Interpersonal Cohesive Harmony Of English Texts

Cohesive Harmony is a theory proposed by Halliday and Hasan(1985)to measure the variation of coherence of texts.The Theory of Cohesive Harmony functions as a cohesive device of measuring the variation of English textual coherence and it focuses on the semantic relations between and among lexical items in texts.The theory attempts to provide a scientific method for the quantitative analysis of the target texts experientially.With the expectation of acquiring an objective result of measuring textual coherence,the theory adopts a quantitative method by analyzing the proportions of relative lexical items in a text.New semantic notions such as cohesive tie,cohesive chain,and chain interaction are put forward for the purpose of proposing three parameters which measure the coherence of texts in practice.According to the observance of the parameters and the phenomena of cohesive harmony in texts,Halliday and Hasan’s Cohesive Harmony is mainly a theory of measuring the experiential aspect of textual coherence and it is expressed as follows:The lower the proportion of the peripheral tokens to the relevant ones,the more coherent the text is likely to be;the higher the proportion of the central tokens to the non-central ones,the more coherent the text is likely to be;the fewer the breaks in the picture of interaction,the more coherent the text.(Halliday & Hasan,1985,pp.93-94)Cohesive Harmony from experiential perspective is summarized as that “variation in coherence is the function of variation in the cohesive harmony of a text”(Halliday & Hasan,1985,p.94),which evokes a new methodology of measuring textual coherence and promotes the study on the measurement of the coherence of texts.Nevertheless,the experiential perspective of Cohesive Harmony cannot guarantee the textual coherence in the absence of study on interpersonal meaning.As the main parts of the interpersonal meaning of texts,the concepts of context,speech function,modality,intonation and evaluation make great contributions to the research on coherence of texts.Context is the occasion of texts and it provides the cultural and situational background of study on Cohesive Harmony and the measurement of the coherence of texts from interpersonal perspective.Mood categories and speech functions indicate that certain mood categories normally express certain speech functions accordingly,which is beneficial to the acknowledgement of the phenomena of cohesive harmony in texts and then develops the Cohesive Harmony Theory from interpersonal perspective.Intonation contributes to the expression of speech functions.By expressing the speaker or the writer’s judgments indirectly and sustaining the harmonious atmosphere between the interactants,modality in texts provides a way of measuring the textual coherence.Evaluation concentrates on the attitude speaker or the writer expresses in texts consciously or unconsciously,which contributes to the prominence of the phenomena of cohesive harmony in texts.Context,mood and speech function,intonation,modality and evaluation act as major interpersonal elements to influence the measurement of coherence of texts and enrich the Theory of Cohesive Harmony for the reason that they highlight the phenomena of cohesive harmony of texts.Although the study on Cohesive Harmony of texts from the interpersonal meaning cannot guarantee the coherence of texts,it does make great contributions to the textual coherence in the communicators’ mind.Thus,the present thesis discusses experiential Cohesive Harmony first and then studies the interpersonal meaning of the theory from the elements of context,mood,modality,intonation and evaluation with the expectation to make up for the theory from the interpersonal aspect of English texts.