Macmillan Books for Teachers Beyond The Sentence Introducing discourse analysis Scott Thornbury TreeMacmilan Edicion Berseen Towns Road, Oxford OX4 3PP ‘A division af Macnaln Publishers Limited ‘Companies and representatives treughou the word ISBN 978-1-4050-6407-4 ‘Text Scott Raorabury 2005 Desimane itustion © Macmiten Pubes Lined 2005 irspeblshed 2005 Allrighs reserved ao part of di publication may he reproach, sore ina reievaljtem ransmited in ansfor, of any tesa, lestonig mechanical, photocopying, cevodng or therwee, with ‘be prior wnten permicsion of the pablahers, Nowe to Teachers rotucopies may be made, fr classroom use of pages 164-175 \withour the prior writen persion of Macmlan Publishes Limited. 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What makes a text? ‘What makes a text make sei Spoken texts ‘Texts in context Classroom texts Literary texts and loaded texts Learner texts ean Classroom activities Photocopiable task sheets Reading list and References, Index 7 35 63 84 103 133 153 163 186 190About the author ‘My teaching and training experience has been mainly in Egypt and Spain, with stints in the UK and my native New Zealand. Now T divide my time between running short courses, conference presentations, and writing, Thave an MA in ‘TEFL from the University of Reading, as well as the RSA/UCLES Diploma. [ have written a number of books for teachers on the teaching of language systems and skills, as well as a lexically-based grammar for students. Lam presently writing a dictionary of BLT: to my informants (Catriona Akana, Anna Tsevekidou, Dennis Newson), my text sources (Rob Haines, Peter Coles, Sandra MacKay, the ETAS conference speakers, and Tessa); also to readers Matt Jones and Felicity Q’Dell for their useful reports, and to Ben Goldstein for his helpful feedback on Chapter 7. Special thanks to my (unwitting) mentors, whose presentations, articles, and books have been a constant source of inspiration, particularly Ron Carter, Guy Cook, Michael Hoey, Mike McCarthy, John Sinclair, and Henry Widdowson. (The usual caveats and waivers apply.) And enormous thanks, finally, to David Riley, Jl Florent and Adrian Underhill, whose joint guidance and unflagging enthusiasm kept me on track, and to Alyson Maskell, whose editorship, once again, has been exemplary. Dedication ‘To Murray ~ for all the texts we have shared. Arohanut.About the series Macmillan Books for Teachers Welcome to the Macmillan Books for Teachers series. These Books are for you if you arc a trainee twacher, practising teacher or teacher trainer. They help you to: ‘+ develop your skills and confidence * reflect on what you do and why you do it + inform your practice with theory «© improve your practic ‘+ become the best teacher you can be The handbooks are written from a humanistic and student-centred perspective. ‘They offer: «practical techniques and ideas for classroom activities +key insights into relevant background theory ‘© ways to apply techniques and insights in your work. ‘The authors are teachers and trainers. We take a ‘learning as you go” approach in sharing our experience with you. We help you reflect on ways you can facilitate learning, and bring your per- sonal strengths to your work. We offer you insights from research into language and language learning and suggest ways of using these insights in your classroom. You can also go to hutp://swww.onestopenglish.com and ask the authors for advice. We encourage you to experiment and to develop variety and choice, so that you can understand the how and why of your work. We hope you will develop confidence in your own teaching and in your ability to respond creatively to new situations. Adrian Underkill Titles in the Series An AZ of ELT Scott ‘Thornbury Beyond the Sentence Scott Thornbury Blended Learning Barney Barrett and Pete Sharma Children Learning English Jayne Moon Discover English Rod Bolitho & Brian Tomlinson Learning Teaching Jim Scrivener ‘Sound Foundations ‘Adrian Underhill ‘Teaching Practice Roger Gower, Diane Phillips & Steve Walters Teaching Reading Skills Christine Nuttall Uncovering Grammar Scott Thornbury 500 Activities for the Carol Read Primary Classroom 700 Classroom Activities David Seymour & Maria PopovaIntroduction to Beyond The Sentence text, n. A continuous piece of spoken or written language, especially one with a recognizable beginning and ending. Language is realized, first and foremost, as text, Notas isolated sounds, or words, ‘or sentences, but as whole texts. And users of language have to cope with texts. ‘They have to make sense of them and they have to produce them. This is as true for second language users as it is for first language users. As teachets of second language users, therefore, our top priority is o help our learners engage with texts. This book sets out to show how this can be done. We live in a world of text. We are surrounded by text: in our homes, in the strects, at workand at school, If you are like me; you wake up in the morning listening to radio text, you glance idly at the cereal packet text as you skim the morning paper, your fridge is festooned with reminders and messages, you go on-line and check your e-mail, you read the ads on the bus on the way to work and work itself is @ veritable deluge of texts: spoken and written, handwritten and electronic, formal and informal. Apparently the average American is targeted by 3000 messages per day, That includes phone calls, e-mail, meetings and conversations.” According to some estimates, typical workers send and receive some 200 messages and documents a day. On average we are exposed to anything from 600 to 1600 advertising messages a day, depending on which source you consult. And these figures pre-date the advent of text messaging, By 2003, in one day alone people in Britain were sending 56 million text messages to cach other, a figure that had doubled in just a year. By the end of that year they had sent 20 billion messages. In fact, so accustomed are we to text that it’s hard to imagine what life must have been like in the pre-electronic, let alone the pre-Gutenberg, era. ‘This steady exposure to language in the form of texts is a boon, of course, to Janguage learners — assuming, that is, that the texts are in the language that the learner is learning. In the case of English, this is often so, even in places where English is not the first language. You'd be hard put to find anywhere on earth that is beyond the reach of an English language pop song, website, movie, or even ‘Tshirt. For better ot worse, English-language text is ubiquitous. This, in turn, is good news for the teacher of English. Or should be. But with so much English language text available, it’s not always easy to know what to select for teaching purposes, or how to use it. Moreover, language teaching has traditionally been more concerned with individual sentences rather than texts, as such, Even in this supposedly communicative era, a lot of the language presentation and practice material available in published coursebooks is sentence-based. There is good reason for this: sentences, after all, are key building blocks of language and have a relatively fixed and describabJe grammar. But language, in its natural state, is not isolated sentences: itis text. As one linguist put it, “Language always happens as text and not as isolated words and sentences. From an aesthetic, social or educational perspective it is the text which is the significant unit of language.’? ‘Going ‘beyond the sentence’ in order to explore the structure and the purposes of whole texts falls within the orbit of what is called discourse analysis, Put simply, discourse is the way that language ~ either spoken or written is used forIncroduction to Beyond The Sentenve communicative effect in a real-world situation, Discourse analysis is the study of such language, and the analysis of the features and uses of texts ~ or text analysis ~ is an integral component of discourse analysis. One way of looking at the distinction between discourse and text is to think of discourse as the process, and the text as the product, That is, speakers (or writers) engage in a communicative process that involves language —such as a shopping exchange, or the expression of birthday greetings ~ and the record of the language that is used in this discourse is called its text. Recognition of the primacy of text has meant that texts have started to play a ‘more prominent role in teaching materials and have even penetrated into the public examinations: the Cambridge First Certificate in English (FCE) examination, for example, is now almost entirely text-based, Nevertheless, many teachers are still unsure as to how to exploit texts in their teaching, Often texts are used simply as a vehicle for teaching a pre-selected item of sentence grammar, Or they are used to develop the skills and subskills of listening and reading, without much attention being given to the text-specific features of their composition, The texts themselves are often somewhat bland and are typically inauthentic - that is, they have been especially written for teaching purposes. Literary texts are often treated with suspicion by teachers, as presenting too many problems of both a linguistic and cultural kind, ‘This book aims to address these issues. By the end, you should have a better idea of ‘+ whata text is and what its characteristic features are + how to categorize and describe texts, eg according to their genre, function, organization and style + how to find, select and adapt texts + how to exploit texts for language teaching and skills development purposes, + how to unpack the hidden messages of texts + how to use literary texts in the classroom and + howto evaluate and use learners’ texts. ‘More generally, itis hoped that you will come away convinced of the value of, text-based language tcaching and be motivated to go ‘beyond the sentence’ and explore this rich resource with Your learners ‘The book has been written with both novice and experienced teachers in mind. While some linguistic terminology is inevitable, this has been kept to a minimum, as have references to academic and theoretical literature. For those interested in following up some of the themes of the book, a reading list of selected books and articles can be found at the backChapter I Unlocking texts Discovery activity 1.1. Unlocking texts Put yourself in the position of a beginner, a complete beginner. Here is a text it ‘comes from the tomb of an Egyptian noble who lived several thousand years ago.* I'm assuming you can neither read hieroglyphs nor speak Ancient Egyptian. But study it closely. Can you make any sense of it? Can you at least spot some patterns or regularities? LL Commentary umm ‘The urge to make sense of text—cven of the text of a language that we neither speak nor read —is such that we are quite capable of inventing meanings on the basis of the flimsiest of evidence. Its possible, for example, that you took a guess that the text is about birds, since figures of birds occur frequently. This, in fact, was the strategy adopted by those scholars who first attempted to decipher hieroglyphs: “They all looked fora symbolic meaning for each hieroglyphic sign, ‘They expected a picture of three wavy lines to mean water and only water; a picture of a head to mean a head, that of an owl to mean an owl and so on, They made no allowance for the fact that such pictures may, in fact, be phonograms (sound signs), or, indeed, letters of an alphabet rather than pictographs. ° It wok some time before this very literal and ‘bottom-up’ approach to decipherment was abandoned. Nevertheless, some of the symbols in the text are pictographs, as we shail see, so the strategy is not entirely unproductive On the other hand, knowing that the text was found in a tomb, you may have guessed that ithad a religious significance, that it was a sacred text, ora biography of the deceased, for example. This ‘top-down’ strategy, using contextual clues, would have put you on the right track. You may also have noticed some repetition of clements ~ the four owls and their associated plant-like symbols, for example Or the four sets of three vertical bars. Putting two-and-two together and using, your background knowledge of text types and funerary culture, you might have guessed that these reiterations indicate a ritualistic discourse style, as befits a funerary text, such as a prayer or incantation.Chaprer 1 Unlockirig texts Ifyou tum to page 185, you'll find a transcription, transliteration and translation of the text and you'll see that the interpretation we have reached is not far from the mark, Some of the signs do in fact mean what they resemble, such as bread, axen and geese. The repeated plantike object and owl combination seem