PHƯƠNG TIỆN LIÊN kết văn BẢN TRONG SÁCH GIÁO TRÌNH ENGLISH FOR ECONOMICS CHO SINH VIÊN năm 3, KHOA SPTA, ĐHNN, ĐHQGHN
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ABSTRACT
This study analyzes lexical cohesive devices to see how often they appear in
Business English course book, from which conclusions are made for both teachers and
students in hopes of improving reading economic texts skill and broadening
specialized vocabulary. The description of data was adopted from the taxonomy of
cohesion by Halliday and Hasan (1976). The data for analysis were taken from five
reading texts in the course book English for Economics by Assoc. Prof. Nguyễn Xuân
Thơm (PhD.). After data collection, analysis and statistic were implemented, and the
results of the study were compared within the text. The results revealed that all types
of lexical cohesive devices found in the BE sample texts at different rates all
contributed to the text cohesion; and of all the cohesive devices, repetition is used
most frequently. At the end of the study, some implications for teaching and learning
BE have been made in context of ULIS.
i
TABLE OF CONTENTS
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A
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iv
LIST OF ABBREVIATION
Assoc. Prof. – Associate Professor
BE – Business English
EFE – English for Economics
ESP – English for Specific Purpose
FELTE – Faculty of English Language Teacher Education
MOET – Ministry of Education and Training
ULIS – University of Languages and International Studies
VNU – Vietnam National University
v
LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES
Table 1 – List of texts analyzed in the study
Table 2 – Number of lexical cohesive devices in sample texts
Table 3 – Frequency of appearance of Repetition
Table 4 – Frequency of appearance of Synonym
Table 5 – Frequency of appearance of Antonym
Table 6 – Frequency of appearance of antonym’s sub-types
Table 7 – Frequency of appearance of Superordinate
Table 8 – Frequency of appearance of Collocation
Figure 1 – Data collecting procedure
Figure 2 – Data analyzing procedure
Figure 3 – Frequency of occurrence of lexical cohesive devices in BE texts
Figure 4 – Frequency of appearance of repetition’s sub-types
vi
PART I: INTRODUCTION
1. Title of the paper
A study on lexical cohesive devices in the texts from ESP course book
“English for Economics” by Assoc. Prof. Nguyễn Xuân Thơm, PhD, and
pedagogical implications for teaching ESP to third year students at FELTE, ULIS,
VNU.
2. Rationale of the study
Over the past two decades, it can be obviously seen that the teaching and
learning English, especially English for Specific Purposes (ESP) have changed
dramatically. In the 1990s, ESP was taught in some selected universities, but now,
it becomes a compulsory subject in almost every universities and colleges that
follow the curriculum established by the Ministry of Education and Training
(MOET). This course provides students with background knowledge and
vocabulary of specialist fields, therefore it helps them greatly in their future careers.
Being aware of the major role of ESP, the researcher found an urge to improve the
teaching and learning of ESP for students at FELTE, University of Languages and
International Studies. However, there remain some difficulties as follows:
ESP is taught to Economics English students in their second year and to
other FELTE students in their third year, accounting for only 45 credit hours. In
other words, two-thirds of the students whose majors are not Economic English,
have only one semester to learn ESP. Within that limited time, those students can
hardly learn much knowledge of ESP. Most non-Economic English students reach
their advance level of English by the end of their third year, so reading economic
texts is not a problem. However, in order to understand and remember all the terms
and economic issues, it requires a longer period of time than 45 credit hours. There
are complaints from the students about the difficulties they encounter while
learning reading passages in BE. It may derive from students’ lack of interest. For
most of them, since economics is not their major, the students have not found it
necessary and interesting to learn. Moreover, the main activity in ESP class is
1
translating for three hours; therefore, learning ESP possibly turns out to private
talking and disorder in class.
