Texture and Culture: Cohesion as a Marker of Rhetorical Organisation in Arabic and English Narrative Texts

Abstract

This paper claims that the differences at the cultural level between the Arabic-speaking and the English-speaking communities have a direct effect on the rhetorical organisation of Arabic and English texts as evident in the different ways in which cohesive devices are used. It is suggested that the two speech communities differ along the following cultural dimensions: oralised v. literate, collectivism v. individualism, high-contact v. low-contact, and reader-responsible v. writer-responsible. In order to test the influence of these cultural differences on the use of cohesive devices on written texts produced in the two languages, translationally-equivalent parallel texts comprising three Arabic short stories and their English translations, as well as a contextually-equivalent parallel texts consisting of three Arabic short stories and three English short stories (unrelated by translation) were analysed in terms of the cohesive devices that they used. This analysis revealed that Arabic and English use different cohesive patterns. Arabic cohesion is characterised as context-based, generalised, repetition-oriented, and additive. In contrast, English cohesion is described as text-based, specified, change-oriented, and non-additive. It is argued that the cultural differences between the two speech communities are directly responsible for the different use of cohesive devices in the two languages.