Poetry Coherence Based On Schema Theory

It is widely believed that Halliday & Hassan's research is concerned with explicit cohesive devices within text, which serve as important conditions for text coherence. But, it is true that text coherence involves much more than merely cohesion, especially in the case of poetry. Poetry is a highly condensed form of literature. It often leaves slots or meaning vacancy in the text where the reader is expected to employ his association or inference. Besides, in contrast with the agreement of interpretations in practical writings, a poem usually has different interpretations for different people, which lead to the relativity of poetry coherence. In view of these facts the interpretation of poetry coherence has too many difficulties to cope only with the theory of formalist and functionalist. Therefore, this paper attempts to deal with poetry coherence from the cognitive psychological perspective by adopting schema theory. It emphasizes the importance of schemata as an implicit cohesive device in constructing poetry coherence.Schema theory is considered as an important theory in cognitive psychology. A fundamental principle of schema theory assumes that a written text does not carry meaning by itself, but just serves as the direction for readers, enabling them to know how to extract or construct the meaning with their previous knowledge. Therefore, it is found that coherence is not an intrinsic characteristic of a text but a concept related to the cognition of text receivers. The achievement of text coherence, to a large extent, depends on whether readers possess or activate the relevant schemata or not. Schema theory is based on the two models of information processing, i.e. the bottom-up and the top-down. Corresponding to this, there are two models of schema activation that provide an explorative view for interpreting poetry coherence.In this thesis, schema will be categorized into three types respectively, i.e. language schema, situation schema and cultural schema, from which poetry coherence can be analyzed specifically and elaborately with practical examples. We can understand the functions of schema theory including predication, selection, and inference. And it suggests the enlightenments that schema theory brings to us. This involves three possible explanations for the failure to achieve poetry coherence. Firstly, there is no coherence to be said by reason of the lack of some essential schemata. Secondly, readers'schemata are not necessarily activated while text process because the text he encounters does not contain sufficient cues to signal the schema to be activated. Thirdly, readers get a consistent interpretation for the poetic text but it may not be the author's true intentions for the simple reason that activated schemata are the wrong ones. In addition, it is pointed that the relativity of poetry coherence is the result of differences of individual's schemata. And the thesis further shows the importance of application of schema theory in the study of poetry coherence.