Tài liệu Lexical cohesion used in the story “white fang” by jack london

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING THE UNIVERSITY OF QUY NHON VÕ THỊ NGỌC ÁI LEXICAL COHESION USED IN THE STORY “WHITE FANG” BY JACK LONDON Field: ENGLISH LINGUISTICS Code: 8 22 02 01 Supervisor: NGU THIEN HUNG, Ph.D BỘ GIÁO DỤC VÀ ĐÀO TẠO TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC QUY NHƠN VÕ THỊ NGỌC ÁI LIÊN KẾT NGỮ VỰNG TRONG TIỂU THUYẾT ―NANH TRẮNG” CỦA TÁC GIẢ JACK LONDON Chuyên ngành: Ngôn ngữ Anh Code: 8 22 02 01 Người hướng dẫn: TS.NGŨ THIỆN HÙNG i STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP I totally assure that the thesis ―Lexical cohesion used in the novel ―White Fang‖ by Jack London‘‘ is my own work for the purpose of graduating the MA course of English Linguistics. The content of this thesis has not been published or written by any other authors except for some references which are used in this thesis. The thesis has not been submitted for any degree or diploma in any university. Quy Nhon, August, 2022 VO THI NGOC AI ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS During the period of doing the research, considerable support and great encouragement from my teachers, friends and family were given to me so that I could overcome difficulties and complete my master thesis. First of all, I would like to show my deep gratitude to my respected supervisor, Dr. Ngu Thien Hung who gives me his helpful guidance and stands by me from the beginning to the end of my thesis. Without his accompaniment and encouragement, I could hardly finish this MA thesis. Second, I owe an unpaid debt to all the qualified and experienced teachers who helped me broaden my knowledge about English Linguistics and my friendly classmates who gave me unforgettable memories. Last but not least, I am extremely thankful to my beloved family and my friends for their love, care and support during the fulfillment of this study. iii ABSTRACT This study aims to examine the lexical cohesion realized through lexical cohesive devices in the first four chapters of ―White Fang‖ by Jack London in order to gain an insight into the distribution of types of lexical devices and their textual functions. As a descriptive study, the thesis sought the qualitative and quantitative information for the issues of the lexical cohesive devices used in the first four chapters of ―White Fang‖ by Jack London, the lexical ties performed by these lexical cohesive devices in the Thematic Progression of the text of the novel. Adopting the descriptive framework by Halliday and Hasan (1976) and Halliday and Matthiessen (2004), the study analyzed the data collected from clauses and sentences containing lexical items that created the cohesion and coherence of the text. The analysis of 1.002 instances of Reiteration and Collocation reveals that instances of Reiteration with repetition of the same word(s), synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, meronymy and general words outnumbered those of collocation with binomials and lexical chains. The instances of lexical cohesion were also found with the textual functions as elaborating, extending and enhancing. In fulfilling these functions, the lexical items that realized the cohesive text also were acknowledged with their contribution to Thematic progression of the text of the novel. Finally, implications about the teaching and learning concerning lexical cohesion were put forwards to the employment of the framework of Systemic Functional Grammar by Halliday and Matthiessen (2004) in analyzing the cohesion of a text, and the recommendation to pedagogical moves in enhancing the interpretation of a text and the writing skills with the use of lexical devices to achieve a cohesive text. iv TABLE OF CONTENT STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP ................................................................... i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .............................................................................. ii ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................... iii TABLE OF CONTENT ................................................................................... iv LIST OF TABLES ........................................................................................... vi LIST OF FIGURES......................................................................................... vii CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION ..................................................................... 1 1.1. Rationale..................................................................................................... 1 1.2. Aims of study ............................................................................................. 4 1.3. Research questions ..................................................................................... 4 1.4. Scope of the study ...................................................................................... 4 1.5. Justification of study .................................................................................. 5 1.6. Organization of the study ........................................................................... 6 CHAPTER 2. LITERATURE REVIEW AND THEORETICAL BACKGROUND ............................................................................................... 7 2.1. Review of previous studies ........................................................................ 7 2.2. Theoretical Background ........................................................................... 11 2.2.1. Definitions of coherence .......................................................................... 11 2.2.2. Definitions of cohesion ............................................................................ 12 2.2.3. Lexical cohesion ...................................................................................... 13 2.2.3.1. Reiteration ............................................................................................ 14 2.2.3.2. Collocation ........................................................................................... 