Week 7 · Discourse: Cohesion, Context and Register 衔接、语境与语域

Oct 26, 2026 · ← Course home

Planned session. Above the sentence. We study how texts hang together — reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, lexical cohesion — and how context reaches into the text. Then the week’s centrepiece: register theory. Halliday’s Field × Tenor × Mode explains why one language wears so many different clothes: change the subject matter, the participants’ relationship, or the channel, and the wording world shifts — recall police vs. cops from Week 1.

Register is the engine behind every functional variety we study next; this week we make sure we can drive it, analysing short texts by situating them on all three dimensions and predicting their lexical and syntactic profiles.

Key concepts: cohesion; coherence; context; Field, Tenor, Mode; dialect vs. register.

Reading: Simpson’s discourse-level units; 董启明’s register-oriented chapters.

Slides and materials will be posted here after class.