to form the meaning a thousand of, which does form a kind of refrain and the whole text does have a ritual function: the offering of funerary gifts. ‘So, our ‘reading’ of the text, while in no way profound, is amazingly accurate, given our zero knowledge of the ‘code’. What we have done is ‘read between the lines’ - or between the glyphs ~ exploiting different clues in order to access different types of knowledge. There are at least three different types of clue we used: the signs themselves, the patterns of signs, and the context. These clues in tum triggered inferences at the level of word meaning, text type, and the overall purpose of the text Atthe same time, by studying the translation, we are already in the position of making some tentative deductions about Ancient Egyptian — its writing system (eg that the three vertical bars are possibly some kind of plural marker) and possibly its grammar and even the culture which the language gave voice to. This one text is starting to reveal the secrets of a whole language and society. i Learners of English are faced with similar— if not quite such daunting — challenges when confronted with English-language texts. They to0 must mobilize variety of ‘text attack’ strategies in order to glean some kind of sense from the text. And, through texts, they have access to ‘insider knowledge’ — about the language and the culture, of which the text isa realization, Discovery activity 1.2 What makes texts difficult? Take, for example, the following text®. What would you expect learners to find difficult about it? 12 Police dog sacked after biting innocent man AA police dog in Basel, Switzerland, has | suspect was still in the building. But as got the sack for biting an innocent | bystander at the scene of a burglary. Shep, a six-year-old German Shepherd, was taken off duty after the incident, ‘The man had to be taken to hospital in an ambulance for treatment to a leg injury Shep’ handler, who had been called to a burglary at a city boutique, was told the officers carried out a search, the dog wandered outside to where a group of people were watching events. He then allegedly bit 20-year-old man Shep was one of eight dogs serving with Basel police. A spokesman said this was the first such incident to have occurred inthe city,Chapter 1 10 Unlocking texts Commentary mm Here, in fact, is what some learners —all of roughly the same level of proficiency ~ had to say, on being asked to rate the text for difficulty 1 ‘Difficult. Because I don’t understand some vocabulary and for this Ineed adictionary? “The vocabulary is difficult but the textis easy to understan “A little easy, Becauseit’s a litte history? ‘Difficult, not because vocabulary but for the content’ ‘Not difficult, It's easy to understand some word by its context” “Difficult because it uses more complex constructions and more unknown vocabulary.” ouren Note how a variety of factors seem to interact in terms of the learners’ perceptions of the difficulty of the text. There are the more obvious ground-level language factors, such as vocabulary and grammar (‘complex constructions’), but also the higher-level features, such as the context (which helps the deduction of unfamiliar vocabulary) and the text type itself: ‘a litle history’, ie a story or anecdote. For this learner, the fact that itis a recognizable text type scems to off-set the ground-level difficulties of vocabulary and grammar, perhaps. And then there is the ‘content’ difficulty, which, to the fourth respondent, is something quite apart from the vocabulary. What does he mean by this? Pethaps the text failed to activate a coherent mental picture (or schema) of the events, This may in part be due to the fact that the events are recounted not in their chronological order, but in an order favoured by news reporting, where the outcome of the situation is summarized before the events themselves are detailed. Alll this suggests that learners approach texts from different directions and with different expectations. This, of course, has implications for the way teachers deal with texts in the classroom. At the very least, we need to bear in mind that a text on the page may ‘generate’ very different texts in the minds of the learners. So far we have been discussing the way learners respond to texts. But, of course, they also have problems creating texts. Here, for example, is the reconstruction from memory by one learner of the text we have just read 13 A police dog has been sacked for biting an innocen’ 20-years-old-man at the scene of a burglary. The dog is from Switzerland and it has bitten the man in the leg. The fact is that the policeman that hand the dog - there are 8 police dogs in Basel ad been told thas a man, accused of burglary was still in the shop. When the police were in the building where the fucts bad taken place, the dog wandered in the sircek and bit the man, who had been taken to the hospital in an ambulance Police said it és the first time that occurred. ‘The learner has succeeded in including all the main facts and events into the account and has done so using language that is generally well-formed (apart from the verb hand instead of handle). To a reader unfamiliar with the story, though. it may not be that casy to reconstruct the events and participants from this account, Some of the information, such as the fact that the dog is from Switzerland, is incorporated rather randomly into the text and might be distracting. Nor is itChapter 1 Unlocking texts entirely clear which man ~ the burglar or someone else? — was bitten by the dog (the dog woandered in the street and bit the man’. "The use of narrative tenses helps give a generally accurate idea of the order of events, but only our knowledge of the order in which such things happen in real life helps us make sense of the use of the past perfect in the phrase the man... liad been taken to the hospital. And the use of the phrase the fact isin the third sentence sends a slightly misleading signal as to how this sentence connects to what has preceded it; it suggests that what we have been told so faris in facta fiction! Hinally, the word chat in the last sentence clearly refers to something further back in the text ~ but what exactly? And does the writer, by choosing shar rather than this, really intend to put some distance between herself and the events? (Compare this with the last line of the original text, for example.) All this suggests that the ability to write connected and intelligible text is— like the ability to interpret text - a complex interaction ofa variety of skills. Its clearly not simply a matter of stringing sentences together. Why texts? ‘The above discussion reinforces the view that learning a language is more than the learning of its grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation. And that the ability to. handle texts docs not necessarily result from the ability simply to read and produce sentences. There is nothing new; of course, about this. Over a hundred years ago, a leading writer on second language learning, Henry Sweet, had this to say: ‘When the sounds of a language have once been mastered, the main foundation of its study will be connected texts.’’ Not words, nor sentences, note, but connected texts. Sweet added that ‘its only in connected texts that the language itself can be given with cach word in a natural and adequate context’. Nor was the idea that you can learn a language through detailed analysis of texts new even in Henry Sweet's time, In 1850 a certain T. Robertson published an English language texthook for French speakers (subsequently re-edited for Spanish speakers) that was based entirely on the study of a single text, spread over 20 units. The first unit of the first course starts with the first sentence of the text (apparently a story from the Arabian Nights): We are told that the Sultan Mahmoud, by his perpetual wars abroad and his tyranny at home, had filled the dominions of his forefathers with ruin and desolation and had unpeopled the Persian empire. ‘The textis first translated word by word and phrase by phrase and this forms the basis of exercises that involve translating the text back and forth. At this point, children and women and anyone else who simply wants to get to grips with the language as soon as possible, are advised to skip the next section, which ‘is written specifically for those laborious persons who wish to know exactly what itis they are committing to memory’. For those laborious persons, the one-sentence text is then subject to rigorous analysis at the level of pronunciation, vocabulary (every word is translated into nChapter 1 R Unlocking texts French) and grammar. For example, the word unpeopled is analysed into its ‘component parts and cach part is commented on, including the prefix un- and the suffix -ed, with other examples of similar compounds being supplied. In the grammar section, the first phrase, Wé are told, is analysed as an instance of the passives his perpetual zoars and the Persian empireare broken down into their components to demonstrate the formation of noun phrases in English. Further ‘exercises of deconstruction and reconstruction follow. And the patiern is repeated for the next 19 units, that is, until the end of the story. ‘The problem with this approach is that, as Robertson himself acknowledged, it can become very pedantic and hence very boring. Also, unless the texts that are chosen for study bear some resemblance to the language needs of the learners, ail _ this analysis is somewhat academic. Itis hard to imagine there being much need, even in 1850, for the verb to unpeople, however good an example of English word formation it might be. Nevertheless, the idea that texis —cven very short ones — can ‘deliver’ a great deal of information about the language, is suggestive. Updating Robertson's method somewhat, let’s have a look at a relatively modern text. Here is the 20th century transiation of a Japanese haiku-like poem by the hermit-monk Ryoka (born ¢ 1758)8. As you read it, consider what features of language it embodies that might be of use to a learner: ° ee Have you forgotten the way to my hue? Every evening Iwai for he sound of | ety do nov appear. ur fooesteps, Short asiit is, the poem is a complete text. [t consists of 21 words (of which two are repeated twice, to make 23 in all) and these are organized into two sentences, the second of which consists of pwo clauses, making ita compound sentence. All but seven of the 26 Ietiers of the written alphabet appear in the text. Of the 24 consonant sounds in English, 16 are represented, along with 15 of the 20 (British English) vowel sounds. “The text shows a typical distribution between gramimar words (or function words) and content words. Function words include haze, 10, of and not, and content words are the ones that carry the burden of meaning, such as forgotten, eay, fut and footsteps. Of the 21 words in the text, 15 are in the top 200 words in English according to frequency counts, and seven (je a third of all the words) are in the top 20, Again, this is a fairly typical distribution, ‘Turning our attention to the grammar, what does the text tell us about the way English sentences are organized? First ofall, all the eight different parts of speech. are represented, apart from adjectives (unless you classify my and youras, adjectives rather than determiners). So, we have nouns (eg hut), pronouns (eg you), verbs (eg forgotten), determiners (eg the, every), prepositions (eg 10), a conjunction (bu‘} and an adverb (not). Of the nouns, one has the plural suffix -s. Of the verbs, oncis in the form of the past participle (forgotten): there are two auxiliary verbs (Have, do) and two finite verbs (wait and appear).Chapter 1 Unlocking texts “These word types are in turn organized into three of the most common phrasal combinations in Finglish. So, we have noun phrases (my hut, every evening), verb phrases (haze forgotten) and prépositional phrases (to my hut). The noun phrases show instances of pre-modification with determiners (as in my hut, the sound) and post-modification using either a prepositional phrase (the exay to my hut) or an of construction (the sound of your footsteps). These are all very common ways of grouping words in English, ‘These words and groups of words in turn realize the main functions typically found in combination'in sentences, such as subjects (/), objects (the way to my hut), verbs (appear) and adverbials (every evening). The three clauses each demonstrate three common verb patterns, respectively: verb + object (ie a transitive verb pattern); verb + preposition (for) + object ; and a verb with no object (ie an intransitive verb). As well as the basic statement form of subject + verb (J zurt...) there is an example each of (1) the inversion of subject and verb to make questions (Have you forgotten..?) and (2) the use of a ‘dummy operator’ + not to form negative statements (vou do not appear). ‘The way English verbs are marked for tense and aspect is also exemplified, with nvo verbs in the present tense unmarked for aspect (wait, appear) and one example of a present perfect construction (have... forgotten). Finaily, atthe level of connected discourse, the conjunction but connects the two parts of the second sentence, signalling that ‘what follows contrasts n some way with what went before. And the repetition of you across the two sentences helps connect them. ‘This rather detailed analysis of one very short textis simply intended to demonstrate how much ‘language’ there is in a text and, therefore, how much potential texts have for the purposes of exemplifying features of language — of phonology, orthography (ie the writing system), vocabulary, grammar and discourse ~ for teaching purposes. Stuck on a desertistand with only a book of haikus at hand, a resourceful teacher has the means to teach a great many facts about the language. (This is not meant to imply, of course, that teaching facts about the language is all that is involved in language teaching. For a start it ignores the possibility of using texts to trigger language production on the part of the learners.) Discovery activity 1.3 Unpacking a text Here is another poem by Ryokan®. Can you ‘unpack’ its grammar? That is to say, what further features of English grammar does it display that might usefully be highlighted for leamers? 