16 2.2.4. Theme – Rheme Structure ........................................................................ 18 2.2.5. Thematic Development ............................................................................ 19 2.3. Summary .................................................................................................. 21 CHAPTER 3. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODOLOGY ..........................22 3.1. Research design ........................................................................................ 22 v 3.2. Research methods..................................................................................... 22 3.3. Data collection ......................................................................................... 23 3.3.1. Sample and sources of data ...................................................................... 23 3.3.2. Data Collection Procedures ...................................................................... 24 3.4. Data analysis ............................................................................................ 24 CHAPTER 4. FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS .......................................... 27 4.1. Lexical Devices ....................................................................................... 27 4.1.1. Reiteration .............................................................................................. 28 4.1.2. Collocation .............................................................................................. 50 4.2.2. Extending ................................................................................................ 64 4.2.3. Enhancing ................................................................................................ 66 4.3. Lexical Cohesive Devices as Tools for Thematic Progression................ 73 4.4. Summary .................................................................................................. 84 CHAPTER 5. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS .............................. 85 5.1. Conclusions .............................................................................................. 85 5.2. Implication to the Language Teaching and Learning .............................. 87 5.3. Limitation and Recommedation to Further Study ................................... 88 REFERENCES ................................................................................................ 90 APPENDICES vi LIST OF TABLES Table 4.1. Quantitative results of lexical devices used in first four chapters of the novel White Fang by Jack London ..................................... 27 Table 4.2. Distribution of Reiteration with lexical items in the first four chapters ......................................................................................... 28 Table 4.3. Reiteration of the same word(s) ..................................................... 36 Table 4.4. Reiteration of synonyms ............................................................... 41 Table 4.5. Reiteration with antonyms ............................................................. 43 Table 4.6. Reiteration with hyonyms and hypernyms .................................... 46 Table 4.7. Reiteration with general words ...................................................... 48 Table 4.8. Reiteration with meronyms ............................................................ 50 Table 4.9. Collocation with binomials ............................................................ 53 Table 4.10. Collocations with lexical chains .................................................. 55 Table 4.11. Textual functions of lexical Devices of cohesion ........................ 72 Table 4.12. Thematic Progression Patterns with Lexical cohesion ................ 81 vii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 2.1. zig-zag Thematic Progression pattern (Eggins, 1994) ................. 19 Figure 2.2. Repeated Thematic Progression Pattern (adapted from Danes, 1974) ............................................................................................. 20 Figure 2.3. Derived Thematic Progression Pattern (adapted from Eggins, 2004) ............................................................................................. 21 1 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1.1. Rationale From the linguistic view, text is a communicative occurrence which meets seven standards of textuality that should be satisfied for a text to be communicative. Beaugrande and Dressler (1992), these standards are the constitutive principles defining communicative purpose of the text and help to realize the connectedness of occurrences through syntactic relations on the surface (cohesion); through conceptual relations in the text (coherence), through the attitudes of the author and reader to the text (intentionality and acceptability), through the transfer of the information (informativity), through the setting (situationality); and through the reciprocal relationship of separate texts (intertextuality). In linguistics and literary studies, textuality is the property by which successive sentences form a coherent text. Among the three basic domains of textuality - texture, structure, and context, the term texture encompases the various devices used in establishing continuity of sense and thus making a sequence of sentences working in terms of both cohesion and coherence. Cohesion analysis has been a growing interest in several branches of linguistics. Halliday and Hasan (1976), Halliday and Matthiessen (2004), Tanskanen (2006) aimed to develop an appropriate taxonomy for the analysis of all kinds of texts. Newmark (1987), the topic of cohesion has always been the most useful constituent of discourse analysis or text linguistics applicable to translation. Analysis of cohesive devices within a text gives us more insight into how writers structure what they want to say and may be crucial factors in our judgments of whether something is well-written or not. Cohesion helps to 2 create texture through meaning relation that requires one element to be interpreted by reference to another. In other words, there is cohesion, where the interpretation of an item in the discourse depends upon reference