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TRACING THE PATTERNS. If a speaker or learner of English hears or reads a passage of the language which is more than one sentence in length, he or she can normally decide without difficulty whether it forms a unified whole or is just a collection of unrelated sentences. Cohesion (or its absence) is what makes the difference between the two. “Cohesion is what gives the text texture” (Halliday and Hasan) Lexical Cohesion. One of the strategies one uses is the understanding of words and phrases in the English language – the vocabulary system. In particular, one uses the awareness of relationships between words: this is called lexical cohesion. There are many different kinds of relationships that could be involved: · Direct repetition; · Synonyms, or near-synonyms (use of words with similar meaning); · Superordination (hyponymy, where one word encompasses another in meaning); · Antonyms; · Specific – general meaning (words referring to the same thing or person, but where one has more detail than the other); · Ordered series (words that we know as a set series, for example, the days of the week, months of the year or seasons); · Whole – part (where one term names a part of an item and the other word describes it in full). A much more general aspect of lexical cohesion is the use by writers of particular semantic fields: this means referring to a specific area of experience or knowledge. The clearest examples of semantic fields occur in the specialist language of occupations. However, semantic fields do not have to contain technical language, or occupational terms. It may be simply that a text uses several words that all refer to the same subject matter, activity or experience. Sometimes, writers deliberately weave together different semantic fields in order to foreground a particular idea. Foregrounding is a type of highlighting – it means that the writer is drawing attention to something and making the reader view it in a certain way. Another option that a writer has, in using vocabulary from different semantic field, is to entwine the words and phrases so closely that the two systems are difficult to disentangle. One way of bringing different systems of vocabulary together is to use metaphor: this is where one thing is described as if it were another. Because metaphor tells us that one thing is another, it is a powerful factor in positioning the reader and constituting a particular viewpoint. Another widely-ranging strategy … used n writing … an understanding of levels of formality in the vocabulary. We talk about language being more or less formal as a way of describing how we vary our language according to the context we are in: for example, we will all use a relatively informal type of language when we are in the pub, relaxing with friends, compared with the more formal style we are likely to produce in a court of law or in an interview for a job. Formality can also be a reflection of social-group membership, particularly occupation, where some types of occupational language have retained special words which sound very formal in everyday discourse: for example, a financial consultant or solicitor might use the word ‘remuneration’ where the rest of us would use ‘salary’ or just ‘wages’. Calling a type of language formal or informal refers to more than simply vocabulary, but vocabulary will be an important contributory factor in a reader’s impression of the formality of a text. For example, although the words ‘home’, ‘house’, ‘residence’, and ‘domicile’ might refer to exactly the same building, they vary a great deal in formality and therefore to replace one with another in a text will create a very different effect. tend to have a particular level of formality associated with them (although changes in the level of formality can occur as part of the process of language change). But the operation of formality is actually more complex and subtle than that: for example, a writer, group of writers or members of an occupational group may write about the same subject in different ways according to the audience they are aiming at, and the purport of their text. Sometimes, writers deliberately manipulate formal and informal styles in order to achieve certain effects. Grammatical Cohesion The way lexical items are woven together through a text was referred to as lexical cohesion. The way the grammatical features are woven together across sentence boundaries is called grammatical cohesion. Anyone who can speak and/or write a language knows grammar, as these structural patterns are learnt very early in life as an integral part of learning language; knowing grammar is different from knowing how to label parts of sentences, however. […] Reference The Penguin Concise English Dictionary defines ‘to refer’ as ‘to send for information’, ‘to seek information’.
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