On The Role Of English Intonation In Spoken Discourse Coherence

This thesis is concerned with the role of English intonation in spoken discourse coherence. Intonation refers to the tone patterns of a language according to its narrow definition, though it includes stress, tempo, rhythm, and other features in a broad sense. In this thesis, only the features of tone patterns and stress placement are taken into account. The author tries to explore the coherent function of English intonation in spoken discourse.Coherence is crucial to discourse. Since Halliday and Hasan published the book Cohesion in English in 1976, more and more linguists have started to study cohesion and coherence in discourse. In this thesis, the theories of Widdowson, Halliday and Hasan are considered. Coherence is realized by various means, including the cohesive relations among sentences, information structure, and the illocutionary development of a discourse as well.Most of the analyses of discourse coherence center around the syntax and grammar. However, the contribution of intonation has been somewhat neglected. The author tries to demonstrate with examples that besides the lexicogrammatical structure of a discourse, intonation also plays a coherent role. Intonation helps to achieve coherence in spoken discourse mainly in three aspects: it expresses cohesive relations; reflects the information structure; and indicates the illocutionary acts of utterances. The study of the coherent role of English intonation in spoken discourse is helpful to Chinese students' listening comprehension and speaking ability.