A Pragmatic Study Of Coherence In English Discourse

Coherence, as a basic feature of discourse, has been taken into investigation for a long time. As for linguistic field, it starts from Halliday and Hasan's study of cohesion, which attempts to search for the objective factors that contribute to a text, viz. coherence. Thereafter a large number of researches have been carried out within texts and conversations respectively, in which the former focuses on the linguistic factors conducive to the result of coherence while the latter pays attention to the non-linguistic factors which are employed to realize coherence. In other words, no research has yet been implemented upon both those linguistic and non-linguistic factors so as to display the dynamic language use to achieve coherence, which, however, is fulfilled by our present work. In addition, far from viewing coherence as effects of language use presented by the past studies, our work is to define coherence as the utterance-building principle preliminary to effects of language use which the language users comply with in the process of utterance production. The present study tries to reveal how the coherence principle is complied with in language use.Based on the Linguistic Adaptation Theory proposed by Jef Verschueren, which expresses the idea that the language users make continuous linguistic choices, consciously or unconsciously, for language-internal and/or language-external reasons, this thesis attempts to impose a comprehensive view upon coherence in language use. Coherence is delimited as an utterance-building principle in this work. How do people achieve coherence? Or, what do people do when achieving coherence? Or, what happens to people when they achieve coherence? The conceptual framework is presented in relation to these questions or to say one question in fact which are separated into three sub-questions and subsequently answered step by step in our work. The first sub-question concerns the linguistic manifestation of observing coherence principle which is dwelled upon in Chapter 4 by way of types of linguistic units and specific linguistic means to achieve coherence. Following the division made by Sperber & Wilson (1995: 182) between explicature and implicature, we classify the ways of achieving coherence into employing cohesive ties to facilitate coherence between explicatures on the one hand and exploitingimplicatures to produce coherence on the other. We try to expound the linguistic variability when people achieve coherence. Besides, according to our framework, those various linguistic means are more often than not chosen in order to adapt to specific contexts in the process of communication. This is mainly discussed in Chapter 5 revolving around linguistic adaptability, the second sub-question, viz. adaptation of these linguistic choices to abide by coherence. The adapted contextual correlates concern linguistic context and communicative context, among which the former includes discourse topic, sequencing and contextual cohesion, and the latter the physical world, the mental world and the social world. Furthermore, we make a brief analysis of coherence-driven achievement of communicative goals based on some examples. Among those contextual factors listed above, 'discourse topic' is the only one which must be adapted to during the process of language use while others are just those which the communicator could choose to adapt to. So we analyze the temporary production of incoherence occurring in communication due to non-adaptation to the discourse topic. The last sub-question should center on the negotiation of these linguistic choices to realize adaptation in Chapter 6, i.e. linguistic negotiability in order to demonstrate the dynamic feature of adaptation. We mainly reveal the negotiation process by exploring the subject of negotiation, for which the typicality of coherence and the intensity of coherence are distinguished from each other.To sum up, the present study sheds new light on coherence research on the one hand;on the other, the present study at least bears testimony to whether the meaningful functioning perspective the Linguistic Adaptation Theory hold on language use could be applicable in every fields of linguistic study. Moreover, the general model of Linguistic Adaptation Theory is modified for the sake of more maneuverability in order to match this specific study.