A Study On Coherence Of Narrative Texts In The Light Of Iconicity

Coherence is one of the core contents and hot topics in the study of texts and, toa large extent, it determines the acceptability of a text. Linguists of different schoolsconducted various researches on it with diverse approaches, including register andcohesion theory, macrostructure theory, illocutionary act theory, rhetorical structuretheory, psychological frame theory and thematic progression theory. But until nowthere are still some important issues remaining to be solved. There is still not anexplicit and uniform definition of text coherence. A basic statement is that cohesionis a kind of lexical and grammatical approach that can connect sentences to form atext, while coherence is just the results of adopting these devices. With theappearance and development of cognitive linguistics, scholars begin to study textcoherence from the perspective of cognition and great achievements have beengained. Human’s experience and cognition to the objective world are fully valued.With the instruction of cognitive linguistics, the author attempts to conduct aparticular study of the strong function of iconicity principles in the realization of thecoherence of narrative texts. In the thesis, both English and Chinese examples areapplied and they are generally analyzed from the text-interpreters’ viewpoint.Nanny&Fischer ever categorized iconicity into two kinds: imagic iconicity anddiagrammatic iconicity. Based on his study, the classification of iconicity principlesare taken even further in our thesis which indicates that iconicity principles have tobe hierarchically divided in the analysis of text coherence, because a text is anentirety with hierarchical structure. So in our thesis, text coherence is largelyanalyzed from two aspects: local coherence and global coherence.Narrative texts in our thesis are casually selected from English and Chinesenovels whose coherence of micro-structure and macro-structure are both studied indetail within the theoretical frame of iconicity. Sequence iconicity, quantity iconicity,topic iconicity, process iconicity and poetic iconicity are all applied in our research and by analyzing we find that sequence iconicity and quantity iconicity, which ismainly taken from previous studies, play quite an important role in the realization oflocal coherence of narrative texts, topic iconicity and process iconicity which is basedon the achievements before and furthered in our study, are closely related with theachieving of global coherence in narrative texts. Besides, a new principle-poeticiconicity, put forward by Freeman, is introduced into our research and it’s proved thatpoetic iconicity shows strong explanation power in the realization of both localcoherence and global coherence of narrative texts.The thesis testifies that iconicity theory, a theory about similarity between thesignifier and the signified, is powerful in the interpretation of the realization of thecoherence of narrative texts, because the similarity between the text-interpreters’mental world and the real objective world is greatly valued.Our research on the coherence of narrative texts is not only a significantcomplement and development of the previous studies but also a meaningful attemptwith a great deal of practical referential value which will give deep insights to futurelanguage teaching, literary translations and contrastive studies between English andChinese. In the meantime, it also shows the feasibility of iconicity theory in theanalysis of text.