1. INTRODUCTION
1.4 Research Questions
This study aims to examine cohesion in Taiwanese college students’ English writing quantitatively and qualitatively by adopting three instruments: (a) TOEFL scoring scheme, (b) a combination model of Halliday and Hansan's (1976), Stotsky’s (1983) and Hasan’s (1985) taxonomy of cohesion and (c) T-test. First, the focus is on comparison between high and low proficiency writers in their use of cohesive devices in narration and followed by exposition. Second, the focus is on comparison of high and low proficiency writers’ use of cohesive devices between narration and exposition.
Four research questions are designed as follows.
1. Is there any difference in high and low proficiency level students’ use of cohesive devices in narrative writing?
2. Is there any difference in high and low proficiency level students’ use of cohesive devices in expository writing?
3. Is there any difference in high proficiency level students’ use of cohesive devices between narration and exposition?
4. Is there any difference in low proficiency level students’ use of cohesive devices between narration and exposition?
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CHAPTER TWO LITERATURE REVIEW
To explore whether different proficiency writers will show differences in their employment of cohesion devices in different genres, relevant literature is reviewed in this chapter, including cohesion theory, criticism of cohesion theory and previous studies on cohesion in writing. Specifically, Halliday and Hasan’s cohesion theory (1976) is first introduced, followed by Stotsky‘s model (1983) and Hasan’s model (1985). Next, studies of writing on different proficiency groups and studies of writing across genres are presented.
2.1 Cohesion Theory
Halliday and Hasan (1976) viewed ‘TEXT’ as a unified whole, a unit of meaning. A text has its ‘TEXTURE’ that distinguishes it from other non-text. To make a text possess the property of texture, certain linguistic features like cohesive devices may be present in the passage to make it a united whole and give it texture; that is, these linguistic features make a sequence of disconnected sentences constitute a cohesive relation. When any two sentences are said to be cohesive in a text, it doesn’t merely mean that these two sentences are related. Rather, it means that what readers presuppose can be fulfilled by relying on the presupposed element in the text. To be brief, the cohesive relation is not merely achieved by the presence of the presupposition. The presupposed element must be present either in the preceding sentence or the following one to satisfy the presupposition. As stated by Halliday and Hasan, cohesion is a semantic unit and it occurs where the INTERPRETATION of the presupposing element in the discourse is dependent on that of another presupposed one.
Cohesive relations can be realized either through grammar or through vocabulary, which can be referred to as grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion
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respectively. Take the following sentences for example.
(2.1) Wash and core six cooking apples.
Put the apples into a fireproof dish. (Halliday & Hasan, 1976, p. 3)
At least, two cohesive ties can be detected from the sentences above. One is grammatical and the other a lexical cohesive tie. The grammatical cohesive tie is evidenced by the anaphoric function of reference the, which refers back to the six cooking apples in the previous sentence while lexical cohesion is achieved by the repetition of the noun apples, which produces the cohesive effect between the two lines.
2.1.1 Grammatical Cohesive Devices
Both grammatical and lexical cohesion devices can be further categorized. First of all, grammatical cohesion devices can be classified as follows.
1. Reference-The cohesive function of references in discourse can mainly be divided into two types: exophora and endophora. Exphoric references are references that must be made according to the context of the situation, while endophoric references are those that can retrieve information made in the text. In other words, exphoric references are situational references, and endophoric references are textual references and both differ in respect of whether or not the referential meaning is retrieved through the context or the text. Generally speaking, different registers display different amounts of exophoric references and the discourse type of speech normally involves a great deal of expohoric references. According to Halliday and Hasan (1976), only endophoric references contribute to the cohesion of the text because they contribute to the interpretation of the text.
Reference classified as endophora can be further specified as anaphora or cataphora reference. The referent of anaphoric references is identified by looking back in the text while that of cataphoric references is identified by looking
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forward in the text, as illustrated by the diagram below.
Reference
As for the types of references, there are three types—personal, demonstrative, and comparative.
(1) Personal reference: Personal reference consists of three types: (a) Personal pronouns: I, you, we, she, he, they, it, me, us, him, her, them, one…; (b) Possessive determiners: my, your, his, her, its and their; (c) Possessive pronouns:
mine, yours, ours, theirs, his, hers...
(2) Demonstrative reference: The referent of demonstrative reference is established on a scale of proximity in time or in space. And it includes: this, that, these, those,
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Smith.
(2.6) Who are those colorful characters?—Those must be the presidential guards.
