The Analysis Of Literary Discourse Coherence Based On Idealized Cognitive Model

Discourse coherence is one of the most heated linguistic topic in recent years, and a large number of scholars have conducted their own researches on this field from different perspectives, such as functional linguistics, pragmatics, and cognitive psychology, hoping to solve the problem of coherence. However, these three schools put their emphasis on a certain perspective, thus lacking in an integrative analysis model. In the 1980 s, Lakoff, a famous linguistic professor, proposes the concept of idealized cognitive model and its four structuring principles. And this theory is widely accepted since then after it is put into some cognitive problems. However, as regard to idealized cognitive model, it can not fully explain the problem of discourse coherence, but background knowledge can be an effective complement for it. Therefore, based on the theory of idealized cognitive model, the author attempts to combine idealized cognitive model with background knowledge to analyze literary discourse coherence. So the purpose of this thesis is to solve such problems as follows: first, Combined with background knowledge, whether idealized cognitive model can explain discourse coherence with various Chinese and English literary genres; Second, how background knowledge functions on discourse coherence; Third, the degree of background knowledge each genre needs. To solve the problems mentioned above, the author randomly chooses one Chinese and one English discourses for poem, drama, and prose respectively to analyze their coherence. After analysis, the author finds that, first, combined with background knowledge, idealized cognitive model can effectively explain such Chinese and English literary discourse coherence as poem, drama, and prose; Second, background knowledge contributes a lot to the understanding of discourse thus discourse coherence, and background knowledge functions somewhat different for different genres. To be specific, the more abstract a discourse is, the more background knowledge it needs.