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


Reference in discourse analysis

In the realm of applied linguistics, and one of its major branches, discourse analysis, the interpretation of reference as an inter-sentential relationship that contributes to cohesion gained popularity with Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) Cohesion in English, which is still a seminal text. Halliday and Hasan (1976) focus on text-level phenomena and do not regard sentence-internal relationships cohesive, because they “obviously cohere” (6) or “hang together”, simply because they are “internally structured” (7). Instead, they identify cohesive ties, which connect two or more sentences by establishing cohesive relations between them and claim that there is one specific meaning relation that is “critical for the creation of texture” – and indeed, cohesion – and that is reference, “in which one element is interpreted by reference to another” (11). According to their definition,

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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