A Study On Coherent Naturalness In Jane Austen’s Works

Since the publication of Cohesion in English written by Halliday in collaboration withHasan, coherence has always been a focus and emphasis in the study of textlinguistics. Yettheoretical research on “coherent naturalness” still belongs to a blank area in need of furtherinvestigation. Moreover, earlier research methods in coherence studies were mainly based onqualitative ones. In recent years, its focus has gradually shifted to corpus-based quantitativeresearches. In addition, literary works have always been an important research content incoherence researches, yet the corpus-based empirical studies on Jane Austen’s works are ingreat scarcity. Based on the brief overview of the current situation in theory, methods andcontents of coherence studies, the author makes a tentative study on coherent naturalness byanalyzing the applications of explicit and implicit coherence in Jane Austen’s works from acorpus-based perspective.Under the guidance of Systemic-functional Linguistics, this paper builds a self-designedresearch framework by combining Halliday’s cohesion theory and Zhang Delu’s cohesiveframework. Through the comparisons between two groups of self-constructed corpora(Corpus NA versus Corpus Austen2, Corpus Austen1versus Corpus18-19), the author makesboth quantitative and qualitative analyses on Jane Austen’s six novels by employing twocorpus tools: Readability Analyzer1.0and AntConc3.2.4. Through the studies on the specificapplications of explicit and implicit coherence in Jane Austen’s six novels, the author verifiesthe hypothesis of the thesis from a corpus-based perspective: Compared with contemporarywriters in the transition from18thto19thcentury, the applications of coherent mechanisms aremore appropriate or natural in Jane Austen’s works.The study finds that coherent naturalness in Jane Austen’s works is characterized by theapplications of explicit coherence and implicit coherence in the following two aspects:1) The applications of explicit coherence in Jane Austen’s works are mainly shown inthree aspects: lexical density, keywords and n-grams. In the aspect of lexical density, it isfound that Austen’s works are better than those of her contemporary writers in the richness ofvocabulary; of all Austen’s works, the vocabulary richness in Northanger Abbey is the highest.In the aspect of keywords, there are more textual references and repetitions being employedby Jane Austen than any other writers in her times. In the aspect of n-grams, it is found thatJane Austen is much better at using idiomatic phrases as conjunction markers to createexplicit coherent connections, which is less found among her contemporary writers. 2) The applications of implicit coherence in Jane Austen’s works are mainly shown inthe functions of keywords of Place field and Textuality field in the case study of NorthangerAbbey. It is found that Jane Austen is better than any of her contemporary writers in theemployment of background ellipsis, situational reference, genre reference and intertextualreference to achieve textual implicit coherence.The research findings give inspirations to the foreign language teaching and point outdirections for future researches in similar fields.This thesis includes six chapters. Chapter One briefly introduces research background,research purpose, research significance and the organization of the thesis. Chapter Tworeviews coherence studies and corpus-based studies on Jane Austen’s works both at home andabroad. Chapter Three presents the theoretical framework and elucidates some basic notions.Chapter Four is methodology, in which the hypothesis, three research questions, corpusconstruction and research tools are stated. Chapter Five is the corpus-based analyses anddiscussions of explicit and implicit coherence in Jane Austen’s works. Chapter Sixsummarizes the major findings of the thesis, points out the limitations of this research andputs forwards suggestions for future studies.