Text Comprehension And Analysis: An Exploration Into The Complementarity Between Systemic-Functional Linguistics And Psycholinguistics

Systemic-functional linguistics (SFL) and psycholinguistics are considered as two greatly influential linguistic theories in the twentieth century. SFL is a sociologically oriented functional linguistic approach which has great effect on various disciplines related to language, such as language teaching, sociolinguistics, text analysis, stylistics and machine translation. Psycholinguistics is the empirical and theoretical study of language comprehension, language production and language acquisition. The differences and correlations between SFL and psycholinguistics have been an area of academic interest for many linguists. Despite the differences in their theoretical stand, research methodology and objectives, this thesis explores the complementarity between the two branches of linguistics from the perspective of text comprehension and analysis.Chapter One presents a brief account of the development of text comprehension and analysis, and proposes that SFL and psycholinguistics can have many overlapping and complementary areas which need further exploration. Chapter Two offers an overview of SFL and psycholinguistics and puts forward the three theoretical bases for the complementarity between the two. Chapter Three is devoted to the exposition of SFL's text analysis theories while Chapter Four gives a detailed account of the three most influential psycholinguistic theories for text comprehension--the propositional theory, the schema theory, and the capacity theory. On such a basis, Chapter Five explores the complementarity between the two in the field of text comprehension and analysis. SFL can complement psycholinguistics in such aspects as the situation model, the social constructivity of language and the role of context. And psycholinguistics can make up for SFL's deficiencies to some extent as specifically shown by the following four points: text as a semantic unit, the relationship between cohesion and coherence, the role of world knowledge and the role of inference. In Chapter Six, after the comparative and explorative study in the previous chapters, the author comes to the conclusion that if SFL can draw upon psycholinguistics in research methodology and findings, it may arrive at new understandings and conclusions in its linguistic research, and vice versa.