Halliday And Hasans Cohesion In English English Language Essay

Halliday And Hasans Cohesion In English English Language Essay A relatively neglected aspect of the linguistic system is its resources for text construction, the range of meanings that are specifically associated with relating what being said. The principal component of these resources is that of cohesion. Through the last four decades, studies have been conducted by linguists to explain and examine cohesive features. The major work that influenced these studies is the one conducted by Halliday and Hasan (1976) on their book Cohesion in English. This paper attempts to explore Cohesion in Englishs content, highlight its influence on English language teaching, and investigate its impact on developing further works on cohesion. The concept of cohesion, according to Halliday and Hasan (1976), is a semantic one. It deals with the relations of meaning within any text. It occurs where the interpretation of some element in the discourse is dependent on that of another and, thus, a relation of cohesion is set up. The one presupposes the other, and cannot be effectively decoded except by recourse to it. The two elements, the presupposing and the presupposed, are integrated into a text. As an example to illustrate the concept of cohesion, the old piece of schoolboy humour time flies, gives no indication of not being a complete text and in fact it usually is, and the humour lies in the misinterpretation that is required if there is a following sentence is to be satisfied. Halliday and Hasans interpretation of cohesion is further elaborated by approaching the notion of a cohesive tie. This is a term that is thought to be needed to refer to an occurrence of a pair of cohesively linked items. It is argued that the concept of a tie makes it possible to analyse any text in terms of its cohesive characteristics and gives a systemic account of its patterns of texture. In English, there are two ways by which cohesive ties are created: lexical and grammatical cohesion (Halliday and Hasan, 1976) and each of these ties has been explained and examined thoroughly by applied linguists in attempt to provide effective way of mastering these ties by English language learners. Lexical cohesion is simply interpreted by Halliday and Hasan (1976:274) as the cohesive effect achieved by the selection of vocabulary. It involves meaningful connections in text that are created through the use of lexical items and that do not intrinsically involve grammatical cohesive ties (Bloor, 2004). The two main categories linked with lexical cohesion are collocation and reiteration. Collocation covers two or more words which can be said to go together in the sense of frequency of occurrence (Bloor, 2004). Learners recognition of collocational ties depends in large measures on the amount of his or her reading or listening. The teacher should therefore, encourage learners to read more and provide a motivational environment in which learners are exposed to lexical collocations. Of the category of lexical reiteration, educators locate difficulty for students of forming a mental picture of the meaning of general nouns, and the fact that they cohere not with a single word but with a wider stretch of meaning. Many researchers have investigated the importance of teaching lexical cohesion in the language classroom. McGee (2008), for example, suggests that collocation errors are pervasive in student attempts to vary their lexis. As much as possible collocation knowledge must be developed alongside reiteration skill development. Collocation dictionaries or corpus data can be used by teachers to help give students the most typical or strongest collocates of important words. Cox, Shanahan, and Sulzby (1990: 60) argue that exposure to contrived texts has a negative effect on the development of a learners use of lexical cohesive ties in writing. They advise teachers not to over-simplify texts for their students as they believe that edited texts are not rich in their lexical cohesive ties. Grammatical cohesion, on the other hand, refers to the structural content, and it is categorised into four main cohesive ties: reference, substitution, ellipsis and conjunction. Reference is considered as a cohesive tie when two or more expressions in the text refer to the same person, thing or idea (Bloor, 2004:93). In relation to the main types of reference, Halliday and Hasan (1976) contrast between exophora and endophora, and suggest that exophoric reference is situational and the endophoric reference is textual. Though both exophoric and endophoric reference embody an instruction to retrieve from elsewhere the information necessary for interpreting a text, exophoric reference must be made to the context of situation whereas endophoric reference is realised by the position of the expressions in the text. Depending on these positions, one can speak of anaphoric and cataphoric reference. If an expression refers to a preceding expression/utterance, it is a case of anaphoric referenc e. Cataphoric reference refers to the following utterances or their parts (see Figure 1 below). Figure 1 , (Cited in Halliday and Hasan, 1976:33) Substitution, in contrary to the reference, is a relation in syntax rather than meaning. It is a grammatical relation used to avoid unnecessary and intrusive repetition of a lexical item by drawing on the grammatical recourses of the language to replace the item (Bloor, 2004). For example, in the conversation, Which ice-cream would you like? I would like the pink one , the word one is used instead of repeating ice-cream. There are three types of substitution in English: nominal (one, ones, the same), verbal (do/did) and clausal (so, not) substitution. Ellipsis is another kind of substitution but in this case a lexical item is substituted by zero. That is to say, rather being substituted in order to avoid unnecessary and intrusive repetition, an item is left unsaid. For example, the word Dormouse is elided after two: There was a table set out under a tree in front of the house, and the March Hare and the Hatter were having tea at it: a Dormouse was sitting between them, fast asleep, and the other two were using