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Chapter OneIntroduction

1.1 Research Background
The Theory of Cohesive Harmony functions as a cohesive device of measuring thevariation of English textual coherence. The theory focuses on the experiential meaningof language and the semantic relations among the lexical items. Halliday and Hasan(1985) put forward the notions of co-referentiality, co-classification and co-extensionwithin the notion of cohesive tie. Based on the semantic relations constituted in lexicalitems in a text, they propose the notions of cohesive chain and chain interaction whichcontribute greatly to the discovery of the phenomena of cohesive harmony in texts.Halliday and Hasan’s Cohesive Harmony is proposed on the basis of the threephenomena in texts, which is stated as follows:The lower the proportion of the peripheral tokens to the relevant ones, the morecoherent the text is likely to be; the higher the proportion of the central tokens to thenon-central ones, the more coherent the text is likely to be; the fewer the breaks in thepicture of interaction, the more coherent the text. (Halliday & Hasan, 1985, pp. 93-94)Notions as peripheral tokens, relevant tokens and so on are created on the basis ofchain interaction. The theory is set up from the perspective of the experiential meaningand it aims to measure the variation of textual coherence by adopting a quantitativemethod of analyzing the propositions of relative lexical items in texts. The variation oftextual coherence is considered as the variation of cohesive harmony of texts.Nevertheless, Cohesive Harmony from experiential perspective of texts cannotguarantee the coherence of texts and it has its shortcomings in meeting the requirementsof coherence of various texts. And thus, the present thesis discusses Cohesive Harmonyfrom interpersonal perspective of texts to make up for the theory.
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1.2 Objectives and Significance
The Theory of Cohesive Harmony put forward by Halliday and Hasan (1985)evokes a new methodology of measuring textual coherence for the reason that it is anattempt to provide a scientific method of analyzing texts. With the expectation ofacquiring an objective result of measuring textual coherence, the theory adopts aquantitative method by strictly analyzing the proportions of relative lexical items intexts. Nevertheless, some phenomena in texts are beyond the scope of the theoryexperientially. The element of context which is composed of context of culture andcontext of situation plays a vital part in the interpretation on coherence of a text, forinstance, move out of the way, the expression often occurs in casual situation when thespeaker and the hearer are in close relationship and it does not affect the coherence ofthe text; while expression like Would you mind moving just a bit? occurs betweenacquaintances in formal situation. That is a matter of the relationship between thecommunicators, and the phenomenon could not acquire much attention or explanationin the experiential meaning of Cohesive Harmony. Moreover, other notions such asspeech function, the type of mood of sentences, modality, intonation and evaluation arethe factors which contribute to the coherence of texts, and thus, the absence of studyingCohesive Harmony from the perspective of the interpersonal meaning weaken thetheoretical and practical adaptation and convincing when we measure the variation oftextural coherence. As one part of the three metafunctions in Systemic Fu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。