The above reasons have induced the researcher to conduct a research on
reading section, as it is the main part of every unit in EFE course book. As a
language learner who has taken ESP course in the third year, the researcher has a
desire to improve both the teaching and learning EPS from an internal linguistic
perspective, rather than the external skill-practicing one. As a result, the researcher
decide to make an investigation into cohesive devices used in the texts of BE
course book, especially lexical devices in hopes that it would help students as well
as teachers more in understanding the reading texts and learning vocabulary.
3. Scope of the study
Within the framework of a graduation paper, the study mainly focus on
lexical cohesive devices, the frequency of occurrence of these devices in some texts
in BE course book. The study investigates how often these lexical cohesive devices
appear, and how they affect the text comprehending and vocabulary learning. After
examining and analyzing the collected data, some pedagogical implications are
drawn for both teachers and students of BE.
4. Objectives of the study
The paper aims at briefly reviewing theories in related concepts including:
discourse, text, coherence and cohesion, and cohesive device; and investigating
how the lexical cohesive ties are used in the chosen economic texts of the course
book EFE. The research particularly attempts to answer the above mentioned
research questions.
5. Research questions
In order to achieve the objectives of the study, the following questions are
raised:
• How is lexical cohesion via lexical cohesive devices realized in
Economic texts?
2
• What lexical cohesive devices are used most frequently in the
economic texts of course book “English for Economics” (EFE)?
• What are the overall features of BE discourses in terms of lexical
cohesion?
6. Methods of the study
6.1. Data collection instrument
With the purpose of pointing out lexical cohesive devices in ten chosen
economic texts, document observation is used to collect data.
6.2. Data collection procedure
Figure 1: Data collecting procedure
6.3. Data analysis method
In this paper, the author uses descriptive analysis and statistic research
methods to achieve the research objectives. The data used for data analysis are
collected from five texts chosen in EFE course book. The author then identifies and
calculates all the lexical cohesive items of each type of lexical cohesion as well as
its subtypes that occur in the chosen texts. The data collected are then compared
within a text or among the categories and according to the analytical purposes using
comparative method and contrastive analysis
7. Significance of the study
This paper is classified as a primary research; therefore can be used as the
foundation for the author’s further studies or reference for any research in the same
field. Also, the recognition of lexical cohesive devices in the Business English (BE)
course book can bring future pedagogical conclusion to ESP teachers on how to
increase the understandings of students while reading BE texts.
3
Step 1:
Five texts are
chosen from the
EFE course book
Step 2:
All lexical cohesive
devices in the texts
are investigated
Step 3:
All lexical cohesive
devices are
categorized
PART II: DEVELOPMENT
CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW
In this chapter, review on other studies in related field is examined to
investigate any possible gaps. In addition, several terms and notions about
discourse and discourse analysis are explained to get a general view on the subject
matter.
1. Discourse and discourse analysis
1.1. Discourse
The definition of discourse is shared among several famous linguists. David
Nunan (1995) said that discourse was “a stretch of language consisting of several
sentences which are perceived as being related in some way”. A similar perspective
was given before that in 1992 by Crystal when he defined discourse as “a
continuous stretch of (especially spoken) language larger than a sentence, often
constituting a coherent unit, such as a sermon, argument or narrative”.
Hoa, N (2004) shares a similar viewpoint in which discourse is defined as “a
combination of sentences (or utterances) used to get our message across”. Nguyen
also provides a more explicit explanation that discourse carries its own meaning
and is more than the whole meaning of its components.
1.2. Discourse and text
The difference between discourse and text has long been discussed, but still
there are two trends going on among linguists towards these terms.
On one side, discourse and text are distinguished. According to Cook (1989,
cited in Nunan, 1993), discourse and text are two different categories. The former is
a meaningful, unified and purposive stretch of language, whereas the latter is the
one being interpreted formally without context. Though Nunan (1993) puts both
discourse and text around the core of a communicative event, he still separates
them as text referring to any written record and discourse being the interpretation in
context.
