The Negotiation Of Coherence In Conversation

This M. A. thesis discusses the importance of coherence in daily life communication, and the way of finding, comprehending and creating coherence among different speakers and listeners in conversation.Linguists in various fields study cohesion and coherence. Halliday, in his theories of functional grammar; Grice and Levinson, in their study of pragmatics, all discuss cohesion and coherence. Coherence is also an important factor in discourse analysis. How to find and comprehend coherence in daily life conversation, and how to create coherence when offering utterances becomes an interesting and serious issue.Researchers in different fields have offered rather varied definitions of coherence, from on the one hand the closely text-based definitions. Givon (1995: 213) proposes that:The coherence we are really after is not the coherence of the external text but rather the coherence of the mind that produce, store and retrieve the mental text... we study the coherence of external text as a useful heuristic in order to get insight about the coherence ofmental text, and about the mind that produce it.In this view, the speaker has a thought which is encoded into words with some coherence and transmits through the air by sound-waves so that it reaches the listener, who decodes the words by using the bridging information of coherence, and then has the speaker's thought. Such an account of communication would have little more to say than that it consists of speaker's exchanging thoughts.Conversation is an important form of communication, to study the way of finding and understanding coherence and creating coherence in conversation can improve the efficiency of communication and save the extra effort of performance in communication.The study is mainly based on the theory and researches of pragmatics. The thesis approaches speech from two basic perspectives. The first is speech act theory: J. L. Austin (1962), who makes very explicit for the first time that there are many different things which speakers can do only with words. His most basic insight is that some utterances are not statements or questions about some piece of information, but are actions. Austin points out that if a speaker produces utterances, in appropriate circumstances, then the speaker has not made simple statements about doing something; such utterance is a real action instead. No sooner said than done without using language, and the saying counts as the doing. Therefore, coherence is achieved through the operation of illustrating sentences and responding the sentences. The second theory is Grice's (1975) conversational implicature. Grice emphasizes the point that conversational implicatures contain information that is conveyed in uttering a sentence but cannot be gleaned from the meaning of the sentence alone. Thus, this information is determined neither by convention nor by truth condition. He distinguishes two main categories of implicature: conventional and non-conventional implicatures. According to the conversational implicature, conversation is not only a linguistic phenomenon. Speaker and listener's condition and the circumstances of the conversation become active hi the analyzing of achieving coherence in conversation. In this thesis, speaker and listener's role is especially discussed.There are two main issues discussed hi this paper:1. Halliday in his functional grammar talks about some elements in cohesion and coherence, in this paper; more means of achieving coherence will be discussed.2. Speaker and listener are the two participants of a conversation, they will be in different age, and sex; have different background and education. How to negotiate coherence for different participants in the conversation is another issue.This paper is composed of six chapters.Chapter one serves as an introduction to the paper. It gives a brief description of the study of coherence in linguistics and provides different definitions of coherence according to linguists, which leads to a broadening of the point of vie...