An ECM-based Research On Text Coherence Contruction Process

Text coherence is a topic that has been heatedly discussed. It is the most complex and important aspect of text analysis, and determines the acceptability of text to a large extent. Coherence itself is not only an issue of formation, but also a character of semantic. It concerns not only the genre or the features of the article, but is more related with the sociocultural, cognitive psychology pattern, understanding ability and context. The matter that how coherence in text is constructed is also a very important issue. There is an immense number of researches about text coherence by linguists in branches like functional linguistics, pragmatics, cognitive linguistics and cognitive pragmatics from different aspects, including illocutionary act theory, Thematic Progression Theory, Relevance Theory, rhetorical structure theory and psychological frame theory.Event-domain Cognitive Model theory is a cognitive model proposed by Professor Wang Yin to compensate for the lack of previous cognitive models, like Langacker’s Billard-ball Model and Stage Model, Lakoff’s Spatialization of Form Hypothesis, and Talmy’s Force-Dynamic Model. Many scholars have used this theory to explain many language phenomenon, proving that the theory has a strong explanatory power.Although plenty of studies concerning coherence have been done, they rarely involve the issues that how coherence is constructed in texts and that how the elements in a text is conducive to the construction of coherence. ECM Theory has been widely used since its birth, but its application is rarely seen in text analysis. This thesis holds the view that the intrinsic hierarchy in ECM Theory can provide a good explanation to the construction of coherence in texts through presenting how the elements in a text are working to contribute to the construction.This paper will build its theoretical framework based on ECM Theory, constructing an analytical model with the help of the intrinsic hierarchy and relation in the theory. This thesis is a corpus-based study with its research materials from the famous American magazine Reader’s Digest, selecting passages and abstractions from the “Everyday Heroes” section of this magazine from July to September in 2013. The reason of choosing this section as the materials in the closed corpus is that the essays in this section are rich in content, varied in themes and strong in topic.Based on the ECM theory, this thesis argues that the establishment of a text coherence needs a unifying concept of the whole picture, the various elements of the concept is also structured logically interrelated. This thesis finds that ECM can provide a good explanation to the construction of coherence in texts which will depend on the construction of a unified ECM and elements in a text on different hierarchies work together to bring out coherence. Therefore, the perspective of analysis used in this study is an effort to improve the explanatory,a tentative research on coherence construction using this perspective, is also a kind of development for previous ones.