it as a cushion, resting their elbows on it, and talking over its head. Halliday and Hasan (1976) lists three types of ellipsis: nominal, the omission of head nouns in a nominal group; verbal, an ellipsis within the verbal group; and clausal, the omission of a clause. The notion of ellipsis has influenced English language teachers to draw on learners short-term memory and help them recognise when ellipsis has occurred in a certain text. The fourth and final type of cohesive ties is that of conjunction. It refers broadly to the combining of any two textual elements into a potentially coherent complex semantic unit (Thompson, 2004). Though the conjunctive elements (for example, then, for this reason, on the other hand) are used to describe the relationship between clauses and sections in the text, Halliday and Hasan (1976:226) suggest that they are not principally devices for reaching out into the preceding (or following) text, but they express certain meanings which presuppose the presence of other components in the discourse. They argue that in describing conjunction a cohesive device, the attention should not be on the semantic relations between the clauses linked by the conjuncts, rather on the conjunctive devices themselves and the function they have of relating to each other linguistic elements. Educational experts, however, attempt to refer to the notion of conjunction in accordance with what suits the English language learner to better achieve the mastery of this cohesive device. Zamil (1983), for example, suggests that rather than the typical textbook approach of presenting lists of conjuncts categorized according to meaning, it would be more effective to begin by classifying linking devices according to their grammatical functions. In other words, coordinating conjunctions (e.g. and, or, but), subordinating conjunctions (e.g. because, although, if), and conjunctive adverbs (e.g. on the other hand, nevertheless) should all be introduced separately. In this way, students could learn how each type of marker works within the sentence and between sentences. Applied linguists have devoted many studies on how learners perceive and produce cohesive structures, and Halliday and Hasans work on cohesion triggers investigations on learners difficulties in recognising cohesive ties in both first and second language learning. Garrod and Sanford (1977b), for example, in experiments with adult L1 subjects, show that the time taken to read a sentence containing the second half of a lexically-conjoined tie is largely determined by the semantic distance between the two halves of the tie. In other words, all other content remaining constant, a pair of sentences containing a superordinate/subordinate lexical tie will take longer to read than a pair containing lexical tie involving repetition. Chapman and stokes (1980) research on the mastery of cohesive ties by L1 British children gives evidence that those children who are beginning to read fluently have the ability to perceive the cohesive factors and are thus able to integrate the text semantically, for they are constructing a meaningful whole as they read. In L2 situation, Cohen (1979) investigated university students reading of English texts in four complementary studies and all four of the studies revealed that learners were not picking up the conjunctive words signalling cohesion, not even the more basic ones like however and thus. Further, Pierce (1975) and Ewer (1980) both comment on the difficulties posed by the conjuncts and discourse markers, and advise that much more attention should be given to this category of tie in teaching reading. The work of Halliday and Hasan (1976) still provides the fullest account of cohesive ties in English (Bloor, 2004). However, there are several scholars who have developed Halliday and Hasans account to investigate deeply into the area. Hoey (1983, 1991), for example, investigates how cohesive features combine to organise long stretches of text. He approaches cohesion as related to some patterns of rhetorical organisation. A special attention on his work is given on cohesive chains and the significance of repetition. His contributions include ideas on the role of the sentence, which he suggests may be a part grammatical, part textual phenomenon, a view that is compatible with much on literature on the topic (Bloor, 2004). Another example to the influence of Halliday and Hasans Cohesion in English, is the work by Mann and Thompson (1992) which gathers different analyses by twelve different linguists of the same text. It incorporates distinct views in approaching discourse and may vary the classifications of text analysis. A further investigation of Halliday and Hasans (1976) work is conducted by Halliday and Matthiessen (1999) who bring broader theoretical perspective the area of language cohesion. Their work sheds light on many factors that lack of space has forced us to neglect. Apart from praise and influential impact cohesion in English has gained, one might note that it is not without its critics. Doyle (1982) ,for example, points out that Halliday and Hasan limit themselves to a discussion of meaning as it appears in surface structure; questions of coherence, of the relationships among propositions in the textual world created by the writer and recreated by the reader, remain unexamined. He argues that the very restrictions which Halliday and Hasan themselves placed upon their study beg questions and forestall observations which seem ultimately more interesting to the study of coherence than the taxonomy which results. In their decision to restrict their study to surface evidence of cohesion beyond the sentence, Halliday and Hasan restrict the relationships which their descriptive system may show. To sum up, Halliday and Hasans (1976) work on cohesion appears to set out a framework for the analysis and coding of cohesion and, therefore, offers a new dimension for language educators to approach language semantics and structure in the language classroom. Applied linguists and language teachers have been influenced by Cohesion in English on designing grammar lessons and language tasks that address lexical and grammatical cohesive ties.

