On Text Coherence: A Study From The Perspective Of Conceptual Metaphor

With the development of linguistics, a new branch emerges, that is, text linguistics, which meets the demand of people for a better understanding of language and a further exploration in linguistics. Before the birth of text linguistics, people study language only at the sentential level and focus on sentence structure. Text linguistics goes beyond the domain of sentence, extends its study from the sentential level to the textual level, and concentrates on how sentences function in text, and on language used in communication. From the very beginning that text linguistics emerges, its development has been in a state of constant renewal. In the field of discourse analysis, many new ideas and thoughts come out one after another, among which the cohesion and coherence theories most attract our attention. But with the publication of Halliday and Hasan's book Cohesion in English in 1976, the concept of cohesion became more popular and was regarded as a useful category for the analysis of text, while coherence attracted far less attention and was neglected. Coherence, as one of the most commonly used terms in discourse analysis, should be put attention to. Coherence of text can be achieved in many ways, among which metaphor is a useful one through its textual function. For scholars holding the traditional view on metaphor, metaphor is merely a rhetorical device to provide language with vividness and expressiveness. People usually pay much attention to the rhetorical function of metaphor rather than its textual function. We may study the coherence of text from the perspective of metaphor through its textual function. This thesis attempts to study how metaphors contribute to the construction of text coherence with the help of an achievement of cognitive linguistics-conceptual metaphor theory.Firstly the thesis gives an introduction to the history of metaphor studies, and its topic, purpose and outline. In literature review on metaphor studies, the author lists four representative theories, which are the comparison theory, the substitution theory, the interaction theory and the conceptual metaphor theory. Later on Fauconnier put forward a new metaphor theory-the blended space theory, on the basis of conceptual metaphor theory. The author does not list this theory, because it has no relation to the topic of this thesis. Then we will come to the topic, purpose and outline of the thesis. Its topic and purpose is to discuss the role of conceptual metaphors in constructing text coherence, and the outline is a preview of the structure of the whole thesis.In the following section, the thesis gives detailed analysis on text coherence studies. Firstly a brief literature review on text coherence studies is given. Then some crucial concepts are clarified and distinguished: text and discourse, texture, cohesion and coherence. Finally several important factors influencing text coherence are discussed because they are closely related to the comprehension of coherent texts by readers. They are situational and cultural contexts, world knowledge, script and frame, and pragmatic presupposition.In the third section, the thesis discusses in detail about conceptual metaphor theory mainly from five aspects: its philosophical basis, the working mechanism, the grounding of mapping, the Invariance Principle and Target Domain Overrides, and the coherence of conceptual metaphors. The fifth aspect is the focus of this chapter and it is based on the former four aspects. For the part of the coherence of conceptual metaphors, the thesis discusses in detail about the coherence within one conceptual metaphor, the coherence between two conceptual metaphors, and the complex coherence among three or more conceptual metaphors. This chapter paves the way for the following chapter.Chapter Four is the concrete application of conceptual metaphor theory, and also the focus of the thesis. In this chapter, the author discusses the role of conceptual metaphor in achieving text coherence based on the discussion of the coherence of conceptual metaphors in the previous chapter. Firstly examples collected for this thesis are analyzed, and then conceptual metaphors existing in these examples are picked out and analyzed to see how they are coherent with one another. We have mentioned that metaphorical language derives from conceptual metaphors, so the coherence of conceptual metaphor decides the coherence of metaphorical language, and then texts constituted by metaphorical language are coherent correspondingly. The final part includes three case studies, and all cases are taken from the book written by Qian Zhongshu-Fortress Besieged. This part is based on, and is the further illustration of the discussion in previous parts. From the analysis in this chapter, we come to the conclusion that conceptual metaphor plays a very important role in achieving text coherence.In the final chapter, the author makes a brief summary of the study, and also indicates the limitations of the study as well as directions for further research.