Lexical Cohesion In Academic Writing: Abstract Of Applied Linguistics

Abstract

The writings of Halliday and Hasan (1976) established the approach of cohesion in texts in discourse analysts. Depiction on this significant study, researchers have been inquiring cohesion in both monologic and dialogic discourses of different languages (Taboada, 2004; Angermeyer, 2002), genres (Tanskanen, 2006; Hoey, 2005), and registers (Hasan, 1984; Hoey, 1991). The purpose of this study was to introspect lexical cohesion in abstracts of research articles from the Applied Linguistics. The study was designed to : (1) analyze the kinds and frequencies of lexical ties used in writing Applied Linguistics research articles abstracts and (2) to check how the lexical ties used in writing Applied Linguistics research article abstracts deal with the coherence of the abstracts. The research approach was both quantitative and qualitative, 60 abstracts of research articles were collected from Critical Discourse Analysis, Semantics and pragmatics, and Stylistics and English language teaching were sampled. The data was collected from online data sources and had a total of 10 words. The study uses Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) lexical cohesion framework. The analysis unconcealed 950 lexical ties intersententially, wherever Repetition (64%) was the foremost paramount, followed by Collocation(15%) and subordination (12%). the info conjointly incontestable that lexical cohesion contributes enormously within the propositional development of all the move structures typical of analysis article abstract as a genre conjointly utilized in the Applied Linguistics..

Introduction

Cohesion analysis is among the approaches to discourse analysis. The main focus of attention during this style of analysis is to look at however components of texts (spoken & written) are associated with provides a unified whole. Studies of this nature were initiated by Zellig Harris (1952) in his paper titled “Discourse Analysis”

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(Beau Grande& Dressler, 1981; John, 2012; Rotimi, 2010; Widdowson, 2004). Harris examined the patterning of texts by viewing the distribution of equivalent morphemes across the sentences. He did this additionally by applying the notion of “transformations”. To Harris, the upper the amount of equivalence across sentences within the texts.

Research objectives:

1. To identify the kinds and frequencies of lexical ties used in writing Applied Linguistics in analyzing articles abstracts.
2. To look at how the lexical ties used in writing Applied Linguistics analysis article abstracts add to the coherence of the abstracts.

Research Questions:

1. What are the categories and frequencies of lexical ties used in writing Applied Linguistics analysis articles abstracts?
2. How do the lexical ties used in writing Applied Linguistics analysis article abstracts contribute to the coherence of the abstracts?

Halliday and Hasan (1976) divide cohesion into 2 broad categories: grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion. Grammatical cohesion is realized by grammatical things of the closed category – pronouns, prepositions, demonstratives and auxiliaries. The sub-categories below grammatical cohesion include: reference, substitution, deletion and conjunctions. On the opposite hand, lexical cohesion is realized by the members of the open-class things – nouns, adjectives, adverbs and (main) verbs. The classes here include: repetition and Collocation. Repetition members include: repetition, synonymy, near-synonymy, superordinate and general words; Collocation members include: subordination, Antony my, Metonymy, Ordered set, and additionally Relations that don't seem to be Systematic. These classes and relations have nowadays been otherwise revised and changed by Halliday and Hasan themselves and plenty of alternative researchers (what we tend to shall see shortly). because the name implies, Lexical cohesion is the sort of cohesion achieved through the employment of various lexical relations. As highlighted earlier on, his role is vie by nouns, main verbs, adjectives and adverbs (McCarthy, 1991; Egging, 2004). Cohesive parts here enter into completely different linguistics relations with alternative parts in alternative clauses and sentences across the text. In contrast to the reference cohesion, lexical things getting into cohesive relations don't need to have identical referent. though completely different cohesion analysts like McCarthy (1988), Hoey (1991), Martin (1992), Taboada (2004), Tanskanen, (2006)etc. have nowadays succeeded in arising with new and changed models of lexical cohesion, Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) elementary model that invoked the entire development of cohesion, would be used within the gift study. The model has 2 broad categories: repetition and collocation. Every of those classes has some subcategories under that as follows: repetition –repetition, synonymy, close to semantic relation, superordinate and general category words; Collocation –hyponymy, antonym, ordered set, part-for-whole, and relations troublesome to explain semantically. These are concisely explained as follows: repetition one. Repetition: this can be once a lexical item is continual in resultant clauses or sentences. The continual item might seem during a slightly changed type, hence, “exact” or “inexact” repetition. Repetitive things needn't discuss with the identical referent or mean the identical factor. It’s an awfully frequent form of cohesion in texts (Hoey, 1991; Gonzalez, 2010; Taboada, 2004; and Tanskanen, 2006). 2. Synonymy: because the name suggests, this can be the employment of lexical things with similar meanings to realize cohesion. it's one in all the areas of argument among discourse analysts. Some researchers opine that synonymic relations ought to be determined by the context and no reference ought to be created to decontextualized meanings (see Gonzalez, 2010 and Tanskanen, 2006, for example) three. Near-synonymy: this can be the relation between lexical things that are “near” however not precisely synonymous. Halliday and Hasan instance road and path. They’re additionally used for cohesive impact in texts.