16 [7 | Fexpected to see only pink blossoms but a gentle spring snow has fallen and the cherry trers are wearing a white coat. BChapter 1 14 Unlocking texts Commentary = mm Like the first Ryokin poem we looked at, this one has a representative range of high frequency features of English, including all the parts of speech (except for prepositions, if you discount the infinitive marker 20). Unlike the first poem, however, this one is particularly rich in adjectives (pink; gentle, white). Iealso includes another form of noun pre-modification which is very common in English: the use of nouns to modify other nouns, as in spring snoce and cherry trees Also of interest is the verb + ro-infinitive panern, extremely common in English, represented by expected to see. Here, too, is an example of an infinitive (to see), as well as regular past tense verb (expected) and examples of each of the two aspects in English: the perfect (/ias fallen) and the continuous (are searing). ‘These, incidentally, demonstrate agreement (or concord) in English, ic the way singular subjects take singular verb forms (fas) and plural take plural (are). Another feature that is well represented in this textis the article system, including both the definite and indefinite articles (che, a) and the ‘zero article’, ie the absence of any determiner in front of a noun phrase, as in pink blossoms. Ml Incidentally, between the two texts (1.5 and 1.6), only three letters of the alphabet G.q.2), plus three each of the consonant and vowel sounds in English, remain unrepresented. Bleven of the 25 most frequent words in English occur, some of them more than once. Grammar coverage across the two texts includes: * all the parts of speech + the basic article system + common ways of forming noun phrases and preposition phrases + firstand sccond person subject pronouns and possessive adjectives ‘+ wansitive and intransitive verb constructions + the infinitive affirmative and negative statements and question forms present and past simple tenses continuous and perfect aspect sentence- initial and sentence-medial adverbials, and * additive and contrastive connectors. In short, a good deal of the traditional elementary syllabus is locked up in these two poems ~ ‘a World in a grain of sand’, as William Blake putit. Ishould stress, at this point, that I didn’t have to look hard to find texts that have such rich seams of grammar running through them. Ai/texts have grammar and especially if they are authentic texts, but not too specialized ~ the grammar that is embedded in them is bound to be fairly representative of English grammar as a whole. In this sense, language shares a feature of other complex systems: its smallest self-standing components (ie texts) are miniature representations of the systemas a whole (ie lexico-grammat). I said that a good deal of grammar is locked up’ in the nwo poems and I chose the (phrasal) verb ‘locked up’ deliberately. The fact that the texts contain examples of X, Vand Z features of English grammar is not of much use to language learner 2) if they don’t notice these features, and b) if they don’tknow how representative, typical, frequent, generative, etc, these features are. ‘That is where the teacher ‘comes in. [tis by means of the teacher's expertise that these features are ‘unlocked’. The process is not dissimilar to the way the secret of the hieroglyphs was unlocked by Champollion using the Rosetta Stone.Chapeer 1 Unlocking texts Classroom applications Atstrategic points in each chapter we will be looking in more detail at ways of exploiting texts for language work. But here are a few basic text-unlocking techniques to get you going, 1 Dictate a short text - such as one of the haikus by Ryokan ~ and allow learners to compare and correct their texts, before asking them to: + count how many sentences there are + count how many words there are and how many words are repeated + identify the word classes (noun, adjective, ete) + say how many countable nouns there are + say how many uncountable nouns there are + say how many adjectives, determiners, adverbs, etc, there are + underline all the verbs + identify the tense, aspect and voice of each verb phrase + find any collocations, ie words that you think might co-oceur frequently (eamers can check their intuitions against a good learners’ dictionary) + find any figurative or idiomatic use of language, including phrasal verbs + identify any cohesive devices + find any pronouns and identify cheir referents (je the words they refer to). 2 After this detailed analysis of the text, ask the learners, working together, to try and re-constructit from memory. It may help to provide some word prompts ‘on the board, eg: pink blossoms . gentle spring snow cherry trees ... white coat. 3 Preparea ‘gap-fill’ version of the text for a subsequent k colleague of mine used this gap-fill idea with a group of EST. students in Oregon, who are studying the English of Natural Resource Technology (NR1), in order to workin that field once they return to Central America: ‘There was a lull in the conversation. I waited, then piped up with how interesting one of the required books for NRT was. The book’s all about how to find one’s way in the wilderness, read topographical maps and things like that. T said I'd just learned how to determine direction using a non-digital watch. Interest! Well, I said, let me read the short paragraph to you. ‘Vhe paragraph became a point of discussion among pairs. {...) Finally, students read the paragraph to themselves, discussed it, then listened to me read it once more as they read along ‘We took a break, during which 1 weote up the paragraph on the board, Next, I created gaps in place of the ‘grammar’ or function words, which T transferred to the other half of the board in random order. Ifa word occurred _ more than once, I marked it accordingly, e.g. “the (x7) After the break, I asked the students to fill in the blanks then compare with a partner and finally with the original text. [...] Fifteen minutes lef... Lask for the difference between function/grammar words and content words by pointing out that we've been finding function words. I talk quickly about how Icarning grammar might just be learning how to fill in the spaces between the content words or mix them successfully with the grammar words, 1sChapter } Unlocking texts How could you do this on your own? Right, find a text, copy it, get rid of the function words and put them back like we did. Problems? How to best get rid of the words. We need to leave the text alone for a while so we're not just working from memory as we did today to some extent (still provided a meaningful challenge to students, I think). Rob Haines Rob's lesson is a good example of how even short texts can be used productively to unlock language features. After all, every word in a text yields a potential language lesson. In any text, therefore, there resides a whole syllabus waiting to be uncovered. 16Chapter 2 What makes a text? 28 TT The univers bas gora park thas got a modern tram system. He bas gota swimming pool Thave got tickets for the theatre Rio has got some beautifil beaches, She has got a good view from the window. !° 3 4 5 6 Bh Suzy Stressed gets up late and has a shower. She doesn’t have brent. She | 7 goes to work by car. She gets to work at five to nine. She uses the lift, At eleven o'clock she has a cigarette and a black coffee. Suzy has lunch at hale past one. She firiishes work at six o'clock. Then she goes to an Tralian class. She gets home late, After that she watches TV, She has dinner at eleven o'clock. She goes to bed very late. Suzy is very stressed, Do you live like | a Suzy’ 2S ae ikea parphin so go Thke acelery. 0 30 | Gotoward the 2) st century. | slow Le a ml go ok i Soler Grane [ ENTERING Sra eMart ta Commentary mm ‘The factis that all seven of these ‘language events’ (I’m avoiding using the word sexe at the moment) actually happened."That is to say, they are all attested instances ‘of language in use, In that sense, they have some claim to be considered as texts. Some; however, seem more acceptable as texts than others. The first, for example, is a recognizable text type, ie a set of instructions typical of food packaging (it was, in fact written on a teabag wrapper). The second clearly belongs to the very general category of lerter and has the obvious purpose of thanking someone for something. Moreover, both 2.1 and 2.2, as short as they are, seem to be entire texts (although the second might make more sense if we knew something of the previous correspondence ~ what disk is being referred to, for example?), And both texts are organized in a logical way: at the very least, they both havea beginning, a middle and an end. They also use language in a way that is acceptably well-formed (although the second one contains a spacing error ~ sendingme~ suggesting a fairly casual production process, in turn indicating an informal medium: itis in fact an e-mail). Which brings us to the last point: their appropriacy. Each was appropriate in the context in which it originally occurred: 18Chapter 2. What makes a text? ‘To sum up, both 2.1 and 2.2 + areself-contained + are well-formed + hang together (ie they are cohesiee) + make sense (ie they are coherent) have a clear communicative purpose + are recognizable text types + were appropriate to their contexts of use. On all of the above grounds, their status as texts seems unproblematic The other five ‘tests’, however, appear not to fulfil all of these conditions. Text 2.3 doesn’t hang together: it’s just six unconnected sentences; 2.4 is obviously written to display a feature of grammar, but itis neither identifiable as a genuine text type nor docs it have any apparent communicative purposes the fifth one makes no sense whatsoever and it’s difficult to imagine a context in which it would make sense (see Chapter § for more on this); the sixth makes slight sense, but seems more playful than communicative and it’s not clear that it is self-contained, even as poetry; and 2.7 is difficult to situate -where would such a text be appropriate? In short, texts 2.3 to 2.7 fail a number of ‘text’ tests. They are either + not self-contained, or not well-formed, or not cohesive, or not coherent, or not communicative, or + not typical, or + notappropriate. mt Over the next two chapters we will look at each of these qualities in turn (although not necessarily in the above order). In this chapter our concern is with cohesion. Cohesion Let’s take a look at the ‘text’ 1. The university has got a park. 2. Ithas gota modern tram system. 3. He has gota swimming pool. 4 Lhave got tickets for the theatre, 5 Rio has got some beautiful beaches. 6 She has got a good view from the window. ! 