A Study Of Cohesion And Coherence In IVC Discourse

With the high-speed development of Internet community technology and the popularization and maturity of Internet community's application, the Internet itself is gradually entering the era of the community, affecting everyone's daily life. As a bridge directly linking up one-to-many or many-to-many communication among people on the net, Internet community nowadays impacts on people's judgments and behavior selections deeply.Internet Community or Virtual Community refers to a variety of groups connected by means of information technologies on the Internet. Today, the Internet communities contain BBS or Forum as the primary part, including bulletin boards, group discussion, online chat, friends making, personal space, blog, network photo album, wireless value-added services and other forms of online exchanges. The language used in such circumstances is deemed as a part of Netspeak or Internet language, which is actually a new research field that has attracted more and more people's attention from every aspect.According to M. A. K. Halliday and R. Hasan, language is a semantic unit and has the feature of integrity. It is cohesion that plays the important role in the construction of integrity in text. It exists among each part of the text, forms the semantic connections, and makes use of the connections as a way to achieve textual coherence. This thesis adopts the theory of cohesion and coherence as the theoretical bases, which is proposed by M. A. K. Halliday and R. Hasan and attempts to explore the characteristics of Internet Virtual Community discourse (IVC discourse), especially the role cohesive ties play in formation of textual coherence.The thesis investigates the forming reasons and the features of Internet language and IVC discourse and introduces the theoretical background and framework of the present study which is cohesion and coherence theory proposed by M. A. K. Halliday and R. Hasan. Moreover, it presents an empirical case study in the thesis—the analysis of IVC discourses in both English and Chinese. The case study follows the steps as following:Firstly, collecting the research data from both English and Chinese community forums.Secondly, analyzing cohesive ties in the two kinds of the discourses collected previously.Finally, finding out that all the IVC discourses can be approximately regarded as coherent and logical no matter in English or Chinese, which is not chaotic as many people think. In order to realize the discourse coherence, personal reference and lexical cohesion are mostly adopted as cohesive ties.Both in the theoretical and practical sense, this thesis has a certain value. On the one hand, it is an attempt to examine the theory of cohesion and coherence in IVC discourse; on the other hand, it gives some inspiration for people involved in the network: while freely communicating in the Internet community, people should pay attention to the features of Internet discourses then they could efficiently use means of cohesion and coherence to achieve better communication.