4
On the other hand, text and discourse are considered to refer to the same
subject matter and may replace each other. Halliday and Hasan (1976) provide the
most appropriate definition of ‘text’. They consider a text as written or spoken
stretches of the text, .i.e., a text is the stretch of written or spoken language which
proposes that language follows a linear sequence where one line of text follows
another with each line being linked to the previous line. This linear progression of
text creates a context of meaning. Contextual meaning at the paragraph level is
referred to as coherence while their internal properties of meaning are referred to as
cohesion. The following definition by Halliday and Hasan (1976) determines the
main factors that constitute a text:
“A text is a unit of language in use. It is not a grammatical unit, like a
clause or a sentence; and it is not defined by its size. A text is sometimes
envisaged to be some kind of super sentence, a grammatical unit that is
larger than a sentence but is related to a sentence in the same way that a
sentence is related to a clause, a clause to a group and so on: by
constituency, the composition of larger units out of smaller ones. But this is
misleading. A text is not something that like a sentence, only bigger; it is
something that differs from a sentence in kind […] A text does not consist of
sentences, it is realized by, or encoded in, sentences.”
(Halliday and Hasan, 1976:1-2)
For further analysis, it is noteworthy that texts exist in both written and
spoken language. In the former, it is produced by the writers with letters, whereas
in the latter, it only becomes language in use if it is recorded, .i.e., it will create
discourse. Thus, text is a linguistic product of discourse that can be studied without
reference to its contextual elements as an evidence of linguistic rules. However,
what is important is that text can only include some factors from the contexts which
are relevant to its interpretation. A text is not just a sequence of sentences strung
together, but a sequence of units that can be sentences or parts of sentences, and are
connected in some contextually appropriate ways. “A text as a whole must exhibit
the related, but distinguishable properties of cohesion and coherence.” (Lyon,
5
1983:198, cited in Azzouz 2009) Thus cohesion is concerned with formal
connectedness. Moreover, according to McCarthy (2001), it is necessary to have
the contribution of schemas’ activation to form a text because the interaction
between the readers’ perspective and the text can be seen through the relation
between sentences and the way a coherent text is created by combining units of
meaning. Thus, text and discourse are interchangeable, focusing on language
“beyond the sentence”, .i.e., to take context as part of any utterances or sentences.
Hence, for the purpose of this study, the researcher would like to take the
second viewpoint about text and discourse as the base. Thus, the words text and
discourse are treated interchangeably.
1.3. Spoken and written discourse
Although spoken and written discourse share some similar features; for
example, they are used “to get things done, to provide information and to
entertain” (Nunan, 1993:8), discourse analysts have made a clear distinction
between written and spoken discourse, and gradually they have become aware of
the need to study each type separately.
David Nunan (1993) makes distinction between spoken and written
discourse based on three categories: grammar, lexical density and situation.
Spoken language involves some problems which are absent in written
discourse, such as a degree of spontaneity when producing speech. Spoken
language can be adjusted according to the interlocutor by the use of some available
international features. The speaker can ensure the comprehensibility by modifying
utterances in communicative situations, where the interlocutor shows a sign of
comprehension (Brown and Yule, 1983). Meanwhile, in written discourse, the
writer has the rights to modify some written language where necessary, as well as
the ability to check up words in the dictionary where needed.
“Lexical density is a characteristic difference between spoken and written
discourse. Written discourse displays a much higher ratio of lexical (content)
6
words […] to total running words.” (Hoang, 2006:24, cited in Pham 2012), so
written discourse seems to deliver more information.
According to Nunan (1993), the difference between spoken and written
discourse lies in the context, .i.e., the situation to what, how and when the text is
performed. For example, the written text is used to communicate with people who
are not in the same setting, or for those occasions on which a record is required.
In the scope of this paper which analyzes the lexical cohesion in written
discourse of BE, the researcher only takes into account the features of written
discourse.