3 agai | ° | ! Initially, it looks as if this is setting out to be a connected piece of text. The itof sentence 2 looks as ifit refers to the university of sentence 1. These expectations are dashed, however, by the mention of a tram system: universities seldom, iPever, have their own tram systems, modem or otherwise. And by sentence 3 we are in no doubt that what we are reading isa scries of isolated sentences, whose only common clementis the grammat structure have got. The fact that the sentences are numbered, is, of course, a dead give-away. In fact, they could be re-arranged in any order without disturbing the integrity of the exercise, in which, by the Way, students of English have to convert the uncontracted forms of hasjhaze got into contracted forms. rT)Chapier 2 What makes a text? ‘On the other hand, text 2.4, about Suzy Stressed, is clearly not a collection of, isolated sentences. Our assumption that the pronoun she in the second sentence refers to the subject of the first sentence is not disappointed. ‘Suzy Stressed gets up late and has a shower, She doesn’t have breakfast. She goes to work by car. She gets co work at five to nine... ete. In fact, every sentence seems ‘tied’ in this way to the subject Suey Stressed, Moreover, there are no unexpected tram systemts to throw us off balance: the word breakfast for ‘example, sits comfortably with has a showerin the first sentence and goes to eorkin the third sentence. They belong to the same lexical set, and, together with other expressions such as gets home, has dinner, goes to bed, and so on, form a kind of lexical chain of topically related lexical items. The repeated use of time expressions (five 10 nine, eleven o'clock, half past one, etc) forms another lexical chain, ‘There is also some direct repetition of vocabulary, such as the word zeork in the third and fourth sentences, which also reappears later in the sentence She finishes work at six o clock. Finally, connecting expressions like shen and afier that make explicit links across sentences, They serve to bind their respective sentences to the ones that preceded them. Note, also, that it simply wouldn’t be possible to rearrange the sentences so that the text started with Thun she goes to an talian class, or Afier that she watches TV, for instance. Both then and afier shar make sense only by reference to previous text. “To sum up, the text is made cohesive (in the way that example 2.3 is not) by a combination of lexical and grammatical devices. The lexical connectors include repetition and the lexical chaining of words that share similar meaning. The grammatical connectors are pronouns (she and hat) and linkers (then). Discovery activity 2.2 Cohesive devices Here is another text, in this case, an advertisement. Can you find examples of lexical and grammatical cohesion in it? Are there any other devices that bind it together as a text? 28 { Bein: g under Whaler ele nyabeybegodlon tesa bp control is knowing the secret of cleaner, al sevexbeeritdos i whos clearer, more ttectuolly tingles on years eye yon i's working. Toke irom us, Use johnson’ Coan & Clr asa cnestep deanser, oronaier (And it’s not soap.) -orsing osnger, ond yu'l eve gt in athe over spots again ‘Not shat itreeds ©. You con see for yoursel. | beautiful skin. - her coe completes copond wow an antChapter 2 What makes a text? Commentary = mm Examples of lexical repetition include skin (four times), clear, clean, secret, and spots (three times cach), and controland soap (twice each). Note also the words belonging to the same word family, ie words that share a common root: clear and clearer, clean, cleaner, cleansing, and cleanser. The fact that these words are prominentis, of course, not accidental, since they carry the main thrust of the advertisement’s message (control through cleaner, clearer skin) and many have positive connotations. ‘There are a number of words that are thematically related and which form chains running through the text (eg skin, complexion; soap, cleansing lotion, cleanser, water, after-cleansing astringent, lather) plus a number of synonyms (fresher, cleaner), as well as the antonyms dirt and clean, and under control, out of control, There is also a rudimentary list: dirt, oiland make-up. Grammatical cohesion is realized by pronouns, which refer the reader back to their referents (ie concepts previously introduced into the text), as in Being under control is knorwing the secret of cleaner, clearer, more beautiful skin, (And it’s not soap.) Here, the pronoun it in the second sentence refers back to she secretin the first. It can also refer forward, and to a general idea, rather than to any specific word or clause, as in: Take it from us. Use Johnson’s Clean & Clear as a one-step cleanser [...Js cand you'll never get in a lather over spots again. ‘Take it from us also demonstrates how some pronouns do not have referents in the text itself, but outside it. Thus, the referent of us is not retrievable from the text, either before or after, but refers to the sponsors of the text (ie Johnson). Likewise your and you in the sentence /t actually tingles on your skin ta tell you it’s working refer to the reader. This is also a kind of cohesive device, since it binds the text to its larger context. The technical name for language that makes direct connection to the material world is deixis (adjective: deictic), Nate, by the way, that the sponsoring authority (sometimes called the author) of the text is not necessarily the same individual as the zeriter. In this text, for example, the pronoun us does not refer to the actual writer, who was no doubt the anonymous employee of some advertising agency, but to the company itself. Another form of grammatical cohesion is displayed in the sentence And that’s ‘even better it does this zoithout drying, where does this stands for (ot replaces) the proposition expressed in the previous sentence (ie: removes more of the dirt, oil and ‘make-up that can lead to spots). The combination of does and this is unintelligible without reference to the previous sentence, hence it is a feature of the text’s cohesion, ‘The use of dojdoes to stibstitute for a preceding verb phrase is called substitution. Words like so and not commonly substitute for whole clauses, as in Will it rain? ~ I think so, (= [think it will rain) ‘Will it rain? ~ I think not. think it won’t rain), ‘Substitution can operate at the level of individual words too. The pronouns one and ones commonly stand in for nouns or noun phrases, as in these two sentences from an advert for Beefeater gin (which also displays clause substitution using so): 2Chapter2 What makesa text? 22 29 ——— | (sit important that a gin comes from London? The ones that don’t, seem to think so. | Le ne The second sentence, unpacked, would read: The gins that don’t come from London seem to think that itis important that a gin does come from London, This is a good example of how cohesion works to pack clements of previous text into the text that follows, ‘Another form of substitution is ‘substitution-by-zero’, as in this example from the” cleansing lotion ad: Teactually tingles on your skin to tell you it’s working, Not that it needs to, Needs to zohut? Needs to tingle on your skin, etc. Rather than repeat this, the writer simply leaves a blank, which the reader fills in. The technical name for ‘substitution-by-zero' is ellipsis, ie the leaving out of elements that can be retrieved from elsewhere. In the gin ad, quoted above, The ones that don't /...J isan example of ellipsis, where come from London, retrievable from the previous sentence, fills the empty slot, ‘The term cohesion suggests the presence in a text of explicit linking words, such as however, but, although, and so on. There is only one explicit linking word in text 2.8: the use of andin the second sentence (And it’ nota soap), and later on in the sentence beginning And what's even berter... And is an instance of a conjunction, Other conjunctions are but, s0, orand because. These typically have a sentence- internal function — that is, they connect clauses inside sentences, Connectors that link sentences are called conjuncts. (They are also commonly called linkers.) Common conjuncts are sch sequencing expressions as first, o begin with, lastly, the reinforcing expressions what's more, furthermore and expressions used to make concessions, such as however, in spite of that, on the other hand. Note that the absence of conjunets, apart from and, in the Johnson’s ad suggests that perhaps the textis so cohesive already that it doesn’t need them, And what's even better displays vet another cohesive device: the use of ‘comparatives to build on, and thus connect to, previous text, The phrase what's even better presupposes a previous mention (direct or indirect) of something good Another grammatical feature of the text that serves to give it internal consistency and hence acts as.a kind of cohesive device is the use of tense. Apart from the will in the last sentence, all the main verbs are in the present and are unmarked for aspect (ie there are no continuous or perfect forms). Another way of connecting text, which is neither lexical nor strictly grammatical, might be best described as rhetorical. For example, in text 2.9, the presence of a question in the text ({s i important that a gin comes from London?) raises the expectation of finding an answer in the text that follows. When this expectation is met, we have a further, rhetorical, means by which sentences are connected and the text is made cohesive. Another form of rhetorical cohesion is whatis called parallelism, where sentences ‘echo’ one another. In this ad, for Sciko watches, parallelism is established in the repeated use of Z's not your...: It's not your music. It'snot your handshake, It's not your clothes. It’s your watch that says most about who you are.Chapter 2 What makes a text? Apart from binding the text together, the parallelism serves to highlight the contrast between the first three lines of the text and the ‘punchline’, where the paticrn is subverted, As we will see in Chapter 7, itis a device that is frequently used in literary texts, Ml ‘To sum up, there are a number of ways that texts are made cohesive, and these: cohesive devices (also called linking devices) are traditionally classified at the level of lexis, grammar and discourse (or rhetoric). These include: + lexical cohesion: = direct repetition, word families, synonyms and antonyms = words from the same semantic field, lexical chains and lists — substitution with one/ones + grammatical cohesion = reference: pronouns, articles (more on this below) ~ substitution of clause elements using so, not, dojdoesjdid, ete ~ ellipsis of clause elements — conjunets (also called linkers) ~ comparatives = tense + rhetorical cohesion = question-answer ~ parallelism Reference ‘We have noted the way that clements in a text refer to other elements (their referents) both inside and outsidé the text and how this cross-referencing serves to ind the text together, connecting sentences with other sentences and connecting the text to its context. Reference is such an important aspect of cohesion—and ‘one that causes trouble to learners ~ that it’s worth looking at it in more detail. Reference, as we have seen, is commonly achieved through the use of pronouns (he, ‘we, it; this and that, these and those) and articles. We'll look at each of these in turn. ‘We have scen how pronouns refer back to previously mentioned referents. Here’s another example, from a Ukrainian folk tale 2.10 One day a dog left his home and went out into the wide world to get a job. | He worked iong and hard and finally took his wages and bought a lovely new | paicofboots i ‘The pronoun he and the possessive determiner his have back-reference to the dog. Back-reference is technically called anaphoric reference. The words he and his act, like litde index fingers, directing us back in the text to these first mentions, (In actual, fact, the pronouns are directing our attention not at something back in the «ext, but ata concept that has been introduced into our evolving mental construction of the narrative as a result of our reading of the text. This mental construction is cafled a schema. Only occasionally, when we have ‘lost the plot’, do we have to physically search the text itself to find the source of a reference. But, normally, itis to the ‘mental schema we refer, not to the text. More on schemas in Chapter 3.) 