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Cohesion In English Legal Documents And Fairy Tales

Posted on:2002-09-06Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:Z P ZhanFull Text:PDF
GTID:2156360062475373Subject:English Language and Literature
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Cohesion in this thesis is defined as a semantic process. Unlike coherence, cohesion is visible and superficial to us. The notable forms of cohesive links are the conjunctions such as and and but, and the deixes such as the and this. All these lexes help to link the sentences together into a discourse or a text.In analyzing cohesion in English, Halliday and Hasan (1976) look on cohesion as a semantic process in respond to the discourse itself, which is also dynamic. They declare two kinds of cohesive devices梩he grammatical ones and the semantic ones. The grammatical ones refer to the lexes which bring to the discourse the grammatical sense such as the deixes the and that; the semantic sense refers to the vocabularies which really make sense, with the most prominent class of nouns. With this classification as the basis, the two linguists again subdivide the category of semantic sense into three types: reference, conjunction and lexical cohesion. The types belonging to grammatical cohesion are substitution and ellipsis. It is from this point that the thesis starts.With the framework of Halliday and Hasan as the basis, the thesis sets its aim to uncover the relation between the use of cohesion and the genre, and the intralink between two kinds of genres, narratives and non-narratives. In order to fulfill the goal, a corpus is built for analysis. There are two kinds of discourses chosen: fairy tales and legal documents, each having 25 texts. The fairy tales and legal documents, as Figure 1 by Finegan (Cf. Chapter One) shows, situate on two ends of the continuum of genres, the fairy tales embodying the narratives and the legal documents standing for the non-narratives. While analyzing the texts, we find out that references have a highest frequency in fairy tales while in legal documents, lexical cohesions have a highest frequency. So from here it can be concluded that the use and frequency of cohesive devices is genre-related. And furthermore, the thesis looks into the possibility of the intralink of the two genres. Accordingly, the thesis introduces two concepts梘rammaticalization and markedness. From the phenomenon of the high frequency of conjunctions in legal documents, the hypothesis of this thesis is that non-narratives are forms once derived from narratives by grammaticalization, which is the routinization of a grammatical phenomenon, and is the marked form in contrast to narratives. In other words, non-narratives are analogous with narratives. To prove the hypothesis suggested, the author uses the statistical method to analyze thecorpus, making use of a formula:Numbers of tiesDistribution of theDevices=*100%Numbers of the clausesThe result is not beyond expectation. From the analysis, the author found that in the discourses of fairy tales, cohesion reference ranks the first; while in the discourses of legal documents, cohesion lexical cohesion ranks the first. With this discovery, it is safe to say that the distribution of cohesion is genre-related, and further, it supports the hypothesis that there does exist intralink between the discourses of narratives and non-narratives.However, during the analysis, there are some problems exist affecting the result of the analysis. The thorniest one is the counting of ties. To make it clear, the paper goes deeper in this problem, trying to find a satisfying answer. So, the author divides three types of cohesive devices according to their syntactic function. As Halliday and Hasan (1976) argues that being grammatical or lexical is not so clear cut, the author drew the conclusion that every kind of devices has two facets, the grammatical sense, and the lexical sense. When either of the sense is weak, the device can only occur with the others but cannot stand independently. Accordingly, ellipsis and conjunction are classified as the independent types; the reference and substitutions, the semi-independent types (excluding the neutral the); and lexical cohesion and the neutral the, the dependent types for there is no instance to prove that they...
Keywords/Search Tags:Cohesion, Fairy Tales, Legal Documents
PDF Full Text Request
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