安徽大学大学英语教学部.docx

1、安徽大学大学英语教学部Cohesion, Coherence and Communication安徽大学大学英语教学部胡学文 Acknowledgement For the three years of my further study in The School of Foreign Studies, I would like to express my appreciative thanks to Professor Hua Quanqun, Professor Hong Zengliu, Professor Zhou Fangzhu, Professor Zhang Zuwu, Prof

2、essor Li Yongfang, Professor Hambeck and many others for their unfailing encouragement and delicate instructions. In particular, I am indebted to Professor Zhu Yue whose critical understanding and wise guidance in this paper has been invaluable and much appreciated. Finally, I would like to acknowle

3、dge that this paper would not have been possible without the help of my directors and many of my colleagues.Contents1. Introduction . 11.1 Discourse 11.2 Cohesion and coherence 21.3 Communication 52. Cohesion 62.1 Reference 82.2 Substitution 92.3 Ellipsis 112.4 Conjunction 122.5 Lexical cohesion 152

4、.6 Sub-conclusion 173. Coherence . 183.1 Context 183.2 Thematic organization and known-new information 233.3 Speech acts 273.4 Conversational implicature and Cooperative Principles 323.5 Sub-Conclusion 364. Communication . 374.1 Sentence, proposition and illocutionary act 374.2 Cohesion and proposit

5、ional development 404.3 Coherence and illocutionary development 435. Summary and Conclusion . 46 Reference 49Abstract This paper focuses on the relationship between cohesion, coherence and communication. Cohesion is a semantic category. It refers to the explicit relationship between linguistic items

6、 which is realized by cohesive devices or cohesive ties. Coherence is a pragmatic category. It refers to the implicit relationship between linguistic elements which is realized by pragmatic connections, such as context, conversational implicature, illocutionary force. Communication involves the inte

7、rpretation of both the surface or sentential meaning and the implicature and intention of a discourse. In the verbal communication, cohesion helps the communicators follow the propositional development within a discourse, while coherence helps them trace the illocutionary development in a communicat

8、ion unit. Both cohesion and coherence are necessary for the production and the interpretation of a communication discourse. Whenever communicators fail to identify cohesion in a discourse, they return to coherence. A communication discourse must be coherent, but not necessarily cohesive.Key Words: c

9、ohesion, coherence, communication, propositional development, illocutionary development内容提要衔接和连贯是交际篇章的必要条件。衔接属于语义范畴，指篇章组成成分之间的显性的连接。这种显性连接是由衔接手段或称衔接节实现的。连贯属于语用范畴，指的是篇章成分之间的隐性连接。这种连接是由一些语用关系来实现的，如语境、会话含义、言外之意等。交际既涉及到字面的、表面的意义的理解，又涉及到深层的含义和意图的理解。在语言交际中，衔接可以帮助交际者按照命题的推进来组织话语和理解话语，而连贯则可以帮助交际者理清篇章中意图推进的脉

10、络。衔接和连贯对于话语或篇章的产生和理解都是相当重要的。一段篇章可以不必是衔接的，但必须是连贯的。关键词：衔接、连贯、交际、命题推进、意图推进1. Introduction1.1 Discourse In the discussion of discourse, there have always been arguments and confusion about what makes strings of words or strings of sentences a discourse. In other words, what is it that makes a passage wr

11、itten or a set of utterances spoken a unified whole instead of just a collection of unrelated sentences? Are there any certain features that are characteristic of discourse? In order to answer these questions, a probe needs to be made to look into the inner mechanisms that govern the making of a dis

12、course. Normal linguistic behavior does not consist in the production of separate sentences but in the use of sentences for the creation of discourse. A discourse may be spoken or written, prose or verse, dialogue or monologue. It is a unit of language in use. It is misleading to envisage a discours

13、e to be a kind of super-sentence, a grammatical unit that is larger than a sentence but is related to a sentence in much the same way that a sentence is related to a clause, a clause to a group and so on. A discourse is different from a sentence not in size but in kind. A text is best regarded as a

14、SEMANTIC unit: a unit not of form but of meaning. Thus it is related to a clause or sentence not by size but by REALIZATION, the coding of one symbolic system in another. A text does not CONSIST OF sentences; it is REALIZED BY, or encoded in, sentenceswe shall not expect to find the same kind of STR

