An Adaptation Approach To The Conversational Coherence In Friends

For a long time, conversation is considered as the key to a better comprehension of the essence of language and how it works. In everyday communication, the art of conversation can not only influence interpersonal relationship, but also manifest personal charisma and quality of education. Therefore, it is extremely necessary conversation be studied. And the attention should be paid to the coherence of conversation. One of the main reasons is that coherence plays a significant role in everyday conversation. In other words, whether the conversation is coherent or not will directly influence whether people can be understood correctly and even will have some effects on their relationship and social status. From another point of view, the grasp of different kinds of coherences will make our daily communication easier and more flexible. Above all, this is viewed as the starting point of the thesis.The present research takes Jef Verschueren's adaptation theory as theoretical foundation, which manifests the view that the process of communicating is full of continuous choice-making, no matter consciously or automatically, no matter for language-internal and/or langue- external reasons. The effect of coherence is mainly achieved by two devices: one is the cohesive ties proposed by Halliday and Hasan, which is named as explicit coherence in the present study. The other condition is that there is no obvious cohesive device in a conversation, which is labeled as implicit coherence. In a word, no matter which kind of coherence is achieved, the communicators should adapt to different contexts so as to continuously make appropriate choices. And according to the adaptation theory, context is divided into communicative context and linguistic context. The former includes communicators'physical world, mental world and social world, while the latter contains contextual cohesion, intertextuality and sequencing.All the excerpted data in this thesis are from the American sitcom Friends, which is a mirror of ordinary people's everyday life. Therefore, all the examples are representative.Through a detailed analysis, some research findings are reached: conversation coherence is an important element in the process of making the communication successful. The explicit coherence can make people's conversation simple and easy to understand, while the implicit coherence will produce different pragmatic functions, such as: humor, irony, protecting the partner's face from being hurt directly, etc. In a word, no matter which cohesive method is selected, the communicators are required to make proper adaptation.