A Discourse Study Of Spatial Words In Mo Yan's Frog

Human beings live in a certain space and time,and have investigated into spatial words for a long time.At the earlier stage,linguists discussed the syntactic features,semantic meanings and cognitive nature of spatial words from the perspective of traditional linguistics.Nevertheless,with the rise of discourse analysis,the spatial words in a discourse have also received the scholars'more attention in recent times.However,most researches seem to primarily concentrate on the construction of textual space and the researchers'native languages while lacking of the discussion of discourse cohesion and coherence.Understanding a discourse can be compared to wandering in a labyrinth;readers have to depend on the connective elements in the discourse including spatial expressions in order to successfully walk out of this labyrinth.Therefore,based on Frog,this paper makes a systematical explanation of the division of Chinese spatial words and their contributions to discourse cohesion and coherence from the perspective of discourse comprehension.The implications on reading,writing,foreign language learning and teaching are also given in this paper.This study is made up of two parts,i.e.the exploration into the division and distribution of spatial words,the discussion of their contributions to discourse cohesion and coherence.The first part divides the spatial words in Frog into three main classes,i.e.words of place,words of locality and demonstratives by retrieval and classification and explores the overall distribution of spatial words.It is found that 27%of the total lexical tokens in Frog are spatial words.According to the Principle of Economy proposed by Andre Martinet,it is claimed that spatial words play a certain role in discourse production and comprehension.Given the classification of spatial words,this second further explores the contributions of spatial words to discourse comprehension on the basis of the first part.In terms of cohesion,according to Halliday and Hasan's theory of cohesion,this study finds that all of them can help discourse cohesion from different aspects whether it is a word of place,word of locality or demonstrative.To be specific,they facilitate discourse cohesion through referential function,lexical cohesion and spatial conjunction respectively.In terms of coherence,this thesis discusses how the three episodes in Frog are both locally and globally coherent on the basis of the restraints context imposes on the obligatory elements of discourse and their orders.Given the assumption that all the other elements in a discourse are cohesive and coherent,this paper argues that the discourse is coherent as long as the spatial expressions in it conform to the order of the obligatory elements.Besides,a way of how to understand and analyze a discourse is also presented in this study,i.e.the means of starting from the explicit cohesion to the underlying level of coherence.The creativity of this thesis is that it is different from the study of spatial words in the traditional grammar,recognizing spatial words as cohesive and coherent components in the discourse.The limitation of this study is that it only focuses on Frog instead of exhausting all the cases of Chinese spatial words.However,this research on the spatial words in Frog still possesses both theoretical and practical values.