being made to some other item in the discourse. Along with the emphasis on the importance of text cohesion to show text relations, Givón (1983) stated that as the realizations of cohesion, cohesive devices enable communicators to produce language which is connected, coherent, and relevant to the subject at hand. Among the different types of cohesive devices, namely, reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical cohesion (Haliday & Hasan, 1976), lexical cohesion is of great importance and has different applications in translation studies, computational linguistics, information retrieval researches and teaching and learning issues. Lexical cohesion involves the choice of vocabulary that is concerned with the relationship that exists between lexical items in a text such as words and phrases. Different genres may show a tendency towards the use of some specific types of different cohesive devices for creating texts. Since their role in discourse organization is genre-dependent, cohesion is dominant in certain genres, whereas in other genres coherence might be more dominant in the organization of discourse. Halliday & Hasan (1976), cohesion is sensitive to the varieties of discourse. Although lexical cohesion is present in the cohesion structure of all these forms of discourse, the distribution of the cohesive types strongly differs for genres. We can find occurrence of certain cohesive links more typically in certain varieties of discourse than others. For instance, for investigations of participant chains, referential cohesion is a characteristic type of narrative discourse (Fox, 1987). In spite of the importance of lexical cohesion in shaping the unity and connectedness of text and the distribution of cohesion in different genres, the 3 literature review has seen few descriptive studies on lexical cohesion in literary works. There have been some studies on the lexical cohesive devices, namely reframed narrativity in literary translation: an investigation of the explicitation of cohesive chains (Li & Li, 2021), analysis of lexical cohesion on the students‘ writing (Sadibutar, 2021), the contribution of lexical cohesion to the text cohesion in EFL students‘ expository texts (Adiantika, 2018). In sum, there have been many studies concerning with different aspects of lexical cohesion in which studies on the meaning and structure of a text also mention the relationship between clauses in clause complexes. Although lexical cohesion have been studied in details as lexical cohesion between clauses, these studies only focused on fairy tales, short stories, not much on novels. The latest work that has investigated the cohesive devices used Chapter 5 ―White Fang and the Indians‖ in the novel ―White Fang‖ by Jack London in view of Systemic Functional Linguiscs (SFG) was conducted by Nguyen (2012). Unfortunately, this descriptive study put its focus on the grammatical cohesive devices with two types of logico-semantic relation – expansion and projection. Also, the textual functions of the lexical devices to realize cohesion in the text, namely Thematic Progression has not been mentioned and discussed in these descriptive studies. Moreover, binomials, a kind of collocation which are frequently used in literary texts have not been addressed as one type of lexical items for lexical cohesion. For those reasons, I chose the novel ―White Fang‖ written by Jack London to investigate the lexical cohesion within simple clauses and between clauses in clause complexes. The reason for my selecting the novel is not only because of its popularity but also because of its precise prose style. Moreover, doing this research gives me a chance to get to know the novel with lessons on bravery, patience, tolerance and love through the use of lexical cohesion in the text. 4 1.2. Aims of study This study aims to examine the lexical cohesion realized through lexical cohesive devices in the first four chapters of ―White Fang‖ by Jack London in order to gain an insight into the distribution of types of lexical devices and their textual functions. 1.3. Research questions To achieve the aims of study, the thesis attempts to answer the following questions. 1) What are the lexical cohesive devices used in the first four chapters of ―White Fang‖ by Jack London? 2) What are the lexical ties performed by the lexical cohesive devices used in the first four chapters of ―White Fang‖ by Jack London? 3) What are the textual functions performed by these lexical cohesive devices in Thematic Progression in the first four chapters of ―White Fang‖ by Jack London? 1.4. Scope of the study The novel consists of 20 chapters but I chose only the first four chapters as the illustrated material for the analysis because through these chapters, the lexical cohesion are realized quite clearly as the lexical chains that set up the scenes of the story at the beginning. As the result, readers can understand more about the lexical cohesion used to start the journey along with the writer. Thus, my study was restricted to the examination of Lexical cohesion used in first four chapters in the novel ―White Fang‖ by Jack London. The issues of lexical cohesive devices to realize cohesion of the text of the four chapters and the textual functions performed by these lexical cohesive devices in Thematic Progression in the first four chapters of ―White Fang‖ by Jack London will be discussed in the perspecitives of Halliday and Hasan‘s (1976) model of lexical cohesion and Halliday and Matthiessen 5 (2004) with the analytical framework of SFG. Also, the two terms binomial and lexical chain as naming the lexical items for cohesion were used in this study. The former was used with the sense other than the linguistic definition of a fossilized collocation with an irreversible pair of words and the latter was defined as instances of any lexical items that were used to build up a cohesive chain under the same theme or context in sentences and paragraphs. Although the lexico-grammar in view of SFG discusses the issues of cohesion on the aspects of clause complexing which involves taxis and logico-semantics, such problems of interdependency between clauses as parataxis and hypotaxis, the two literary terms that describe the way clauses in complex or simple sentences are ordered, positioned, and related to one another in the clause relation in the texts will not be dealt with in this study. Regarding the Logico-semantics, the nature of the relation between clauses concerning extension, elaboration and enhancement will be discussed in terms of lexical relations between lexical items in a sentence or clauses, between clauses and paragraphs without referring to projection of locution or ideas. 