| In different scholars' works, text/discourse has different meanings. Some linguists believe that it refers to both spoken language and written language. Some linguists take text as the written form of language but discourse as the spoken form of it. Other linguists regard discourse as both the spoken and the written forms of language and H. Widdowson takes discourse as written language. So many people want to use text to refer to written language and discourse to spoken language. In 1983, Stubbs thought that discourse always has an oral interactive sense, while text often has non-interactive monologue meaning; discourse has a kind of length while text might be very short.W.Edmondson regards text as a kind of language unit which did not appear on a use occasion, however, discourse as a kind of language unit appearing on a use occasion. In this paper, discourse is to be used to refer to both the spoken and the written forms of English. In fact, the differences between discourse and text are territorial. They are the same in essence. American linguists prefer to use discourse and discourse analysis while European linguists use text and text linguistics.It is well known that discourse is the object of study of discourse analysis. Since 1 950s of the 20th century, discourse analysis has become one of independent subjects. It means analyzing a kind of language unit that is much bigger than a sentence, e.g. sentence groups, paragraphs, etc. It aims at helping people to make up and understand all kinds of coherent discourses.There are two kinds of theories that dwell upon language structure. One is grammar, the other discourse analysis. The former always deals with single, isolated sentences, while the latter studies discourse in communications. In grammar, a sentence is the largest unit of grammatical structure, while discourse analysis is a super-sentential analysis. It studies sentences' arrangement, cohesion and coherence.What the traditional grammar and the structural grammar together with the transfermational generative grammar study is limited to the level of sentence and its components. Those grammarians do not adequately take the relations between sentences and their positions and functions in a larger language unit into consideration. However, like individual English words possessing different meanings and functions in different sentences: sentences sentence groups and paragraphs have different connotations and communicative functions in different linguistic contexts. If sentences and sentence groups or paragraphs were not placed in a certain context, then there is no way to identify their real sense. It is difficult to define language units' communicative functions if there were no concrete contexts and occasions. More and more linguists have come to realize thativlanguage study should not be confined at the sentence level. It must go beyond the sentence bounds and study the functions of sentence groups and paragraphs in discourse as well as the vividness of language in real life.Cohesion and coherence are two important terms in discourse analysis. Linguists study discourse from different angles. Accordingly they define these two terms in different ways. When speaking of the relations between cohesion and coherence, linguists hold identical and divergent views on them. How to understand the crux of cohesion and coherence is an important question that we cannot evade. By using coherence as an example, Crystal defines it as a piece of discourse with the underlying functional connectedness on the basis of discourse features; Petofi regards it as an image of relatuni in human brains, If readers can match a discourse with a sense so that they can rebuild a connected, completed image, then it is a coherent discourse to them. Scholars in China always take cohesion as lexical and grammatical devices a matter of form. Coherence is an effect of a discourse consisting of these cohesive devices. As for the relations between cohesion and coherence, scholars hold different views on this point... |
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