A Study Of Cohesion Constituents: A Systemic-functional Analysis Of Three Essays Of Different Genres

Discourse analysis is a relatively new discipline in linguistic study. Ever since the emergence of discourse analysis, a great progress has been made, i.e. the appearance of a variety of interstudies of discourse analysis combining different disciplines in linguistics, such as Structural Analysis, Cognitive Analysis, Social and Cultural Analysis, Critical Analysis and Comprehensive Analysis. And this present dissertation adopts Functional Analysis and focuses on transitivity analysis, one subsystem of Halliday's Systemic-functional Grammar,Traditional cohesion analysis is on the level of words, such as the reference of words, and substitution of words. The cohesion ties show the structure between one clause and its sequencing clause, but they are too micro to show the whole structure of the text. While on the other hand, transitivity analysis shows the processes of sentences arid describes the specific features of the sentences, such as participants, circumstances and predicators. Besides, it also presents the general structure of the text.The present dissertation relates the study of transitivity analysis to the study of cohesion analysis. With the analyses of three essays of different genres, the paper shows that the processes of one text are not at random, and they serve as the framework of the text, thus it is important to study the relationship among processes of a text. A certain text falls in a certain genre and has a certain framework, and the processes are organized accordingly. With three texts' analyses on processes and cohesion, the author finds that the cohesion ties are cohesion constituents on the level of words and could not scaffold the framework of the text. In analyzing, it is common to see that some successive sentences are of the same processes, and other sentencesfall in a formula of one particular process plus another. These phenomena can be called process concord and process sequences respectively.By means of the cohesion analysis on levels of words, and especially processes, it is helpful to the comprehension of the whole text's structure, thus hopefully it may provide some instructive suggestion and implications for translating, literature critics and teaching writing and reading.