Investigating Coherence In Text From The Perspective Of Dynamic Context

The significant role that context plays in the study of the meaning of language was due to the great publicity by Malinowski, who, owing to Wegener's concept of situation (Firth, 1957: 94-96), postulated two notions: context of situation and context of culture. And up to now, many linguists abroad and in China have made great achievements in the research of context, but there are still some issues that need to further study: first, nowadays, most of the social cultural study on context is about genre, that is, when we classify contextual elements, we pay more attention to its abstract contextual types and ignore the individual study on concrete context; secondly, most linguists, such as Firth and Halliday, study genre to predict how language users make choices of language forms, but seldom do they research on how to predict underlying meanings in texts; thirdly, the dynamic nature of context needs more study. (朱永生, 2005: 27-28). For dynamic context, many linguists propose their own views, but mostly are induction on elements for the creation and comprehension of discourses. In this thesis, we will do our research according to the views of O'Donnel on context and his two criteria of measuring dynamic context, and the two criteria are: first, whether the context is activated in every stage of the process of a communication; second, whether contextual elements change through the whole process of communication. Here, according to the theories of dynamic context, we think of context as being dynamic instead of completely static.According to the three issues we have talked above, and on the foundation of views of dynamic context above, this thesis will mainly investigate coherence in text from the perspective of dynamic context. In this research, we will pay more attention to the individual analysis on context, and emphasize the analysis on texts involving underlying meanings, such as pun, irony and vagueness and so on. Also, we will investigate O'Donnel's views and criteria in given coherent texts, mainly through the...