(3) Comparative reference: The comparative reference is indirect reference by means of IDENTITY or SIMILATIRY such as same, identical, similar, equal, other, else, better, less, more….
(2.7) It’s the same act as the one we say yesterday.
(Halliday & Hasan, 1976, p. 78)
The interpretation of the italic elements (e.g., He, His) in the examples of personal reference and demonstrative references relies on the presupposed element expressed in the preceding sentence, while the interpretation of the italic elements (e.g., same) in the example of comparative reference relies on the following sentence and both consequently, lead to the cohesion of the text.
2. Substitution-Different from reference, substitution is a relation between linguistic items such as words, phrases, or clauses. However, it does share some similarities with reference as it is anaphoric and the substitute item creates a cohesive link with the preceding text. Generally, there are three types of substitution: nominal, verbal, and clausal.
(1) Nominal substitution
(2.8) These biscuits are stale. Get some fresh ones.
(Halliday & Hasan, 1976, p. 92) (2) Verbal substitution
(2.9) John is smoking more now than he used to do.
(Halliday & Hasan, 1976, p. 115) (3) Clausal substitution
(2.10) Is there going to be an earthquake?—It says so.
(Halliday & Hasan, 1976, p. 130)
The ones in the first sentence anaphorically refers back to the biscuits in the previous sentence and creates a cohesive relation between the two sentences. As for the
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cohesive device do in the second example, its specific action is recoverable from the preceding sentence. Finally, different from the nominal and verbal substitution, so in the third sentence substitutes for the whole clause there is going to be an earthquake in the previous sentence and forms a cohesive relation between the two sentences.
3. Ellipsis-Simply speaking, ellipsis is ‘substitution by zero.’ There are three types of ellipsis: nominal ellipsis, verbal ellipsis, and clausal ellipsis.
(1) Nominal Ellipsis: Ellipsis within the nominal group is called nominal ellipsis.
(2.11) Four other Oysters followed them, and yet another four.
(Halliday & Hasan, 1976, p. 148)
(2) Verbal Ellipsis: Ellipsis within the verbal group is called verbal ellipsis.
(2.12) Have you been swimming?—Yes, I have.
(2.13) What have you been doing?—Swimming.
(Halliday & Hasan, 1976, p. 167)
(3) Clausal Ellipsis: The structure of clause is composed of two elements—modal and propositional element. The modal element includes the subject plus the finite elements in the verbal group while the propositional element is the remainder of the verbal group. The following two examples show the ellipsis of a modal element and the ellipsis of a propositional element.
(2.14) What was the Duke going to do?—Plant a row of poplars in the park.
(Halliday & Hasan, 1976, p. 197)
(2.15) Who was going to plant a row of poplars in the park?—The Duke was.
(Halliday & Hasan, 1976, p. 198)
4. Conjunction-The conjunctive elements presuppose the presence of other components in the discourse so they indirectly construct the cohesive relationship inter-sententially. There are four types: additive, adversative, causal, and temporal sequence.
(1) Additive
(2.16) For the whole day he climbed up the steep mountainside, almost without stopping. And in all this time he met no one.
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(Halliday & Hasan, 1976, p. 238) (2) Adversative
(2.17) She failed. However, she’s tried her best.
(Halliday & Hasan, 1976, p. 252) (3) Causal
(2.18) …She felt that there was no time to be lost, as she was shrinking rapidly;
so she got to work at once to eat some of the other bit.
(Halliday & Hasan, 1976, p. 256) (4) Temporal sequence
(2.19) Finally, we should record that the influence of the humanists contributed a good deal towards the final decay of the plainsong tradition.
(Halliday & Hasan, 1976, p. 264) 2.1.2 Lexical Cohesive Devices
When compared to grammatical cohesion, the effect of lexical cohesion is as not obvious and easy to estimate. Simply put, the cohesive relation each lexical item denotes cannot be detected unless it is by reference to the text. Similarly, each lexical item in the discourse will contribute to the texture of the text and the context or the environment will decide the textual meaning of the lexical item. To make the text cohesive in the discourse, the words in the discourse must be related to a certain degree. In other words, it is the occurrence of the item in the context of related lexical items that provides cohesion and gives to the passage the quality of text (Hallliday &
Hasan, 1976). Lexical cohesive devices can be further categorized into two types:
reiteration and collocation (Halliday & Hasan, 1976). In Halliday and Hasan’s framework, the category of reiteration includes (a) same word (repetition), (b) synonym (or near-synonym), (c) superordinate, and (d) general word.
