Coherent Text Research Articles

Modes of cohesion and coherence in multimodal fictional prose texts

Modes of cohesion and coherence in multimodal fictional prose texts

The Basic Differences of Textual Cohesion between English and Chinese

This paper discusses the differences of cohesive devices between English and Chinese in sentence structure and text organization. Chinese has the characteristics of topic prominence, while English is subject prominent; Due to the differences in thinking styles between China and the West, there are differences in subject consciousness and object consciousness between English and Chinese. This leads to the differences between theme and rhyme in English and Chinese texts, and these differences also lead to the differences in cohesion. In addition, the parallel structure and loose grammatical relationship of Chinese and the tree structure and relatively strict grammatical restrictions of English can make the difference of textual cohesive devices.

COMPOSITIONAL AND NARRATIVE PECULIARITIES OF THE POSTMODERN NOVEL (BASED ON D. MITCHELL’S NOVEL “CLOUD ATLAS”)

The article focuses on establishing genre, compositional and narrative features of the postmodern novel based on the novel “Cloud Atlas” by D. Mitchell. It is argued that postmodernism in literature gets impacted not only on the content (themes of spiritual values loss, loss of contact with space, disharmonious states, multiplicity of worlds and their interpretations, relativity and illusiveness of the universe) but also on the form (certain structural and compositional characteristics) of literary works. It has been found out that a non-linear multiply fragmented composition of the novel in question is formed owing to interchangeable alteration of diegetic planes “deep down”, every following plane serving the hypodiegesis for the preceding one. This way a hyper-hypodiegetic entity is being created as a vertical structure of the main architectonic blocks of the novel. Variety of genres within the compositional structure of narratives has been stated, from a diary through a correspondence, a detective story to science fiction utopia. The type of each of the six narratives has been substantiated as a combination of the two factors: a narrator’s or a personage’s relation to the story told, on the one hand, and a narrator’s status concerning the level of narration, on the other. It has been described the realization of such structural and compositional devices, which contribute to the textual categories of unity and conceptuality, as: the device of mirroring composition, the device of montage, using a literary image as a means of coherence in the novel, the device of coordinating, the device of circular composition. The device of mirroring composition which serves to reinforce the motif of power and human greed, the device of montage which links different parts of the novel through a common emotional and content thread – the motif of a soul reincarnation and cyclic historical events and the device of using a literary image (identical inner world, a recognizable protagonists’ soul acting in all the six narratives) ensure textual coherence in the novel.

Semantic Parallelism in Love Poetry in the Umayyad Era, Analytical Study - Selected Models

This study, was named with (Semantic Parallelism in love Poetry in the Umayyad Era, Analytical Study - Selected Models-) tries to investigate semantic parallelism as one of the stylistic features in love poetry in the Umayyad era, where it sheds light through this technique on some of the technical aspects inherent in the content of the lyrical text and exploring its depths, drawing on the opinions of some Western critics, ancient Arab scholars and contemporary Arab researchers.
 The study examined the nature of semantic parallelism and its importance in literary and critical studies, and then went through the application of the topic of semantic parallelism to selected models of love poetry in the Umayyad era for a number of stallion poets, through two main aspects: synonymous parallelism and contralateral or congruent parallelism, in order to reveal The effectiveness of parallelism in supplementing the poetry with a number of artistic and moral characteristics and stimulating the recipient, in addition to creating a kind of moral and verbal cohesion in the creative poetic text.
 The study also dealt with semantic parallelism through all types of love Poetry in that period, and in some cases it drew illustrative charts for the purpose of clarifying the idea and ease of acceptance by the recipient.

