The Study Of The SPGU Model In The Text Coherence Of The Modern Chinese Narrative Prose

Schema theory is one of the theories that have been applied to explain the mental comprehensive process by cognitive psychologists. Schema theory believes that a new experience can be understood only by comparison with the old one kept in mind. A schema is "a structure in semantic memory that specifies the expected sequence of events". There are various kinds of schemata in man's mind, one of which is the model of Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding (i.e. the SPGU Model). The present study attempts to examine the clues of text coherence by analyzing the narrative structure of some randomly-selected modern Chinese narrative prose through the SPGU model. That is to say, the dissertation tries to explain the connections of text elements in light of schema theory. Here the information of a given action in a situation is considered as a schema. The dissertation also tends to offer an analysis of the objectivity of critics'subjective criticisms in a cognitive approach. In addition, the paper may be considered as an example of the AI research on the understanding of a text with more than one sentence.