Repetition of the same lexical item creates a coherent relation in the text. In the following example, to further support the idea that there are children everywhere, the word children is repeated three times. The repetition of children all refer back to the word children in the first sentence and it is used to describe the fact that children are
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enjoying various recreational facilities.
(2.20) There are children everywhere. There are children on the swing, children on the slides, and children on the marry-go-around.
(Halliday & Hasan, 1989, p. 81)
Unlike repetition, synonyms are different phonological words which have the same or very similar meanings (Saeed, 1997). In other words, words which are synonyms have identical meanings but this does not mean that their meanings totally overlap with each other (Halliday & Hasan, 1987). Pairs like couch/sofa, boy/lad, lawyer/attorney etc. are synonymous ones. Under the classification of reiteration, it also includes superordinate; superordinate is a relation held between a general class and its sub-classes (Halliday & Hasan, 1987). That is, the word relation is a hierarchical one in that under the general words includes a series of words with a more specific meaning. The hierarchical semantic relation can be visualized by the following taxonomy of human artifacts: (Saeed, 1997, p. 69)
tool
hammer saw chisel
hacksaw jigsaw
The last sub-categorization of reiteration is the use of general nouns in the text.
Although general nouns are lexical items, they are on the borderline between a lexical item and a grammatical item. Moreover, general nouns are usually accompanied by the reference item the, and the whole combination functions like an anaphoric reference item such as “Henry seems convinced there’s money in dairy farming. I don’t know what gave him that idea.” (Halliday & Hasan, 1976, p. 275) What exactly that idea refers to all depends on the preceding context. From the above example, we can infer that “that idea” refers anaphorically to “there’s money in dairy farming”. In
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addition to the anaphoric function of general nouns, another function of general nouns is to express interpersonal attitude, especially those referring to human beings, by adding attitudinal modifiers as shown in the dears, the poor dears, the stupid thing, and the lucky fellow (Halliday & Hasan, 1976, p. 276). These expressions are used to convey familiarity, sympathy or occasionally contempt. Other examples of common general nouns are presented as follows:
1. Human noun: people, person, man, woman, child, boy, girl 2. Non-human animate noun: creature
3. Inanimate concrete count noun: thing, object 4. Inanimate concrete mass noun: stuff
5. Inanimate abstract noun: business, affair, matter 6. Action noun: move
7. Place noun: place
8. Fact noun: question, idea (Halliday & Hasan, 1976, p. 274)
Aside from using reiteration to achieve cohesion in a text, collocation is the second type of lexical devices that can achieve the cohesive effect. The definition of collocation is “the association of lexical items that regularly co-occurs” (Halliday &
Hasan, 1987, p. 284). The co-occurrence of the lexicon enables cohesion to form within the text. Further, as pointed out by Halliday and Hasan (1976), it is the most problematic part of lexical cohesion because in addition to the cover term ‘reiteration’, other lexical items that contribute to the cohesion of the text are subsumed under the category of collocation. Under the categorization of collocation, antonym such as cold/hot and like/hate are lexicon that will contribute to the cohesion of the text. The second type of collocation contains pairs of words drawn from the same ordered series. For instance, days of the week and measurements of currency. Another kind of collocation involves lexical items that are related in terms of the part-to-whole or part-to-part semantic relation. For example, the semantic relation between car/brake and box/lid are part-to-whole relation while mouth/chin, verse/chorus are part-to-part
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relation. The last is that pairs of words may be the co-hyponyms of the same superordinate item such as chair/table etc.
Even though the suggested framework provided above seems to serve as a panacea to understand the cohesion relation in the discourse, a limitation within this framework continues to exist. As Halliday and Hasan stated, there is no clear criterion for deciding the lexical cohesive relation within the text, for a lexical item is not bound to a particular grammatical category or to a particular morphological form (Halliday & Hasan, 1976, p. 291).Therefore, from time to time seeing clearly enough to determine whether a pair of words such as tooth and dental are counted as the same lexical item but in different morphological forms or are counted as different lexical items is not possible. The only way to solve the puzzle is to refer back to the text itself.
Despite this limitation of indeterminacy in its application to actual instances, Halliday and Hasan’s cohesive framework is still essential to help us understand what makes a text cohesive.
