coherence课件.doc

Coherence 1. The Definition of Coherence In the past two decades, foreign language schools have seen a greater importance on textual coherence. Although different linguists believe that coherence is the essential property of a text，they approach the concept from different angles． Van．Dijk interprets coherence from the perspective of semantics．He believes “coherence is a semantic property of discourse，based on the interpretation of each individual sentence relative to the interpretation of other sentences”（1973：）． Hallidays full attention is given to those cohesive devices such as reference，substitution，ellipsis，conjunction and lexical cohesion. Widdowson（1978）believes coherence is a pragmatic concept．Coherence is the relationship between illocutionary acts． Beaugrande（1981），coherence is defined as the procedures which ensure conceptual connectivity，including（1）logical relations，（2）organization of events，objects and situations，（3）continuity in human experience．It concerns “the way in which the components of the textual world which underlie the surface text are mutually accessible and relevant”（1981：4） In Brown and Yules opinion（1983），coherence is the result of the interaction of the text and the receiver．It is provided by readers processing of the text． We can see that they focus on different aspects of discoursal coherence. Coherence is a multi-level notion. (1) At the semantic level. Coherence is established through cohesive devices and propositional development (2) At the pragmatic level. Coherence is often achieved through the illocutions or implicatures of discourse in linguistic communication on certain occasions (3) At the mutual mental interactive level. Coherence is considered as a process of mental interaction between the producer and the receiver. It is about interlocutors’ interaction. To sum up, coherence is the study of the connectedness in multi-level notion, varying from semantic level, to pragmatic level and to mental le