1.4. Discourse analysis
Linguists had long been concerned with the analysis of single sentences
where the focus was on morphology and phonology area. The attention was then
shifted to the sentence level by the advent of Chomsky’s transformational
Generative Grammar in 1957. However, Coulthard (1977) criticizes that the
analysis is not really adequate because it still focuses on the formal properties of
language rather than achieving meaning. Linguists have become aware of the use of
context and language function (Cook, 1989). This awareness came with Harris’s
paper published with the title “Discourse Analysis” in 1952. Later in the 1960s and
the 1970s, there were several studies of language in context, namely the work of
Austin (1962), Hymes (1964), Halliday and Hasan (1976), Grice (1975), M. A. K.
Halliday (1973), Sinclair and Coulthard (1977),Van Dijk (1972) and many others.
McCarthy (1991) states that “Discourse analysis has grown into a wide ranging
and heterogeneous discipline which finds its unity in the description of language
above the sentence and an interest in the contexts and cultural influences which
effect language in use.”
Discourse is related to many disciplines such as: semiotics, sociology,
psychology, etc. Brown and Yule (1983) claim that “the term discourse analysis
has come to be used with a range of meanings which cover a wide range of
7
activities at the intersection of many disciplines from sociolinguistics,
philosophical linguistics to computational linguistics.”
The principle concern of discourse analysis is to examine how any language
produced by a given participant whether spoken or written is used in
communication for a given situation in a given setting. Thus, discourse analysis is
concerned with written and spoken forms. According to Hoa (2000), “discourse
analysis is a study of how and for what purposes language is used in a certain
context of situation and the linguistic means to carry out these purposes”. He
claims that the speakers or writers are always at the main stage of communication
where they commence topics, set up presuppositions, define information structures
and create inference; meanwhile, the hearers or readers interpret and draw
inferences. He concludes that “this is essentially what makes communication a two-
way process by means of language.”
1.5. Discourse context
It is undeniable that context is very important in the interpretation of
discourse.
Halliday (1991) defined context as “the event that are going on around”
when people speak and write, while Yule (1983) referred it to the “physical
context” or the “linguistic context” in which words are used. Nunan (1993) claimed
that context fell into two categories: linguistic and non-linguistic. The former is any
language surrounding the piece of discourse under analysis, whereas the latter
includes the types of communicative events; topics, purpose and setting of the
event; the participants and the relationships between them as well as the
background knowledge and assumptions underlying the communicative event.
Therefore, context is the environment in which a discourse occurs, which
refers to both linguistic and non-linguistic aspects. In order to make a successful
communicative event, listeners or readers have to understand the context of the
discourse.
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2. Cohesion and coherence
These two concepts of discourse – cohesion and coherence are considered
interrelated. Cohesion can be seen as a way to indicate coherence, but should not be
identified with coherence and assumed that there is a one-to-one correspondence
between them. (Hoa, N 2000)
2.1. Cohesion
Cohesion plays an important role in the comprehension of written discourse,
because readers depend on the cohesion and coherence of texts to comprehend.
Cohesion locates within a text and is different from coherence which is established
within the reader during the process of reading. Since cohesion creates semantic
continuity, it allows coherence and comprehensibility.
Tanskanen (1984) referred cohesion to “the grammatical and lexical
elements on the surface of a text which can form connections between parts of the
text.” While Halliday and Hasan (1976) claimed that “the concept of cohesion is a
semantic one; it refers to relations and meaning that exist within the text, and that
define it as a text.”
To illustrate, we can take an example: a cooking instruction says “Wash and
core six cooking apples. Put them in a fire proof dish” the item “them” in the
second sentence refers back to “six cooking apples” in the first sentence. In this
case, we would not understand the second sentence without referring back to the
first one which gives signal to what “them” stands for. This means, “them” is an
item to which it facilitates the readers’ understanding of the relation between
sentences in a text.
2.2. Coherence
Once again, according to Halliday and Hasan (1976), “coherence is the
underlying organizer which makes the words and sentences into a unified
discourse that conforms to a consistent world picture. Coherent text is meaningful,
unified and gives the impression of ‘hanging together”.”
9
In grammar, ungrammatical sentences are those that do not fit together in a
sensible way, either with or without mistakes in individual sentences. They are
called incoherence in text and discourse analysis, which leads to a key issue of
finding what makes some texts hang together while others are incoherent.
