| Discourse is the biggest unit of language analysis. Human language communication is mostly carried out beyond the levels of words and sentences, and in most cases, verbal communication is based on discourse. Therefore, nearly for half a century, discourse analysis has attracted many researchers. In the former discourse analysis, the theory guidance has mainly come from functional linguistics. Discussing the model and theoretical basis from the perspective of cognitive linguistics is a recent exploration. Although lots of researches have been done on discourse analysis on the respective theoretical bases by researchers, discourse is an extremely complex unit, any single theoretical explanation can only reveal parts of its features. What's more, limiting to discourse coherence of certain stylistic type, there's no comprehensive data support from a corpus. In view of their respective explanatory power and the complementarities of cognitive linguistics and functional linguistics, the author believes that cognitive linguistics and functional linguistics can be combined to explain the coherence of discourse. Thus, the author puts forward the cognitive and functional (abbreviated as CF) analysis model of discourse coherence based on a corpus with argumentative discourses of the English Extensive Reading textbooks for English majors of universities in China by employing qualitative and quantitative research methods. Due to the limitation of space, for the means of discourse cohesion of functional linguistics, this thesis only discusses the conjunctions; for mental coherence of cognitive linguistics, only the conceptual metaphors.The major findings of the study are: (1) In the argumentative discourses, the frequency of conceptual metaphors is proportional to the frequency of conjunctions, which shows in the construction of a coherent argumentative discourse, the roles of conceptual metaphors and conjunctions are complementary, i.e., both the conceptual semantic relations on the deep level of discourse and the means of cohesion at the surface level function in the building of discourse coherence; (2) Conceptual metaphor has important impact on discourse understanding, the more conceptual metaphors are used and the more complex the conceptual metaphors are, the more difficult to understand the discourse; (3) The linguistic expressions of the source domain not only reflect in verb metaphor, noun metaphor, adjective metaphor, adverb metaphor, preposition metaphor and quantifier metaphor, but also in pronoun metaphor; (4) Being not only reflect in noun metaphor, but in adverb, adjective, preposition, quantifier, and pronoun metaphors; (5) The metaphorical descriptions can be included in 20 types of source domain (i.e., the event E'), the frequency from high to low in use are: Person-thing Event, Container Event, War Event, Gas / Liquid Event, Building Event, etc.; (6) In terms of the study based on the corpora, eight other common domains are found, i.e. container, gas /liquid, traffic, home, money, natural world, business, and art/ culture, which has improved the studies by K?vecses (2002) and Miao Meng (2007) and has enriched the study of common domains, especially the source domains; (7) There are lots of connective pronouns as well as connective adverbs, such as who, whom, whose, which, what, where, when, how, why, which also play the role of connection from the perspective of grammar. This study provides a new perspective for analyzing discourse coherence, and has a certain value in reference for English extensive reading course.
|
PDF Full Text Request