Linguistic elements in discourse

Every teacher of English should have the knowledge of linguistic elements in discourse to possess linguistic and communicative competency. It is not only beneficial to us, but it also helps us understand how language is structured, getting the message across properly in teaching learning community.

Cohesion

Coherent texts are sequences of sentences or utterances which seem to ‘hang together’. These contain text-forming devices that enable the writer or speaker to establish relationships across sentence or utterance boundaries. According to Halliday and Hasan (1976), there are five types of cohesion: reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical cohesion. Substitution is seen as a sub-category of ellipsis, according to David Nunan.

1. Referential cohesion

There are anaphoric and cataphoric references in referential cohesion, whose sub-types are personal, demonstrative, and comparative references.

1.1. Anaphoric and cataphoric reference

There are two different ways in which reference items can function with a text. They

are anaphoric and cataphoric references. Anaphoric reference points the reader or listener ‘backwards’ to previously mentioned entity, process or state of affairs with devices like ‘he, she, his him, etc. On the other hand, cataphoric reference points the reader or listener ‘forward’ – it draws us further into the text to identify the elements to which the reference items refer.

1.1.1. Personal, demonstrative and comparative reference

These sub-types of devices enable the writer or speaker to reference people and things within a text.

Personal reference items are expressed through pronouns and determiners. They identify individuals and objects in the text. For example, John is a student. He is good at sports.

As for a demonstrative reference, expressed through determiners and adverbs, these items can represent a single word or phrase or much longer chunks of text. For instance, come here and taste the toast! Do you like this?

Comparative reference is expressed through adjectives and adverbs to compare items within a text, as in:

A: ‘Is it the same band we heard last week?’.

B: ‘No, it’s the other band. Look at them carefully!’

2. Substitution and ellipsis

Halliday and Hasan also point out that substitution and ellipsis of cohesion are essentially the same. Substitution has three types – nominal, verbal, and clausal.

1) Nominal substitution

There are some tickets in my bag. These ones are for the VIP class.

2) Verbal substitution

A: We all hate hypocrisy. B: Yes, everybody does.

3) Clausal substitution

A: Has everyone gone home? B: I hope not.

A: Is there going to be an earthquake?

B: It says so.

Ellipsis

Ellipsis occurs when some essential structural element is omitted from a sentence or clause and can only be recovered by referring to an element in the preceding text. There are

three types of ellipsis:

1)  Nominal ellipsis

My friends are introverts. Both are friendly indeed.

2)  Verbal ellipsis

A: Have you finished dinner? B: Yes, I have (0).

3) Clausal ellipsis

A: What were they doing? B: playing games.

A: Will it rain tomorrow? B: Perhaps.

3. Conjunction

Conjunction signals relationships that can only be fully understood through reference to other parts of the text. There are four types of conjunction – temporality, causality, addition and adversity. Examples of each type follow.

1) Adversative

Using Facebook is good. However, its addiction will lead to negative impacts on our health.

2) Additive

He’s very fluent in English. Moreover, he is the president of the Students’ Union.

3) Temporal

At last, he finished the rehearsal for his role.

4) Causal

She studied math hard as she wanted to pass the exam with flying colours.

In fact, the cohesive devices themselves do not create the relationships in the text; they make the relationships explicit. Most clauses in a text can relate to others without the relationship being explicitly signalled to the listener or reader by a conjunction.

4. Lexical cohesion

Lexical cohesion occurs when two words in a text are semantically related in some way. They are related in terms of their meaning. The two major categories of lexical cohesion are reiteration and collocation.

Reiteration

Reiteration includes repetition, synonym, or near synonym, superordinate, and general word. Thus, it fulfils a similar semantic function to cohesive reference.

1) Repetition

Cats are nice. Everyone likes cats.

2) Synonym

Are you interested in technology? Yes, AI is the most impressive one for me!

3) Superordinate

The rose bloomed early this spring. All the flowers in the garden are beautiful.

4) General word

A: She couldn’t find her pen. The thing is always disappearing.

Collocation

Collocation can cause significant problems for discourse analysis because it includes all those items in a text that are semantically related. Sometimes, this makes it difficult to decide whether a cohesive relationship exists. However, its contribution to coherence in text is so significant that it cannot be ignored. The problems arise because colocation is expressed through open rather than closed-class items such as pronouns, conjunctions and prepositions.

Many lexical relationships are text- and context-bound. For instance, the words 'artist' and 'thief' are not related at all, but in the following text, they are synonyms.

The artist captivated everyone with his delicate brushwork.

But behind the scenes, that thief stole ideas from his peers and claimed them as his own.

Additionally, the background knowledge of the reader or listener plays a more prominent role in the perception of lexical relationships than in the types of cohesion.

One problem is that these relations in the text relate to how many ‘steps’ away an item can be in a word class and still contribute to cohesion. Our ability to identify collocational relationships in a text will depend on our background knowledge – that is, our familiarity with the content of a text.

Overall, the importance of a particular sentence within a text is determined by the number of connections it has to other sentences. Language teachers with explicit knowledge of cohesive techniques are better able to help their ESL students understand complex texts (textual relationships) and avoid cohesion problems in their own materials.

Without: Nyi Nyi

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