An Exploration Of Perspective Shifts In English Majors Compositions

"Perspective" is a frequently-used term both in our daily life and our academic research, which refers to a particular way of thinking about something, especially one that is influenced by one’s beliefs or experiences. In discourse, as the starting point, perspective has a great influence on the interpretation of everything that follows. Therefore, it plays a crucial role in producing a coherent discourse. Over the past two decades, perspective has also aroused broad attention in the circle of linguistics. Based on the researches of Van Dijk (1977) and Roger Fowler (1986), Xiong Muqing (2001) proposes the theoretical frame of discourse perspectives. He categorizes the discourse perspectives into four types, i.e. spatio-temporal perspective, ideological perspective, perceptual perspective and narrative perspective. Meanwhile, he probes into their influences on discourse structure, especially on coherent. This study aims to explore the perspective shifts patterns in English majors’compositions so as to find out the problems and possible reasons.The study was conducted in Taiyuan University of Technology. The author chose67sophomore English majors as the subjects and collected their compositions written in an English writing exam as the data. Then, the narrative perspectives and their shifts in the data were tagged and wconcord and SPSS16.0software were used to retrieve the varieties and calculate the frequencies so as to find out the common patterns of perspective shifts. Schema theory was employed to explain the possible reasons for these shifts. Based on the data analysis, an interview was conducted to investigate the problems existing in the perspective shifting and the possible reasons. The statistical results of this study show that the first-person perspective is adopted most frequently by the subjects in the compositions. Considering the center-periphery schema theory, this is because the writer himself lies in the center part in his cognition. When the author examines the data from the sentence level, the perspectives shift irregularly; when she examines the samples from the discourse level, she summarizes eight types of perspective shifts patterns. Based on the center-periphery schema, the underlying reason for these shifting is the changing of the center components and periphery components during their cognitive process. The main problems of perspective shifts existing in English majors’compositions are the arbitrary perspective shifting and inappropriate use of "you". As for the reasons, mother tongue’s influence and students’lacking of awareness are the major ones.This thesis covers six chapters altogether. Chapter one is the general introduction of the study in which the background, significance and objectives of this study are presented. Chapter two is the literature review, where the definitions of the key terms, the classifications of discourse perspective and the related previous studies of perspective are introduced. Chapter three reports the basic theories related to perspective and its shifts, including Brown&Yule’s natural order, discourse coherence and coherent perspective and schema theory. Chapter four is concerned with the methodology adopted in this thesis, in which the research design, such as the research questions, the subjects, the research instruments and the data collection, are described in detail. Chapter five, as the main part of the whole paper, deals with the presentation and explanation of the perspective shifts. The data selected from sophomore English majors in TYUT are analyzed. The problems of perspective shifts and the possible reasons are also explored in this chapter. In chapter six, major findings of the study are summarized first and the implications and limitations are concluded briefly. The suggestions for further studies are also mentioned in the end.