A Tentative Study On Coherence Construction In Cross-cultural Context

Research on cohesion and coherence has been one of the hottest issues in discourse analysis. It is agreed that cohesion is distinct from coherence, however, when the relationship between cohesion and coherence is concerned, there exist two seemingly exclusive theories—cohesion is essential to coherence, as claimed by Halliday, and coherence is produced by language users' background knowledge, having nothing to do with cohesion, as argued by Brown & Yule. Nowadays, most contrastive studies on Chinese and English discourse focus on the comparison of cohesive devices, which is always undertaken in the frame of functional grammar. Owing to its failure to explore into the cultural and cognitive mechanism behind the linguistic form, it is impossible for this type of research to offer an insightful and convincing explanation on the differences between Chinese and English. It could be argued that only when discourse, a complex phenomenon related to culture and cognition, is approached in an integrative way can the essence of it be brought to light.This thesis is an attempt to approach discourse in an integrative way by integrating all the achievements concerning coherence made by scholars from such fields as ethnography, pragmatics, cognitive linguistics and functional grammar into the frame of schema theory. It argues that cohesion and coherence are the two sides of the same coin, that is, cohesion is the semantic relationship within discourse, while coherence is the semantic relationship reconstructed through the interaction between discourse and the language user's cultural schemata. Meanwhile, it asserts that the cultural images, as opposed to the linguistic form, decide the cohesive power of the cohesive devices in discourse, and that the cohesive devices can be classified as grammatical devices, lexical devices, rhetorical strategies and metaphorical implicatures. Therefore, on the one hand, cohesion and coherence are the universally definite characteristics of discourse, and on the other hand, the preference to the use of certain cohesive devices are cultural-specific.With the aim to discover the principles governing the construction of discourse in Chinese and English, we make a contrastive study on the cohesive devices employed in them and find out that Chinese and English differ widely in the images related to the devices used to build cohesion in discourse. English tends to explicate the logical relationship within discourse by using linguistic codes while Chinese prefers to imply the logical relationship. In lexical cohesion and metaphor, there are differences in cultural images and co-occurrences of certain lexical items. With regard to the rhetorical strategies, the discrepancy between Chinese and English is more obvious, which is attributed to their different judgments of politeness. In the formal circumstances, English discourse is usually developed in a deductive pattern, while, in an informal context, an inductive pattern is more appropriate. The case with Chinese is the other way round.Through the analysis, we can find that cultural schemata definitely play a decisive role in the construction of coherence. Then, in order to make cross-cultural communication successful, it is advisable for speakers/writers to provide enough of cultural clues to help listeners/ readers restructure their present cultural schemata and construct coherence.The pragmatic value of this research is that it can provide suggestions and strategies for cross-cultural communication, C-E/E-C translation as well as language teaching.