A Cohesive And Coherent Analysis Of Winsburg, Ohio

Winsburg, Ohio is the American author- Anderson , Sherwood' s masterpiece. The vocabulary of the works is simple, but the meaning is profound; the works is a collection of short stories in form, but actually it is a semantic unity. By what methods the author achieves these stylistic effects? That has been the focus of many literary researches. Speaking from the angle of linguistics, those features of the works will be reflected in language itself; besides, in the field of linguistics, the study of textual coherence is an important subject. Since the set-up of cohesive theory by Halliday and Hasan, many linguisticians have expressed their ideas about, the relationship of cohesion and coherence. So, there is a need for testifying those ideas in a typical text. No doubt, as language materials for coherence and cohesion, Winsburg, Ohio is an ideal one. Therefore, the dissertation will carry on two tasks: first, applying the cohesive theory to Winsburg, Ohio to find some objective evidence of the coherence of the works; second, testifying the validity of the cohesive theory in analyzing the textual coherence.In the dissertation, the coherence of the works will be testified from three aspects: lexical, clausal and message aspects. In lexical aspect, Anderson achieves the coherence of the works by using those lexical devices such as repetition, collocation, general words and so on; in clausal aspect, through using referential devices skillfully, the author succeeds in creating semantic coherence between clauses in which there are no relationships of grammatical structure; As for message aspect, the pattern of thematic progression shows how new information and given information are connected with each other. At the same time, it portrays the trains of the author's thoughts.