| Text coherence, a focus on text analysis, attracts many scholars’ attention and many remarkable achievements have been made in this field. Poetry is widely acknowledged as a special sort of text, which is noted for its concise language, implicit cohesive devices and profound implications. Few scholars at home and abroad study text coherence in terms of poetry, and most of them concentrate on the perspectives of cohesion and semantics. Yet, not all sorts of verbal communication and literary works contain cohesive devices, and cohesion is not the only vein to comprehend coherence. Therefore, more cognitive manipulations and interpretations are required to acquire text coherence. In this thesis, the author intends to make an attempt to study the internal mechanism of text coherence, under the guidance of Image Schema Theory in the realm of cognitive linguistics.There is a saying goes that poetry is the pith of language, while imagery is the soul of poetry. As imagery is an integral part of poetry, the accurate understanding of imageries is crucial in processing poetry coherence. Image Schema, put forward by Lakoff&Johnson, serves as a basic cognitive model and gives a powerful elaboration to a quite number of language phenomena. According to Image Schema Theory, the process of understanding a text is related to the construction of both old schemas in human mind and new schemas in the world. Human’s bodily experience and perceptions are involved in processing poetry coherence, because image schema owns the properties of embodiment and perceptibility. Stimulating new schema in human minds, reasoning default information, and interpretating new schema in texts are very steps to achieve the real meaning of texts; therefore, image schema model in human minds plays a central role in the accurate understanding of texts. As a revolutionist, statesman, militarist, and a remarkable poet, Mao Zedong’s poems exert a far-reaching influence on literature. His works, with refined language and intensive image, fully embodied the magnificence of natural beauty and vigorous grandeur. In this thesis, the author takes Mao Zedong’s poems as a representative of typical poetry, and analyzes text coherence under the framework of Image Schema Theory, aiming to further interpret poetry coherence from a cognitive angel. This research not only analyzes the text itself, but also tries to explore the internal mechanism of the formation of imageries. Meanwhile, it helps readers have a deep comprehension of Mao’s poetry and provides a new angle for the appreciation and research of poetry.This thesis consists of6chapters. Chapter1is the introduction, which briefly introduces research background, motivation as well as significance, data collection and outline of this thesis. Chapter2is the literature review. Firstly, it introduces the definition of text and text coherence, and then it describes the relationship between cohesion and coherence, at last it provides a general description of4types of previous studies of text coherence, namely, register, semantic, pragmatic and cognitive. Chapter3is the theoretical framework, which includes the definition, classification, properties of image schema and how image schema relates to text coherence. Chapter4and Chapter5are the body parts. Chapter4presents the cognitive interpretation of coherence in Mao Zedong’s poems from the angle of Image Schema. It discusses how different types of Image Schema help readers to understand the deep meaning of poems; it is also found by the study that the constitution of cognitive schemas in human mind plays an essential role in realizing poetry coherence. Chapter5is the extension of theoretical research, which presents implications of image schema in understanding poem coherence. It argues how cognitive theories can be applied to the practical reading as well as poetry appreciation and how Image schema aids readers to motivate schemas in processing poetry comprehension. Chapter6is the conclusion. |
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