A Study On Cohesion And Coherence Of Poems From The Perspective Of Reference

Quite a few Chinese and foreign scholars have paid much more attention on the cohesion and coherence in the past decades. In the past of poetry cohesion and coherence researches, some scholars generally pay more attention to rules and forms of classical poetry, phonology, logic, the context of poetry, imagery and vocabulary study, they pay less care about the cohesive devices on the poetry of cohesion and coherence and the researches on the poem from the perspective of reference is not so much done nowadays. As one of the common phenomena in linguistics, if reference can be used to analyze cohesion and coherence properly, it will be a strong explanatory power and inspiration for cohesion and coherence theory.The purpose of this paper is as following: Building on the theory of Reference, this thesis tries to analyze the cohesion and coherence features of Byron’s poems from personal reference, demonstrative reference and comparative reference. With the aid of the theory Accessibility, to analyze the specific referents in the poems and then analyzes its effect on the semantic coherence of Byron’s poems. At the same time, this paper also tries to explore the function of the semantic coherence and the background knowledge on the gist of Byron’s poems, so as to provide a new perspective for the study of English poems. By doing this research, it is clear that Reference can be used to analyze cohesion, coherence and theme of Byron’s poems. At the same time, it will be a great help to master the theme of Byron’s poem with the help of pragmatic knowledge.This thesis is composed of five chapters, which are divided into three parts: the introductory part(from chapter one to three), the body(chapter four) and the concluding part(chapter five).Chapter one is the introduction, which mainly introduces the research significance and the objective of the research, research innovation and questions and research methodology and structure of the thesis. Chapter Two, literature Review, which introduces research status of cohesion and coherence, reference and Byron’s poems at home and abroad. Chapter Three, Theoretical Foundations, mainly introduces classifications, definition and origination of Reference. Chapter Four, mainly analyzes the figures of cohesion and coherence in Byron’s poems and the author’s attempt to explore the function of cohesion and coherence on the semantic coherence. Chapter Five is the conclusion, which simply makes a summary about the dissertation, and proposes the limitation and further research of the study.