The Analysis Of Coherence In The Australian Aborigines, Dreaming Narrative Discourse Of Carpentaria

Coherence is an important prerequisite for discourses to obtain the unity and it is also thefoundation of production and understanding of discourses. Many domestic and internationallinguists, from different points of view, have studied the issue of discourse coherence in thepast forty years. The early researches mainly studied explicit discourse coherence throughmeans of cohesion in internal text. In the past ten years, the linguists in our countryintroduced the basic concepts of cognitive science into the study of discourse coherence.Based on the principles of interactive experience and mental coherence and combined withcognitive methods applied to analyze words and sentences in cognitive linguistics, theselinguists, from the perspective of experiential philosophy, have investigated discoursecoherence through the method of cognitive world analysis (Wang Yin2006).Discourse coherence is a sort of semantic features, which can be determined bynon-verbal forms, such as, the general cognitive psychological model for human beings,social, historical and cultural background information and so on (Zhang Delu2003). However,we have found that in most of samples used in cognitive researches in discourse coherence inour country were acquainted by Chinese readers, and it is quite rare for our linguists, based onthe general cognitive model, to analyze foreign discourses or the discourses of high levelunfamiliarity, such as the research of constructing mental coherence of the AustralianAboriginals’ narrative discourses at home. Therefore, the author believes that it is worthy ofanalyzing how the Chinese readers achieve the representation of mental coherence of theAboriginal discourse from the perspective of human beings’ cognitive ability in general,together with the Aboriginal historical-cultural factors.The discourse scenarios theory in cultural linguistics, written by Palmer, provides a newpath for the study of discourse. The theory of discourse scenarios integrates the culturallinguistics, which characterized by humanism, cognition and imagery, with the discourseanalysis; in addition, the discourse scenarios applies the schemas or images between speakersand hearers into discourse study. The scenario is a cognitive concept based on schema andrestricted by culture, while the generation of discourse scenarios is the result of projectingcognitive images into human’s communication to construct the discourse framework.Thus,Palmer’s discourse scenarios is a kind of conversational cognitive model used to analyzediscourse. In the thesis, the author takes the Aboriginal dreaming novel of Carpentaria, written bythe famous Aboriginal writer Alexis Wright, as the data, based on the discourse scenarios, toexplore the explanatory power of discourse scenarios on the achievement of discoursecoherent mental representation under the help of the Aboriginal historical-cultures.With the combination of theoretical analysis and cases analysis, we find that coherence isnot only a formal concept but also a cognitive psychological concept. The coherence of theAustralian aborigines’ narrative discourse---Carpentaria largely depends on mentalcoherence projected by the Dreaming, which is regarded as the basis for analyzing discourseand the necessary conditions for producing and understanding discourse. According to ideathat language is based on interactive experience and cognitive processing, the human beingshave profound cultural identities in experiencing activities across the world. The differentnation’s cultural backgrounds can affect people’s cognitive styles and methods about theworld. Therefore, historical-cultural factors should be taken into account when we analyzediscourse coherence of the Australian aborigines’ narrative discourse in the thesis.The thesis can be divided into five chapters. In the first chapter, the rationales of thestudy, research questions, objectives and significance, and the outline of the thesis will beintroduced; in the chapter two, literature review of discourse coherence and theoreticalframework of discourse scenarios can be presented; in the chapter three, the methodology ofthis thesis will be explained; the chapter four is the main body of this thesis, the analysis anddiscussion of how the mental coherence realize in the Aboriginal narrative discourses will beshown in it; the chapter five is conclusion, the summary of the whole the study, the findingsand limitations of the thesis will be provided.