A Study On The Cohesion And Coherence Of Text Messages

Text messages are a type of new linguistic form coming into being with the development of mobile phone industry. From the linguistic perspective, they have their own linguistic characteristics so that they are considered as a new genre. The present thesis is intended to study the cohesion and coherence of this new text form.Cohesion and coherence are one of the central research areas of text linguistics. In recent years, text analysis attracts a lot of attention from many linguists both home and abroad. It has become one of the hot topics in linguistics. In the field of text analysis, cohesion and coherence studies are very prominent. Since text message is a kind of new text form, it is necessary to make clear their textual features, especially how they achieve cohesion and coherence. By doing so, people can understand text messages better and make a better use of them in our lives.This thesis first of all investigates the nature, the reason of their appearing and main features of text messages. With mobile phones popularizing, text messages promptly blend with people's daily lives because they have many advantages, such as they are short and extractive, humorous and witty, prompt and swift. Currently there are mainly three approaches to the study of text messages: sociological, rhetoric and linguistic. The present study adopts linguistic approach, intending to probe into their textual features.Then it introduces the theoretical background and framework of the present study. The thesis focuses on the investigation of the cohesion and coherence of text messages within text linguistic framework and is based on the theoretical basis of functional linguistics.The research finally conducts an empirical case study. As Chinese native speakers, the author takes Chinese text messages as study cases and analyzes their characteristics. 100 pieces of text messages from ten categories have been collected and studied. Through statistical analysis, the original theoretical hypothesis has been proven to be true. The major cohesive devices of Chinese text messages are reference (especially first- and second-personal references) and lexical cohesion (especially repetition) while coherence is achieved mainly through semantic, pragmatic and cognitive mechanisms.