Discourse and Cohesion

【摘要】任何一个篇章都是一个有机的整体，而它的整体性都是靠有效的衔接和连贯手段来实现的。其中，语篇的衔接理论一直是语言学界的研究重点之一，因为它对语言学和语言教学的影响是巨大的。因此本文从宏观的角度探讨了衔接理论的概念和理论以及在教学中的应用。

【关键词】语篇；衔接理论；教学

The term cohesion has been discussed by many linguistics, which is most commonly used in linguistics to refer to inter and intra-sentence relations by which a text is bound together as a unified whole. Leech (1970:1200 defines cohesion as the way in which independent choices in different points of a text correspond with or presuppose one another, forming a network of sequential relations. Halliday and Hasan (1976:18) define it as the set of possibilities that exists in the language for making text hang together. Mona Baker (2000:180) thinks that cohesion is the network of lexical grammatical and other relations which provide links between various parts of a text.

Why and how a text can be regarded as a system? There are many resources for creating “texture” as a unity and cohesion is one of the resources. Cohesion is a crucial linguistic resource, which provides relations within a text and can serve to make the group of sentences a text as a system than a collection of unconnected words or clauses. In short, no cohesion, no text as a system.

Cohesion is the network of lexical, grammatical, and other relations which provide links between various parts of a text. These relations or ties organize and, to some extent create a text, for instance by requiring the reader to interpret words and expressions by reference to other words and expressions in the surrounding sentences and paragraphs. Cohesion is a surface relation; it connects together the actual words and expressions that we can see or hear, which is different from coherence. Coherence is in the mind of the writer and reader: it is a mental phenomenon and cannot be identified or quantified in the same way as cohesion. Cohesion refers to the linguistic devices by which speaker can signal the experiential and interpersonal coherence of the text, and is thus a textual phenomenon: we can point to features of the text which serve a cohesive function.

Thematic progression refers to the development of themes and rhemes in a text. In English, “the theme is the element which serves as the point of departure of the message.” (Halliday, 1985) According to Hu Zhuanglin, there are three basic cohesion mode of thematic progression in a text: 1) the theme of the next sentence is the repetition of the theme in the previous one. 2) the theme of the next sentence is developed from a part or the whole of the previous rheme. 3) the theme and rheme of the previous sentence together produce a new theme of the next sentence. Here, in the thematic progression, we are concerned with the semantic relation between the themes and rhemes.

Apart from literal meaning, the verbal meanings of a text have lots of other different layers, namely, referential content, emotional, coloring, cultural association and so on. The many layered nature of semantic meaning is also a kind of cohesive device. Among connotative meanings, we can use the synonyms, the antonyms, the superordinates and so on to create cohesion in a text. In this case, we achieve the cohesion with help of the semantic meaning.