Study On Discourse Coherence In Oscar Wilde's Fairy Tales: A Metonymic Perspective

Coherence is the basis for text generation and understanding. In the last decades, linguists in China and abroad have explored coherence from different perspectives, such as semantics, pragmatics, psychology and even cognitive linguistics, but few have studied coherence from the perspective of metonymy. With the development of cognitive linguistics, metonymy is regarded as more than a linguistic device. It is a cognitive and inferential process, a basic mode of thinking and behavior, an important means helping people to know the objective world. It is rooted in people's basic experience, and it constitutes our ordinary thinking and behavior model. In this thesis, discourse coherence in Oscar Wilde's fairy tales will be studied from the perspective of metonymy, which will open up a broader prospect for coherence study.