Text Coherence Standards From Text-decoders' Perspective

The past three decades, short as they are, have witnessed a great development of text coherence theory. Such a development roughly falls into three stages according to the different approaches to the study, i.e., text-based approach represented by Halliday, reader-based approach represented by Givon and the approach emphasizing coherence relation between text segments.Generally speaking, there are three main problems with the existing coherence theories. Firstly, Researchers taking text-based approach to text coherence consider it as a property of the text itself, ignoring the role of the text-decoder. Secondly, scholars taking the reader-based approach overemphasize that coherence is a mental phenomenon or some other property independent of the text itself rather than a language phenomenon. They even firmly deny text-based approach to text coherence. Thirdly, certain researches on conditions for text coherence often pay attention to some aspects of text coherence to the neglect of others. What is more, such researches have been flawed by the lack of soundly grounded arguments. Some researches base their exploration into how to obtain coherence on the text itself, no mention being made of the text-decoder's role. Others, starting from the reader's mental cognition, overly stress the importance of reader's cognition by negating the role of the text itself.Although a few researches pay attention to the role both of the text itself and the text-decoder, such attempts, especially those from the perspective of text-decoder, lack enough persuasive arguments for the extralingusitic factors that contribute to text coherence. Currently, researches are hardly seen that have been carried out to explore the standards for text coherence in its comprehensive sense from the viewpoint of the text-decoder.In view of the imperfections of the previous studies in text coherence, the author, after a careful qualitative study of the achievements of our predecessors, advances her own definition of text coherence. The author is of the opinion that text coherence is produced in the text itself and completed in the process of the text-decoder's understanding, and that it is a property of the text itself and also part of the cognitive properties of the human mind, and that a comprehensive text coherence can only be achieved by the joint efforts both from the text-encoder and the text-decoder.In addition, the author makes further efforts to put forwards, with the text-decoder in mind, five conditions for text coherence. They are semantic consistency, topic consistency, context consistency, culture model i+1 and cognitive model i+1. While dealing with the above five standards, the author lays some emphasis on the use of the Input Hypothesis theory, the most developed of Krashen's Monitor Theory, for the purpose of proving that the text-decoder's own culture model, cognitive model and his/her accumulation of knowledge about different cultural models and cognitive models play an important part in the process of obtaining text coherence. Lastly, the author supports her argumentation through a lot of case studies.The major conclusions from the dissertation are as follows. First, text coherence is completed through the thorough collaboration of the text-encoder and the text-decoder. Second, the more the text-decoder accumulates knowledge about different culture models and cognitive models, the more easily he/she obtains profound comprehension of text coherence during second language reading. Third, in the process of the second language reading teaching, stress should be given to the imparting of the relevant knowledge about different culture models and cognitive models to sharpen students'awareness in these fields, although the input of language points is necessary.