A Contrastive Study Of Prose Coherence And Cognitive Style Between English And Chinese

Cognitive linguistics holds that language is both a product and tool ot human beings' general cognitive activities, so language structure and functions should reflect these activities in turn. English and Chinese, although share some similarities, are different in many aspects. However, can these linguistic differences also reflect cognitive difference between Westerners and Chinese? In this thesis, prose coherence, which is closely connected with people's cognition, is chosen to be the contrastive core with a view to discovering different cognitive styles between Westerners and Chinese. This thesis consists of six parts, and the main content of each part is as follows:Chapter one briefly introduces the reasons for choosing the present topic, the feasibility of this study and the main purpose and study method of it.Chapter two is the theoretical foundation of this thesis, which states the basic theory of cognitive linguistics and mainly discusses Wiktin's Theory of Field Dependence -Independence cognitive style.Chapter three gives a brief introduction to prose, including the concept, the characteristics and the category of prose.Chapter four discusses the notion of coherence, the relationship between coherence and cohesion, the standard to judge text coherence, and prose coherence.Chapter five is the most important part of the thesis, in which differences between how English and Chinese prose achieving their coherence are described and meanwhile different cognitive styles reflected from them are discovered. To sum up, there are three different points: hypotactic coherence versus paratactic coherence, salient sequence coherence versus natural sequence coherence, and view of focal point coherence versus view of scattering point coherence, all of which reflect that the western cognitive style tends to be relatively field-independent, whereas the Chinese tends to be field-dependent.The last chapter summaries the major points of this thesis and narrates contribution and limitations of this study.