An Analysis of Cohesion in Chinese and Native American’s
Argumentative Writing
1.Defining Key Terms
Cohesion and Coherence
Cohesion and coherence are important terms in the study of text analysis. Halliday and Hasan view the concept of cohesion as” a semantic one” (Cohesion 4). They also define the term as “Relations of meaning that exist within the text, and that define it as a text.”(Cohesion4) In their later book, Language, Context and Text, Halliday and Hasan define cohesion and coherence as “Every text is also a context for itself. A text is characterized by Coherence, An important contribution to coherence comes from cohesion: the set of linguistic resources that every language has for linking one part of a text to another.”(48).
In a word, Coherence can be created by cohesion in the way of adding some implicit meaning. As for the definition of both terms, the author agrees with Halliday and Hasan’s point of view. And this paper employs Halliday’s approach in the analysis of cohesion
2.Data Collection and Analysis
2.1 Data collection
This paper is based on analysis of two argumentative writings. The topic of both essays is the debate of drinking age. The first argumentation chosen as data is a FLC freshman’s homework assignment in a key normal university from Zhejiang province. And the second essay in the data is written by John M. McCardell Jr. from . Although the two texts vary from length and perspectives of arguments, they do share the same point of view on limiting drinking age, also, the priority being to compare the cohesion in data. Some deviations like grammar mistakes in texts may possibly exist but they will not affect the results and findings. The data to be analyzed in this
paper is in the appendix.
The intentions of choosing and analyzing argumentative writing as data in this paper are as follows. Firstly, argumentative writing comprised a large portion of the writing part in Chinese high school English test. Secondly, correlation studies on this type of writing are rare. As a pre-service teacher, it would be beneficial for the author to study this writing type and employ the findings into future teaching career.
2.2 Methods on data analysis
This paper employed Halliday’s categories of cohesion (Cohesion 333-339) to analyze data. The methodology of analysis is as follows:
1.Identify the cohesive items in each sentence.
2.Figure out the cohesion type
pare the results in two texts and find differences
The types of cohesion in data are showed in two tables in the part of results of analysis.
3.Results and Discussion
3.1 Results of analysis
After the analysis of two texts, the author found that differences of cohesive items and types are obvious.
Firstly, the cohesive items in text 1 are relatively diversified as different words and expressions like “it” and “that” are used to create text coherence. However, the cohesive items in text 2 are severely repeated, the items “you”and “I”make up a large part in total cohesive items of this text. Secondly, the richness in types of cohesion is different in two texts. The types are almost totally different in text 1 while the result is opposite in text 2. The monotonicity of cohesion types in text 2 may partly be related to the cohesive items. However, in text 2, the bonded sentences are mostly adjacent pairs and simple lexical repetition is used most frequently; in text 1, the bonded sentences for certain cohesive items are not adjacent. Thirdly, there is a significant difference between the two text s’ rate of using paraphrases. Expressions like “The statement” and “the answer” are used in text 1 in order to refer to longer sentences or the phrases in different parts of the text. However, text 2 lacks of
