Cohesion And Coherence In Business English Discourse

The relation between coherence and cohesion is one focus of linguists in discourse analysis. Halliday once said in Cohesion in English (1976):''A text is a passage of discourse which is coherent in these two regards: it is coherent with respect to the context of situation, and there fore consistent in register; and it is coherent with respect to itself, and therefore cohesive. Neither of these two conditions is sufficient without the other, nor does the one by necessity entail the other.''it is coherent with respect to itself, such coherence is reached by using cohesive ties suggested by Halliday, on the other hand, the coherence of a discourse must keep consistent in register, that means It is coherent with respect to the context of situation in which it is functioning, here the term context of situation is equals to register, and such nature of consistence can be showed by some cohesive ties.After reading large amounts of business correspondences and business negotiation materials, the embodiment relation is studied further, meantime, turn taking in conversation analysis is also applied into this study to analyze business discourse in detail. Firstly, the consistence between cohesive ties and context of situation is showed by the embodying functions of cohesive ties, namely, cohesive ties are considered as embodiment of three variables of context of situation: the frequent uses of some certain cohesive items can implicate the topic of the discourse, thus the purpose and function of this discourse can be showed to a certain degree, so these cohesive items can embody discourse field; there are few exophoric reference ties in business correspondence, and the number of ellipsis and substitution is also limited, thus the independence on situation of context is strengthened, which is a stylistic feature of written discourse. Then, the use of turn taking in discourse also can embody discourse mode: all letters are monolog, there is no Turn taking. Some cohesive items can implicate the relationship between the communicator, and so they can embody the tenor of this discourse. So after analyzing a lot of materials, according to the embodying relationship between cohesive items and variables of context of situation, cohesive items in business English discourse can be grouped into three types: Field—Embodiment, Mode—Embodiment, and Tenor—Embodiment.The suggested theoretical framework in this paper is based on Halliday and Hasan's five cohesive ties and the theory of Turn—taking, and the deep structure of business discourse is explored. It not only explained how cohesive items and context of situation keep consistent with each other, adjacency pairs are also considered as cohesive methods here, 6 types of adjacency pairs in business discourse are summarized: Greeting—Greeting, Ask—Answer, Proposal—Acceptance, Proposal—Refusal, Claim—Counterclaim, Claim—Claimsettling.This thesis consists of six chapters. Chapter I is a brief introduction to cohesive theory suggested by Halliday & Hasan and various views of linguists on this theory, including definitions of cohesion and coherence and significance of this thesis. Chapter II presents a literature review to the study on business English discourse: the notion of Business English discourse; the researches on business English discourse abroad and at home. Chapter III deals with the theoretical base of this study. In this chapter, the writer will introduce five cohesive ties suggested by Halliday & Hasan in detail. Furthermore, the terms such as register, mode, field, tenor, especially their relation to each other is also studied here, and what's more important, Turn taking and Adjacency Pair are introduced in this chapter too, what is more important is that a theoretical framework on the base of five cohesive ties and Turn-taking is proposed, and this theoretical framework is applied to analyze four samples of business English Discourse in written form(business English correspondence) in Chapter IV and four samples in oral form in Chapter V. Chapter VI deals with the major findings, limitations of the present study, and suggestion of further study.Particular cohesive features are studied in this thesis; what's more important is that the relation between coherence and context of situation is explained in detail.