Relevance Theory And Its Explanatory Power To Discourse Coherence

The history of discourse analysis can be traced back to 1950s. In the field of discourse analysis, discourse coherence has long been a focus of attention since it has relations with every aspect about how and why a passage can be considered as a discourse. Previous researches on discourse coherence, both semantic and pragmatic, have contributed greatly to our understanding of this phenomenon. But that is not enough for analyzing coherence since it has paid inadequate attention to the cognitive feature of coherence. It is not just a feature of discourse as a static product but achieved by participants in a dynamic process of interaction. This thesis attempts to explore the process of constructing discourse coherence from a pragmatic and cognitive perspective. Here discourse is a dynamic process and coherence is analyzed by placing it in the dynamic process of interaction.Theoretical foundation of this thesis comes from Relevance Theory, a cognitive pragmatics proposed by Sperber & Wilson (1986/1995). According to Relevance Theory, human communication is a certain kind of cognition, which is relevance-oriented. They proposed Ostensive-Inferential Communication Model, which is used as the basic theoretical framework for the present research. This thesis aims to investigate discourse coherence on this framework and offers a new angle of coherence interpretation. It explores how discourse producer and receiver make contribution to discourse coherence by their mutual efforts in the dynamic process of discourse formation and discourse comprehension through ostension and inference respectively and finally it is applied to discourse teaching.