| According to the viewpoint of systemic-functional linguistics, the explicit cohesive ties are the most important ways that guarantee the text coherence. However, as a special kind of language form, poetry is characterized by the shortage of dominant cohesive devices. Thus, the coherence of the poems is difficult to interpret through the constructing words in the poem for there is always the difference between the literal meaning of the words and the themes of the poems. Therefore, to interpret the coherence of poetic discourse requires more cognitive efforts of readers whose psychological coherent mechanism needs to be mobilized in a large degree. The implication of the poems can be interpreted by activating the encyclopedic knowledge and identifying the implicit cohesive device. There are lots of studies on the discourse coherence both at home and abroad, but the studies on coherence of the poetic discourse are sparse in number.Wang Wei was a very famous and prestigious poet in Tang Dynasty and he received the compliments and praise from the scholars of his time. Deeply influenced by Buddhism, he also was regarded as "Buda of poem" in Chinese history. Wang Wei was quite productive in creating poetry, his landscape poetry enjoyed the highest reputation among all his poems. Wang Wei was talented in creating poems, painting and music, so the basic tactics in paintings and music were also adopted in his poems creation. The former studies on Wang Wei’s landscape poems were mainly from the angle of literature, religion, aesthetics and etc; the exploration on the coherence study of his landscape poems is seldom involved.Cognitive poetics is a disciplinary which was originated in1970s on the basis of cognitive linguistics and literature researches. It applies the approaches in cognitive sciences into the analysis of literal text, providing a new studying perspective of the interpretation of the literal text.Idealized Cognitive Model (ICM) was proposed by the cognitive linguist George Lakoff in1980s. According to him, it refers to a comprehensive cognitive structure, or gestalt, that involves background knowledge in various relevant cognitive domains. Lakoff (1987) holds that our knowledge construction of the world is through ICM. Each ICM is a complex structure whole, a gestalt which uses four kinds of structuring principles: propositional structure, image-schematic structure, metaphoric mappings and metonymical mappings. The present thesis will carry out the study of the coherence on Wang Wei’s landscape poems from the perspective of cognitive poetics, under the framework of ICM to interpret the image construction and the cognitive mechanism explaining the coherence of the poetic discourse. The major findings of the present thesis are as follows:the realization of the propositional coherence relies on the activations and bridge-buildings of relevant conceptions and the physical experiences of human beings. The image-schematic coherence is achieved by the descriptions of natural sceneries in different places, various spatial schemas are established and the expressive visual and audio images are used in his landscape poems to ensure the harmony and consistence between the meaning of the poems and aesthetic effects of his corresponding paintings. Although depiction is the main method in Wang Wei’s landscape poems, some metaphoric mappings from the nature domain to human domain and metonymical mappings such as choosing the typical natural sceneries to stand for the whole category to express his true feeling as well as to ensure a successful expression of intention make the poetic discourse coherent in terms of the unity of the landscape poems and paintings. |
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