3. Cohesive devices
3.1. Cohesive devices
A coherent text is the one with grammatical sentences and/or containing
certain words and expressions that connect the sentences together. Such linking
words and expressions are called cohesive devices, which keep different parts of a
text together.
In terms of usage, cohesive devices help us distinguish new information
from the old information. When reading a text without cohesive devices, readers
would have an impression of reading all new and irrelevant information, though we
can still depend on our background knowledge or clues from the text to organize
the information without the help of cohesive devices. A text is still considered
coherent if it has grammatical sentences, though the writer or speaker does not use
cohesive devices. In contrast, a text with only cohesive devices and no grammatical
sentences can confuse readers or hearers, and so the text becomes incoherent. This
means a communication discourse must be coherent but not necessarily cohesive.
3.2. Classification
Halliday and Hasan (1976) identify the five types of cohesion: reference
cohesion, substitution cohesion, ellipsis cohesion, conjunctive cohesion, and lexical
cohesion. The first four types belong to the categories of grammatical cohesion.
Lexical cohesion, on the other hand, refers to the relations between any lexical
items and previously occurring items in the text, which is independent from the
grammatical category. The five types are further explained below.
3.2.1. Referential cohesion
Thompson (1996) gave an explicit explanation of reference when he wrote
“reference is the set of grammatical resources which allow the speaker to indicate
10
whether something is repeated from somewhere else in the text or whether it has
not yet appeared in the text.”
Reference is divided into two types, which are anaphoric reference and
cataphoric reference. Anaphoric reference draws the readers or listeners backwards
to the previously mentioned entity, while cataphoric reference draws the readers or
listeners forward to identify the elements to which the reference items refer (Nunan
1993).
3.2.2. Substitution cohesion
Substitution is “the replacement of one item by another” which is “a
relation between linguistic items, such as words or phrases…, a relation on the
lexico-grammatical level” (Halliday and Hasan 1976:89).
Substitution cohesion contains sense identity relation, not the reference
identity relation. It has three subdivisions namely clausal substitution, verbal
substitution, and nominal substitution.
3.2.3. Elliptical cohesion
The absence of a word, a phrase or a clause in a sentence whose meaning is
still understood is called elliptical cohesion. Like substitution cohesion, elliptical
cohesion also consists of clausal ellipsis, verbal ellipsis, and nominal ellipsis.
3.2.4. Conjunctive cohesion
Look at the following example.
E.g. She brushed her teeth before she went to bed.
The word “before” suggests a sequence, signaling that what is expressed in
the second clause follows what is expressed in the first clause.
Halliday and Hasan (1976) pointed out that “conjunctive elements are
cohesive not in themselves but indirectly, by virtue of their specific meanings; they
are not primarily devices for reaching out into the preceding or following text, but
they express certain meanings which presuppose the presence of other components
in the discourse.”
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Conjunctive cohesion can be seen in four ways: additive (similarly, likewise,
in the same way, and, or…); adversative (although, though, despite, however,
nevertheless…); causal (hence, then, so, because, therefore…) and temporal (then,
next, after that, at last…)
3.2.5. Lexical cohesion
Lexical cohesion is the last type of cohesion according to the classification
of Halliday and Hasan (1976). Unlike the rest four types which are associated with
syntactic elements, lexical cohesion has nothing to do with syntactic relations. For
this reason, lexical cohesion is the most difficult type to define since it is
vocabulary-driven and based on lexical relations. It is divided into two main
categories: reiteration and collocation, which are further explained below.
3.2.5.1. Reiteration
Reiteration is a form of lexical cohesion which comprises of the repetition of
a lexical item to refer back to a lexical item and number of things in between as the
use of synonyms, near-synonyms, antonym or superordinate (Halliday and Hasan,
1976).
3.2.5.2. Collocation
According to Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary 8
th
, collocation is a
group of words in a language that happens very often and more frequently than
would happen by chance. Another explicit explanation is that collocation is a group
of words whose meaning relates to the same certain contents. (e.g. car, gas, driver)
(Pham 2012).
