Cohesive Chains Research Articles

‘What we found is’

Abstract This paper examines two variants of the pseudo-cleft construction which display a WHAT-NP-VP-be pattern with the VP realised with cognitive verbs and the proform do in the context of spoken British English dyadic and multi-party BBC podcasts. It is based on the premise that the construction’s referencing potentials are both cataphoric and projective, and that depending on its contexts, one of the two referencing functions is foregrounded while the other is backgrounded. The analysis focuses on those linguistic features and contextual configurations which either contribute to its cataphoric referencing function, or which go beyond the local cataphoric referencing function and indicate its projective, discourse-organising function. The research is corpus-based and uses quantitative and qualitative methodologies, filtering out the linguistic features and contextual configurations which contribute to assigning the two variants the status of a projective construction with a discourse-organising function. The features under investigation are (1) the semantics of the constitutive NPs and VPs marking for tense, aspect and modality and their uptake in the discourse, (2) degrees of continuity and discontinuity in the cohesive chains triggered by the constitutive parts of the construction. The paper shows that when semantic continuity between the what-clause and what follows is discontinued and thus deferred, the construction’s projective function is foregrounded.

Multimodality and cross-modal cohesion in manga

Manga with their distinct style and symbolism represent a growing reading trend in the world. Manga use an established set of symbols to convey various emotions. Manga have generally been more experimental in layout than Western comics. They are more fragmentary and contain more panels that enhance the dynamism of the story. We aimed to outline methodological approaches to the analysis of manga; to summarize specific features of manga as a separate medium; to analyse how multimodal cohesion is created in manga; to reveal various types of relations between visual and verbal modes. Manga is a multimodal discourse, combining several modes, mainly visual and verbal. The aural mode is represented by linguistic and visual signs, e.g. jagged borders of a speech bubble or the size and boldness of letters. We applied methods originally designed for the film analysis to the analysis of manga, in particular, Tseng’s (2013) theory of cross-modal cohesion, based on tracking cross-modally realized characters, objects, actions, and settings. This analysis included building cross-modal cohesive chains. We argue that it is possible to track cross-modal cohesion in manga, based on the interaction of visual, verbal, and aural components of identity chains. Besides, the interaction between visual and verbal modes was revealed by analysing text-image relations. In this paper we have outlined manga-specific features, distinctive features of manga’s page layout, cinematic devices, which manga borrowed from films, some of which may be used as focalisation-marking devices.

Reframed narrativity in literary translation: an investigation of the explicitation of cohesive chains

Abstract Explicitation is a key concept in translation studies referring to turning what is implicitly narrated in a source text into explicit narration in a target text; it has been widely studied from different aspects across language pairs and genres. However, while most previous studies investigate explicitation through a few indicators of explicitness, most of which are specific logical links and connectives, textual explicitness encompasses far beyond these. To date, little attention has been paid, especially in literary translation, to semantic explicitation, which is realized through cohesive chains in textual development. Since cohesive chains represent the development of events and characters throughout the text, it is assumed the more there are of them, the more tangible a text is in realizing its meaning within its context. This research, therefore, sets out to investigate the cohesive chains in a Chinese classic novel, Hong Lou Meng, and in its two English translations, The Dream of the Red Mansions and A Story of the Stone, with an emphasis on how the texts are manifested as narratives in the respective contexts with different readers. It has found a trend of explicitation in translation from Chinese source text to English target texts in terms of the numbers of cohesive chains and the lexical items forming the chains. It has also found differences in the distribution of different types of cohesive chains (identity chains and similarity chains), which represent distinctive patterns of realizing the context in each text. The interpretation of these different stylistic features in narrative reflects both typological differences and translators’ choices.

The Use of Cohesive Devices to Provide Coherence in Argumentative Essays of Universitas Negeri Semarang Graduate Students

This study aims to analyze the use of cohesive devices and the chain interaction of cohesive devices to achieve coherence in argumentative essays of Universitas Negeri Semarang graduate students. This study employed descriptive qualitative research design. It focused on cohesion and coherence analysis of students’ writing. The findings of the study showed that all of the types of cohesive devices such as reference, substitution, ellipsis, and reiteration were found in the students’ essays. These cohesive devices provide the coherence of the text through their semantic relation or bound which create the two cohesive chains; identity chains and similarity chains. The interaction between both chains can give explicit signals to guide readers towards the intended interpretation of the text. The result of this chain interaction is known as cohesive harmony. Most of students’ essays achieve coherence because the total tokens of the students’ essays enter more than 50% of chain interaction. Unfortunately, the students overuse certain types of cohesive devices such as repetition in creating the chains.

