A Descriptive Framework For The Study Of Discourse Coherence

Coherence is a major property of discourse. In the past three decades, coherenceresearch has been an important area in discourse analysis. To the present day, coherenceresearch has made great achievements; however, there is little consensus as to the natureof coherence and coherence research approaches. Generally speaking, existingcoherence studies have a major problem: researchers often devote their attention to onlyone aspect of coherence and ignore the others, resulting in the fact that their theories donot have enough persuasiveness. Therefore, it is urgent to establish a coherent andconsistent framework of coherence by exploring its multiple aspects.The present study solves the problem by making a comprehensive study ofdiscourse coherence from the perspective of linguistic, semantic and pragmaticapproaches, making an attempt to construct a systematic descriptive framework for thestudy of discourse coherence. The exact properties that contribute to the coherence ofdiscourse will be studied, and the applicability of the framework will be tested.The author of this dissertation has reviewed the study of discourse and discoursecoherence by other linguists and presents her own understanding of them. Discourse isconsidered to be a stretch of language, spoken or written of whatever length, taking onmeaning in context, perceived by users as purposeful, meaningful, and connected.Defined as a 'perceived'quality, the coherence of a discourse will vary both with itsperceiver and with context. The author also has surveyed context, which is grouped intolinguistic context and pragmatic context. Coherence is thus understood as the realizationof the unitary sense of a discourse, combining both the explicit relationships holdingbetween parts of the text, expressed by specific lexical-grammatical markers, and theimplicit potential meaning relationships among parts of a text, made explicit by thereader or listener through the process of interpretation.The explicit coherence is recognized through objectively detectable devices such aslexical-grammatical cohesion and sound system (including intonation, tone concord andprosody) in the surface structure while the implicit coherence must be establishedthrough the underlying relatedness of meaning, contextual inference, conversationalimplicature and illocutionary acts.This dissertation is composed of five chapters.Chapter One presents basic notions to be clarified and reviews the major studies ofdiscourse and discourse coherence, which provide a theoretical basis for the discussionsin the subsequent chapters.