Text grammar I

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Text grammar I

• Cohesion and Coherence

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Beyond the sentence

• Although sentences can occur on their own, they
  usually form texts (these can be written or
  spoken). There are three prerequisites for a
  text.
• A text makes sense,
• it is somehow complete
• and it has coherence and cohesion.

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When is a text not a text?

• We can tell whether something is a text e.g.
• Text 1. Pick up a handful of soil in your garden.
  Ordinary, unexciting earth. Yet it is one of
  natures miracles and one of her most complex
  products. Your success as a gardener will largely
  depend on its condition, so take the first step
  in gardening. Get to know your soil.

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It makes sense

• We can understand what the text is about.
• We can translate it.
• We can paraphrase it .
• We can summarise it.
• We can explain the meaning to someone else.

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It is somehow complete

• It is made up of sentences, not bits of
  sentences.
• E.g. Can I have a.
• is not a complete sentence we know there is
  something missing at the end
• were not very clear
• Is not a complete text we know there is something
  missing at the beginning

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Summary of the text

• Our text was taken from the first page of a book
  about gardening. The first paragraph introduces
  the idea of the important role played by the
  soil, underlining how unremarkable it is in
  physical terms but how miraculous it is in terms
  of it properties, and encourages the reader to
  become familiar with this element.

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Cohesion

• Cohesion is the set of grammatical and lexical
  connections between sentences which are linked
  together into a text.
• There are several of these elements in our text.

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Cohesive features

• Text 1. Pick up a handful of soil in your garden.
  Ordinary, unexciting earth. Yet it is one of
  natures miracles and one of her most complex
  products. Your success as a gardener will largely
  depend on its condition, so take the first step
  in gardening. Get to know your soil.

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Cohesion in texts
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Coherence?

• Fertilizers put back what the rain and plants
  take away. Plastic pots are not just substitutes
  for clay ones. Pears are a little more
  temperamental than apples. Supporting and
  training are not quite the same thing.

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Incoherent

• Although there are some cohesive features in the
  text it is not coherent. It does not really say
  anything coherent that one could paraphrase. It
  seems to be talking about a lot of unconnected
  things even though it is on the topic of
  gardening. In fact it is taken from the first
  line of each chapter.

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Cohesive features

• Texts have texture as we have seen. The sentences
  in a text are linked together into a cohesive
  whole, the elements are in some way tied
  together, they are linked by a series of devices
  known as cohesive ties.
• Without cohesive ties, texts become a collection
  of isolated sentences they are the devices a
  language uses to achieve unity and cohesiveness
  in texts, written or spoken.

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cohesion

• Five kinds of cohesion have been identified
  reference, substitution, ellipsis and conjunction
  which are kinds of grammatical cohesion using
  closed sets.
• and lexical cohesion which uses the resources of
  the lexical system by using the same, similar or
  related words in successive sentences so that the
  later occurrences refer back to and link up with
  the previous occurrences.

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Lexical cohesion

• and lexical cohesion which uses the resources of
  the lexical system by using the same, similar or
  related words in successive sentences so that the
  later occurrences refer back to and link up with
  the previous occurrences.
• The two broad types of lexical cohesion are
  reiteration (four kinds repetition, synonymy,
  superordinates, general words) and collocation
  which refers to the habitual company which words
  keep, cohesion resulting from the occurrence of a
  words collocates.

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Grammatical cohesion

• Reference is a semantic relation. It ensures the
  continuity of meaning in a text involving items
  which cannot be interpreted without recurrence to
  the surrounding text (endophoric reference) or
  outside the text to the situation (exophoric
  reference).

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Endophoric reference

• Reference to elements which can be reconstructed
  from inside the text.
• It can be cataphoric (pointing forwards as in
  This is how he said it) or, much more commonly,
  anaphoric, pointing backwards e.g. I spoke to the
  bus driver. He was completely drunk. Where he in
  the second sentence refers back to the bus driver
  in the first sentence). Only endophoric reference
  is cohesive since it refers to another point in
  the same text. In the majority of cases it is
  anaphoric.

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reference

• There are three kinds of reference personal,
  demonstrative and comparative. To be able to
  understand, produce and analyse texts you will
  need to know how to recognise them.

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Personal reference

• by means of the personal pronouns, possessive
  pronouns (mine, yours etc) and possessive
  identifiers (my, your etc). Third person pronouns
  are nearly always endophoric but first and second
  person pronouns can be exophoric. Most pronouns
  replace noun phrases so as to be economical and
  avoid excessive repetition. Sometimes the third
  person pronoun it can refer back not to a noun or
  a noun phrase but to a larger unit, sometimes
  even more than one sentence.

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Demonstrative reference

• involves the demonstrative (this, that , those,
  these) the definite article (the) and the adverbs
  (here, now, there, then) they are a form of
  verbal pointing (known as deixis indicating
  proximity in the text. They can also be used to
  refer to extended text. This can refer to
  something the speaker has said and that to
  something the other person has said. The former
  and the latter to discriminate between the first
  and the second thing mentioned in an earlier part
  of the text.