“Explanation videos unravelled: Breaking the waves”

Explanation videos are increasingly common on media websites such as YouTube and are used by school students, university students, and members of the general public alike. Such videos cover all areas of knowledge and aim to provide viewer-appropriate explanations concerning a large variety of topics. It is, however, still far from clear how such videos work and under what conditions they are effective. In this paper, we consider how this can be measured and whether guidelines can be determined empirically for their improvement. Building on the notion of semantic waves developed in Legitimation Code Theory, we discuss the design of cumulative knowledge-building processes and how to isolate cases where this fails to operate, selecting examples from a number of videos of this kind. To support this, we introduce a detailed annotation framework that fully reflects the multimodally-rich extent of our data. This framework systematically defines coding categories for use with the ELAN annotation tool and uses these for the adjacent construction of multimodal cohesive chain diagrams. We first motivate and describe the application of this annotation framework and then show through subsequent multimodal cohesion analyses how constructed cohesive chains can be interpreted within the scope of pedagogically relevant semantic wave patterns.

Free Indirect Thought in Stream-of-Consciousness Fiction: A Textural Cohesive Perspective

Free indirect thought (FIT) is an important linguistic device to portray characters in stream-of-consciousness fiction. Most studies are concerned with its linguistic manifestations that align the text with the character’s point of view, and not much attention is given to the implicit coherence underlying FIT’s seemingly disconnected and disorganized structures. Using cohesion theory (Halliday & Hasan, 1985), this article analyzes FIT extracts of the two major characters in Mrs. Dalloway. The analysis is conducted to examine the non-structural cohesive devices and the cohesive chains these devices form and explore their unique contribution to the depiction of characters’ thought processes and distinctive personalities.

Coherence in Hong Lou Meng and its English translations: an exploratory investigation

Coherence can be studied from both logical and textual perspectives in systemic functional linguistics. The logical and textual metafunctions together contribute to the coherence of a text. Coherence is realized through clause complexes and cohesive chains at the lexicogrammatical level from the logical and textual meanings. Clause complex reflects the logical development of the text, while cohesive chains are the threads of a coherent text. The clauses that are involved in cohesive chains take a more important role in forming a coherent text than others, and thus have the potential to reveal the features of coherence realization.This research aims to explore the realization of coherence in a Chinese novel Hong Lou Meng and its two English translations, The Dream of the Red Mansions (by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang) and The Story of the Stone (by David Hawkes), or more specifically, the distribution of logico-semantic types in both the Chinese (ST) and the English texts (TT). The research shows that there are both similarities and differences between the ST and the TTs on the one hand, and between the TTs on the other, and that the differences are related to the styles of translators.

Cohesive Chains in the Transfiguration Narrative of Matthew 17:1-13

While much work in biblical studies has been offered in the form of theological exposition and historical critical speculation of literary origins of the gospels, few modern biblical studies scrutinize the language of these gospels from rigorous linguistic criteria. This paper takes a discourse analytic approach from the field of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) founded by M. A. K. Halliday. The notion of cohesive chaining is taken in order to evaluate the level of literary unity in the original Greek of the episode of the transfiguration narrative found within the Gospel of Matthew. Cohesive chaining will be defined; its function within the greater sociolinguistic theory of SFL will be examined, and then the concept will be directly applied. The study concludes with a unique contribution demonstrating how these cohesive chains are then unified via choices in verbal aspect as the grammar that not only solidifies semantic continuity among those chains, but contours the discourse using a scheme of markedness that signals the prioritization of its message. The hope of this study is to reinforce the recent paradigm shift of biblical research utilizing modern linguistic paradigms as tools to transform biblical interpretation and exegesis into a rigorously discourse-centered linguistic methodology.

Cohesion and Coherence in the Writings of Iranain EFL Students

This study was conducted in to investigate the relationship of cohesive chains and chain interaction to the coherence of texts. To do this, the following procedure was followed. First, 95 EFL students were asked to write a composition on a particular topic. These texts were scored by three experienced raters based on their perceived degree of coherence. The texts were then ordered from high to low. Thirty high-rated texts were labeled as group A, and thirty low-rated texts were labeled as group B. These texts were analyzed for the presence and frequency of cohesive chain and chain interaction based on the model proposed by Hassan (1989). After collecting the data and statistically analyzing them, the results showed that the texts getting higher coherence scores had a higher proportion of relevant tokens to peripheral ones and a higher proportion of central tokens to non-central ones in comparison to the low-rated texts. Therefore, cohesive chain and chain interaction can be used as an indicator of coherence and has pedagogical and theoretical implications.

Because of the role of er front office um in hotel

This paper describes lexical cohesion across participants in a discourse, and across discourse events, and the additional contribution made by speakers’ choices of prominence in the cohesive chains. The choice of prominence is made to communicate what is perceived to be situationally informative in the local context of interaction (Brazil 1985 and 1997). This study describes a connection between a speaker’s choice of a lexical or non-lexical word in a cohesive chain and the speaker’s choice of prominence and, in doing so, offers a partial explanation to the question Hoey (1991:17) asks of Winter (1974 and 1979): ‘under what circumstances do we use one (cohesive device) rather than the other?’. It also describes how the selection of prominence across speakers in a discourse can signal divergence and convergence between them. Lastly, the paper discusses the pedagogical implications of the study with regard to English language learning and teaching.

Cohesive chains and writing quality

(1989). Cohesive chains and writing quality. WORD: Vol. 40, Systems, Structures, and Discourse: Selected Papers from the Fifteenth International Systemic Congress, pp. 235-254.