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Abstract：Contrastive transition refers to lexical items that signal contrastive coherencerelation between  adjacent text spans.  Contrastive  transition has received muchattention in  text linguistics  and language  teaching.  However,  the functions  ofcontrastive transition and how it contributes to the textual coherence at poly-levelsrequire further exploration. Besides, the issue of its implicitness and overtness needsfurther discussion since it has been simply touched upon. This essay is an attempt topropose multi-perspectives for the analysis of contrastive transition at the textuallevel.
    Based on Halliday's theory of three metafunctions of language (1985b), thefunctions of contrastive transition are studied. Austin and Searl's speech act theory(Austin, 1961;Searl, 1969) and Sperber and Wilson's theory of relevance (1986) areapplied to the issue as well. According to Halliday (1985b), language for an adult hasthree metafunctions, ideational, interpersonal, and textual. These three functions formthe meaning network systematically, and provide meaning potentials for languagecommunication. Schiffrin (1996) is the one who further applies Halliday's theoreticalframework to the study of transitional words. As Schiffrin states (1996: 190), "itsuggests that the discourse roles of and, but and o} parallel their grammatical roles…the linguistic properties of and, but and o} interact with the discourse slots in whichthey occur to produce their discourse functions". Therefore, contrastive transitionplays semantic (textual function) and pragmatic (interactional function) roles as wellas a syntactic role (ideational function).
   The main focus of this paper is on the interpersonal and textual functions ofcontrastive transition. The former is summarized as: (1) to succeed a topic, (2) toindicate additional topic or shift of topic, (3) to play a facilitating role in performingspeech acts. And the latter is: (1) to have cohesive force, (2) to have constrainingfunction, (3) to predict the successive proposition.
Transition enables us to gracefully shift from one part of a sentence to another
part of the sentence. As a matter of fact, the scope of contrastive transition is not
confined to inter-clausal or inter-sentential connectivity; on the contrary, it reaches
beyond a physical unit such as a clause, a sentence, and a paragraph. Therefore, the
focus is on the occasions when contrastive transition connects two sections of a text at
supra-sentential level.
    In general, the overtness of transition exerts a positive influence on the reader.
Without transition a text may be incoherent. Consequently, readers' comprehension
efficiency may be lowered and their comprehension effects may turn worse. But there
exist some specific purposes which implicit contrastive transition serves一economy
of language, improvement of rhetorical effects and symbolization of genre and
register. Among them genre and register are the principal factors which contribute to
overtness and implicitness of contrastive transition.
This paper mainly adopts three approaches of research, analytical, data-based
experimental.  Particularly,  the  data-based  approach for  statistical  analysis
provides forceful argument for the paper.
1.  Introduction
2.  A survey of the study of contrastive tran本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。