A Study of Iraqi EFL Learners' Misuse of Repetition as an Emphatic or Redundant Process in Translation

Recently, translation studies have received more attention on translation efficiency and the correct use of repetition in the translation process to know what translator’s skills are important in order to achieve a qualified and precise translation. The current study aims to investigate the misuse of repetition as an emphatic or redundant process in translation by EFL learners, especially the Iraqi university EFL students. The study sample consisted of 30 randomly selected fe/male students at the department of English language majoring in translation or English language literature of University of Thi-Qar.
 A researcher’s designed test has been administered to the Iraqi EFL learners and their responses have been descriptively analyzed. The study is dealt with four sections to discuss and find the precise results of the planned aims. So, the first section presents introduction, problem statement, research questions, objects, and research significance. The second section deals with the literature review to expose theoretical background of translation, repetition, redundancy, and related studies. The third section is about research method and design. Whereas, the fourth section exposes the results and discussions where it is found that the Iraqi university EFL students have a low level of awareness of translation skills and low performance regarding the use of repetition in their translation process which can be referred to their insufficient lexical knowledge in both target and source languages.
 Furthermore, the results also showed that a large part of the EFL students was able to distinguish the repeated terms, however they do not realize the reason or the purpose of the correct use of the emphatic repetition as a tool that contributes to creating lexical coherence in texts. The study concluded that there are many causes of the misusing forms of repetition in translation, including the students’ weak ability to translate abbreviations and their inability to find suitable synonyms for Arabic words to be used in English translation. These major causes point to the urgent need for systematic reforms of the curriculum, methods of teaching EFL in universities, and strategies adopted for teaching translation to students. An appendix of the test is found at the end of the research.

The Effectiveness of Direct and Metalinguistic Written Corrective Feedback to Deal With Errors in the Use of Information-Structuring Connectors

Background. Writing is a complex skill, even more so, if the student does not handle the generic structure of the institutionalized practices imposed on Higher Education.
 Purpose. The purpose of this study is to determine the effectiveness of direct and metalinguistic focused written corrective feedback (WCF) on information structuring connectors.
 Methods. This quantitative study compares focused WCF effectiveness in 39 subjects who are divided into three groups: the first one is the control group, which did not receive feedback, the second is the experimental group 1 that was corrected through direct WCF and the third one corresponds to experimental group 2 that received feedback through metalinguistic cues.
 Results. The findings indicate that WCF is effective for the experimental groups. There is a significant decrease in the number of errors of information-structuring connectors in experimental group 2, while experimental group 1 shows a reduction, but without statistical significance. As for the control group, it did not present improvements. In addition, the development of writing tasks corrected through metalinguistic WCF strategies led to textual cohesion improvement with the accurate use of connective devices.
 Conclusions. It is important to reflect on the use of focused feedback as part of the writing process, firstly, because writing cannot be taught without reviewing a student's writing, and secondly, considering that focused feedback supports the noticing of errors and decreases teacher correction time.

An Unbridgeable Gap? The Treatment of Definiteness Restrictions in French and Chinese Presentational Constructions

Availing ourselves of a parallel corpus – composed of two written and spoken subcorpora –, in this study we adopt a contrastive perspective to explore the (lack of) correspondence between French il y a-constructions with a definite pivot and Chinese yǒu-constructions. It is shown that most il y a-constructions appear in enumerative contexts (including the sentence-level and inter-clause list-reading, as well as the instantiation of an explicit part-whole relation). Written Chinese uses other strategies to ensure textual coherence and to mark a part-whole relation between the “pivot” and a given referential group (e.g., the lexical verb bāokuò “include”). In the spoken subcorpus, the yǒu-construction is the most frequent strategy which however competes with the locative shì “be” construction when a Ground is overtly expressed. Presentational and event-reporting il y a-constructions are mostly found in the spoken corpus and align more neatly with yǒu-constructions. Overall, the present study argues that the differences between the two languages are more nuanced than has so far been believed, showing that the correspondence between the cognitive status of referents and the formal marking of definiteness is not straightforward. Chinese pivots that are unmarked with respect to definiteness (e.g., bare nouns and bare-head noun phrases) can be semantically definite despite their postverbal position. At the same time, French definite pivots do not always denote identifiable referents, as is the case of the weak use of the definite article but also the special use of demonstrative determiners in topic-promoting and event-reporting contexts.