Jurassic Park :: essays research papers

Two paleontologists, Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler, were financed by John Hammond, a very wealthy man. The two were visited by a man named Morris who was very interested about Hammond. Apparently he had leased an island off the west coast of Costa Rica for some type of big development that had been in the making for some 10 years. Part of the plan was to buy large quantities of amber, which drew attention from Morris, because amber was of little or no value.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Shortly after the visit the two paleontologists were called by Hammond to come visit his island. He told them it was a type of biological preserve that he believed would alter all science across the world. Hammond needed them to come look at his island to give him their opinions about weather the island was safe for business. Hammond said the island would be called Jurassic Park.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  During the development of the island word spread of the new finding to a rival company. Dodgson, who worked with the company knew that he knew Hammond was on to something big and he wanted a part of it. He arranged to met with one of Hammond's employees, Nedry. At the park he was in charge of design of the park's computer system. Nedry informed Dodgson that they were recreating dinosaur embryos but wasn't sure how. Nedry agreed to steal embryos from the park in exchange for $1 million.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  In the meantime Sattler and Grant arrived at the island where they met friends of Hammond’s, including Ian Malcolm, a famous mathematician. The others were Dennis Nedry; Henry Wu, the brains behind the park; and Ed Regis, a lawyer. Later Hammond's grandchildren arrived, Lex and Tim.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  When all had arrived and were settled the tour began. It consisted of six people: Hammond's grandchildren, Malcom, Dr.Sattler and Dr.Grant, and Ed Regis. While on the tour it was explained how the dinosaurs were created. First amber that had hardened millions of years ago with mosquitoes or other blood drinking bugs. DNA was extracted from the blood and was used to recreate dinosaur embryos. There were 15 different species and 238 individual dinosaurs.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  During the tour weather became bad weather. Because of the bad weather all power went out and without Nedry, who was quietly stealing embryos, it could not be fixed. However, Nedry was killed by a dinosaur because of a wrong turn.

Harlem Renaissance Poem Analysis Paper

Lee-Michael Torcedo Prof. Quiroz English 1302 October 22, 2012 Dreams After the civil war, African Americans obtained their freedom. Still despised by many white Americans, African Americans continued to fight for justice. Around the early 1900’s the Harlem Renaissance began across the nation they fought for their culture and expressed it through art, music, dance, and literature. One of the biggest names in the Harlem Renaissance is Langston Hughes (Harlem). The poems he wrote better expressed the feelings of the many African Americans during this era.Langston Hughes published his poem, â€Å"As I Grew Older,† which explains the difficulty many African Americans had with following their dreams during this time. On February 1, 1902, Carrie M. Langston and James N. Hughes gave birth to, arguably, the most famous Harlem Renaissance literary poet, Langston Hughes. He grew up attending school in Kansas and Illinois, and graduated from High School in Ohio where he began writ ing his poetry. Later, Hughes went on to college, but stopped shortly after.He took many jobs in New York and a job working on a freighter that took him across the Atlantic Ocean to African, Spain, and France. He returned to Washington D. C. to live with his mother with hopes of returning to college. He had trouble making enough money and didn’t go back to college until a year later where he graduated from Lincoln University in 1929. After college, he began publishing his works and started to become famous. On May 22, 1967, Langston Hughes died of cancer in New York (Langston). Langston Hughes’ legend still lives to this day, and his poems are often mentioned in literature.In his poem â€Å"As I Grew Older,† published in 1925, he begins by saying â€Å"It was a long time ago/ I have almost forgotten my dream/ But it was there then/ In front of me/ Bright like a sun—/ My dream† (1-4). Whether or not Langston Hughes wrote this about himself or not, i t can go either way on who could be mentioning this and who is reflecting on the past that was a â€Å"long time ago†. Hughes gave the perspective that the main persona is talking about his past and about how even though his dream was right in front of him, he could not grasp it.In the early ages of Langston Hughes life, many obstacles barricaded him from reaching his dreams and goals, losing sights of what he really wanted. He talks about a wall in the poem that rises slowly between him and this dream. It â€Å"rose until it touched the sky† (11). The wall symbolizes his obstacles or what blocked him from his dreams. The wall rising until it touched the sky showed the degree and emphasis of the difficulty for Hughes to see his dreams. On line thirteen he mentions the shadow that the wall covered him in. There was no more light to be seen.All hope seemed to be lost until he â€Å"breaks† down the wall, â€Å"shatters† the darkness, and â€Å"smashes† the night. At the other side of this wall, is light, the sun, and his dream. Langston Hughes must have at one point in following his dream felt so overwhelmed with everything in his way and just â€Å"lie down in the shadow† (15). Just like in his poem, he takes down that wall and does not let it get in his way. He is successful in reaching his dream of becoming a well-known poet even through the worst of times. His poem reflects the situation many African Americans faced during this time.Freedom is still new to most and following dreams is difficult because of prejudism. Many African Americans ran into this â€Å"wall† and many did not break through as Langston Hughes did. Although some did, they went through the same difficulties as Hughes poetically explained in his poem. The beauty of this poem is the universality of it. It may have been written to explain the difficulties African Americans had, but it reflects the difficulty for anyone following their dreams sh ould not be forgotten. They are not always easy to achieve, but that does not mean one should give up.The poem is powerful in meaning and motivational as it speaks to anyone and illustrates that you should never surrender. Langston Hughes’ dream as a young boy was to be known as a poet. Much like the wall, he had to overcome many obstacles to achieve his dreams. He would vision his dream so clearly in front of him like the sun but as he got older and taller, so did this wall that blocked his way. Even though, Hughes smashed down that wall and become one of the most well-known founders of the Harlem Renaissance. Works Cited â€Å"Harlem Renaissance – Biography. com – Biography. com. †Ã‚  Famous Biographies & TV Shows – Biography. om. N. p. , n. d. Web. 22  Oct. 2012. . Hughes, Langston. â€Å"As I Grew Older by Langston Hughes. †Ã‚  PoemHunter. Com – Thousands of poems and poets. Poetry Search Engine. N. p. , 3  Jan. 2003. Web. 22à ‚  Oct. 2012. . â€Å"Langston Hughes Biography – life, children, parents, name, story, history, school, mother, book, information, born, college. †Ã‚  Encyclopedia of World Biography. N. p. , n. d. Web. 22  Oct. 2012. .

