Good morning!

My name is …and I am going to deal with topic 29:

"Análisis y articulación del discurso. Cohesión y coherencia.
Anáfora y catáfora. Los conectores. Deixis."
First of all I will make a short introduction about the theme then I will
develop the topic dividing it into several points:

1. What’s discourse analysis?

2. The concept of cohesion
3. The concept of coherence
4. Connectives.
5. Deixis.
6. Conclusion
7. Bibliography

Let’s then start with the INTRODUCTION. Many things have been
said about this topic which is relatively new, therefore I will try to
analyze it in an easy and clear way. According to Brown and Yule, "the
analysis of discourse is necessarily the analysis of language in use”. As
such it cannot be restricted to the description of linguistic forms
independent of the purposes or functions which these forms are
designed to serve in human affairs. For this reason, the relevance of this
theme lies in the fact that discourse analyses have important
consequences to society, to education and to linguistics, as it may result
in better understanding of how we learn language and other languages.

Let’s now continue with point number 1: WHAT´S DISCOURSE

ANALYSIS? It is not the analysis of sentences in isolation. Its goal is
not to account for all and only the sentences of the languages or their
syntactic relationship to each other. When a speaker of a language
hears or reads a passage this speaker can normally decide without
difficulty whether it forms a unified whole or is just a collection of
unrelated sentences; whether it is a text or not. Any instance of living
language that is playing some part in a context of situation is a text. It
may be either spoken or written. A text is regarded as a semantic unit,
a unit of meaning and it is encoded in sentences where cohesion gathers
them all in one text.

In the study of text it is also important to take into account that every
text has a context of situation which Halliday analyses in three
components:
-the field of discourse or the kind of activity within which
language is playing some part.
-the tenor of discourse referring to the actors that are involved
in the text.
-the mode of discourse referring to the particular functions that
are assigned to language in this situation and to the rhetorical channel
that is therefore assigned to it.

The concept of texture is entirely appropriate to express the property of

being a text. The property of texture is related to the listener’s
perception of coherence.
For example: "read all the books you want to. Afterwards,
you will have to bring them back to me".
The word "them" in this sentence refers to "all the books". This
anaphoric function of "them" gives cohesion to the two sentences so
that they are interpreted as constituting a text or part of a text; the
words "all the books" and "them" refer to the same thing, they are co
referential.
Apart from this co referential cohesive tie there are other such as:
 -substitution
-ellipsis
-conjunction
-lexical cohesion
A tie is the most important concept in talking about texture because it
relates two terms together through some meaning relation. Such
semantic relations form the basis for cohesion between the message of
the text. This concept of tie carries us directly to point number 2: THE
CONCEPT OF COHESION. The concept of cohesion is set up to account
for relations in discourse. We can interpret cohesion as the set of
semantic resources for linking a sentence with what has gone before.

Following Halliday we can say that "language can be explained as a

multiple coding system comprising three levels of coding or "strata": the
semantic (meanings), the lexicogrammatical (forms) and the
phonological and orthographic (expressions)". As cohesion can be
expressed partly through the grammar and partly through the
vocabulary, we can speak about grammatical cohesion and lexical
cohesion. Now we are going to discuss cohesion relations under the
headings of reference, substitution, ellipsis which are grammatical,
conjunctions which is in the borderline of the grammatical and the
lexical and lexical cohesion.
1. Reference : there are certain items such as personals,
demonstrative and comparatives in every language which have the
property of reference, i.e., words that make reference to something else
for their interpretation. As a general rule, reference items may be
exophoric (situational) or endophoric (textual): and if endophoric they
may be anaphoric or cataphoric. Anaphora is a form of presupposition
which points back to some previous item which is its linguistic
reference.
 For instance: " I saw Adrian yesterday; however he didn’t see
me"
the personal pronoun "he" refers to its linguistic reference "Adrian"

On the other hand cataphora points to the following text and relates to
an item which is referred later.
For instance: "she phoned her mum. Debra was very happy
because she hadn’t talked to her mum for some days"
.

2. Substitution &ellipsis: the substitution makes the connection

at the lexicon-grammatical level. Between substitution and ellipsis the
difference in meaning is minimal.
e.g. "does he love you? Yes, he does.
The world "does" substitutes the verb "love"
e.g. "where are you leaving? next month"
Here in this sentence not all the elements have been said "I am
leaving next month" would have been the long answer.

3. Conjunctions: conjunction is somewhat different from the

other cohesive relations. It is based on the assumption that there are in
the linguistic system forms of systematic relationship between
sentences. These logical relations are embodied in linguistic structure in
the form of coordination, apposition, modification, etc... Conjunctive
relations represent semantic links between the elements that are
constitutive of text. For instance: "all the tickets had been sold out .
However, she got a few."
The word "however" is an adversative conjunction joining the two
sentences.
 4. Lexical cohesion: lexical cohesion embraces two distinct
though related aspects reiteration and collocation. Lexical cohesion
refers to the cohesive effect achieved by a selection of vocabulary.
Reiteration is the repetition of a lexical item or the occurrence of a
synonym of some kind in the context of reference and in most cases it is
accompanied by a reference item typically "the".
E.g. "they passed the exam . The task/
The thing/ was not easy.
The paper/

Collocation is a natural and unnoticed aspect of textual cohesiveness.

Members of the same lexical set tend to appear close together in texts.
The item "oranges" relates to terms such as orchard, tree, orange
blossom, Spain, etc... They all belong to the same semantic field:
"oranges"

Now that we have finished the concept of cohesion, let’s move

straight to its closely related point number three: THE CONCEPT OF
COHERENCE.

