Discourse Analysis Reflection

COHESION

I. Introduction, concepts, and definitions

In this paper, I will go over the aspect that called my attention the most as a part of the discourse analysis subject, its definition, its different features and what they are used for. I will also do an analysis of a sample material that I use in my lessons. Finally, I will discuss the relevance, or not, of applying cohesion and its various elements to the learning and teaching contexts or in life as a part of human and personal development.

Richards and Schmidt (2002) define cohesion as the grammatical or lexical connections between the various elements of a text. That is, the relationship between different sentences and/or the different parts of a sentence. Hence, a text can be cohesive

For instance, the omission of the pronoun he and the verb was in this biography about Alfred Nobel make the text more cohesive, understandable, and easy to digest because it avoids repetition that otherwise would make it look unnatural and unappealing to the reader.

Collocations are words that arbitrarily go together and in this text I found two of them, the adjective native, that can be accompanied by the nouns language, country, American, etc. and the item foreign, which can go together with the nouns language, currency, person, country, etc.

The predominant tense in the sample text is the past simple since it is a biography. We can find, for instance, some regular verbs in past such as died, expected, lived and some irregulars like was, made, had. In contrast, the aspect or internal framework of the text is expressing actions that occurred and were completed in the past, therefore his death in 1896.

The last feature that I came across with is repetition and (near) synonymy, for instance, the items alone and private person, the both refer to an estranged person that dislike being in the company of others. Another example of synonymy or near synonymy is the group of words explosive, dynamite, and weapon which refer to devices that can hurt or kill