Superordinate: this can be the connection between lexical things within which the that means of 1 (mentioned later) dominates the that means of the opposite (mentioned earlier) within the lexical taxonomy e.gascent/task, boy/child etc. 5. General words: these are the kinds of common nouns and a few indefinite pronouns used anaphoric ally to check with already-mentioned things in a very cohesive approach. It’s sometimes preceded by a reference item and it forever shares referent with the previously- mentioned item. Flowerdew (2013) explains that completely different cohesion analysts label general words otherwise as: kind three vocabulary (winter, 1977), repetition nouns (Francis, 1986), shell nouns (Schmid, 2000), signaling nouns (Flowerdew, 2003, 2006, and 2010.

Literature Review

“A survey of the cohesive ties - reference and lexical cohesion- in history books of the second and third grades in guidance school in Iran article” was written by Akram korani in 2012 .his purpose of the study was to investigate whether using cohesive ties in history books of 2nd grade and 3rd grade make it understand or not. His aim of research was to investigate the relationship between number of cohesive ties and ease of text. His research questions were what is the relationship between decreasing the number of cohesive ties and increasing the difficulty of a text is meaning full or not. His linguistic feature was coherence and cohesion. His origin of data was Kermanshah .his population of data was 10,000 words. His study was quantitative. He used spss as a research tool and he takes the t-test.his conclusion was lexical cohesion of 2nd grade books had more cohesive ties than the third grade history books.

“lexical cohesion in academic discourse ;exploring research article abstracts” was written by Zubaru Malah in 2015. His main purpose of writing this article was to examine lexical cohesion in research articles abstracts of applied linguistics. His aim of research was to identify the types and frequencies of lexical ties utilized in writing Applied Linguistics research articles abstracts and examine how the lexical ties utilized in writing.his research questions were. i. What are the types and frequencies of lexical ties utilized in writing Applied Linguistics research articles abstracts? ii. How do the lexical ties utilized in writing Applied Linguistics research article abstracts contribute to the coherence of the abstracts? His linguistic feature was lexical cohesion.this work was done in Nigeria.he took 40 research articles abstracts from critical discourse analysis,second language acquisition and contrastive linguistics.his approach was quantitative as well as qualitative .he used lexical framework of halliday and hassan .in this study researcher directed attention towards further studies across different disciplines.

“A contrastive study of lexical cohesion in introduction in research articles :native english & iranian Applied Linguistics” was written by Hamideh Gholami&Firooze Alizadeh.this research was held in 2017.this study was intended to contrast the frequency and density of use of different types of lexical cohesion in introduction part of native English and Iranian applied linguistics articles .his aim was to conduct a comparative study between how native English and Iranian university scholars use cohesion devices in the introduction of their applied linguistics. This study was done in Iran.His linguistic feature was lexical cohesion.he took 40 introduction parts of native English and Iranian applied linguistcs.his approach was quantitative .he used spss scale and his results indicated that there were statistically significant differences in the use of lexical ties in introduction part of native English and Iranian applied linguistic research.

“Cohesion in texts:A Discourse analysis of a news article in a magazine “was written by tehseen hameed in 2008 in diyala.the main purpose of this study was analyse an English text from a magazine for the purpose of identifying cohesive elements in text.his main aim was to demonstrate the relevance of the cohesive elements that are present in texts which contribute to the overall meaning of the text.his research questions were: which type of cohesion is the most substantive contribution to texture ;and whether this type is effective or not.his linguistic feature was coherence and cohesion.he took 1 news article and analysed it through halliday and hassan lexical cohesion framework.his study was quantitative.his results states that: Understanding how cohesion functions within text to create semantic links is beneficial to students of English as a second or foreign language to help “decode” meaning.