What has gone before provides the environment for what is coming
next. This sets up internal expectation. An important contribution to
coherence comes from cohesion, that is to say, the amount of linguistic
resources that every language has for linking one part of a text to
another. Nevertheless, natural discourse is not fully explicit, relationship
between sentences or propositions may exist without being expressed.
According to Van Dik who analyzed deeply in this field the relation
between "world or situation" does not always follows a sequence of
linear ordered facts due to several reasons:
 1. firstly, a discourse usually mentions a small part of the fact of
some situation
2. secondly, the ordering of facts may correspond to a different
order in the discourse, due to pragmatic and cognitive constrains.
3. finally, facts are not always linearly ordered, but for instance
spatially or hierarchically ordered.

The study of the relations between sentences in a discourse will have

first of all to show how the meaning and reference of sequences of
sentences act. Therefore, let’s now go on with point number four:
CONNECTIVES.

Connectives typically range over sentences or propositions as "wholes".

We have to take into account a connection may be a necessary but not
sufficient condition for the acceptability of discourse.
For instance, in a sentence like: "Patricia is one of my friends, so my
mum has got short hair.” in spite of the presence of the connective
so, there is no connection. Clauses are connected if the facts are related
in the same world or situation.

We can find the following connectives:

1. Conjunctions, both subordinating and coordinating, e.g. "and",
"or", "because", and so on. They make composite sentences from simple
sentences.
2. Sentencial adverbs, such as "yet", "nevertheless",
"consequently", etc...
3. Nominalized propositions may have a connective character
too, such as "due to", "in spite of"...
4. Interjections expressed by intonations or phrases like "you
know!"," isn’t it?"
 5. Finally, connection may be expresses by others such as, nouns,
verbs, adjectives, and by full phrases and clauses, such as :
"conclusion" "to conclude"...

Let’s now deeply analyze three of these main kind of connectors:

Conjunction and disjunction, conditionals and contrastives.
First of all Conjunction and disjunction not only join clauses
together but they also show how the meaning of the two clauses are
related. One of the problems of natural connectives is their possible
semantic ambiguity because the same connective may express different
types of connection and one type of connection may be expressed by
various connectives as illustrated by the following examples: "she
opened the door and came in" and "she opened the door and the
teacher closed the door behind her" In this second example the use
of the conjunctions is not natural, if antecedent and consequent change
place the whole sentence becomes unacceptable.
Disjunctions express the truth of one of the propositions necessarily
implies the falsity of the other in the same possible world.
For example: "Am I going to clean the car or am I going to visit
one of my friends?" It means that only one proposition is going to be
fulfilled, there is a conjunction either one option or the other one.
The second kind of connector would be the conditionals,
expressing dependency relations between propositions or facts. They
have been divided into two: actual conditional and hypothetical
conditionals. Under actual conditionals Dick classifies connectives such
as "because", "for", "therefore", "so" "since"...
For example:" because it did not rain that summer, the soil was
dried out”. Hypothetical conditionals connectives are "if... then...""in
case... then..."e.g. "if you do not understand a word you would not
know how to do the exercise."
 The third type are: Contrastive When any course of event
contrasts with the normal expectations about what normal worlds look
like. Such unexpected and contrastive relations between facts are
expressed by "but", "though", "yet", "nevertheless", "in spite of"...
For instance: "she had studied almost all the topics; nevertheless
they asked her, the only topic she has not had time to study" The
fact that she had studied almost a 100% of her themes seems to
assume that she had high probability of passing the exam. Therefore the
fact that she had been asked the only topic she hadn’t time to study was
unexpected.

Let’s now turn our attention to the last point, point number five:
DEIXIS.

Let’s consider the following note, pinned on a professor’s door: "sorry.

I missed you. I’m in my other office. Back in an hour". Without
knowing who the addressee is, what time the note was written or the
location of the other office, we are hard put to make a precise
interpretation of the message. Those terms that we cannot interpret
without an immediate context are sometimes called deictics (the name
comes from the Greek word "deixis" which means "pointings").They are
used to locate actions in a time frame relative to the present or to
locate part of a text in relation to others.
For example the sentence: "as I have mentioned before, you and I
have to be together here from now onwards." The words "you and
I" are the social deixis, "here" shows the place where the utterance is
taking place so place deixis locates one or another or both the
participants in the speech act because these adverbs serve as a spatial
reference point. Words such as "from now onwards" delimits and points
at the time where the situation is being dealt, i.e., time deixis. In
English the most common deictic adverbs are "here and there" and
the demonstratives "this and that" used in different ways.
Finally, the expression: "as I have mentioned before" refers to some
portion of the discourse; discourse deixis.

Now that I have dealt with all these points about discourse
analyses, I will summarize it with a short conclusion. Although the
study of texts and discourses have always been taken into account, it
has been lately when all these new concepts have been analyzed in a
more detailed way. We as teachers have to teach students how to learn
strategies and all the tools such as connectors, etc... so that they
understand and produce cohesive discourses.

As far as bibliography is concerned, I have mainly used the

following resources:

Halliday. Cohesion in English. Longman. 1977.

Dijk. Text and Context. Explorations in the Semantics and
Pragmatics of discourse. 1980.
Quirk.A comprehensive Grammar of English. Longman. 1985.
Crystal, D. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language.
C.U.P. 2004.