23Chapter 2 24 What makes a text? Less commonly, and for certain stylistic effects, the referring pronoun can anticipate the referent. This kind of reference is called cataphoric, The underlined words in the following text!? point forward to their referent, rather than back: H's played junkies and cly slicker, Jedi, knights and US rangers. He's at home in Hollywooe's boulevards and Glasgow's tenements. He spends his life in the arms of beautiful women and is happily mariad I seems Ewan McGregor can do anything he wants LL. nd ‘The pronouns it, his and dar can all refer back (ie anaphorically) to whole topies Gather than single nouns) thathave becn mentioned previously. Kor example, in the last sentence of the following extract from a book review!4, the pronoun it refers to the complete proposition expressed in the preceding sentence: 212 a “HARD work, no pay, eternal glory, Society president and astronautical ran the internet ad for volunteers for a | ‘engineer Robert Zubrin relates. the couple of weeks in a simulated Mars checkered history of the project, as well | base at Devon Island in the high Arctic, | as his experiences as a crew member, | oF in the Utah deser. More than 400 | Zuibrin describes himself as mercurial, | applied. In Mars on Earth, Mars | optimistic andsomantic. Itshows, What shows? Not Zubrin, obviously. Here itrefers to the whole idea of Zubrin being mercurial, optimistic and romantic. Asa rule, tis used to continue referring to the same topic, shis draws attention to new or important topics and that has the effect of distancing the writer (or speaker) from the topic. For example: SOUND When the sound wave strikes our ears, it causes our eardrums to vibrate and | serves send signals to the brain, This fs how we hear. Hfthere were no ait there | | would be nothing to carry the sound. That there is no sound in space.) ‘The pronoun sis, in referring to the whole process described in the sentence that precedes it, serves to bring into sharp focus the point the writer is making. On the other hand, the writer has chosen that rather than this in the last sentence, perhaps because she is referring to something thatiis rather peripheral to the main topic, which is SOUND. Ifthe topic had been SPACE, she might have chosen this instead. Another difference between this and that is that the former can refer both back and forward in a text, whereas hat only ever has back reference. 2.13 Pronouns can have referents outside the text, as well as inside it. That is to say, the index finger can point beyond the text: we saw this with the pronoun us in the Johnson ad: Take itfrom us. Reference outside the text is called exophoric reference. The referent may be in the form of visual information on the page, as in. this caption to an illustration in a children’s reference book'®: 2. ‘This is a Roman valve that allowed water to be pumped uphill. Water would | [_ther come out of fountains such asthe one shown here —— TtChapter? What makes text? Or, as in the case of spoken language, the referent may be in the immediate physical environment. To continue the story of the dog in the Ukrainian folk tale (text 2.10): On his way home he met up with a rabbit, who said, ‘Those are beautiful boots, | indeed, May Itry them on, please?” Like pronouns, the definite article che can also make connections back, forward and outside the text. Again, to return to the story about the dog, note how each instance of the implies a previous mention of the noun that it determines: | ‘The dog was so proud of the boots that he agreed, and he sat down to take them | off The rabbit sat down next to the dog, pulled on the boots and admired himself | | —-— ‘The function of heis to signal knowledge that is given, ie knowledge that is shared between writer and reader (or between speaker and listener). Itis as if to say: you ‘nore which dog (or boots, or rabbit) I am talking about. The reason we know, in this case, is because the dog and the boots and the rabbit have been introduced to us previously in the text, using the indefinite article a to flag new informatior A dog... a pair of boots... a rabbit, A dog... the dogissa clear example of the way new information becomes given information. Often, however, the noun is not repeated verbatim in this way (dog— dog), but is expressed differently, eg by a synonym or a more general term, as in the following story opening!’, where the Beduin’s son is referred to successively as son, boy and child, where the town is referred to as the place, and where the ‘Beduin himself slater called the father: 25 [ ve | A Beduin once had business in the cattle market of a town. He took his | youne son with him, but in the confusion ofthe place he lost trackothis boy | | and the child was stolen. i The father hired a crier to shout through the streets that a reward of one | thousand piasters was offered for the return of the child. Although the man | who held the boy heard the crier, greed had opened his belly and he hoped | | toearn an even larger sum. So he waited and said nothing | On the following day the crier was sent through the streets again The above text also demonstrates how a noun can be made definite, not by what has already been said about it, but by what is about to be said about it. Thatis, the refers forward in the text, rather than back. The answers to the questions Which cattle market? and Which confusion? are not located buck in the text, but immediately after the noun: the cattle market ofa toto; the confusion of the place. Likewise: die return of the child. Other way’ of qualifying @ noun s0 as to make it definite include the use of relative clauses, as in the man zoho held the boy. Nouns can also be made definite through the addition, for example, of adjectives, especially adjectives that imply uniqueness, as in the following day. 25Chapter 2 What makes a text? Neither forward nor back reference seems to account for the use of the definite article in the streets, however: The father hired a crier to shout through the streets. Which streets? There is no answer to the question thatis explicit ip the text. In this case, of course, the reader infers which streets are being identified by reference to the previous mention of « town: towns have streets (and post offices and bus stations and town halls and mayors, and so on). Once the town ‘schema’ is activated, therefore, it would be unnecessary, even pedantic, (o specify which streets by writing, for instance, the streets ofthe ton. Here is a more contemporary example!®, where, once the basic schema has been triggered, the answers to the question Which? can easily be inferred. First ofall, here is the first line: 216 ot So ; In the evening Hamim took me to his movie theater Lo St How many things and events does the above sentence evoke? Now read 01 rs H We entered by a side door and stood near the screen, watching the show. It | was a steamy Los Angeles mystery dubbed into Arabic. | forget the title and | plot ... Hamim told me he had seen the movie before; but | noticed now that | | he intended to seeit again. |wanted to leave, but ... we stayed to the end. | a In this text, none of the nouns identified with she have been mentioned previously. How do we know, then, which screen, which show, which title, ete, is being referred to? The identity of each is, of course, easily recoverable by reference to the mental schema of the movie theatre. If you substituted just some of these items with others from a different schema, you can easily see how the word cheno longer fits, since it no longer ‘points’ to a shared schema’ {nv the evening Hamim took me to his movie theatre. We entered by a side | door and stood near the aquarium, watching the antelopes. | Definiteness is @ quality that is not only inferred from chues in the text, but also conferred by recourse to common knowledge of the world outside the text, The underlined references in the opening of the following (Armenian) folk tale!? are all recoverable from our knowledge of the world. (You should by now be able to explain the other instances of the.) ‘There was once a rich man who had a very beautiful wife and a beautiful daughter known as Nourie Hadig (tiny piece of pomegranate). Every month when the moon appeared in the sky, the wife asked, ‘New moon, am I the most beautiful, or | are: you? And every month the moon replied. “Youare the most beautiful’ i 247 ‘The answers to the questions Which moon? and Which sky? are not to be found in the text at all, neither explicitly mentioned nor implicitly inferred. The referents are ‘outside the textaltogether (je they are exophoric), in the shared general knowledge of reader and writer, where there is only one moon and only one sky. When there is only one of something, we always know which one is being referred to!Chapter 2 What makes text? Shared world information can consist of things in the immediate context, like the ‘cat or the corkscrew, oF things in the local context, like the post office, the pub, oF things in the national or global or universal context, like the Queen or the United Nations or the sun, Exophoric reference means that a lot can be left unsaid when speaking or writing. When, for example, my neighbour buzzes and asks, ‘Can I borrow the electric drill?’ [understand that she means the electric drill that is part of our shared world, the one she has borrowed a number of times before. Likewise, the referent of she in a note pinned up in the office (‘Can you switch off the lights when you Ieave?’) is in the shared world of reader and writer. It is this ‘insider’ knowledge which makes it difficuly, often, to understand other people's mail (if you are the kind of person who reads other people’s mail!). Take this e-mail I sent to my sister: 248 Dear Trish, | | Ipicked up the box this morning ~ thanks so much for the goodies ~ can't wait to try them, What do you do with the figs wonder? And the apron will be perfect for Sent Pol barbies. How's the new granddaughter?! e-mailed Lib both to share congratulations and to check if she had got the Amazon voucher ~ she hadn't | suspect she may have trashed it, thinking it was spam. Oh well ‘The prevalence of the definite article in this text reflects both the close relationship between writer and reader and the fact that the writer is not so much relaying news a8 responding to, or commenting on, events that are already familiar. Nominalization Pronouns and articles are used to refer backwards, forwards or outwards, to specific referents. But we can also make referenecs in a less focused, more general way, using certain nouns, a process called nominalization. Yo return to text 2.11, for example, in the sentence Robert Zubrin relates the checkered history of the project, the word project has no previous mention in the text, but refers back in a general ‘way to the events described in the first sentence of the text. Nouns that are cally used to ‘nominalize’ actions and events include situation, process and sway. Ideas, t00, can be referred to, using words like idea, theory and viewpoint, And, very commonly, words like explanation, criticism, proposal, suggestion, etc, are used to refer to what has been said or written. For example, in this extract”? two writers have just mentioned how they first heard about the ‘recovered memory” controversy and how it prompted them to collaborate on a thrille: 2.19 Nae Since we had come across the idea together we decided to write together. Much of that pracess seems vague now, but ] remember the day before we started writing Here, both she idea and shat process refer back in a general way to previously mentioned thoughts and events.Chapuer 2 What makes a text? 28 Classroom applications Tt shoutd be fairly obvious that the way reference works can onl be yeopeahs understood when batts seferting expression and referent are locatable in the context. The meaning of a word like de, for example, is not easily contained in sentence-length examples. The same can be said for i, ihis, shat and other referring devices. This suggests that, at the very least, learners need to meet and use these items in contexts beyond the level of the sentence, ic in extended segments of text. Discovery activity2.3 Referents ‘One way of raising awareness as to how articles and pronouns work to achieve cohesion in a text is to ask students to identify the referents (ie the things referred to) of each instance of reference in a text. And, in the case of the definite article, to Say why the referent is being presented as definite. The referent can be either the text, or inferable from the text, orin the world outside the text. If it is inthe text, it could be back in the text (anaphorie reference) or forwaed in the text {cataphoric reference). if it is outside the text (exophoric reference), it could be in the immediate physical context, or in the general knowledge of the world that the speakers share. Try doing it with this joke**: 2.20 | | An American. a Frenchman and an Australian were sitting ina baroverlooking | | Sydney Harbour. ‘Do you know why America is the! wealthiest country inthe? | world?’ asked the? American. ‘It's because we? build big and we build fast. | We put up the® Empire State Building in six weeks. : | ‘Sixweeks, mon dieu, so long!’ snappedthe” Frenchman. Z¢* Eiffel Tower | |_ we put up in one month exactement. And yau®, he continued, turningto | | the" Australian, ‘what has Australia done to match that"! i i | | | t ‘Ah, nuthin’, mate, Not that { know of ‘The American pointed to the!? Harbour Bridge, ‘What about that"? pe! asked ‘The! Australian looked over his'® there yesterday, houlder. ‘Dunno, mate. [It!7} Wasn't Commentary = mm Here is a suggested answer to the task: 1 The referent (country) is made definite by a superlative adjective, which implies that there is only one such country with this quality and hence the question Which country? has only one possible answer, which, in this case, occurs back ia the text (America). 