An Analysis Of Coherence Of Electronic Conversational Discourse

With the rapid development of computer and internet technology, a new mode of communication, termed electronic discourse, has emerged. Electronic conversational discourse is subject to electronic discourse, which belongs to the type of synchronous communication. Electronic conversational discourse is a kind of instant, interactive and dynamic text-only communication. Internet language is the basic communicative language in electronic conversational discourse which has features of disrupted adjacency, overlapping exchanges and topic decay. Many researchers at home and abroad focus their studies on several aspects: compared electronic discourse with spoken and written discourse, the influence that brings to language production, the features of electronic discourse and electronic conversational discourse. These researches present many natures of electronic discourse and electronic conversational discourse, which bring this thesis a reliable research basement.This thesis is under the framework of ostensive-inferential communicative model in relevance theory, aims at finding how to construct coherence in electronic conversational discourse to realize a successful communication. The current study attempts to analyze electronic conversational discourse coherence from the following aspects:1. How the speaker encodes explicature assumptions and how the hearer decodes the explicature meanings and enriches them in explicature communication?2. How the speaker encodes implicature assumptions and how the hearer decodes and deduces the implicature meanings in implicature communication?3. What factors repaired coherence when coherence is disrupted in electronic conversational discourse?This research aims at finding out how coherence constructed by ostention and inference, and expatiates on the process of coherence construction in explicature and implicature level separately. The data of this thesis is chosen from the instant messaging system—QQ, which is popular in internet communication. In explicature dimension, it is a process of external and internal interaction, speaker expresses intention ostensively, and the hearer uses disambiguation, enrichment and saturation process, ad hoc concept construction to decoding and making contextual assumptions, and use higher-level explicature description to comment on the embedded proposition. In implicature dimension, it is a process of internal interaction, the speaker hides the real intention in the communication, and hearer should depend upon contextual deductions to infer the implicit meaning. However, when the coherence of interlocutors'communication is disrupted, participants will assist by cognitive environment and optimal relevance to repair that interrupted relevance to achieve continuous coherence, which deepen the understanding and application of electronic conversational communication.