Conjunctions as Cohesive Devices in Some Selected Animated Movies: A Discourse Analysis

Abstract

Animated movies are one type of movies that are presented for children and they are classified according to their age. G- Rate movies, for example, are suitable for pre-school age, PG- Rate movies are for school age and P- Rate movies are for teenagers. These movies are created by computer and shown as a series of different movements of people, animals and objects. The use of conjunctions in children's movies is important and help children in connecting different units and clarifying the meaning of the text, and thus, they are considered as one of the important cohesive devices in making unity. The present study aims at finding out the types of conjunctions and investigating the most dominant conjuncts in four selected animated movies. These movies are from two different rates, G and PG movies. G- Rate movies include 'The Little Mermaid' and ' Princess'; and PG-Rate movies are' Moana' and 'Frozen'. Many studies, like, (Clark, 1973, Bloom, 1980, Vygotsky, 1962 and etc…) have observed that the use of connectives is an important point of developing children's cohesive skills and they use conjunctions, for example, and, because, and etc.…., before 6 years but after this age the semantic meaning and production of conjunctions are obvious (Joseph and etal. 1996: 160-161). According to these studies, the researcher hypothesizes that conjunctions are one of the important linguistic feature to be investigated and they are used more in PG-rate movies than in G- rate because this rate is presented for school-age and in this period children's language is developed and the use of conjunctions is more than in the period of pre-school. Furthermore, in this period children tend to connect ides and like to ask a lot of questions to get more information about different topics, but in pre-school age, children tend to use simple language and they focus on one idea. So, the use of conjunctions in G-rate movies will make the movie in somehow difficult. Therefore, literary works are crea