Language Development for English-Medium Instruction: A Longitudinal Perspective on the Use of Cohesive Devices by Chinese English Majors in Argumentative Writing

In alignment with a strong increase of fully or partially English-taught programmes worldwide, intense research interest has been drawn to English as a medium of instruction (EMI) in higher education. In the meanwhile, much research has been done concerning cohesion and coherence in second language writing, which reveals that the appropriate use of cohesive devices will ultimately lead to text coherence. This study adopts a longitudinal perspective to examine the use of cohesive devices by Chinese English majors in argumentative writing in the EMI context. Thirty-one second-year Chinese English majors participated in this study. They were given three writing prompts at the initial, middle, and final time-points of one academic year, respectively. Altogether, 93 argumentative writings were collected, and 30 cohesion indices were selected and investigated at local, global and text levels via two automatic computational tools: Coh-Metrix and TAACO. The major findings of the study indicate (1) Chinese English majors were capable of a variety of cohesive devices in their writing. They tended to use local cohesive devices, especially connectives, more than global and text cohesive devices; (2) Most of the cohesion indices demonstrated growth. Of the 30 selected cohesion indices, 13 presented significant development over one academic year, and among them, 3 were at local level, 10 at global level and 3 at text level. Informed of the possible learning trajectories of cohesive devices, teachers may be guided to focus on their teaching in some specific areas of cohesion, and students may be more aware of what contributes to their writing performance and what to emphasize when writing in English.

The textual cohesion means in Al -Adiyat Surah: Descriptive study

This study aims to stand on some of the most important means of textual cohesion in Al Adiyat Surah represented in audio syllables, Qurān separations, morphological structures, grammatical forms and repetition, release, presenting and delay, and referencing to identify what those means introduce from coherence and relations that help understand its aims, values, and instructions for humanity. Both researchers have divided the study into an introduction, a pref-ace,a study,and a conclusion following the descriptive way of analysing and counting to learn the aims of the linguis-tical text .

The impact of the linguistic link in the construction of the text an applied study on some Quranic verses in the light of modern linguistics

Linguistic interrelationship is one of the most important relationships that function on the cohesion and coherence of the text. The linguists dealt with these conjunctions. and relationships and explained it in detail when they are analyzing the textual discourse. In this research, the researcher dealt with the apparent formal interrelationships, referential interrelationships, and contextual moral interrelationships. These relationships are among the most prominent linguistic interrelationships that work on the coherence and cohesion of Quranic text.

Incoherence in the Text of Q: An Investigation on Q Discourse Markers and Boundaries

In critical scholarship, Q, a compilation of verses from Luke and Matthew, is considered to be the earliest document of the gospels. This article assesses the notion of such a document by analyzing its coherence. This is done through the study of discourse markers and boundaries of the Greek text of the Critical Edition of Q with the aim to detect possible areas of incoherence. This study continues the debate on the reality of Q since arguing for Q presupposes the existence of a coherent text. After presenting the nature, characteristics, extent, and problems of Q, an analysis of the information structure of Q was conducted. The study shows that there is coherence in the lower levels of discourse while there is some level of incoherence at higher levels. While such a finding in itself is not an explanation for the non-existence of Q, it is an indicator that the redactors of the Q text constructed a text that is not fully coherent.

Written narratives of adolescents with developmental language disorder compared with typically developing adolescents and adults

Abstract Children who struggle with acquisition of oral language are likely to become less proficient writers later on. The current study aimed to compare written texts of adolescents with developmental language disorder (DLD) and their typically developing (TD) peers in terms of length, content, cohesion, coherence and errors. Additionally, texts of TD adolescents were compared with the texts of TD adults. Accordingly, three participant groups were included in this study: 21 DLD adolescents, 21 TD adolescents and 22 TD adults, all native speakers of Croatian. The comparison of narrative texts written by DLD and TD adolescents suggests that the former write shorter and less cohesive texts and produce more errors. These results indicate that individuals with DLD have writing profiles similar to those obtained in other studies. Comparison of texts written by TD adolescents and adults shows that both groups write largely similar texts which differ only in the use of sophisticated vocabulary.

