Abstract
Cohesion is an indispensable linguistic feature in any discourse. Lexical Cohesion and conjunction as two crucial elements to textual cohesion and comprehension have been the focus of a wide range of studies up to now. Yet the relationship between the open register and cohesive devices has not been thoroughly investigated in discourse studies. This study concentrates on the potential similarities and differences between literature for children and adult level (regular) with respect to the frequency of lexical cohesive markers and conjunctions. To this end, selected excerpts of two contemporary famous novels were analyzed and codified for the use of different kinds of lexical cohesion (reiteration and collocation), conjunctions (elaboration, extension and enhancement) and their subcategories. The results of Chi square tests showed that the children and regular novel texts were significantly different in terms of reiteration and collocation as the main categories of lexical cohesion as well as total frequency of lexical cohesive pairs. Also, the use of conjunctions, elaboration and extension showed significant difference. Yet, the difference was non-significant for enhancement. The findings of this study add to the existing literature of research on cohesion and inspire researchers in discourse studies, child language studies, and English teaching and learning of young children. Keywords : Cohesive devices, Conjunctions, Lexical Cohesion, Children, Literature
Highlights
Cohesion system was mainly introduced by Halliday & Hasan (1976)
Chi square test performed to determine the significance of difference for conjunctions
This reveals that the child and regular novel texts are significantly different in terms of elaboration and extension
Summary
Cohesion system was mainly introduced by Halliday & Hasan (1976). They argued that cohesion has a semantic concept, which refers to relations of meaning that exist within the text and define it as a text. Halliday (1989) confirms that cohesion occurs where the interpretation of some elements in discourse is dependent on that of another. Studying cohesion as an essential part of textual unity can be beneficial for different areas including linguistics, translation and language teaching and learning. Studying the use of different cohesive devices can help second language learners grasp the text structure and improve their reading comprehension, their writing and translation skills. Analyzing a text in order to derive the cohesive devices makes one more sensitive to the way in which sentences are related and, enhances his/her linguistic sense (Lee, 2013)
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