A Cognitive Study Of Asyndetic Connection

Since Halliday and Hasan put forward the theory of cohesion, many scholars have made a further study and achieved much in this field. They proposed new methods in the classification of cohesive devices, such as explicit connection and implicit connections. Asyndetic connection belongs to the latter. Asyndetic connection, as a kind of language phenomenon, exists in our natural language. Natural language can be considered as a psychological phenomenon. Cognitive linguists hold that language competence is a part of cognitive ability and application of language is interweaving with human cognitive activities. This thesis is aiming to find theoretical foundation of asyendetic connection.The thesis considers cognitive sequence, economy principle, and relevance theory as its cognitive rationale. Human recognition to the outside world follows certain order, and language is the reflection of human cognition. Hence, the order of linguistic form or text structure is a reflection of the conceptual or experiential order that the form or text structure represents. Furthermore, text corpus is proved that explicit conjunction is unnecessary to mark the development of the text when it is connected in certain order. Economy principle aims to use few words to express complete meanings in the process of language usage in order to save time and space, which is the necessary precondition for the use of asyndetic connection. The guidance of economy principle starts in two aspects: "economical use of word" in the surface structure and the optimization of cohesive device in the deep structure. According to relevance theory, "input effect and output effect" and "the first interpretation" have been used to analyze asyndetic connection in the process of encoding and decoding. The study based on these theories reveals the psychological cognitive rationale of asyndetic connection and its constraints in the progress of text encoding and decoding. The function of these constraints is presented in two aspects: in text encoding, asyndetic connection provides the encoder with greater coherence through paying minimized efforts; and in text decoding, asyndetic connection offers the decoder minimized efforts to achieve the best understanding of the text through guiding him to the presupposed context hypothesis.This thesis considers asyndetic connection as not only a language phenomenon but also a thinking pattern. Hence, the comprehension and application of asyndetic connection must abide by human cognitive rule. Coherence of asyndetic connection is a kind of psychological phenomenon, and the comprehension of it should start from the aspects of linearity, unity and cognitive context. Linearity refers to the linear coherence at the clause and sentences level. Linearity is achieved when text organized in order. This order parallels the development order of things in the objective world. Asyndetic connection constructs mainly a kind of linear coherence. Unity refers to the unitary coherence of the whole text. Unity demands every clause and sentence to function properly in text and to construct certain model. Cognitive context is dynamic, and it varies with the changing text. The process of interpreting cognitive context is a process of textual reorganization and a process of psychological reconstruction, which asks the decoder to choose and process new information to the received information constantly. Performance of language is a process concerning with the use of cognitive context, the incompleteness of linguistic expressions can be complemented by the inference based on cognitive context. During construction of cognitive context, people use situational information, linguistic co-text, encyclopedic knowledge and logical inferential ability to infer the implicit information and hypothesis. In conclusion, unitary takes the dominant place in the text, and it is the foundation of linearity, cognitive context is the necessary complement to text meaning. According to the analysis above, the application of asyndetic connection should let the information relevant to proposition, which aims to reduce the burden of memory, and to achieve textual coherence.