A Cognitive Frame Approach To Coherence Studies Of Wang Wei's Landscape And Pastoral Poems

Since the publication of Cohesion in English by Halliday and Hasan,discourse cohesion and coherence have received extensive attention.The present researches are mainly focused on communicative discourse,whereas little attention has been paid to literary texts.Poetry,on the other hand,is characterized by its lack of explicit cohesive ties.Due to the fact that the main idea of a poem can not be grasped through the literal meanings of the words,readers have to activate related cultural backgrounds and encyclopedic knowledge to recognize the implicit cohesive ties and semantic relations in achieving poetic coherence.Wang Wei is regarded to be one of the most eminent poets in Tang dynasty.Despite a number of researches done on Wang Wei's poems,few discussions have been made on the cohesive features and coherent patterns of his poems.And since the rise of cognitive poetics,there has appeared a new trend of doing poetic studies from the perspective of linguistic ontology,with a particular emphasis on the employment of cognitive linguistic approaches.It has undoubtedly paved a new way to the researches with regard to literary texts.Based on Cognitive Frame Theory,this thesis aims to give a detailed account on poetic local and global coherence.On the local coherence level,image cohesion and iconicity constitute the major cognitive frame,which represents the main cognitive approaches employed thereby.The cohesive ties implied between images interrelate different images in a poem,enabling distinct lines to be closely combined semantically.Iconicity is another significant feature that facilitates the form and the meaning of the images to interact with each other in producing a poem.And global cognitive framework,which transcends the linguistic feature of linear coherence,integrates the title,the motif and the form into a systematic whole.It gives an account of the global coherence pattern of poems from a macro perspective,which reflects the cognitive structure in achieving global coherence.