“Study on lexical cohesion in english and persian research articles(A comparitive study)” was written by Fatmeh mirzapour&Maryam ahmedi in 2011 in iran. His purpose of study was to analyze comparatively English and Persian research articles (Linguistics, Literature, and Library and Information disciplines) in terms of number and degree of utilization of sub-types of lexical cohesion in order to appreciate textualization processes in the two languages concerned. His main aim was to analyze comparatively English and Persian research articles.his linguistic feature was lexical cohesion. He took 60 research articles from English and Persian and analyze it through sub type.his approach was quantitative .this study revealed results as In both data the most frequent sub-types are repetition, collocation, synonymy. In English data the general tendency is towards the use of repetition and collocation but Persian data show the general tendency towards the use of repetition and synonymy.

“lexical cohesion corpus linguistic theory &its application in eng language teaching” was written by Michaela Mahlberg in 2000 in Liverpool .his purpose was a corpus theoretical approach to the description of English prioritizes lexis and does not assume that lexical and grammatical phenomena can be clearly distinguished. The article looks at difficulties of teaching cohesion, shows links between communicative approaches to ELT and corpus linguistics, and suggests practical applications of corpus theoretical concepts. His research questions were: how cohesion can be seen in a new light? How cohesion is created by interlocking lexico-grammatical patterns and overlapping lexical items? His linguistic feature was lexical cohesion. He analyzed it through linguistic framework. This study was qualitative and quantitative based on corpus linguistics. And conclusion was A corpus linguistic theory provides a framework for a description of the English language that does not need a strict separation of lexis and grammar.

“Lexical cohesion: patterns in research articles: hard science vs soft science disciplines” was written by Mohsin shahrukhi in 2013 in Canada. The purpose of his study was to investigate the frequencies of lexical cohesion patterns in three soft science disciplines (namely, Sociology, Psychology, and Linguistics) and three hard science disciplines (namely, Chemistry, Physics, and Engineering).his aim of research was to explore lexical cohesion pattern of hard and soft sciences disciplines, and to examine the similarities and differences in the lexical cohesion patterns between hard and soft science articles. His research questions were: Which types of lexical cohesive devices are most frequently distributed in hard and soft science disciplines? Are there any similarities and differences in the patterns of lexical cohesion between hard and soft science disciplines? His linguistic feature was coherence .he took 90 research articles from 3 disciplines and analyze it through Hoyer’s model with the help of corpus linguistics. And the results claimed that there is a significant difference in distribution of lexical cohesion patterns in hard and soft disciplines.

And the last but not least “lexical cohesion, the thesaurus and the structure of text” was written by Jane Morris in 1998 in Canada. His aim was to find efficient ,plausible methods that will cover enough cases to ensure the production of meaningful chains. He took five texts and the size was 183 sentences and analyzed it through thesaurus .this study was qualitative. This was a corpus based study and the results revealed that the lexical chains are computable, and exist in non-domain-specific text, they provide a valuable indicator of text structure. The lexical chains also provide a semantic context for interpreting words, concepts, and sentences.

Methodology and Analysis

The data was collected from online sources specially from university websites from different articles of applied linguistic field. The genre was Critical Discourse analysis, Semantics and pragmatics, Stylistics, ELT. The data was gathered from internet from different journals of applied linguistics on above genres. The data was abstracts from research articles and the number was 60 .the size of data was 10928. This investigation utilizes blended mode structure. It is quantitative in light of the fact that we recognize the sorts, frequencies, and rates of the lexical firm ties utilized by the Applied Linguists in composing their examination articles abstracts. It is additionally subjective in light of the fact that we evaluate how the utilization of these binds adds to the fulfillment of soundness in the edited compositions. The study employs purposive sampling. Solely articles written within the field if Applied Linguistics are sampled for the analysis. The information were sampled from Critical discourse Analysis, semantics and pragmatics, stylistics, and ELT.

The data for this study was selected from 60 journals from applied linguistics from which 60 abstracts were selected.it was basically a corpus based study.the corpus is of 10928 words.

Analysis

The study was based on Halliday and Hassan’s lexical cohesion model. This framework has the subsequent relations:General words, Repetition, Superordinate, Synonymy, Nearsynonymy, Collocation, Antonymy, Meronymy, Comeronymy, and subordination. based on this framework, cohesive relations are established solely intersententially. Intra-sentential cohesion, in keeping with Halliday and Hasan (1976) is provided by the structural relations (not cohesive as a result of they operate solely at intervals the identical sentence).Therefore, keep with this, and additionally going by the character of the info as composed of chiefly easy sentences, we tend to analyze cohesion solely across the sentence and not at intervals the identical sentence. During this analysis, texts are 1st segmental into sentences and every sentence is coded with range. Then, things going in cohesive relations are underlined and features are drawn to attach things that are cohesively connected (as in Hoey, 1991). Cohesive units are often either easy or complicated. Easy cohesive units are accomplished by single-item lexical things, while complicated lexical units are accomplished by multi-items lexical things like phrases, word-groups, or idioms (see additionally Eggins, 2004; Martin, 1992). Therefore, cohesive relations will exist between not simply single words, however additionally teams of words (or phrases). Lexical units also are not orthographically restricted. this enables numerals additionally to be cohesive too.

