A Study On Discourse Coherence Based On Frame Semantics

The analysis of discourse coherence has been the hot topic in linguistics. With the theory of Frame Semantics as guidance, the thesis illustrates Halliday and Hasan's four grammatical devices such as reference, substitution, ellipsis and conjunction, which can not explain certain discourse coherence phenomena from the linguistic level,and need to search for the answer on the cognitive level. Frame Semantics holds that the words, which represent the conceptualization of human beings'world, provide us background information. Through the combination between lexical meaning and background information, discourse can reach the coherence on cognitive level. This thesis attempts to make up for the limitation of other theories of discourse coherence from cognitive perspective and provides references for the further researches of discourse coherence on cognitive level.