1.5. Justification of study The outcome of this study is expected to bring an insight into the use of lexical devices to realize cohesion. Specifically the distribution of the different types of lexical devices in the first four chapters of the novel ―White Fang‖ by Jack London. Also, the analysis of the lexical relations in the text is hoped to bring some pedagogical implications to the teaching and learning of English, especially the assessment of the textuality of the narrative text of a literary works. The learners are expected to earn the benefits from the results of analysis to practice the skills of writing short stories concerning the lexical cohesive devices to earn a coherent text. 6 1.6. Organization of the study The study is presented in five chapters: Chapter 1: Introduction In this chapter, the researcher deals with general issues of the study such as the reason to choose this topic, justification, aims, objectives, and scope of the study. The audience will also find it easy to follow the study through research questions posed in this chapter. Chapter 2: Literature Review and Theoretical Background This chapter is an overview of previous related studies and theories employed as the basis for arguments and analysis of the data in the study. This chapter covers such terms as coherence, cohesion, Thematic progression. Chapter 3: Research Design and Methodology This chapter demonstrates the setting, participants, and method of data collection as well as the process of data analysis in particular and the procedure of research in general. Chapter 4: Findings & discussion The qualitative and quantitative information for the answers to the research questions is presented in this chapter. The first part of this chapter describes the lexical cohesive devices. The second part presents the analysis of the lexical ties performed by the lexical cohesive devices. The last part deals with the textual functions. Chapter 5: Conclusions & implications This chapter is the summary of research questions, the procedure employed, and the results obtained. In the end, the implications of the findings and limitations of the research were pointed out. This chapter also includes the suggestions for further research on related issues. 7 CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW AND THEORETICAL BACKGROUND 2.1. Review of previous studies The issues of cohesion and coherence of a text and discourse have been a growing interest to linguists and researchers from different approaches, namely lexical semantics and discourse analysis in view of semantic relations and Thematic Progression. The review presents related studies from different approaches of descriptive, comparative and corpus linguistics, concerning the use of cohesive devices in diferent genres such as novels, standard proficiency tests, students‘ writing papers under themes and topics, namely tokens frequently used for types of cohesive devices, second language acquisition and thematic progression. Specifically, more focus is put on studies of lexical devices such as Reiteration and Collocation, which include the subtype of these, namely Binomials, viewed in this study as the one falling into the category of Collocation. In view of cohesion in Charles Dickens's novels, Muhsin Al-Maliki (2017) analyzed cohesion in part of Charles Dickens‘s Hard Times (1854) in terms of Hallidy and Hasan‘s model. The study examined and categorized the five devices proposed in measuring their role to some aspects of the novel including characters, themes, and imageries. The study revealed that Dickens skilfully employed these cohesive devices to build up the texture and serve his novel. Regarding the lexical cohesion, Armaia (2013) examined reiteration and collocation in Suzanne Collin‘s Catching Fire by using discourse analysis with descriptive qualitative method in order to find out and describe types of reiteration in this fiction works by using Halliday and Hasan’s theory about 8 cohesion and meaning of expression containing reiteration and collocation. The researcher found out thirty- five expressions containing the kinds of reiteration and collocation with thirteen expressions that contain repetition, seven expressions that contain synonym or near synonym, four expressions that contain superordinate, three expressions that contain general word, and eight expressions that contain collocation. Using an acceptability judgment task for the investigation into the acquisition of Binomials by Kuwaiti EFL Learners, Abdullah and his partner (2015) tested whether fifty Kuwait EFL learners are aware of one type of lexical collocations, namely, binomials (e.g., up and down, salt and pepper, men and women) with the question whether the participants‘ English proficiency level and the syntactic category of the internal components of binomials play a role in their acquisition. The results confirmed a relation between the participants‘ English proficiency level and their answers on the test whereby the advanced learners performed better than the intermediate learners. The study also revealed that Kuwaiti EFL learners have little awareness of English binomials and their lack of awareness was due to several reasons such as L1 negative transfer, the existence of culture-specific items and lack of exposure to certain items. With the view of looking into lexical cohesion in terms of its application in English language teaching (ELT), Mahlberg (2006) applied a corpus theoretical approach to the description of English prioritises lexis over the assumption that lexical and grammatical phenomena can be clearly distinguished. This view saw cohesion as the production of interlocking lexico-grammatical patterns and overlapping lexical