2 exophoric: in the knowledge that the speakers share: world anaphoric: refers to ‘an American’ in line 1 anaphoric: refers to the whole clause ‘why America is the wealthiest country in the world’ exophoric: refers to the speaker (and his compatriots) at there is only one awChapter 2. What makes a text? 6 exophoric: only one Empire State Building in the world, It is a characteristic of proper nouns that, by virtue of their uniqueness, they are always definite. ‘This docsn’t mean, of course, that all proper nouns take the definite article, Think of your own name, for example. 7 Tike 3 8 like 6 9 exophoric: refers to the person being addressed 0 like 3 1 anaphoric: refers zo the Frenchman's previous claim, ie that the Eiffel Tower was put up in one month 12 like 6 13 exophoric: refers to the actual bridge. 14 anaphoric: ‘the American’ 15 anaphoric 16 anaphoric 17 exophoric: the actual bridge fil A slightly easier text for students is the Ukrainian folk tale”, which you now have in its entirety. Itis rich in cross-references: 2.10 (complete) | Why Dogs Chase Rabbits One daya dog lett his home and went out into the wide world to geta job. He worked Jong and hard and finally took his wages and bought a lovely new pair of boots, indeed. May try them on, please” ‘The dog was so proud of the boots that he agreed and he sat down to take them off. The rabbit sat down next to the dog, pulled on the boots and admired himself. Suddenly he jumped up and ran away, . [ ‘And that is why dogs still chase rabbits. They ae trying to get their boots back t | On his way home he met up with a rabbit, who said, "Those are beautiful boots A logical follow-up to reading the text and identifying the references would be to ask learners to restore the referring words to a ‘mutilated’ version of the text: ‘One day (1) dog left (2) home and went out into (3) wide world to get (4) job. (5) worked long and hard and finally took © ‘wages and bought (7) lovely new pair of boots. On (8) ____ way home (9) met up with (10) rabbit who said, ‘ay. are beautiful boots, indeed. May [try (12) on, please?’ ete. Note that for some of these gaps there may be more than one possible option, eg (1) aor the, (8) tis or the, according ta the intentions of the writer, and therefore learners should be asked to justify their choices, explaining what differences in meaning (any) are implied. Conjuncts ‘We havé devoted quite a lot of space to the subject of reference ~ but what about conjunets (commonly known as linkers)? Their very name suggests that they play a crucial role in holding a text together. In fact, as we saw in text 2.8, they are not 29Chapter 2. What makes a text? 30 as prevalent as you might think: that particular text was held together more by lexical and referential cohesion than by any explicit linkers ~ apart from two instances of ad. Of course, the amount of explicit signposting will depend to a large extent on the type of text we are dealing with, Here, for example, is an extract from a book on applied linguist 2, with the explicit linkers underline: 2.22 [ass {As nas pointed cut earlier. Standard English is generally defive by its lexis | and its grammar. In fact, when you come to look for it, standard lexis is very | elusive; so elusive that one wonders if it can be said to exist at all. And on | reflection iis hard to see how it could exist. To-begin with, the nation of | standard implies stability, a relatively fixed point of reference. Sq if | invent i | } | @ word, for example, it is not, by definition, standard But people are | inventing werds all the time to express new ideas and attitudes, toadjust to their changing world. Note that even in this text, where every sentence is explicitly linked to a previous one, the linkers are all relatively non-academic, apart from the phrase as was pointed out cartier. In fact, theee of the most common linkers are each represented in this text: and, but and so, So common are these that there are grounds for arguing that, for the purposes of speaking and writing, most learners need learn only these three (plusa few sequencing linkers), reserving the more obscure or formal linkers, such as nevertheless and furthermore, for recognition purposes only. It stands to reason that these are best presented to lcarners in their contexts, ie in connected text. A standard activity type is a combination of identification and categorization. Discovery activity 2.4 Conjuncts Identify the sentence conjuncts in these short texts and classify them. (Note that, for the purposes of this discussion, we are interested only in ways that sentences, are linked one with another, as opposed to internally. Sentence-internal linkers, eg such asin text 2.22, can be ignored for the time being.) 4 | Cold-biooded creatures, suchas reotits, cant control thar body temperature like we | | t i can, This is why they preter lile on land, where ts easier for them to warm up. But there | are some reptiles that have adapted to ocean lfe.24 3 { pocint Egyptians were skilled at making mummies. The body's insides were removed, except for the teart, Next, the body was left to dry for 40 days. Then it was washed and : ‘ied with jinn to Keep its shape. Finally, the body was olled and wrapped in linen |. Aspider nas eight legs. Soitis not an insect. tisatype ofanimalcaledanarachnid.°5 |Chapter 2 What makes a tex? 2.28 | Plant-eaters must spend much of their time eating in order fo get enough nourishment {goodness from food). A zebra, for example, spends atleast half its day munching grass. The good side to being a plant-eater, though, is that the animai does not have fo chase ‘and fight for its food as hunters do 2” 2.26 oman baths were more than a piace to get clean, They were also places to relax, moet | friends and get ft 28 Lo Commentary a aw Conjunets can express a number of different categories of logical relation between parts of a text, The main categories (with examples ftom the above texts in bold) are: + additive - thats, relations of addition, exemplification, similarity, emphasis: also, too, as well, moreover, zohat’s more, in addition, for example, likewise, similarly + adversative that is, relations of contrast or alternatives: but, though, however, on the other hand, in fact, alternatively + causal~thatis, relations of cause and result: this is why, so, therefore, asa result + temporal ~ thatis, relations of sequence in time: next, then, finally, in the meantime, ever since. Notice that some conjuncts are single words (usually adverbs), such as nevertheless, eventually, while some are preposition phrases (asa result, in addition), and there are others that consist of entire clauses, such as what’s more, this is because... ‘The above categories, too, are very broad categories and itwould be misleading to think that the items within a category are interchangeable. Fora start, there are different syntactic constraints on where each conjunct can be placed ina sentence. Compare, for example: a) The film was slow. But I enjoyed it. b) The film was slow. enjoyed it, though. and a) Jackie's a vegetarian. Karl isa vegetarian, 100. b) Jackie's a vegetarian, Karl is also a vegetarian. “There are also stylistic differences, some conjuncts being very formal, even pompous (novwithstanding, whereupon) and others being relatively informal and characteristic of spoken language (still, whar’s more). All of these factors create problems for learners, resulting in under-use and over- use (as we shall see below) and misuse, as in these examples (the misused linkers are underlined): 1Chapter 2 32 Whos makes a text? 1 Ta tell you the truth, Lcome {oom a small fanily There are four of us in our familu: My mother, my father, my sister and I [dare say, we also have got a eat Hs name is Mozari 2 Hiceypping can be very ivitating if we are logether with other peaple or if we hiccup for avery long time. However, some people can hiccup for hours or even days. 8 Then we were on the road again, but only for half an our The tyre punctured. I opened she boot and realized we didn’t have an extra tyre and the toal to changes it Alt least we pull up in front of the hotel at midnight 4 My surprise was when 1 arrived at home, there was a police car in front of my door. Firstly I though that something wiong had happened. However when I came in my home, I could see all my family sat in my sitting room with @ policeman and & man 5 Lm quite used not only ke speaking English with customers but also dealing with people that have English as a second language. For that reason, I'd like to practising my English even during my leisure dime, Probably what the writers meant were, respectively: 1 Imighe add... 2 Infact... 3 Atlast (or Eventually...) 4 Atfirstand (possibly) Indeed... (since itis unlikely the sight of a policernan alloyed his initial fears!) 5 The choice of that rather than shishas the effect of distancing the reason fom the consequences in fact, This is why... might work even better to join the two sentences. Classroom applications ‘The tendency, especially at beginner and elementary levels, to teach the language through isolated sentences means that many learners are uncertain as to how to weld such sentences into connected text, Here, for example, isa text written by an elementary student in response to the task Write a paragraph each about your free time, recent activities and future plans 2.27 T spend my free time doing my homework L spend my free time going to a walk with my friends T spend my free time listening musiz: Last weekend I stayed at home with my family. Last holiday £ went to Tarragona and I went to the beach Last weekend I went to the disco with my friends The next few months I'm going to slay at home all the day, studing Tin going to a picnic in 4 week Tin going to have 4 long holadays the next few months. Essentially the tektis nothing more than a lst of sentences, or, rather, three sets of lists. The only apparent connecting device is the repetition of the sentence frames (eg I spend my free time -ing). ‘This (inadvertent) use of parallelism is perhaps more suitable to a song than a written composition! What would help would be theChapter? What makes a text? inclusion of some basic conjuncts, especially those that express addition, such as and and also. Asking learners to identify and categorize the conjuncts in a simple text or texts (as you did with texts 2.22-2.26) is one way of drawing attention to them. One way of forcing the use of linking devices might be to ask the student who wrote text 2.27 to redraft it using fewer words and fewer sentences. Another problem with cohesionis a tendency of learners to overuse certain sentence- internal linkers, such as and and because. Inthe following text the learner incorporates because into practically every sentence. 2.28 In my free lime T lke 10 pass when my family. We go to swimming pool because we like to sutimming too muck A lot of times I go to video club and I get a film because we like very much the films toa. I can not go 40 the cinema frecuentiy because I have two children. The last film that ail the family saw was Atlantis because other film they do nat will like. Showing learners that, in order to express causality, there are alternatives to ‘because, such as so, might help here. Also, substituting some sentence-internal links with links across sentences, using formulae such as this is because... and this is why... would also help vary the rather repetitive sentence structure. One way of doing this might be to reformulate the text and ask the learner to note any differences. For example: like to spend my free time with my family. We love going swimming so we often go to the pool. And, because we also like films, I go to the video club a lot. Ihave two children so I don’t go to the cinema very often, The last film that we watched together was Atantis. This is because there was no other film that they wanted to watch, A follow-up stage, where learners re-cast sentences using the newly presented linkers, might look like this: Re-write each of the following sentences at least twice, choosing from these patterns: Toften go to Chinese restaurants because Tike Chinese food, ~ like Chinese food so Loften go to Chinese restaurants. — Because | like Chinese food I often go to Chinese restaurants. => Toften go to Chinese restaurants. This is because Ilike Chinese food. > I ike Chinese food. This is why Toften go to Chinese restaurants. 