Mediazione Linguistica
Lingua Inglese
I° anno
Group 1 (A – F)
a.a. 2005/2006
Kate Riley
Hanging together
How do texts hang together?
How do series of sentences make up a whole text?
From definition of cohesion in Oxford companion to the English language.
In linguistics, the use of language forms to indicate semantic relations between elements in a discourse.
Grammatical cohesion concerns such matters as reference, ellipsis, substitution, and conjunction; lexical
cohesion concerns ties that are valid only for a particular rext.
Together, cohesion and register contribute to textuality, the sense that something is a text and not a random
collection of sentences.
From ‘A Little Spanish Cookbook’ – recipe for Gazpacho
Mince the tomatoes, cucumber, red pepper and onion.
Crush the garlic and mix it with the salt, pepper and breadcrumbs.
Add the oil, drop by drop, to from a thick paste.
From ‘HP and the half-blood prince’ p 295
Whether it had been built that way, or because he had used magical trickery to make it so, Slughorn’s office
was much larger than the usual teacher’s study.
The ceiling and walls had been draped with emerald, crimson and gold hangings, so that it looked as though
they were all inside a vast tent.
The room was crowded and stuffy and bathed in the red light cast by an ornate golden lamp dangling from
the centre of the ceiling in which fairies were fluttering, each a brilliant speck of light.
From BBC online News
Immigrant workers in the United States are urging supporters to boycott their jobs on Monday in another
nationwide protest over immigration reform.
Millions are expected to stay away from work and school, and avoid spending money, in an effort to show
how much immigrants matter to the economy.
Called A Day Without Immigrants, the protest comes as Congress wrestles with reform of immigration laws.
From conversation
Mum, I’m hungry. Can I have something to eat?
I’m sorry, there isn’t much. A bit of cheese pie, if no one’s had it, or crackers and cheese. Oh and some
bananas
I think I’ll make myself a banana milk shake, OK?
The features you probably used to help you do this are:
Semantic field (food)
Repetition of lexical items
Register (formal vs informal – e.g. academic text vs informal conversation)
Ellipsis
Adverbs of time
Verb forms (e.g. imperatives in recipes)
Use of personal pronouns
Lexical density (e.g. abundance of adjectives in literary text)