Within the scope of the study, the researcher focuses on the two sub-types of
lexical cohesion which are reiteration (repetition, synonym, antonym, and
superordinate) and collocation.
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CHAPTER 2: METHODOLOGY
In this chapter, the research methodology is carefully analyzed, including:
research design, the setting of the study, participants. Besides, data collecting
instruments and procedure are put into consideration as well, and same for data
analysis methods.
1. Research design
In this particular study, the researcher decides to use a combination of both
qualitative research and quantitative research. Scollon (2001) stated that critical
discourse analysis is a form of qualitative research, and so qualitative research is
used as the main research method in this study. The researcher provides careful and
detailed descriptions of data, and works intensively with only some of the texts
chosen. However, as to support the purpose of the study and to answer the research
questions, the number of lexical cohesive devices appearing in the texts is
calculated to measure its frequencies.
As shown in the book Second Language Research - Methodology and
Design (Mackey, A & Gass, S M 2005), quantitative research generally starts with
an experimental design in which a hypothesis is followed by the quantification of
data and some sort of numerical analysis is carried out. Qualitative studies, on the
other hand, generally are not set up as experiments; the data cannot be easily
quantified, and the analysis is interpretive rather than statistical.
2. Setting of the study
ESP has become one of the compulsory courses for fast-track students at
FELTE; however it is not among the main subjects, so it has a translation approach.
The EFE course book is designed for students to translate economic texts between
Vietnamese and English, and vice versa. Through the translation work, the students
also learn new words, terminologies, and new knowledge about economics.
13
3. Participants
Within the scope of this study, five texts from the EFE course book are
selected for analysis, which are:
Table 1: List of texts analyzed in the study
Chapter Text Page
Chapter 1 GOING GLOBAL 13
Chapter 2 DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER 31
Chapter 3 ENTREPRENEURS 47
Chapter 4 IF THE PRICE IS RIGHT 68
Chapter 6 RE-ENGINEERING THE CORPORATION 91
The above five texts are extracted from five units of the course book EFE
which is used for third year students at ULIS in their ESP course. Most of the units
in the course book have three main parts:
An informative reading text giving general ideas and key points of
related topic;
! Exercises that can be either listening or reading practice;
3. Two reading passages, one in Vietnamese and one in English, for
translation practice.
The five texts are five English reading passages taken from the third part of
the unit. They provide further examples and analyze deeper in the economic issues
being discussed, including a large amount of relevant economic terms.
4. Data collecting instruments
4.1. Observation of documents
Observation usually refers to “methods of generating data which involved
the researcher immersing in a research setting, and systematically observing
dimensions of that setting, interactions, relationships, actions, events and so on,
14
within it” (Mason, 1996). The researcher aims at providing careful description of
the texts, and listing all lexical cohesive devices through some combinations of
notes.
Observation of documents is used to gain understanding of lexical cohesive
devices in the texts. Documents used in this study are the written, physical texts in
the course book.
5. Data analyzing procedure
Figure 2: Data analyzing procedure
6. Data analysis methods
6.1. Content analysis
Content analysis starts off as a method for analyzing messages in the media,
but more recently, it has been applied more widely to almost any form of
communication, involving materials such as essays, and in this case, texts.
In this study, the researcher reads and analyzes the five chosen texts to find
all lexical items.
15
1
2
3
4
5
6.2. Statistical analysis
In this study, the lexical cohesive devices are listed, counted, and
categorized in groups depending on their characteristics. Mean, mode, and median
are often used to carry out the above process.
In this study, after analyzing texts and listing out all lexical items, the
researcher counts the number of items and categorizes them in groups according to
the framework. Mode and median are not used in the calculation process however
the percentage of each lexical types and sub-types are applied to see the trend and
frequency of lexical devices.
16
CHAPTER 3: RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
In this chapter, the lexical cohesive devices used in five different texts are
analyzed. Statistics description is used to demonstrate the results.
