Analyzing Chinese Students' Rewritten Discourse

This thesis argues that the notion of coherence is derivative, and can be dispensed with on a relevance-theoretic account. Intuitions about the relatedness of discourse segments can be straightforwardly captured using the machinery of Relevance Theory. This thesis agrees with the idea that Relevance Theory can explain coherence within a limited scope and aims to test the validity of the principle of relevance in an empirical study by applying the principle of relevance to an analysis of L2 interpretation process on text comprehension to test whether Relevance Theory can explain intuitions of acceptability or unacceptability; if so, under what circumstances? 93 subjects were required to retell a chosen text in written form. The data was classified into four categories: (1) 16.13% of the subjects chose to remain the contextual information of the reproduced texts the same as the original text; (2) 2.15% of the subjects chose to add more contextual information to the original information; (3) 68.82% of the subjects chose to cut off the original contextual information in the reproduced texts; and (4) 12.90% of the subjects chose to both cutting off and adding contextual information in the reproduced texts. Further detailed analysis suggests that individuals tend to hold different perspectives toward the understanding of the same text: they tend to fulfill text-coherence in their minds by revising the contextual information of the original text. Though differences remain in the four categories of the text reproductions, all these subjects were consciously or unconsciously applying Relevance Theory, consistency with the Principle of Relevance in particular, when processing comprehension. This suggests that Relevance Theory can be conducive to the explanation that a text is coherent, but the result may only be confined to these data in this thesis.