2。 Literature Review

Establishing implicit coherence can help senior high school students to understand the discourse deeply。 Scholars from home and abroad are paying more and more attention to implicit coherence。

In China, many scholars have done a great amount of research on implicit coherence。 Firstly, in the article “Discourse: Explicit Coherence and Implicit Coherence” YaoQin discusses explicit and implicit coherence and their difference。 The author emphasizes that coherence is the essence of passage。 The establishment of implicit coherence relies mostly on the context and pragmatic knowledge (Yao 77)。 Secondly, in the article “A Pragmatic Approach to Implicit Coherence in Text”。 Mao Wenjing discusses the implicit coherence from the perspective of the pragmatic approach。 The author holds the view that some of the surface incoherent discourse can be changed into coherent discourse with the help of contextual information。 What’s more, the author further analyzes the implicit coherence with the help of Austin’s Speech Act Theory and Grice’s Cooperative Principle (Mao 170)。 Then, in “The Optimal Relevance and Construction of Implicit Coherence”。 Wang Shu emphasizes the importance of optimal relevance in understanding the implicit coherence and analyzes the establishment of implicit coherence with the application of optimal relevance (Wang 19)。

There are many researches about implicit coherence abroad as well。 Before the publishment of the book Cohesion in English (Halliday&Hasan 112), coherence didn’t get enough attention from people。 But after the publishment of the book, the topic of the discourse coherence has become a hot topic。 Reinhart put forward the concept of explicit coherence and implicit coherence and she held the view that coherence must meet these factors: consistency, connectedness and relevance (Reinhart 57)。  Sperber & Wilson regards human communication as a cognitive activity。 In the process of understanding the discourse, cognitive subjects use reasoning and contextual assumptions to seek internal relations between them, and choose explanations which have the optimal relevance。 Therefore, finding the optimal relevance is the necessary means to establish implicit coherence between discourses (Sperber&Wilson 109)。 Hobbs holds the view that the coherence of a discourse does not depend on whether it has a form of cohesion on the surface but on whether the listener understands the speaker's intentions。 He emphasizes that implicit coherence is a semantic concept that reflects the deep semantic or functional relationship of discourse。 He says that establishing implicit coherence can help people understand the deep meaning of the discourse (Hobbs 67)。文献综述

In this thesis, the author aims to teach students to be aware of the existence of implicit coherence and learn to establish implicit coherence by means of context, world knowledge and cognitive environment。 It helps students to improve reading comprehension by establishing implicit coherence to make the discourse coherent and thus understand the discourse much better。

3。 Implicit Coherence 

3。1 Introduction to implicit coherence

Coherence is the basic requirement of discourse expression and an important symbol and characteristic of discourse。 From the perspective of its nature, coherence can be pided into explicit coherence and implicit coherence。 Explicit coherence mainly manifests as the vocabulary, grammar and structure of the surface form of cohesion。 However, cohesion is neither a necessary part for achieving discourse coherence nor a sufficient part for achieving discourse coherence。 Therefore, it is far from enough to understand coherence from the level of cohesion。 There is another different language phenomenon: The coherence that doesn’t have cohesion as connective grammatical means is called implicit coherence。 In this thesis, implicit coherence refers to the coherence formed by the association of context, pragmatics and culture, which is out of the surface of the language, and involves the association and interaction between the language and the objective world。 This coherence is beyond the traditional interdisciplinary and inter-sentence coherent and other micro-discourse features (Yao 77)。