A Study Of Reiteration Of Lexical Cohesion In English Texts

As an important component of discourse analysis,lexical cohesion plays an important role in the formation and analysis of texts.Since Halliday and Hasan put forward lexical cohesion in the book Cohesion in English in 1976,the research on this pattern has never stopped.In this book,they divide lexical cohesion into reiteration and collocation.In term of reiteration,Halliday and Hasan classify it into five categories:repetition,synonym,near-synonym,hyponym and general word.After that,based on Halliday and Hasan's classification,many scholars at home and abroad,such as Gutwinski(1976),Hoey(1991),Hu Zhuanglin(1994)and Huang Guowen(1988),have put forward their own opinions.Throughout the research status at home and abroad,it is not difficult to find that many scholars just emphasize the significance of Halliday's or Hoey's researches to teaching;they just explore different texts based on the former theories;the classifications proposed are relatively one-sided.For these reasons,the author attempts to explore the reiteration by studying corpus,so as to try to put forward a new classification of reiteration.In addition,most of the discourses selected randomly by researchers are reading comprehension or texts in English textbooks.These kinds of researches are characterized by relatively single corpus,strong subjectivity and non-uniform length of discourses.However,it has been found that the use of cloze can probe the other contents of reiteration better.The two reasons are as follows.Firstly,there are 20 blanks among most of the cloze taken by college students,which makes it easier to scientifically examine whether reiteration is helpful for students to comprehend discourse or not,and the statistics obtained are relatively objective,too.Secondly,the research results are useful for college English teaching and learning,and its effect is comparatively obvious to see.Therefore,this paper attempts to start from the cloze corpus to explore what other contents of reiteration still exist in discourses besides the known contents of reiteration;whether the frequency of reiteration in discourses with different subjects is significant;which kind of classification of reiteration accounts for the highest proportion in the corpus,and which is the lowest;and whether studying reiteration is beneficial for students to comprehend discourses.This study comprises two steps.The first step is two quantitative researches.To begin with,this thesis tends to proceed with the category of reiteration of lexical cohesion in cloze,and analyze and research scientifically the corpus comprised of 45 cloze texts.Later,it will illustrate the type of reiteration and its appearance in cloze with different subjects.In view of the objectivity of material selection,the cloze in CET-4(College English Test Bend 4),TEM-4(Test for English Major Bend 4)and NEEP(National Entrance Examination for Postgraduates)will be chosen as the corpus.The above three types of tests include the students both from English majors and non-English majors,which guarantees the breadth and width of the selected materials.In addition,millions of students take these tests every year in China,which fully ensures the authority of the corpus.And the results indicate that there indeed exist other contents of reiteration in discourses besides what we have known,such as the reiteration of the words with the same roots,the reiteration of the near-synonym with different parts of speech and the reiteration of general-specific in hyponymy;the emergence of reiteration in discourses with different subjects is obvious,occupying about 1/4 to 1/3;among that,the highest proportion of reiteration happens to near-synonym which takes up about half of the total of reiteration in forty-five cloze,and the lowest one goes to hyponymy with 9%.Here is another quantitative research.In order to probe whether this study can improve students' understanding of discourses,this paper makes an empirical comparative study of 90 non-English junior students in three universities-Hebei Medical University,Northeast Normal University and Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture.The result shows that mastering reiteration is of great benefit to students comprehension,and the students who have learned that knowledge can get higher scores.The second step is the qualitative research.In order to study whether reiteration can help students understanding on discourses better,and whether teachers pay more attention to teaching students' knowledge about discourse cohesion,one student in each university is selected randomly to do an interview.The results exhibit that students consider that learning and grasping reiteration is helpful to apprehend the texts;the teachers only mention a little about reiteration in class,and seldom teach students that knowledge systematically.As for the theoretical and practical significance,it extends the contents of reiteration in lexical cohesion,and puts forward a new mode,which can inspire more researchers to focus on the theory itself.Besides,by studying cloze corpus,it also broadens the scope and perspective of the research on discourses.Furthermore,this study will improve students' thinking coherence and logical reasoning.The last one is that it to a certain extend will guide the language teaching and learning.Here are the limitations.Because of the research methods,some of the results and process may be influenced by the author.And due to the limitation of time,this study only chooses cloze as the corpus,as for whether it goes for the other discourses is not sure at present,which gives us a good perspective for further study to validate,for example,people can choose other discourses,select more samples or combine quantitative way with qualitative way together to research the role of reiteration in teaching and learning.