Discussions

With 10928 words, 956 cohesive links, the corpus had12:15 cohesion magnitude relation. it's thus attention-grabbing to inquire into what the findings of this study demonstrate. It may be seen that the abstracts of Applied Linguistics articles as analyzed during this study were lexically cohesive, and therefore the writers utilized style of cohesive ties in achieving this. as a result of it occurred over tenth, Repetition was the foremost frequent cohesive tie within the corpus. Following repetition, Collocation (100%) and Hyponymy (12%) were the following most frequent sorts of lexical cohesion within the abstracts. Previous studies of cohesion on totally different genres and part-genres of the tutorial discourse have reportable findings the same as the findings of this study. Lewin et al. (2001) explored lexical cohesion and move within the Introduction and Discussion sections of science analysis (SSR) articles. The researchers observe that repetition and synonymousness contribute up to ninety nine of the cohesive relations within the texts. They additionally believe that researchers target these sorts of cohesion so as to attain clarity, precision, and definitions in their writings. Mirzapour and Ahmadi (2011) analyzed lexical cohesion in English and Persian research articles.

They discover that in each English and Persian articles, repetition, collocation and synonymousness are the foremost frequent sorts of lexical cohesion within the corpus. But, whereas English articles tend to exhibit repetition and collocation, the Persian articles tend to exhibit repetition and synonymousness. Mohammed Sayyidina (2010) studied cohesion in educational texts created by Arab EFL writers. The study reveals that repetition is that the most frequent cohesion employed by these writers. Some cohesion studies that targeted on different texts sorts and totally different genres additionally apparently report repetition because the most frequent form of cohesion in their corpus. Examples embody Gonzalez (2010) on phone phone conversations; Taboada (2004) on English and Spanish conversation; and Hoey (1991a) on patterns of noesis in non-narrative texts. On the cohesively wealthy nature of those abstracts, this goes a protracted means in revealing however the writers create their meanings clear particularly by continuance key words, mistreatment collocates, hyponyms and synonyms. With these verdant and genre driven cohesive signals provided by the discourse producers, the discourse receivers would definitely notice the texts quite coherent. we've earlier commented on the generic principle (or purpose) of writing abstracts in analysis papers (that of giving readers a preview of the main focus, method, findings, and conclusions of analysis studies), it may be seen however these linguistic signals designed on the surface text will facilitate however readers would grasp the messages sent. Therefore, it's well to conclude that the employment of those ties contributes to the attainment of generic coherence of the Applied Linguistics analysis articles abstracts.

CONCLUSION

This study reveals the patterns of lexical cohesion typical of the Applied Linguistics analysis articles abstracts. This genre unit of educational discourse is additionally shown to utilize lexical cohesion in building coherence. The scientist suggests similar studies mistreatment larger corpus across totally different disciplines.

References

1. Malah, Z. (2015). Lexical Cohesion in Academic Discourse: Exploring Applied Linguistics Research Articles Abstracts. Research Journal of English Language and Literature, 3(4), 291-299.
2. Korani, A. (2012). A survey of the cohesive ties-reference and lexical cohesion-in history books of the second and third grades in guidance school in Iran. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 47, 240-243.
3. Gholami, H., & Alizadeh, F. (2017). A Contrastive Study of Lexical Cohesion in Introduction in Research Articles: Native English and Iranian Applied Linguistics. Journal of Applied Linguistics and Language Research, 4(8), 307-316.
4. Hameed, H. T. (2008). Cohesion in texts: a discourse analysis of a news article in a magazine. Al-Faith Journal, 37(1), 81-114.
5. Mirzapour, F., & Ahmadi, M. (2011). Study on Lexical Cohesion in English and Persian Research Articles (A Comparative Study). English Language Teaching, 4(4), 245-253.
6. Mahlberg, M. (2009). Corpus linguistic theory and its application in English language teaching. Lexical cohesion and corpus linguistics, 17, 103.
7. Hyland, K. (2008). As can be seen: Lexical bundles and disciplinary variation. English for specific purposes, 27(1), 4-21.
8. Morris, J., & Hirst, G. (1991). Lexical cohesion computed by thesaural relations as an indicator of the structure of text. Computational linguistics, 17(1), 21-48.