Chapter 5　LocaI Coherence in the EngIish Learning Advertisements

Global coherence alone is not enough to account for the coherence of the discourse.Local coherence at micro level of the discourses is also indispensible.Compared to global coherence，the term local coherence has a much more agreed connotation in the linguistic circle，that is，it is usually used to refer to the inter-sentential relations in purely linguistic sense.In the English learning advertisements as multimodal discourses，the local coherence involves not only linguistic elements but also visual elements like pictures and graphs.The notion of local coherence needs to be extended to accommodate the multiple semiotic systems of meaning-making.Specifically，it refers to the semantic connection between verbal elements and adjacent visual elements in smaller discourse unit like discourse segments.As inter-sentential relations in purely verbal texts are one of the most studied areas in text linguistics，“the relationship across and between modes in multimodal texts and interaction are also a central area of multimodal research”（Jewitt，2009：17）.Therefore，to investigate how the visual and verbal elements are connected locally in the English learning advertisements as a special multimodal genre has great significance.This chapter will focus on the ways in which local coherence is constructed in the English learning advertisements，specifically，the ways in which linguistic elements and adjacent pictorial and graphical elements in the different stages of the advertisements connect semantically.

In this chapter，Section 5.1 will propose the working definition and principle of local coherence in this book.Section 5.2 and Section 5.3 will analyse the verbal-pictorial local coherence in the corpus of English learning advertisements.Specifically，Section 5.2 identifies the need to differentiate among the various stages in terms of visual and verbal configurations and hence patterns of local coherence.Section 5.3 will analyze the patterns of local coherence in these different stages respectively.