1. My flatmate doesn’t go out much because he is shy. 2. The scas are rising because the Arctic ice is melting. 3. ete. Of course, it is important that learners get beyond this rather mechanical stage and start writing short texis of their own creation. One way of doing this might be to sot a task such as: Describe some changes that have happened in your town/neighbourhood in the last few years and explain why these changes ocetCnapver 2 34 What makes a text? An overemphasis on teaching conjuncts, however, at the expense of a focus on Chat other ways of making texts cohesive, can result in the kind of stilted, over connected type of text that is parodied by Ann Raimes in her article “Anguish as Foreign Language’”’: {Louie rushed and got ready for wrk, but. when he went out the door, he saw the | snowstorm was very heavy Therefore, he decided not to go to work Then, he sat | down to enjoy his newspaper. However, he realized his boss might get anery because he did nat go to the office. Finally, he made another decision, that he must go to work. So, he went ollt the door and walked to the bus stop. Raimes comments: ‘Many of us, at one time or another, have praised a student for sucha piece of writing. No grammatical mistakes, I have seen such flat paragraphs as this applauded as excellent and I, t00, have assessed similar papers with a check mark and the comment “very good”, Raimes attributes this attitude toa pre-occupation with ‘bottom-up’ processes, as opposed to ‘top-down’ ones. Bottom-up processes focus on getting the details right at the expense of the whole: “We have, I fear, trapped our students within the sentence. ‘They worry about accuracy; they stop after each sentence and go back and check it for inflections, word order, spelling and punctuation, breathe a sigh of relief and go on to attack the looming giant of the next sentence.” Asan antidote to this bottom-up view, one idea might be to ask learners to remove conjuncis from a text, leaving only those that arc absolutely necessary and making any other adjustments (eg in the ordering of the sentences) that might be required. Conclusion In this chapter we have considered how a text can be distinguished from a random collection of sentences and what implications this might have for jearners in interpreting texts and in producing their own. We looked principally at the question of cohesion ~ what is it that binds the parts of a text together? ‘The main teaching implications of this discussion of cohesion can be summarized as: + expose learners to texts rather than to isolated sentences only + draw attention to, and categorize, the features that bind texts together + encourage learners to reproduce these features, where appropriate, in theit own texts + provide feedback not only on sentence-level features of learners’ texts, but on the overall cohesiveness as well. In the next chapter we will address the question of coherence: what is it that makes a text make sense?Chapter 3 What makes a text make sense? In the last chapter we looked at the way a text hangs together —how is it is ‘made cohesive’. But a text needs to do more than simply hang together. It also needs to make sense. In this chapter we will fook at way’ that this is achieved and the relation between this sense-making quality (a text’s coherence) and its internal cohesion. To do this it may help to unravel a textin order to demonstrate that its, coherence is more than simply a function of its cohesive ties. Discovery activity 3.1. Ordering Here, for example, (s a short text from a children's encyclopedia®°. The sentences have been re-arranged and lettered. Can you sort them into their correct order? What linguistic (and nor-linguistic) clues did you use to help you do the task? | a) Two years later his lather took him to play at concerts in the great cities | of Europe, b) Mozart wrote church music, opera and nearly 50 symphonies. ©) The Austrian composer Mozart was a musical genius 4d) He worked hard but earned little money and died very poor at the age of 38. e) He began writing music at the age of five. Commentary m mm In case you didn’t get it, the original textis as follows: - 3.4b —_ (o) The Austrian composer Mozart was @ musical genius. (e} He te | writing music at the age of five, (a} Two years later his father took him to play at concerts in the great cities of Europe. (b) Mozart wrote church music, ‘opera and nearly 50 symphonies. (d) He worked hard but eamed little money and died very poor at the age of 35. ‘The point of this exercise is that the correct ordering of the sentences does not depend on cohesive ties alone. The only sentence thatiis explicitly linked to its predecessor is (a) because of the connector later. Neither it, nor sentences (e) and (@) —because of the referring pronoun fe could begin the text. But apart from that constraint, they could go anywhere, technically speaking. Nevertheless, our expectation, as readers, is that the text will more or less follow the chronological order of Mozart's life. Moreover, it simply wouldn’t make sense to put sentence (@) at the end, for example: Bale He worked hard but eared little money and died very poor at the age of 35. | Two years later his father took him to play at concerts in the great cities of | Europe. ed 3S.Chapter 3 36 What makes a text make sense? Coherence “This capacity of a text to ‘make sense’ is called coherence. An incoherent text, such as 3.1c, doesn’t make sense: however closely connected its indivicual sentences might be. it is non-sense, Coherence is a quality that the reader derives from the text: itis not simply a function of its cobesion, Liven quite cohesive texts can be nonsense, as in this invented example: 32 “The Austrian composer Mozart wasa musical genius. He has gota sizing | pool. It actually tingles on your skin to tell you it’s working. Water would | ES ‘come out of fountains stich as the one shown here, And that is why dogs | still chase rabbits, ‘The text, in case you hacln’t noticed, is constructed out of sentences from other texts in this and the previous chapter. Meaningless as itis, itis not without cohesion ~ the sentences are notionally connected by the use of pronouns, substitutions and conjunets. Butt is incoherent however hard we try, we can't getit to make sense Cohesion, then, is a surface feature of texts, independent of the reader. Coherence, on the other hand, results from the interaction between the reader and the text. This is not to say that cohesion and coherence function independently. Writers intentionally use cohesive devices with the aim of making their texts easier 10 follow, ie more coherent. But if the text is basically nonsense, no amount of linkers will make it coherent. Unfortunately, alot of student writing reflects an ‘over-dependence on the cohesive ‘trees’ at the expense of the coherent ‘wood’, as wwe shall see shortly First, though, we need to consider what exactly itis that makes a text coherent = or, rather, what helps make a text coherent, since coherence, Lam arguing, is in the eye of the beholder. ‘The issue of coherence is usually approached from two perspectives: the micro~ Jevel and the macro-level. At the micro-level, readers have certain expectations of how the proposition (i¢ the meaning) of a sentence is likely to be developed in the sentence or sentences that follow it, When these expectations are met, the immediate text will seem coherent, At the macro-level, coberenc &) the reader can easily discern what the textis about, b) the text is organized ina Way that answers the reader’s likely questions and c) the text is organized in a wav that is familiur to the reader. Micro-level coherence sentence-by-sentence, level. We'll start by looking at the micro Discovery activity 3.2 Logical relationships Match the two halves of these short authentic texts. What is the logical relation between the two parts of each text?Chapter What makes a text make sense? 1 Shares in Parmalat, the Italian global food group, fell by more than 50% after a three-day suspension. A Pool, brook, stunning views, lush groves, comfort, privacy, 3+ 2 Doctor Foster went to Gloucester Ina shower of rain. B They may be recovered via the lodge on payment of the current fee, 3 Magical Provence: modernized farmhouse in medieval village. © Add Spice Paste and stir well. 4% Shookingly, 10 passengers on @ flight are at risk of DVT. D The company had been plagued by apparent balance sheet discrepancies.2? 5 Bicycles parked other than in the racks provided are liable to be impounded. E We are biocking the pavement. Thank you. 6 Boil water in a saucepan. F Scholl flight socks can help prevent. you being one of them.2? 7 Toall smoker road to smoke. lease cross the @ He stepped in a puddle Right up to his middie And never went there again. Commentary a ‘The complete texts are: 1-D, 2-G, 3-A, 4-R 5-B, 6-C, 7-B. The exercise should have been easy to do: apart from anything else, there are lexical clues that bind the texts together, But, there are also implicit logical connections and it is these that help create the fecling that the (admittedly minimalist) texts make sense. The logical connections are the same as those we looked at when discussing linking devices, but note that there are no explicit conjuncts signalling the relation between the two sentences. We take the relation on trust. Here are the relations: + additive, as in text 3-A. ‘I'he second sentence gives details about, or specifies the statement in the first sentence. This movement, from general to specific, is cone that readers are ‘primed? to recognize. + adversative,as in texts 4-F and 5-B. In 4-F the second sentence, in claiming to solve the problem stated in the first, makes a contrast that could have been signalled with however, for example. In 5-B (which was a notice in the forecourt of an Oxford college) there is a contrast between impounded and recovered, which could have been signalled with but or however + causal, as in texts 1-D and 7-E, where the second sentence provides a reason, for the situation or request mentioned in the first. + temporal, as in texts 2-G and 6-C, where the chronological order of events (and then...) implied, rather than explicitiy stated. Note that when two past tense sentences are placed together, and in the absence of any other evidence, ‘we assume that the first happened before the second, as in John sang a song. Janet told a joke. ‘The above texts have been chosen to demonstrate how whole (admittedly short) texts cohere because of the kinds of expectations that are both set up and satisfied by their component parts. This happens both at the level of the whole text and 37Chapter What makes text make sense? 38 also at the Jocal level, from one sentence to the next, such that at any pointin a tex any one sentence both reflects what has gone before and anticipates what is going to.come, The sentence ‘represents’ the text at that point. Take a sentence randomly chosen from the middle of a text: (12) The genes carry all the information needed to make a new plant or animal. We can fairly safely assume that the previous sentence was ubout genes, and that the sentence that follows will develop this general statement further by saying something more, and possibly more specific, about either genes oF information. Let’ see if this is in fact the case: (11) Bach partis called’ a gene. (12) ‘Phe genes carry all the information needed to make a new plant or animal. (13) ‘They decide its sex and also what characteristics it inherits, Our hypotheses have been confirmed: sentence 11 introduced the term geneand sentence 13 specified two sub-sets of information subsumed under all the information in sentence 12 We could repeat the exercise with sentence 11 and sentence 13, reflecting back and projecting forward, and again with sentences 10 and 14, and soon, until, in theory, we had ‘guessed the whole text — or, rather, a limited set of potential whole texts. We are able to do this not only because of cohesive clues like the definite article the that goes with genes in sentence 12, suggesting a previous mention, but also because the information in sentences is distributed in a predictable way. In English, sentences (and the clauses of which they are composed) have a simple two-way division between what the sentence is about (its topic) and what the writer or speaker wants to tell you about that topic (the comment). Moreover, the topic of the sentence is often associated with whatis already known, or give, Given information is information that is retrievable because it has been explicitly mentioned at some prior point in the text, or because itis inferable from the text or from the context, or hecause itis part of the shared world knowledge of