On The Discourse Coherence Mechanism Of Irrelevant Communication From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

A theory of communication aiming to explain various communication phenomena should explain not only successful communications but also those failed ones caused by various factors. Irrelevant communication, or rather, ineffective relevant communication, is defined as ineffective communication caused by many different factors. According to Relevance Theory, failed communications are caused by the different cognitive contexts in each other’s mind. Based on the two points above, this thesis, with several authentic literary works as materials, aims to explore the discourse coherence mechanism of irrelevant communication in literary works from the perspective of relevance theory by putting discourse coherence in a dynamic communication process.First of all, this thesis presents a literature review of discourse coherence. Next, this thesis introduces the theoretical foundation of the study—Relevance Theory in great detail, generalizes its strengths, and then brings up its unique perspective on discourse coherence mechanism of irrelevant communication in literary works. After that, based on previous studies, this thesis gives its own interpretation of discourse coherence and explores the nature of discourse coherence and the relationship between relevance and coherence. And then, this thesis focuses on the discourse coherence analysis of irrelevant communication in literary works. Through an analysis of ineffective exchanges between characters, it is found that there are altogether six factors, namely lexical ambiguity, situational elements, social factors, pragmatic ambivalence, emotional factors and perceptual ability that may block the success of character communication. And by way of further exemplification and analysis of those six factors respectively, this thesis concludes that when putting those ineffective exchanges into the context of the story theme, readers can easily find that they are in fact intended by the writer to convey his or her communicative intention. In this way, it can be said that those literary works succeed in not only conveying the writer’s communicative intention but also achieving discourse coherence. Finally, this thesis proposes that this study can be applied to the teaching of British and American literature.Under the framework of Relevance Theory and with rich examples of irrelevant communication between characters in literary works, this thesis aims to explain how the ineffective relevant communication in literary works serves the story theme and makes a textual alternation from irrelevance into relevance, and hence a textual coherence would be achieved, and a distinct literary style will come into being, thus proving that relevance theory has great explanatory power on whether oral communication or literary texts, whether relevant communication or irrelevant communication.