MORPHOLOGICAL FEATURES OF THE FIRST PRINTED GOSPELS IN UDMURT

The article describes the morphological features of the first printed Gospels in the Udmurt language. These editions are the first longest coherent Udmurt texts, that is, they are one of the first sources for studying the formation of the morphological system of the standard Udmurt language. The paper describes the main grammatical categories of the noun (number, possessiveness, case) and verb (voice, mood, tense), as well as non-finite forms of the verb (infinitive, participle, gerund). The study is based on the corpus of texts that includes translations of the Gospels of Matthew and Mark into the Glazov dialect and the Gospel of Matthew into the Sarapul dialect of the Udmurt language, which were published in 1847. The analysis was carried out by comparing the linguistic data from the sources with the one from the Udmurt literary language and its dialects. Whenever possible, questions of the origin of morphological indicators are touched upon in order to determine the innovative or archaic nature of the features identified in the sources under analysis. The analysis reveals various kinds of characteristics in the texts of the first Udmurt Gospels. At the same time, many features are characteristic of the sources both in the Glazov and Sarapul dialects, which probably indicates the compilers’ desire to make all translations as easily understandable as possible for the speakers of different Udmurt dialects. However, the translations into the Glazov dialect still have some distinctive characteristics, such as the functioning of special possessive forms, the presence of secondary spatial cases, the use of egressive forms in the elative function, which indicate their dialect affiliation.

PRAGMATIC FUNCTIONS OF REPETITIONS IN NEWSPAPER INFORMATIONAL TEXTS

The scientific article continues the number of researches dealing with the theory of text. The author studies pragmatic functions of repetitions in informational newspaper texts, namely – in newspaper weather forecast reports of “The Washington Times”. The achievement of the goal mentioned above is subject to the fulfilment of the following tasks: it is necessary to characterize the elements of redundancy in newspaper weather forecast reports and to find the specific features of repetitions in such kind of texts. Moreover, the author analyzes such notions as ‘information’, ‘redundancy’, and ‘compression’. Linguists pay much attention to newspaper informational texts because Mass Media influence has been constantly strengthening and expanding. Nowadays Mass Media has become one of the greatest ‘influencers’ in the society. The topicality of the linguistic problem mentioned above is proved by the huge interest to the noise-resistant factors that are aimed at providing efficient transferring and obtaining information in the process of newspaper communication. Fundamental works of Ukrainian and foreign linguists in the fields of text theory, pragmalinguistics, cybernetics, and stylistics have served as the basis of the scientific article. Newspaper weather forecast reports are the object of the paper, and elements of redundancy in the given texts are the subject of the research. Repetition provides coherence in newspaper informational texts, focuses on the subject of report, and contributes to automatic remembering of information and its saving in long-run memory.

Rekurence kā teksta saistījuma līdzeklis latviešu zinātniskajos rakstos

Text cohesion can be achieved through grammatical and lexico-semantic means. Lexico-semantic means used in text cohesion can be defined as recurrence, as in Latin, the word recurrere means returning to a previous utterance or repeating it. Repetition of lexico-semantic means in the text can be named using a foreign word in the Latvian language, rekursija (recursion in English). In Latvian, the concept rekursija is related to phonology, defining it as ‘the final part of pronouncing a sound, in which speech organs deviate from the previously assumed state characteristic of a particular sound’ (translated from Latvian of the entry in Tēzaurs 2022). Recursion in English linguistics is often understood as the sequential use of grammatical structures, while in German text linguistics, the concept Rekurrenz is defined as the repetition of similar language means, elements, and forms in the text. The research goal is to identify types of cohesive devices used in scientific articles in the Latvian language. The research focuses on full or partial repetition of such cohesive devices as words and word collocations, substitution, etc. in the scientific texts in Latvian that have been included in the Corpus of Latvian Scientific Articles. The Corpus comprises 1401 texts published between 2008 and 2018 covering six scientific branch groups. A qualitative research method, content analysis, has been used. It can be concluded that scientific texts in Latvian contain exact repetitions, partial recurrence, ellipsis, and substitution as lexico-semantic cohesive devices. Research findings show the different density of recurrence means used in scientific articles in different scientific branches and how relatable the used recurrence means are to the article’s title and the indicated key words.

