The Influence Of Context On Acquirement Of Coherence In Discourse

Coherence is of considerable importance in discourse analysis. It is also an important topic in the studies of communications. Whether a discourse is coherent or not will influence the possibility and effectiveness of the communication between interlocutors. Many researchers focused on the elements which produce coherence in discourse. Those elements, in this paper, are summed up as three main resources of coherence. They are cohesive devices, schemata or scripts and conversational inferences. This paper aims to explore the influence of context on perception of coherence.Context, in this paper, is classified into two categories: intra-linguistic context and extra-linguistic context. These two categories of context exert different influence on the acquirement of coherence. The influence of the former is realized at three levels: lexical level, sentence level and discourse level. The latter, extra-linguistic -context is further divided into situational context (or context of situation) and cultural context (or context of culture) in this paper. The influence of important factors in situational context (setting, participant, key, ends and so on) as well as three key institutions in cultural context (world view, family andhistory) on acquirement of coherence in discourse is probed in this paper.Findings in this field, applied in daily life, will significantly promote human communication, which, in turn, will improve people's life.