| In discourse analysis, new ideas and thoughts emerge in an endless stream. The ones that most catch our eyes are the theories of cohesion and coherence. After the publication of Halliday and Hasan's book Cohesion in English in 1976, the notion of cohesion was widely welcomed and accepted as a well-defined and useful category for the analysis of text behind the sentence, while coherence was regarded or even dismissed as a vague, fuzzy, and rather mystical notion. Coherence, as a significant and mostly used term in discourse analysis, is still not fully elaborated in its connotation and extension. However, the past two decades has seen a considerable shift in orientation, and, in particular, a fundamental rethinking of the concept of coherence. Linguists have explored coherence from different perspectives such as semantics, pragmatics, psychology and even cognitive linguistics, correspondingly various theories of coherence were constructed. However, few took the approach of metonymy. As an essential component of cognitive linguistics, metonymy opens up a broader prospect for studying the development of meaning construction at various levels, including discourse coherence.In the last decades, with the advent of cognitive linguistics, it is generally believed that metonymy as well as metaphor is more than a linguistic device;rather it is seen as a reasoning and inferential process. Metonymic concepts are part of the ordinary, everyday way we think and act as well as talk (Lakoff and Johnson 1983: 38). Compared with metaphor, metonymy receives less attention. Actually, metonymy is more original, namely, language is metonymic in nature (Radden and Kovecses 1999). Metonymic thinking plays a central role in the interpretation and generation of discourse. All researches on metonymy agree that metonymy is based on relations of causality and contiguity, thus it is capable of providing a complete theory of discourse coherence.In the thesis, based on the framework of metonymic theories by Radden andKovecses and other cognitive linguistics, we try to analyze the explanatory power of metonymy on discourse coherence from Al-sharafi's viewpoints on textual metonymy. The thesis contains five chapters as follows:In Chapter One, we answer the questions as what is the study topic in this paper, why we choose this topic and how to conduct the attempting study.Chapter Two is a comprehensive survey of researches upon coherence. We contribute some room in this part to the clarification and classification of some basic terms. We distinguish between text and discourse, cohesion and coherence, and various categories of and different approaches to discourse coherence. And through the analysis in this part, we propose our study perspective in the thesis.Chapter Three and Chapter Four are the main parts of the study. We look at metonymy from the perspective of cognitive linguistics in Chapter Three first. Some notions related to it will be discussed respectively, i.e. definition of metonymy, properties of metonymy, classifications of metonymy, ontological realms in which metonymy occurs. Finally, metonymy is distinguished from metaphor. The discussion of metonymy here not only poses great importance on the theory itself but also on the interpretation of discourse coherence in the thesis. In Chapter Four, we try to establish a link between discourse and cognition through various types of metonymic process or metonymic relation. We address specifically the relevance of the five major knowledge structures commonly discussed in the literature on schema theory, these are schemata, scripts, scenarios, plans and goals, and then relate them to the concept of metonymy in its cognitive and textual aspect to account for continuities and coherence in text. Coherence can be realized through the recognition of metonymic relations underlying the surface structure of the discourse.Chapter Five, the concluding part of the thesis, summarizes our findings and points out the limitations of the research and directions for future study.
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