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Comparative reference

• may be general, expressing the identity,
  similarity or difference between things or
  particular expressing a qualitative or
  quantitative comparison. He earns 12000 a month.
  I wish I had such a salary.
• She was wearing an orange sweater with a purple
  skirt with holes in it. I couldnt bear to see
  her so badly dressed.
• The same man was seen later leaving the pub
  accompanied by a young girl
• Naples is much livelier than other cities.
• His right hand held a formal evening top-hat. He
  had a glove in the other hand.

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Substitution 

• is a grammatical relation where one linguistic
  item substitutes for another. The substituted
  item can only be interpreted by reference to the
  original longer item. There are three kinds of
  substitution nominal, verbal and clausal.
• Nominal substitution is when one or ones in
  pronominal use substitute a singular or a plural
  countable noun Or the substitution of the whole
  noun phrase by the same .

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Nominal substitution

• This Coke is flat. Get me a fresh one.
• This bulb is broken . give me a new one.
• These magazines are old. Lets look at some newer
  ones.
• Give me a pint of Guinness and a packet of
  crisps.
• Ill have the same.

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Verbal substitution

• Substitution of a verb is carried out by means
  of the various forms of do functioning as
  pro-verbs substituting for some lexical verb
  mentioned previously.
• Did you manage to finish that homework? I didnt
  but Martin did.
• Does anyone live in Grosseto? I need a lift.
• I do.

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Clausal substitution

• Replaces a whole clause and not just a verb It
  is carried out by means of so to replace an
  affirmative clause and not to replace a negative
  one
• Is there a strike on Saturday? They say so.
• Are you going to Grosseto? If so, we could travel
  together. If not Ill take the bus.

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Ellipsis

• Ellipsis is similar to substitution but the item
  concerned is replaced by nothing. There is an
  obvious structural gap which can only be
  revealed by a previous sentence.
• Nominal ellipsis involves the omission of a head
  noun or noun phrase.
• Ten students passed and another ten failed.
• Which jeans are you going to wear? These are the
  nicest.

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Verbal ellipsis

• Verbal ellipsis involves the omission of a
  lexical verb form a verb phrase and possibly an
  auxiliary or two, only recoverable from reference
  to a previous sentence.
• Is it going to rain today? It may, it may not.
• Have you been crying? No, laughing.

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Clausal ellipsis

• Clausal ellipsis is concerned with the omission
  of large parts of clauses, whole phrases and
  more.
• Who has taken my CD? Peter has.
• Where did you leave those library books? On the
  floor in the bedroom.

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Conjunction

• Conjunction refers to specific devices,
  conjunctions which link sentences to each other.
• Additive conjunctions add on information
• Adversative conjunctions draw a contrast
• Causal conjunctions make a causal link
• Temporal conjunctions make a time link between
  two sentences.

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Lexical cohesion

• the use of the same or similar or related words
  in successive sentences, is of two types
• Reiteration, where the same word is repeated. Try
  speaking for one minute without repeating a word
  and you will see how difficult it is to avoid
  using reiteration. Some writers try to avoid this
  by the use of what is called elegant variation
  this will use such devices as
• Synonyms
• Superordinates
• General words

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General words

• General words, a range of lexical words which
  need their context to be fully understood which
  describes a certain class of objects.
• What shall I do with all this stuff?
• These are a number of these words, they are
  basically superordinates people, man, woman,
  child, boy to refer to humans. To refer to
  non-human animates we can find creature,
  inanimate concrete things thing, object.
  Inanimate concrete mass stuff. Inanimate abstract
  nouns have a number of possible general words
  like business, matter, affair. Referring to
  actions you can use words like move, action, and
  for places place.

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anaphoric nouns

• A whole range of nouns which talk about the
  discourse itself can be used as cohesion
  producing pro-forms standing for other more
  complete and explicit units such as admission,
  accusation, answer, assumption, belief,
  complaint, conclusion, criticism, hypothesis,
  declaration, point, proposal, statement,
  suggestion.
• For example He wanted to go out and spend a day
  in the hot pools in Saturnia then go to a
  restaurant he knew nearby but no-one was
  interested in that proposal.
• The proposal involves the outing including hot
  pools in Saturnia and the meal at the restaurant.

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Collocation

• either words which habitually go together e.g.
  heavy drinker, or from the same lexical field or
  set of fields, for example an article about a
  road accident might have one set of words which
  are collocates on the topic of injury, another
  to do with roads and weather conditions and
  another to do with the highway code.

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Coherence

• Coherence is concerned with logical links which
  mean that the text makes sense as a whole. It is
  concerned to a great extent with our knowledge of
  the world which comes from our previous
  experience and learning, we use this to process
  texts.
• texts therefore can seem incoherent to people who
  have very different backgrounds from the person
  writing.

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schemata

• We can talk of having certain expectations.
  Sometimes we talk about schemata, frames,
  scenarios to refer to these expectations. They
  often help us to predict the content, finish a
  text which is unfinished or complete an illegible
  text. Background knowledge plays an important
  part in understanding texts