An Investigation Of Lexical Cohesion In English Majors' Argumentative Writings

Writing, as a tool to express thoughts and feelings, has become an effective way for communication. However, the flexibility, uncertainty and complexity of writing cause readers some difficulties in understanding the text. In college English teaching, students have to face various exam writings. How to express ideas and feelings clearly has become the major issue. Cohesion and coherence, as the texture of a text, provide clues for solving the problem.Cohesion and coherence, as an analyzing approach derived from Discourse Analysis and Contrastive Rhetoric has been frequently used in analyzing all kinds of texts. They are the essential feature that a text inherently has and reflect the textual construction, providing probabilities for realizing meaning. They realize not only the relationship built between word and word, word and sentence, sentence and sentence, sentence and discourse but the topical continuity. Cohesion theory is a very controversial topic for those scholars abroad and at home and it includes the analytical methods from a few prospectives. Among them, the system established by Halliday and Hasan is the most comprehensive and thorough. And the addition made by Hoey to the cohesion theory is creative and favorable. The thesis combines the theories of the three scholars on cohesion and coherence, and their classification of lexical cohesion to argue about the cohesive function of repetition, synonymy, antonymy, superordinate, reference and collocation.The study sets about the most basic meaning unit lexicon and explores the characteristics and problems that students use above six lexical cohesive devices to form a text. The previous empirical studies focus on differences in usage of cohesive devices employed in non-English majors'writings, especially those grammatical cohesive devices. In fact, there are few researches carried out to keep an eye on the top students'writings of English majors, let alone studying lexical cohesion in their writings. The writings of the high grade levels of English major are paid even less attention. Those existing studies are rarely concerned about the specific presentation of lexical cohesive devices and what functions they exercise in students'writings. The thesis aims to investigate the differences lying in using lexical cohesion to construct a text and fulfilling the maximized meaning between students with different language competence. The research questions in the study are:(1) What are the features reflected on the number of lexical cohesive devices of high-scored and low-scored writings?(2) What is the difference of text organization between high-scored and low-scored writings in terms of lexical cohesion?(3) What are lexical problems reflected in high-scored and low-scored writings?The subjects of the research are 72 juniors of English major in the Foreign Language Department of Xinjiang University. The instruments are two similar-style argumentations and there are 62 writings to meet the TEM8 evaluating criteria newly adapted in 2004. Three very experienced intensive-class teachers help examine those writings and give them marks. The author herself identified and categorized all the lexical devices in all the writings with a systematical data collection. The data analysis shows that the high-scored students are better at employing more repetition, synonymy, superordinate, and collocation between sentences to build connections among words so as to construct a cohesive and coherent text and they use lexical cohesion with more accuracy and complexity. The low-scored group makes up less meaning connections between sentences so that their writings lack in intensity and topical continuity. The group tends to overuse reference and underuse collocation, with a result, due to the lack of practical words their compositions lack in substantial content, let alone forming textual connections. Moreover, their use in superordinate and synonymy is quite unsatisfying. Both the two groups seldom adopt inter-sentence antonymy to construct a text but the intra-sentence antonymy, which proves that antonymy is just a rhetorical device rather than an element to form a cohesive text. The analysis demonstrates that the high-scored students are more competent than the low-scored students in using lexicon and diction to organize a meaningful text; their sense and awareness of constructing an intense and meaningful text is stronger than the low-scored students...