On The Issues The Race for Virgina Governor - 1360 Words

This year’s 2013 Governor of Virginia campaign was a tight race for the Republican and Democrat contenders. The candidates were Republican Ken Cuccinelli, Democrat Terry McAuliffe and Libertarian Robert Sarvis. These campaigners had different views on marriage, immigration, and abortion, among other issues commonly discussed in politics within our country. Marriage is a controversial subject in every part of the world. Whether you believe in traditional marriage between a man and woman, same sex marriage, or open marriages, everyone usually has a strong opinion on what they were brought up believing or think is right. Ken Cuccinelli is a firm believer in traditional marriage. His firm views are based on his Catholic roots. He had†¦show more content†¦Sarvis mother is an immigrant from Asia, where he gets his Chinese roots. He believes in an open society that welcomes all backgrounds of people and hopes to see greater numbers of immigrants in the United States and Virginia each year. One phrase Sarvis repeated numerous times during his campaigning was â€Å"Virginia should be a place that is open-minded and open for business, that provides equal protection of the laws to all people, that ensures personal freedom, that fosters open and competitive markets where people of all skill levels can compete on a level playing field.â⠂¬  ( Sarvis. Immigration. Robertsarvis.com.). My views on immigration are slightly different than some of those of the candidates. I believe immigration is good for America if proper procedures are executed. Criminal background checks need to be enforced to curb drug trafficking and other criminal acts. Resources should be distributed to natural born citizens and legalized immigrants before given to those just entering our country. On the subject of abortion, Ken Cuccinelli strongly opposes it. Although it has been said by his competitor that Cuccinelli does not support abortion even in the case of rape, incest, or the mothers endangerment this has been a partly false statement. He only supports abortion if the mother’s life is at stake. He had previously described himself as â€Å"the most aggressive pro-life leader in the VirginiaShow MoreRelatedRacial Project : Jim Crow Laws1201 Words   |  5 PagesWinant, their texts give insight to our understanding of what is a racial project. A racial project explains how â€Å"[racial dynamics] are simultaneously an interpretation, representation, and explanation† (Omi et. al 54). Racial projects offer insight how race is linked to both structure and representation by the ideology that is primarily evident by everyday practices whether it be found institutionally or individually. The Jim Crow Laws are a prominent and notable example of a racial project. Jim CrowRead MoreApush American Pageant Chapter 1 -24887 Words   |  20 Pagesthe African Coastal Islands. Portugeses adverntures here were the origins of a plantation economy. 6. Spain - Spain became much more unified after the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella, they were eager to outstrip their portuguse rivals in the race to tap wealth of the indies. Portugal controlled African coast, so Spain looked westward. 7. Words Collided (Exchanges) - Essentially after the discovery of the New World, Africa became the laborers, Europe - Markets, and Americas - Resources. TheRead MoreProject Mgmt296381 Words   |  1186 Pagesresearch highlights that continue to promote practical application of project management. Overall the text addresses the major questions and issues the authors have encountered over their 60 combined years of teaching project management and consulting with practicing project managers in domestic and foreign environments. The following questions represent the issues and problems practicing project managers find consuming most of their effort: What is the strategic role of projects in contemporary organizations