Coherence And Writer-Reader Communication In Text

Text, in this thesis, is viewed as a written form, performing the communicative functions to pass on interactive information between writers and readers. However, traditionally, text was regarded as the monologue of the writer, and little attention was paid to the communicative nature of text. Having realized the important role of text in communication, some linguists and scholars, with their great efforts, try to explore the reciprocity of text and end the traditional period. Modern semiotic linguistic theory is strong enough to demonstrate satisfactorily how text can function as a tool of the communication. Devoting more energies on the writer-reader communication in text, M. Bakhtin in his social semiotic theory has advocated that text has the quality of being directed to somebody. During the whole process of text creation, the image of the reader and his possible response to the works will be embodied in the writer's mind, and the writer tries to make his generic and language selections suitable for his reader to comprehend. Therefore in the course of writing, the writer regards text as the tool of conveying his intentions to his reader. The writer initiates the communication between his reader and himself, and he intentionally concords his language choices to the need of the communication in text. Halliday and Hasan, from the functional perspective, view text as a functional vehicle conveying the social meaning to implement personal interactions. The three well-known metafunctions of language called ideational metafunction, interpersonal metafunction and textual metafunction are the core of their theory. The textual metafunction is one of the main theoretical recourses of this thesis.In the process of the communication in text, coherence, in this thesis, is viewed as the guarantee of the smooth communication between the writer and the reader, although coherence itself is a very arguable term. Coherence is merely thought of as either a sort of linguistic phenomenon or a mental process, the combination of the two, in this thesis, however, constitutes a truly complete meaning of coherence. Consequently, coherence in text and coherence in mind are used by contrast in this paper. Coherence in text and coherence in mind are crucial factors ensuring the whole process of the writer-reader communication. Coherence in text, in this thesis, mainly refers to the linguistic phenomenon — cohesion, achieved by such cohesive devices as reference, substitution, ellipsis, repetition, synonym, superordinate, general words, reiteration, collocation and logical connectors, from which the reader can perceive the linguistic stimuli and find out coherence between words, sentences, and paragraphs in text. Coherence in mind, on the other hand, is discussed in the reader's part. Schema, undoubtedly, is considered as the most sound and convincing theoretical basis, on which the mental or psychological coherence is established during reading. Schema is an abstract knowledge structure, containing some generalizations of things, situations, phenomena and their logical relations. A reader can potentially put his schema knowledge on display, when the linguistic input or the perceived information (the text) matches the background knowledge present in his mind. Therefore, the knowledge of genre, culture, world, pragmatics stored in the reader's mind in form of schema can be accordingly activated during reading, and they can encourage and promote the reader's understanding.There is a pretty tight relation between the two kinds of coherence. In brief, coherence in text is an edifice on which coherence in mind is built. They jointly contribute to the writer-reader communication in text, and it is the guarantee for the writer to organize an intelligible text and for the reader to comprehend the text correctly to communicate with the writer.