| Contrastive transition refers to lexical items that signal contrastive coherencerelation between adjacent text spans. Contrastive transition has received muchattention in text linguistics and language teaching. However, the functions ofcontrastive transition and how it contributes to the textual coherence at poly-levelsrequire further exploration. Besides, the issue of its implicitness and overtness needsfurther discussion since it has been simply touched upon. This essay is an attempt topropose multi-perspectives for the analysis of contrastive transition at the textuallevel.Based on Halliday's theory of three metafunctions of language (1985b), thefunctions of contrastive transition are studied. Austin and Searl's speech act theory(Austin, 1961; Searl, 1969) and Sperber and Wilson's theory of relevance (1986) areapplied to the issue as well. According to Halliday (1985b), language for an adult hasthree metafunctions, ideational, interpersonal, and textual. These three functions formthe meaning network systematically, and provide meaning potentials for languagecommunication. Schiffrin (1996) is the one who further applies Halliday's theoreticalframework to the study of transitional words. As Schiffrin states (1996: 190), "itsuggests that the discourse roles of and, but and or parallel their grammatical roles…the linguistic properties of and, but and or interact with the discourse slots in whichthey occur to produce their discourse functions". Therefore, contrastive transitionplays semantic (textual function) and pragmatic (interactional function) roles as wellas a syntactic role (ideational function).The main focus of this paper is on the interpersonal and textual functions ofcontrastive transition. The former is summarized as: ⑴to succeed a topic, ⑵toindicate additional topic or shift of topic, ⑶to play a facilitating role in performingspeech acts. And the latter is: ⑴to have cohesive force, ⑵to have constrainingfunction, ⑶to predict the successive proposition.
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