of formation and cognitive mechanisms of all the connecting means.Chapter IV mainly focuses on the study of Discourse Markers, which is a "hinge" component in discourse. Discourse markers express procedural meaning, they lead the way to understand discourse and help discourse accepters to get the useful information of organizers'intention. Discourse markers possess both interpersonal function and discourse function. We took "NI + perceptive Verbs" as example, to show how discourse markers work in the discourse connection. We defined "NI + perceptive Verbs" as rhetoric construction, which needs to be analyzed on the basis of rhetoric intention and interactive context.Chapter V mainly focuses on the study of logical conjunction, which is also a "hinge" component in discourse. Logical meaning is one of its inherent attributes. In this chapter, we discussed three different kinds of performance and relationships between logical conjunctions and its context, and we explored its function in discourse connection.In Chapter VI, we researched connecting means under discourse topic frame. Topic is very important in discourse connection, which sets the content frame and leads the extension. Coherence means are useful to construct the Topic relationships, while cohesion means also take effect. Reference is closely related to human's cognitive psychology, such as ICM, Image Schema and Script.