Terminological Tools to Describe the Connecting Units of the Russian Language

Purpose. The article is devoted to the dynamics of theoretical understanding of connecting elements and the development of corresponding terminology in the Russian linguistic tradition. The research analyzes classic works of the founders of traditional Russian grammar as well as the latest linguistic works.Results. The study reveals three main levels of terminology which is applied to connecting units and related to their very nature: connecting units play an important role in creating the coherence of oral and written speech, and therefore are studied in the linguistics of discourse and text; connecting units are used in the organization of simple and complex sentence, and therefore are studied in syntax; connecting units are special lexical units that receive morphological characteristics. In general, we can say that in the 20th century the part-of-speech paradigm moved to syntactic and textual ones. First linguists tried to determine the place of connecting elements among the classes of words (parts of speech), but since the middle of the 20th century the idea of the priority of syntactic function over morphological characteristic has been increasingly expressed. This tendency was clearly manifested in discursive linguistics studying coherent texts and integrating very heterogeneous phenomena on the basis of common functions.Conclusion. Despite some inconsistency of the modern Russian terminology describing connecting elements it identifies their semantic-grammatical and functional originality.

Unsupervised abstractive summarization via sentence rewriting

Unsupervised extractive summarization aims to extract salient sentences from the document without labeled corpus. Existing methods have achieved promising progress, thanks to the power of large-scale pre-trained language models and high-quality contextualized representations. However, extractive summaries often fail to maintain smooth transitions between sentences and struggle to form a coherent and fluent text due to splicing of sentences. Nevertheless, to the best of our knowledge, very few studies currently focus on unsupervised abstractive summarization. Inspired by the intuitive human process of writing summaries, which involves extracting salient sentences first and then reconstructing them, in this paper, we propose an Extract-then-Abstract framework to generate more coherent and human-like summary. Specifically, we first adopt extractive summarization model as summarizer to generate extractive summary in the extraction stage. Then in the abstraction stage, we propose a BART-based sentence write model to generate more coherent and fluent abstractive summary. To this end, we design a novel parallel data creation method for our rewrite model by proposing an effective sentence sampling strategy without any manual annotation cost. Extensive experiments including automatic evaluation and human evaluation demonstrate that our framework consistently outperforms strong baselines for unsupervised abstractive summarization and can generate more coherent and human-like summary while maintaining in competitive ROUGE scores for unsupervised extractive summarization.

A Cross-Sectional Examination of the Written Expression Skills of Students with Low Vision, Visual Impairments, and their Sighted Peers