15、UCTURAL integration among the parts of a text as we find among the parts of a sentence or clause. The unity of a text is a unity of a different kind. (Halliday & Hasan, 1976:2) A discourse has texture, and this is what distinguishes it from something that is not a discourse. If a passage of a langua

16、ge containing more than one sentence is regarded as a discourse, there will be certain linguistic features present in that passage which can be identified as contributing to its total unity and giving it texture. The texture is provided by the cohesive relation that exists between two or more items

17、in the discourse. Such relation is called tie by Halliday & Hasan (1976:3), and they have discussed the cohesive ties in some detail and their discussion has become a standard reference.1.2 Cohesion and Coherence Many linguists have discussed the question of cohesion and coherence. But their opinion

18、s on these two notions differ. Some (such as Crystal, 1985) think that cohesion realizes the relation between meaning and its super forms and coherence realizes the relation between meaning and the context. Some (such as Brown & Yule, 1983) think that when people interpret a discourse they do not ne

19、ed textual markers (cohesive ties), and they assume that the discourse is coherent and make the interpretation under this assumption. Some (such as Wang Zongyan, 1992) think that cohesion is the lexical and grammatical devices in a text and coherence is the effect realized by these devices. Still so

20、me (such as Widdowson, 1978) think that cohesion is the explicit relationship between propostions of sentences and coherence is the relationship between illocutionary acts of utterances. In this paper I refer to cohesion as anything at the semantic level that makes parts of communicative elements re

21、lated, and refer to coherence as anything at the pragmatic level that makes parts of communicative elements related. Cohesion occurs where the interpretation of some elements in the discourse is dependent on that of another. The concept of cohesion is a semantic one; it refers to the relations of me

22、aning that exist within a discourse. The interpretation of a discourse does not only rely on the lexicogrammatical devices; one has to refer to the cohesive relations that exist between the elements in a discourse. That is to say, in a discourse, some elements presuppose and some other elements are

23、presupposed. The interpretation of the element that presupposes cannot be reached without recourse to the presupposed. Take the following discourse as an example:(1) Find a proper word for the sentence. Put it into the blank.It is clear that it in the second sentence refers back to a proper word in

24、the first sentence. This kind of relation is called anaphoric and it is this anaphoric function of it that gives cohesion to the two sentences, so that we interpret them as a whole; the two sentences together constitute a discourse. What is more, the interpretation of it cannot be made if we do not

25、rely on the relation that exists between it and a proper word in the two sentences. There are several other cohesive relations that make a discourse into a whole which I will discuss in the second part of this article. Certainly we rely on the cohesive devices for the interpretation of the meaning o

26、f a linguistic message, but it is a mistake to think that meaning can be or is only achieved by syntactic structures and lexical items used in a linguistic message. Sometimes we can recognize a discourse in form but can not claim to have understood, simply because we need more information. To show t

27、his point, let us check the following exchange taken from Widdowson (1978: 29).(2) A: Thats the telephone. B: Im in the bath. A: O.K.How do we make sense of this? We cannot find any cohesive ties in this exchange. But our mind tells us these fragments of linguistic messages do form a unified whole i

28、nstead of some unrelated sounds. That is to say, we do recognize this as a coherent instance of discourse. What we do, of course, is to envisage a situation in which the uttering of the first sentence is regarded as a request. The reason we give it the value of a request is that we recognize the way

29、 in which it relates to the other parts of the exchange here. For the same reason, we take Bs remark as a reply to As request and as having the communicative value of an excuse for not complying with As request, and we take As second remark as an acceptance of Bs excuse and as an undertaking to do h

30、imself (or herself) what he (or she) originally asked B to do. Having recognized these relations, we can, therefore, supply the missing propositional links and produce a version which is cohesive:(3) A: Thats the telephone. (Can you answer it, please?) B: (No, I cant answer it because) Im in the bat

31、h. A: O.K. (Ill answer it).The elements in the brackets are not supplied by the two speakers (neither A nor B) but are provided by the two listeners (both B and A). In a discourse, such elements which are not supplied directly but can be complemented by the listener or the reader constitute the cohe

32、rent relationship within a discourse. A discourse with coherent relations may claim to have coherence in it.1.3 Communication As is discussed above, the interpretation of a discourse can not be achieved without taking the cohesive or the coherent devices within it into consideration. The proper use of the two devices by the speaker/writer to encode the meaning and by the listener/reader to decode it throws light on the linguistic competence