| Discourse analysis has become a flourishing development of linguistic study and gained considerable achievements. Consequently, it has received the international linguistic circles' high attention. At the same time, cohesion theory which can reflect the connection between the structural components of discourse arouses the common interest in modern linguistics.Cohesion theory is an important component of systemic functional linguistics. When speaking of cohesion theory, linguists hold identical and divergent viewpoints on it. Generally speaking, linguists study discourse from different angles. Accordingly they define cohesion in different ways. In this thesis, the author introduces some linguists' expounds of cohesion including its classifications. Then, Halliday's cohesion theoretical framework is applied into practice.The object of my project is the U. S. selected presidential inaugural addresses. It is well known that the U. S. selected presidential inaugural addresses are typical politics discourse. Cohesion is one of the most important objects of study in discourse analysis. Therefore, to make further study on cohesion features, the writer carries out an investigation based on the selected materials from five devices of cohesion: reference, ellipsis, substitution, conjunction and lexical cohesion.The thesis demonstrates how Halliday's theory of cohesion generally realizes in the typical politics discourse with a great number of analyses. At the same time, in different periods of sub-corpora, many similarities of cohesion devices have been perceived by the author. And by comparing, the author also finds that there are some differences of cohesion devices in the U. S. selected presidential inaugural addresses and the conversations on IRC. It is a challenge to the author. We hope that it can not only make us become a good public listener, but also better help us to understand the effective communication largely depends on cohesion function.
|
PDF Full Text Request