items. The study shows links between communicative approaches to ELT and corpus linguistics, and suggests practical applications of corpus theoretical concepts. In the investigation into Lexical Cohesion in English and Persian Texts 9 of Novels, Rahimi (2012) attempted to identitfy the stylistic differences between Persian and English novelists with regard to their choices and application of lexical patterns, the textual differences between Persian and English novels in terms of lexical cohesion analyzed 1000-word excerpts of these novels. The study showed that the difference between Persian and English novelists‘ choices of lexical patterns was attributed to the higher number of reiteration as well as the collocation pairs used by Persian novelists with higher frequency in the Persian novels than in the English ones (e.g. Equivalence and Elaborative collocation), conversely some are more salient in English texts under study (e.g. Simple repetition). With the aim to investigate the logico-semantic relations between clauses in clause complexes, on the basis of her re-examination of some basic concepts of systemic functional grammar and two types of logico-semantic relation – expansion and projection, Nguyen (2012) analyzed Chapter 5 ―White Fang and the Indians‖ in the novel ―White Fang‖ by Jack London based on the framework of Halliday‘s (1994) An Introduction to Functional Grammar. The study showed that both types of logico-semantic relations were present in the text in which expansion was predominant than projection. This could be attributed to the writer‘s main aims in describing the characters, their behavior and actions rather than quoting or reporting their talks. Extension was the most frequent use in expansion because of the construction of the text for giving more information rather than explaining it. In projection, projecting locutions were found to be more prominent than projecting ideas, for the fact that the characters communicated with each other by languages rather than by thoughts. The study also revealed some characteristics of the type of the text along with the reflection of the complexity of language and logico-semantic relations between clauses in clause complexes. These findings help to put forward some implications for teaching and learning English and some 10 suggestions for further research. Approaching the topic of thematic progression from the analysis of literary works, Qadoury Abed (2010) examined the thematic progression patterns in ―A Tale of Two Cities‖ by Charles Dickens, based on Danes (1974). This author has established thematic progression patterns and stressed the difference due to the overuse of Constant Theme and Ellipsis formed with repetition, synonymy between theme and rheme. In a descriptive study of the reading insert text question (RITQ) of TOEFL IBT, Tran (2019) examined the cohesion and coherence of the RITQ of TOEFL iBT in order to help the students have a better insight into identifying the factors of cohesion and coherence for an effective performance of the reading test. The author analyzed 7 reading passages with insert text questions with a diagnostic and a 10-item questionnaire delivered to 100 students accompanied by a structured interview to 10 students used to collect both quantitative and qualitative data about the learners‘ difficulties in dealing with this kind of questions. The findings revealed that an insert text question can get the relevance at a position in the context of the paragraph given that the explicit and implicit information obtained from the inference of the clues of cohesion and coherence, cognitive/contextual effect are established. Also, the information about the students‘ difficulties in dealing with this kind of questions were provided concerning their failure in identifying the clues and figuring out the thematic progression to make good decision on a relevant choice. Though the mentioned above researches have brought into light the issues of cohesive devices and their roles in contributing to the textuality with different kinds of language items in different genres, there still remain some gaps for further discussion. Types of lexical cohesive devices should be exhaustively examined and discussed. Also, specific lexical items should be 11 identified with their functions in contributing to the shaping of the text as a whole and the interpretation of the text in terms of meaning specification in genres such as narration of novels through lexical ties and textual functions performed by the lexical devices in particular contexts of the novel. 2.2. Theoretical Background The objectives and research questions of study require the researcher to present some related concepts that are neccesary for inpreting the constructs of this study, namely the definition of coherence, cohesion with types of grammatical and lexical ones, Theme-Rheme structure and some basic types of Thematic Progression. 2.2.1. Definitions of coherence Brown and Yule (1983:224) cohesion and coherence are means of understanding between units in a text or utterance. In the discourse structure, coherence is necessary aspects of existence to arrange the inner relationship between the propositions in one another to achieve wholeness. This existence of relations of meaning that occur is reflected by inter-elements in semantics to realize the coherent wholes of the text. These relationships sometimes occur with a tool of cohesion, but it can sometimes occur without the help of cohesion. On the whole relations of meaning, coherent is a part of semantic organization. Meanwhile, Halliday and Hassan (1976) asserted that basically the structure of discourse is not a syntactic structure, but the semantic structure, namely semantic sentences containing the propositions. Some sentences will be a discourse from a relationship of meaning (sense) between the sentences itself. Therefore, because of the coherence of these relationships, a set of sentences accepted as a whole is relatively complete. The existence of the element of coherence is actually not in text-only unit (formally), but it is also on the ability of the reader / listener link the meaning and interpretation of a form of discourse that it receives.