1. An overview of the study
According to Halliday and Hasan (1976), in order to make texts hang
together experientially lexical cohesion is used as the central device. Hasan (1984)
and Hoey (1991) both agreed that forty to fifty percent of a text’s cohesive ties are
lexical, which proves the importance of this type of cohesion.
This paper adopts the taxonomies provided by Halliday and Hasan (1976) as
mentioned in the previous part, in which lexical cohesion is divided into two main
types: reiteration and collocation. Reiteration is sub-classified into four sub-types:
repetition, synonym, antonym, and superordinate.
The occurrence of lexical cohesive ties found in the five BE texts is
presented in the following table:
Table 2: Number of lexical cohesive devices in sample texts
Types of
cohesive
devices
Repetition Synonymy Antonymy Superordinat
e
Collocatio
n
Total
Number
of items
200 62 43 102 74 481
The overview of lexical cohesive devices in the five BE texts reveals that:
there is a preference in using repetition, superordinate and collocation in written
discourses of the book and a lower frequency of other types. There are totally 481
lexical items identified in BE reading texts of which 200 are repetitions, accounting
for 41.6%. Superordinate has a count of 102, equivalent to 21.2%. Next is
collocation device with the occurrence of 74 times, accounts for 15.4%, followed
by synonymy with 62 items counted and the lowest frequency is antonymy device
17
with 43 items counted equal to 8.9%. The following figure shows the difference in
the contribution of lexical cohesive ties in the sample texts
Figure 3: Frequency of occurrence of lexical cohesive devices in BE texts
2. Analysis of lexical cohesive devices in BE reading texts
2.1. Reiteration
Reiteration is termed by Halliday and Hasan (1976) and explained as "the
repetition of a lexical item, or the occurrence of a synonym of some kind, in the
context of reference; that is, where the two occurrences have the same referent.
Typically, therefore, a reiterated lexical item is accompanied by a referent item
usually 'the' or a demonstrative" (Halliday & Hasan 1976: 319). The role of a
referent is claimed to be absolutely important in creating the cohesive force in
discourses. Obviously, a reiterated item followed by a referent item is therefore
cohesive by reference as in the following example:
There is a boy climbing that tree
The boy's going to fall if he doesn't take care. (repetition)
The lad's going to fall if he doesn't take care. (synonym)
The child's going to fall if he doesn't take care. (superordinate)
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2.1.1. Repetition
Repetition refers to the same lexical item with the same meaning occurring
more than once in the same discourse. Repetition is categorized by Hoey (1991)
into simple repetition and complex repetition.
2.1.1.1. Simple repetition
Simple repetition is when a lexical item that has occurred previously is now
repeated exactly or without great changes in grammatical paradigm. For example,
"is lent" is the simple repetition of "lends". Here are some more examples:
Example in text 1:
Perhaps the biggest challenge now facing the international advertising
industry is that of establishing “world brands” by appealing to the global
consumer in all of us. For whiles there will always be national and niche
markets which require specific marketing strategies, global operations call
for global campaigns, Professor Theodore Levitt of Harvard Business
School first put forward the theory of “the globalization of markets”. But
the idea that there are more similarities between cultures than differences
goes back to the popular image of the “global village”
In the above example, the adjective global is repeated exactly with its
grammatical function, it is, therefore, considered simple repetition.
One way of making a discourse coherent is repeating important words which
are used more than once in the same discourse. In all the sample texts investigated
in this thesis, most of the topic words occur repeatedly. For example, in text 3
“Entrepreneurs”, the topic word entrepreneurs is repeated seven times. In text 4
“If the price is right”, the word price is used repeatedly 11 times, whereas the word
diamond is repeated up to 13 times in text 2 with the topic “Diamonds are
forever”. The followings are some typical examples taken from the sample texts:
Example in text 2:
The high price of diamond is a triumph of the commercial clout and
marketing genius of De Beers, the South African conglomerate that has 80
percent takes in world diamond supply. By strictly regulating the mining
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