Research On Systemic Functional Grammar And Russian Textual Coherence

Coherence is the essence of a text. It is the main criterion for judging if a group of words can be a text. Over recent years textual coherence has been a hot topic in the field of discouse analysis. Since being brought to public discussion, coherence has drawn great attention from scholars and invited heated debates in linguistic circles, both home and abroad. At present there are tens of ways to define textual coherence.Systemic functional grammar is one of the main schools of today’s functional linguistics. Being semantically oriented, it is a linguistic theory for textual analysis. Use of systemic functional grammar in analyzing Russian textual coherence is scienitifical and rational. According to the theory of systemic functional grammar, the text is a semantic unit. As a product of the interaction between linguistic system and context, it needs, on one hand, to follow the grouping principle of the linguistic system, and on the other hand, to be related to the context, reflecting the textual coherence in confirmation with the situation. Therefore, cohesion and register consistency are two required conditions in judging textual coherence. They explain the definition of the text inside and outside the linguistic system.The idea of the metafunction of the language is the core hypothesis of the theory of systemic functional grammar. The ideational metafunction describes various phenomenon and processes that people experience. Interpersonal metafunction can be used in the relations between different social roles, expressing the manner, emotion and view of the subject. The textual metafunction organizes the ideational and interpersonal metafunction to connect the language to the context and realize the metafunctions, forming the coherence of the text. We believe that the use of the idea of linguistic metafunction can further explain the forming of textual coherence, which is the effect of textual metafunction. The realizing device of textual metafunction means the forming device of textual coherence. Based on this, we also expanded the coverage of the concept of Cohesin and its realizing device, making clear the concrete content of register consistency. Meanwhile, we carried out concrete textual analysis of the test of textual coherence, with Russian news reports as the corpus.