Written Discourse Analysis

An analysis of the cohesive devices used to create texture in the text.

Introduction

According to Halliday and Hassan, texture is always present in a text and is what makes a text, a text. This feature is mostly provided by cohesive devices. Cohesion, as both professors state, refers to relations of meaning and occurs when the interpretation of an element in the text depends on another one. Where there is a lack of cohesion, this makes it hard to decode the text and make sense of it. As so, cohesive devices are what link different parts of a text together.

I will be analysing an Amazon review for this exercise by pointing out cohesive devices and explaining how these create texture. For this analysis I will mostly base myself in the work done by Brian Paltridge, Michael Halliday and Ruqaiya Hassan in this field of study.

Cohesive devices – Grammatical Cohesion

Reference

References happen ‘when the identity of an item can be retrieved from either within or outside the text’ (Paltridge, 2012, p. 115).

On the first sentence of the text, the author uses “her” to refer to Alexa, which they mention after – this is a cataphoric reference because the pronoun used is for something referred later in the text i.e. by reading the text, we only know who “her” refers to by looking forward in the text (Paltridge, 2012, p.116).

However, the most common form of reference in this text is the anaphoric reference. This one, instead of referring forward to another word or phrase, refers back (Paltridge, 2012, p. 115). It can be found on line 1, 4 and 20, when the author uses the word “This” to refer back to Alexa - demonstrative reference - just as “it” on lines 3, 5, 7, 8 and 15 also refer back to Alexa - personal reference. Besides that, the author uses “That” at the beginning of the third paragraph to refer back to the problem described before and does this again on line 18 - demonstrative reference.

All these references were used by the author to create an informed text with focus and flow, avoiding repetition and misunderstandings.

The author uses personal references to refer to the same item with “she” and “it” which is a curious choice of words considering that Alexa is artificial intelligence.

There is no use of comparative references, letting open the possibility of presuming that the author as never had a device similar to this one.

Substitution/Ellipsis

Substitution is replacing one item for another and ellipsis is the omission of an item (Halliday & Hasan, 1976, p. 89). None of these cohesive devices are present in this text. We can presume this happens because ellipsis and substitution are limited to the following clause instead of reference, that can reach a long way. Since this review is talking about the same device and all grammatical cohesive devices are used to refer to Alexa, it makes sense that the author only used reference. Also, reference is used when the writer wants to refer to the same exact thing whereas substitution and ellipsis refer to something slightly different (Paltridge, 2012, p. 126).

Cohesive Devices – Lexical Cohesion

As Paltridge explains, lexical cohesion refers to relationships in meaning between lexical items in a text. It is the cohesive effect that is caused by the vocabulary selected.

Reiteration

Reiteration is everything between the repetition of a lexical item and the use of a general world to refer back to a lexical item (Halliday & Hasan, 1976, p. 278).

Throughout the text, Alexa is referred to as “piece of kit” (twice), “control device”, “the machine”, “the purchase”, “the screen”, “the sound” and “the audio”. We can consider all these reiterations of some kind.

The first four expressions can be classified as synonyms since they have all similar meaning. The author uses all these expressions to avoid repetition since it is not interesting to repeat the same word over and over again in a text. By reading the text, we can understand that all these are referring to Alexa but in a different way. The change of words keeps the text interesting and even gives us a little more information than we had before.

The last three are meronymies of the superordinate Alexa. They refer to parts of the whole device, such as the screen and the audio.

The relationship of these items is not explicit and although I can assume all these relationships, the author didn’t make it clear to the reader and someone who knows nothing about Alexa and technology would be left to work it out from the text. That is why Halliday says that taxonomies can become very complicated.

Collocation

According to Halliday & Hassan, collocation is the most problematic part of lexical cohesion. This cohesive device describes the link that exists between vocabulary items that usually occur at the same time.

“Fallen” and “Love” are items that typically co-occur so we can say that they form a collocation. There are a lot of these devices in the text, a few are: “Smart” and “Home”; “Control” and “Device”; “Up and running”; “More and more”, among others.

By the use of this, we can say that the writer is a fluent English speaker since some of these don’t make sense when translate it.

Conjunction

Conjunctions put phrases and sections of text together.

One example of conjunction is the word “and”. This word repeats itself through the whole text (lines 4, 14, 15 [twice] and 20) and it draws the idea of addition just like “as well as” (line 11) does.

The notion of comparison is drawn by words like “but” (lines 1, 3 and 18).

We could also identify “then” (line 8) and “Overall” as conjunctions, being the first one a temporal one, drawing the idea of time and the second one a casual conjunction, starting the conclusion of the review.

Conclusion

Like said before, cohesive devices are what make a text, a text because they create texture by creating cohesive and coherent texts.

Since this is an online review, I would say that this text was not very thought through. It is not an essay or a news report, which would be more formal. The text is very well written though, which is interesting how we, by knowing a language, know how to write, how to be coherent and cohesive, how to create texture and make a well written text without giving much thought into it. It is something that we know by speaking and writing the language on our everyday life.

References

Halliday, M. A. K. & Hassan, R. (1976). Cohesion in English. London: Longman.

Paltridge, B. (2012). Discourse Analysis: An Introduction (2nd ed.). London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

This work was submitted on November 6th 2020 by Lara Soares for the module 'Discourse and Digital Media' as part of my degree English and Creative Writing BA.