Cohesion And Coherence In Literature Discourse

Cohesion and coherence are two important concepts in the study of text linguistics. Many linguists at home and abroad have extensively studied on their theories and their relationship from a range of perspectives. Due to the various interpretations of the two concetps and the different frameworks for the comparison, no general consensus so far has been reached on them.This thesis advocates a discourse-based approach to study the relationship between cohesion and coherence. The applications of cohesion and coherence to the literary works cannot only help to understand the content of the works, but also can inspect their functions through the case in point. Therefore, the present thesis intends to render insight into the appriciation of Charles Dickens' world-famous novel Oliver Twist from the perspective of the applications of cohesive devices and coherent factors. Analysing both the grammatical and lexical cohesive devices which are employed in the work can help to study the inter-structure, from which we can experience the access to the topic the author provides. Meanwhile we can appreciate the uniqueness for the characters'inner thoughts through the contextual knowledge and cognitive factors.This thesis is based on the relevant surveys and the different viewpoints at home and abroad, and is illustrated using corpus linguistics examples mainly from the concrete literature discourse. It values the analysis and the practical applications of the examples. Meanwhile, the thesis narrows the extension of cohesion, clarifies the definition of coherence, and modifies the relationship between textual cohesion and coherence from an exclusively textual perspective. All the above could be conducive to the discourse comprehension and production.This thesis mainly consists of following four parts.Chapter one is the literature review to text linguistics. Firstly, this chapter in principle introduces Halliday and Hasan's great initiative contributions on the discourse development in different periods. Secondly, this chapter also introduces the different standpoints on the definition of discourse. It also discusses the essential factors to judge whether a sequence or a set of sentences, which are arranged one after another, can make up one coherent discourse.Chapter two introduces the theoretical framework of cohesion and coherence. It respectively describes the progress in study on cohesion and coherence and their definitions. Furthermore, it discusses the relationship between cohesion and coherence on the basic study of a coherent discourse:they are different but connected with each other. Cohesion is the crucial method to realize textual coherence but cohesion is not the exclusive one for coherence.Chapter three is the applications of cohesive devices and coherent theories in literary work of Oliver Twist. In this part, dozens of samples from this work are selected and analysed with the help of cohesive devices (reference, ellipsis, substitution, conjunction and lexical cohesion). Meanwhile, this part also deals with the coherence from the perspective of the contextual knowledge and the communicators' cognitive and mental knowledge.The last part concludes the aim of this thesis is to dig the value of cohesive theories and coherent factors in analysing literary work, that is, a new way of interpreting the literary works from the linguistic view and the further study in analysing the novel.