Gabriella Jenei

Referential Cohesion in Academic Writing

A descriptive and exploratory theory- and corpus-based study of the text-organizing role of reference in written academic discourse


Discourse beyond surface level features

The work of de Beaugrande and Dressler (1981) already indicates the start of the exploration of discourse beyond strictly surface features. Their “standards” of textuality (cohesion, coherence, intentionality, acceptability, situationality and intertextuality) mark the broadening of interest in phenomena that affect textuality. As for the description of cohesion, Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) analysis of cohesive ties was one of the first attempts to describe text-level characteristics. The popularity of this taxonomy is probably due to its relatively convenient applicability to any text type. At the same time, it provoked a number of negative responses (see, for example, Carrell, 1982). A slightly different approach is taken by Lautamatti’s (1987) Topical Structure Analysis (TSA) model, which describes coherence in a text by inspecting the semantic relationships between sentence topics and the overall discourse topic by analyzing the repetitions, shifts, and reoccurrences of topic. This model is of direct relevance to us here because, in the transformation of Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) cohesion analysis method, the idea of representing related entities under each other is used, as it is done in Lautamatti’s (1978) analysis. The notion of representing sentence topics is replaced by a similar representation of reference entities, in a sentence-by-sentence analysis, which will be described in detail in Chapter 6. According to Lautamatti (1987), coherence can be mapped using a system of three distinct progressions:

Referential Cohesion in Academic Writing

Tartalomjegyzék


Kiadó: Akadémiai Kiadó

Online megjelenés éve: 2024

ISBN: 978 963 664 049 1

This monograph aims to contribute to the study of written discourse and to writing pedagogy within the field of teaching English for academic purposes. The study has both a theoretical and an empirical focus. Due to the lack of an analytical tool available for the reliable cohesive reference analysis of extended texts, to explore the patterns of referential cohesion in research papers, it has been necessary to develop a new analytical tool. In practice, the study advances the theory of cohesion analysis by refining the cohesive reference-related aspects of Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) taxonomy of cohesion to transform it into a reliable and valid analytical tool for cohesive reference analysis in academic discourse in particular. The analytical tool is then applied to present a corpus-based comparative analysis of research articles and EFL (English as a Foreign Language) writers’ MA theses. This is accomplished by a multi-stage investigation, using quantitative and qualitative approaches at every stage to ensure that quantitative data is supported by qualitative insights and vice versa. The present empirical study points out considerable differences regarding the cohesive reference patterns among research articles produced by expert writers and the subcorpora of high- and low-rated theses by novice EFL writers. A major outcome of the investigation is that it yields significant pedagogical implications for both teachers and learners of academic writing: provides clues for the design of tasks for the development of the relevant aspects of EFL discourse competence together with additional practical activities for a variety of applications of the theory-based analytical tool.

Hivatkozás: https://mersz.hu/jenei-referential-cohesion-in-academic-writing//

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