2.2 Critique of Cohesion Theory
In spite of the fact that Halliday and Hasan’s 1976 framework of cohesion theory was recognized in discourse analysis and was adopted by many researchers to analyze textual cohesion and coherence (McCulley, 1985; Norment, 1982; Neuner, 1987; Tierney & Mosenthal, 1983; Wittey & Faigley, 1981 and so on), critique of the framework continues to occur. Crowhurst in her 1987 study found that twelfth graders in the writing of argumentation had higher incidence of lexical repetition than sixth graders. In her analysis, Crowhurst discovered the employment of lexical repetition caused different situations to arise depending on which of two school grades a student belonged to. While older graders’ use of lexical repetition reflected their maturity to elaborate and summarize arguments; younger graders’ use of lexical repetition reflected an immaturity that caused them to employ limited vocabulary over and over.
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From Crowhurst's study, we can learn that quantitative and qualitative analysis of the cohesive devices are both indispensable when attempting to reflect different graders' problems accurately. Additionally, some researchers criticized the incompleteness of cohesive paradigm as it failed to consider cohesive errors such as an inappropriate tie or the failure to provide a needed tie, which could serve as an index of lack of cohesion (Fitzgerald & Spiegel, 1986).
Another researcher Stotsky (1983) highlighted several problems with Halliday and Hasan’s categorization of the lexical cohesive devices for they failed to note the text-forming relationships created by the use of derivatives or derivational elements.
According to Halliday and Hasan’s theory (1976), a lexical item is not bound to a particular grammatical category or a particular morphological form (p. 291). For instance, talk, talks, talked and talking are all counted as one lexical item. Aside from this, there are “no perfectly clear criteria for deciding just how far this principle can be extended.” Consequently, noun, nominal, nominalize and nominalization are
“presumably” all one lexical item. Hence, if any derivatives are deemed as mere repetition of the base word, some crucial information about the textual pattern could be lost (Stotsky, 1983). On the other hand, through the display of derivatives in expository writing, writers can demonstrate their stylistic flexibility and lexical maturity while preserving basic meaning. To be more specific, the occurrence of the derivatives in writing can indirectly imply whether or not the writer is sophisticated.
In addition, Stotsky stated that derivational elements appear to be useful in creating an additional cohesive tie aside from the antonymous related items such as idealistic/realistic and result in multiple cohesive ties, which strengthen the cohesive quality of a text and compensate for the increasing density of ideas as writers consolidate phrases into words to achieve a more succinct prose style. Moreover, the employment of derivatives is a predominant feature of expository writing because it
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can not only make the meaning more precise but also make the expression more concise. This is why derivatives should be considered a distinct and separate category from repetition, synonymy, or antonym when stylistic differences in ways of achieving lexical cohesion are examined across different kinds of discourse (Stotsky, 1983, p. 434).
Thirdly, Stotsky also pointed out that Halliday and Hasan omitted to mention how a cohesive tie created by superordinate plus subordinate would be classified because only the subordinate words which precede the superordinate words are discussed. When it comes to the explanation of superordinate, Halliday and Hasan stated that it refers to any item whose meaning included that of the earlier one. In other words, any item that dominates the earlier one in the lexical taxonomy is a superordinate. Take the following sentence as an example: There is a boy climbing the old elm. That tree isn’t very safe (Halliday & Hasan, 1987, p. 280); in the case of which the tree is the superordinate of elm. As for whether the opposite position of superordinate and subordinate in the sentence could achieve cohesive function and could be counted as another cohesive type or not was not discussed. Therefore, Stotsky doubted that some useful information about text construction may be lost if we failed to classify the use of a superordinate word followed by a subordinate item as one type of cohesion because in essay writing; sometimes it is common to present the general ideas first, followed by detailed discussion or examples.
Finally, Stotsky asserted that readers have no clear-cut criteria except for their subjective judgment based on the topic and experience to judge lexical collocation.
Therefore, it is the "the most problematical part of lexical cohesion” because any two lexical items that tend to occur in similar contexts and form the cohesive effect is collocation (Halliday & Hasan, 1976, p. 284). Moreover, Stotsky claimed that antonym should be singled out as a separate category like synonyms because there is
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no difference in understanding, comprehending or producing these two expressions.
Thus, she doubted what linguistic principles separated these two expressions when there are no apparent differences in processing the similar or opposite counterpart.
To restate all the points, it is clear that Halliday and Hasan’s scheme needs some modification. The quantitative method of counting the number of cohesive device
To restate all the points, it is clear that Halliday and Hasan’s scheme needs some modification. The quantitative method of counting the number of cohesive device