writer and reader (or speaker and listener). Given information normally precedes new information in the sentence. The new information is typically placed in the comment position. ‘Theme and rheme/ Topic and comment ‘The topic and comment are also called the theme and the rheme of the sentence or clause. The different terms derive from different theoretical viewpoints and also from the need to distinguish the topic of a sentence from the topic of a text (which ‘we will discuss below). In our example sentence the topic is the genes: topic (theme) | comment (rheme) ‘given information| neve information (12) The genes | carry all the information needed to make a new plant ot animal ‘The topic is the aunch pad’ of the message and is typically - but not always — realized by a noun phrase (the grammatical subject of the sentence). ‘The comment is what the writer or speaker considers to be “newsworthy” about theChapter 3 What makesa text make sense? topic: what you as reader or listener need to pay attention to. (For this reason, the comment typically carries the major word stress when articulated.) ‘The tendency to place the new information in the latter part of a clause or sentence is called end-aeight. This new information, in turn, often becomes the given, information of the next sentence, as in sentenees 1 1 and 12. Or the same topi carried over and a new comment is made about it (as in sentences 12 and 13): topic (theme) _[ comment (rheme) ‘given information | new information (1D Fach part. [ is called a gene. 12) The genes _| carry all the information needed to make a new plant or animal. (13) They decide sex and also what characteristics it inherits. Predicting ‘backwards’ again, we can be fairly sure that the word part (in the theme of sentence 11), or one of its synonyms, was either the topic or comment of sentence 10. This is in fact the case: topic (theme) comment (rheme) (10) Different parts of each chromosome | carry different ‘coded messages’ (11) Each part is called a gene, Going back again, we are not surprised to find that chromosome is from sentence 9: “carried over’ topic (theme) ‘comment (rheme) (9) Inside every cell are tiny chromosomes. (10) Different parts ofeach chromosome _| carry different ‘coded messages’ (1D Each part iscalled a gene. ‘The comment may consist of more than one ¢lement (as in sentence 13), only one of which may be carried over: topic (theme) comment (rheme) (13) They decide its sex and also what characteristics it inherits. (14) Some inherited characteristics | are stronger than others. 39Chapter 3 What makes a text make sense? ‘These patterns of topic and comment can be represented like this (after McCarthy 1991): 1 topic! comment! topic? > comment? topic? —————» «tec. 2° topic! —————» comment' ' topic! comment? topic! —————». ete. 3. topic! ————-» comment! + comment” topic? “~~ comment? topic? —» comment* ‘The Genetics text demonstrates how writers mix and combine these patterns in order to carry their argument forward in the way they feel is most coherent. (It would be rare to find a longish text that adopted one pattern at the exclusion ef others.) As readers, these alternating patterns of topic and'comment help us make sense of the writer's argument. Disrupting these patterns, by moving topics to the comment position, for example, would prove very distracting: «.. Different ‘coded messages’ are carried by different parts of each chromosome. A gene is what each partis called, ‘The information needed tomake a new plant or animal is carried by the genes. Its sex and what characteristics it inherits they decide, Stronger than others are some inherited characteristics. ‘There are other means, as well, for signalling the evolving argument of a text. One is through the use of nominalization (see page 27). There arc key words, such as ay, problem, anscer, situation, process, and so on, that can either encapsulate what has gone before ot set up expectations as to what is to come. Here is another segment from the text on genetics, Note how the underlined words ‘gather up’ the adjacent sentences, both retrospectively and prospectively: (© Each parent passes on certain characteristics to its offspring. (7) This process is called heredity. (8) Heredity works in an amazing way. Process encapsulates the entire proposition expressed in sentence 6. Way, especially in rheme position, signals that some kind of description will follow. It would be very odd if the sentence that follows way did not go on to outline how, in fact, heredity works,Chapuer 3 What makes a text make sense? Discovery activity 3.3. Logical relations It’s time to look at the whole of the Genetics text3®. You should now be able to identify the logical relations between its sentences, showing how each sentence either anticipates the sentence that follows, or encapsulates some element of the sentence that preceded it 33 a GENETICS The science of genetics explains why living things look and behave as they | do. Advanced animals have two sexes, male and female. Each individual | | produces sex cells. Ifa male and female sex cell join, the female cell grows into a new individual, Bach parent passes on certain characteristics to its offspring, This process is called heredity | Heredity works in an amazing way. Inside every cell are tiny cromasomes, | largely made of a chemical called DNA. Different parts of each chromosome | carry different coded messages. Each pattis called a gene. The genes carry all the information needed to make a new plant or animal. They decide its sex and also what characteristics it inherits, ‘Some inherited characteristics are stronger than others. They are dominant, Weaker ones are recessive. Genes for brown eyes, for example, dominate cover the weaker genes for blue eyes. Commentary = mm ‘The following outline summarizes the logical relations between the sentences of the text (J) GENETICS Statement of topic. (2) The science of genetics explains [~The topic (genetics) is now a given, why living things look and behave as_| having been announced in the title they do. and takes theme position. The definition that follows is the ‘news? and takes the theme slot. The embedded question (Vy do living things look and behave as they do?) predicts an answer. The rest of the textin fact answers the question. @) Advanced animals have two “The topic (adeanced animals) echoes sexes, male and female, part of the comment in (2) (living dings) ~ this suggests that (3) is the beginning of an answer to (2). () Bach individual produces sex Again, the topic (each individual) is a cells. re-focusing of the living things, advanced animals thread ~ same topic, new comment, with the word sex carried over. The dynamic verb atChapter What makes a text make sense? (12) The genes carry all the Previous comment becomes topic; | information needed to make anew | information is similar in meaning to plant or animal coded messagesin (10) (13) They decide its sex and also Same topic as previous sentence. what characteristics itinherits. Characteristics is cartied over from (6). Again, will the characteristicsbe | itemized! (14) Some inherited characteristics | One of the previous comments are stronger than others, becomes the topic. (15) They are dominant. Re-wording of previous sentence. (16) Weaker ones are recess Weaker ones = othersin (14); the structure of the sentence imitates (15) — and is an example of parallelism (see page 22). (17) Genes for brown cyes, Atlast, and as expected, some specific for example, dominate over the characteristics are mentioned (see 6, ‘weaker genes for bluceyes. 13 and 14); dominant becomes dominate; weaker is repeated: genes is repeated wie ‘This analysis docs not in any way exhaust the intricate network of interowining, themes and arguments in this one text: not for nothing does the word text derive from the Latin texere, to weave. In fact, some writers use the word rexture to describe the combined effect of such structural features of a text as the topic comment organization and of its internal cohesion, both grammatical and lexical. Itisimportant to stress, at this point, that texture is not simply a decorative or stylistic quality of texts, but that it fulfils a vital communicative purpose. When we are reading a text ~ or listening to spoken text -we are attending only to the immediate sentence or utterance. We cannot process the whole text all at once. (Of course, with a written text, you can glance back through it, but, generally, we don’t.) Therefore, as readers and listeners, we need guidance as to what has gone before and what is yet to come. The immediate sentence has to represent the text at that moment. Or, as John Sinclair puts it, “The text at any particular time carries with it everything that a competent reader needs in order to understand the current state of the text.’*° This view of a text unfolding in time has led Sinclair to propose a radical theory of text, which argues that the text is only the immediate sentence. ‘This focal sentence either encapsulates the immediately preceding sentence, or it sets up an anticipation of the sentence that follows (what is called prospection). So far this argument is consistent with our analysis of the genetics text. In fact, its coherence is achieved almost entirely by acts of prospection, that is, by setting up an expectation that is immediately satisfied, as in: Heredity works in an amazing way, > Inside every ecll are tiny chromosomes, largely made of a chemical called DNA. etc. 43Chapter 3 44 What makes a text male sense? But Sinclair goes on to argue that, for all intents and purposes, the restof the tet apart from the immediate sentence exists only as a trace or an echo. Ic is not subjet to mental consultation, hence there cannot really be such a thing as anaphoric (or back) reference. This is of course easier to argue with regard to spoken language, where itis simply not possible to consult the text in any physical way. But Sinclair extends the argument to written text as well. The interconnectivity of texts is only an artefact, he argues. Itis available for us to study after the event, but itis notan accurate way of modelling what happens when we actually read, What does happen? As the focus of our attention proceeds from one sentence to the next te state of our mental representation based on the text ~ the knowledge shared by writer and reader — is continuously updated through processes of encapsulation and prospection, Referents in the sentence, such as pronouns, do not ‘point back’ in the text. Rather, they point at what has become shared knowledge, much in the same way as definite articles or proper nouns do, as in the sentence from text 2.18 And the apron will be perfect for Sant Pol barbies... The referents are notin the text, but in the reader's and writer’s heads, as it were Sinclair concludes that ‘a text does not consist of a string of sentences which are intricately interconnected, but of g series of sentence-length texts, each of whichis a total update of the one before’.?” As compelling (and exciting) as Sinclair's argumentis, it does not invalidate the study of cohesion in texts, but it does suggest that the processes of encapsulation and prospection demand more attention than they have been normally been given. Reader expectations ‘Not ail texts are as transparent as text 3.3, which, apart from anything else, was Written for children and therefore'is relatively straightforward and unadorned. Some texts do not yield their sense without more of d struggle. Nevertheless, as readers we approach a text assuming it will make sense until proven otherwise, even if it means putting out initial hypotheses on hold, or even abandoning them altogether. Take these two sentences, for example: 34 1 | (1) Teared to read around my sixth birthday: (2) I was makinga dinosaur in | school from crépe bandage and toilet rolls when I started to feel as if an avisible pump was inflating my ead from the inside. ‘Our understanding of the first sentence suggests that the second sentence will be connected ta it either in some temporal or causal sense, eg it will relay the circumstances, or the cause, or the effect of the writer’s leaming to read. The past continuous in sentence 2 (J was making a dinosaur...) tends to support the temporal hypothesis, as itis « verb form ofien used to set the scene for some particular narrative event. It’s only when we getto the ‘invisible pump’ that the hypothesis starts to wobble a bit. Perhaps the writer is implying that the experience of learning to read felt like his head was being pumped up. But how is the dinosaur related to reading? Is the dinosaur a red herring? Let’s put our theory on hold and move on: | @) My face became a cluster of bumps, my feet dangled limp and too far away L te control. Ls |