Abstract Introduction: Several studies in the literature have investigated writing skills of students with visual impairment and low vision. However, no research was found to examine the written expression skills of students with visual impairment in terms of text cohesion, text coherence, text quality, text length, and writing time variables. A more comprehensive approach to research on the written expression skills of students with visual impairments and low vision is needed. Methods: In this study, a cross-sectional design was employed to examine the written expression skills of students with low vision, visual impairment, and their sighted peers. Participants of this study consist of 344 secondary school students who were divided into three groups: Visual impairment, low vision, and sighted peers. During the application process, all students were given two different guidelines (six in total) for each text type (memoir, persuasive, informative) and asked to write about the instructions they chose. As a result, all students wrote three different texts. Texts scored on text length, writing time, text quality, coherence level, and cohesion levels. Descriptive statistics and statistical comparisons of groups were provided. Whether written expression skills of students differed according to groups was determined by one-way analysis of variance, which is one of the parametric tests. Results: In this research, the mean of students with visual impairment and sighted peer’s text length and writing time differed statistically. And in this study, the average of students with visual impairment and sighted peer’s coherence level and text quality differed statistically. Discussion: It can be stated that students with visual impairment do not consider their thoughts in integrity, have difficulty in concluding their articles, their texts remain as an introduction, and generally write low-quality texts. In this study, the mean of students with visual impairment, low vision, and sighted peer’s coherence level and text quality differed statistically. There are significant differences between students in all text types except for persuasive text. While there was no difference in memoir and persuasive text at the level of cohesion, were significant differences among students in terms of informative text and total scores. There are studies in the literature that are in line with these results. Thus, it can be said that results obtained from the present research are parallel to the literature. Limitations: The results obtained from this research are limited to memoir, persuasive and informative texts. The variables are limited to text length, writing time, text coherence, text quality, and cohesion level. Having each student write three different texts simultaneously (consecutively) in a single session can be given as another limitation of the research. Conclusions: In this research, memoir, persuasive, and informative text types were used. In future research, texts such as discussion and stories can be writing, or variables such as effort, motivation, and writing tendency can be examining. Further research on fluency and legibility regarding the mechanical aspect of writing can be planning, or spelling mistakes of students with visual impairment can be investigating. Experimental research focusing on teaching writing strategies can be done. Activities should be organized by teachers to motivate students about writing, encourage them, and increase their interests. If teachers include writing activities, this can serve to the improvement of students with visual impairments. Students who try to write should be supported. Considering the limitations of students with visual impairment in terms of writing skills, technologies that will serve these students’ better writing should be used.

Writer responsibility across sections of research articles: Recycling of directional determinants by English and Iranian academics

Motivated by the assumption that the recycling of directional determinants (DDs) (the research purposes, hypotheses, questions) across English research articles (RAs) is evidence of the writer's responsibility, this study sought to investigate any potential differences between English and Iranian researchers in the recycling of DDs throughout RA sections. To this end, 600 empirical RAs representing six soft science disciplines from 2006 to 2018 were chosen, 300 of which were authored by English L1 scholars and another 300 by Iranian researchers. The quantitative analysis revealed similarities between the two groups of scholars, with the DD recycling appearing more frequently in the Discussion section than in other sections, and in Economics than in other disciplines. In the qualitative phase, the two groups of authors' common rationales for the DD recycling, including editorial policy, RA length, English academic writing conventions, and reader guidance were determined. However, only two reasons were identified in novice Iranian researchers' responses: redundancy and English academic writing conventions. This implies that EAP writing course designers need to provide more explicit teaching materials to help novice non-English L1 researchers find out how the DD recycling in each RA section directs the writing of that section and contributes to text coherence.

A Typological Approach to Word Order and Information Processing: English as a SVO Language

The main purpose of this study is to examine a relation between word order and language processing and identify language-specific features that affect the degree of accessibility to information structure in a SVO word order. The findings from this study reveal that subject-prominent mechanisms in English, such as clefting structures, dummy subjects, existential sentences, non-agentive subjects, raising constructions, and passive voices, are well motivated for the purpose of maximizing language-use efficiency. In addition, passive constructions and non-agentive subjects are strategically exploited for the purpose of promoting high accessibility to a rigid SVO sequence and improving textual coherence. Furthermore, the tendency towards short–long ordering in SVO languages like English is predominant, and thus the language-specific maxims, such as ‘end-focus’, ‘end-weight’, and ‘dependency length minimization’, are well observed in the use of left-branching and right-branching modifiers in English for the purpose of increasing the efficiency of information processing. Finally, this study suggests that the language-specific structures, patterns, devices, or principles that are available in SVO word order seem to be optimized for facilitating information processing.