scholarly journals REFERENCE AS A DEVICE OF GRAMMATICAL COHESION IN THE ABSTRACTS WRITTEN IN ENGLISH AND SERBIAN

2019 ◽  
pp. 177-195
Author(s):  
Sanja Maglov

Along with the title, the abstract is a part of the research article that readers first encounter when they want to read a particular article as it provides the most important information related to the article itself. The appealing character of an abstract depends mostly on its content and the way it has been written. This article compares the use of reference as part of grammatical cohesion in mechanical engineering and social science abstracts in English and Serbian. Three types of reference have been analysed, namely personal, demonstrative and comparative in the corpus comprising 25 research article abstracts for each discipline and each language. More frequent use of reference, primarily demonstrative, in the English abstracts implies that their authors use those structures not only to achieve better textual cohesion and density of expression, but also to guide their readers through the text. Especially, the combination of demonstratives and the definite article with general and other nouns leads to the interlacing of lexical and grammatical cohesion, thus providing a wider range of expressions, argumentation and generalization. Unlike the English abstracts, the mechanical abstracts in Serbian rely more on lexical cohesion, with very few personal pronouns as cohesive devices. The awareness of such differences can be an important guideline to all researchers attempting to write for international readership.

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (S1) ◽  
pp. 5-5
Author(s):  
Christine M. Weston ◽  
Mia S. Terkowitz ◽  
Daniel E. Ford

OBJECTIVES/SPECIFIC AIMS: The objectives of this study were to compare different methods for determining the disciplines involved in a research article. We sought to address the following questions: To what extent does the number of disciplines reported by an article’s corresponding author agree with their description of the article as unidisciplinary or interdisciplinary? (Q1) and To what extent does the corresponding author’s description of the research as unidisciplinary or interdisciplinary agree with its classification as unidisciplinary or interdisciplinary based on the affiliation of its co-authors? (Q2). METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: Using Scopus, we randomly selected 100 articles from 2010 and 2015 from science teams that had at least 1 author affiliated with Johns Hopkins. Author affiliations were grouped into common academic disciplines: Basic Science, Medicine (and all clinical specialties), Public Health, Engineering, Social Science, Computer Science, Pharmacy, Nursing, and Other. Articles with more than 1 discipline were considered, interdisciplinary. We then sent an online Qualtrics survey to the corresponding author of each article and asked them to indicate (1) all of the disciplines that contributed to the research article at hand, and (2) to indicate whether they considered the research to be “unidisciplinary” or “interdisciplinary” based on definitions that we provided. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: For Q1, we asked corresponding authors to indicate the number of disciplines involved in their research and then to choose the definition that best described their research. Among 76 respondents, 42 indicated that their research consisted of 1 discipline, and 34 indicated that their research consisted of more than 1 discipline. Of the 42 respondents who indicated that their research consisted of one discipline, 21 (50%) respondents described their research as “unidisciplinary” and 21 (50%) described their research as “interdisciplinary.” However, of the 34 respondents who indicated that their research consisted of more than 1 discipline, all but 1 (97%) described their research as “interdisciplinary.” For Q2, we assigned a discipline to each co-author based on his/her affiliation and counted the number of disciplines involved. Among 76 respondents, of the 22 who described their research as “unidisciplinary,” 16 (73%) were categorized as “unidisciplinary” and 6 (27%) were categorized as “interdisciplinary,” using this method. Of the 54 respondents who described their research as “interdisciplinary,” 30 (56%) were categorized as “interdisciplinary” and 24 (44%) as “unidisciplinary.” DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE OF IMPACT: Our results highlight that different methods for determining whether a given research article is interdisciplinary are likely to yield different results. Even when researchers indicate that their research is based within one major discipline, they may still consider it interdisciplinary. Likewise, classifying an article as either unidisciplinary or interdisciplinary based on the affiliations of its co-authors, may not be consistent with the way it is viewed by its authors. It is important to acknowledge that assessing the interdisciplinarity of research is complex and that objective and subjective views may differ.


SAGE Open ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 215824402110321
Author(s):  
Hesham Suleiman Alyousef

This qualitative study examined multimodal cohesive devices in English oral biology texts by eight high-achieving Saudi English-as-a-foreign-language students enrolled in a Bachelor of Science Dentistry program. A Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis (SF-MDA) of the textual and logical cohesive devices in oral biology texts was conducted, employing Halliday and Hasan’s cohesion analysis scheme. The findings showed that students used varied cohesive devices: lexical cohesion, followed by reference and conjunctions. Although ellipsis was minimally employed in the oral biology texts, its discipline-specific uses emerged: the use of bullet points and numbered lists that facilitate recall. The SF-MDA of cohesion in multimodal semiotic resources highlighted the processes underlying construction of conceptual and linguistic knowledge of cohesive devices in oral biology texts. The results indicate that oral biology discourse is interdisciplinary, including a number of subfields in biology. The SF-MDA of pictorial oral biology representations indicates that they include instances of cohesive devices that illustrate and complement verbal texts. The results indicate that undergraduate students need to be provided with a variety of multimodal high-cohesion texts so that they can successfully extend underlying conceptual and logical meaning-making relations.


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 515
Author(s):  
Emi Emilia ◽  
Nurfitri Habibi ◽  
Lungguh Ariang Bangga

The paper reports on the results of a study aiming to investigate the cohesion of exposition texts written by eleventh graders of a school in Bandung, West Java, Indonesia. The study used a qualitative case study research design, especially text analysis, involving 32 students. In the interest of space, the paper will present the data obtained from six texts written by 6 students, representing low, mid, and high achievers. The texts were analyzed using systemic functional linguistics (SFL), especially in terms of schematic structure and linguistic features, especially those contributing to the cohesion of the texts, such as Theme progression and cohesive devices. The results show that all texts show students’ grasp and understanding of the schematic structure of an exposition, including thesis, argument, and restatement of the thesis. All texts also successfully use the zig-zag and the Theme reiteration patterns, which indicate the students’ emerging capacity to create a text with cohesion at the clause level. However, only texts written by high achievers employ the multiple Theme pattern, indicating the students’ emerging capacity to create a text with better sense of connectedness, unity, and flow of information at the global level. High achiever texts also employ discourse features which allow the reader to predict how the text will unfold and guide them to a line of understanding of a text as a whole. Moreover, in terms of cohesive devices, all texts use some simple cohesive devices—reference, lexical cohesion, and conjunction. It should be mentioned that all texts are rudimentary with some inappropriate word choices and grammatical problems. This suggests that the students still needed more guidance and time to do research on the topic in focus, to go through the process of writing as professional do, to allow them to create a better text with more elaboration and characteristics of written language with consistency and accuracy. It is recommended that further research on different perspectives and foci of analysis of different text types using systemic functional linguistics, with more representative samples, and studies on the teaching of writing be conducted.


Author(s):  
Klaus von Heusinger

Definiteness is a semantic-pragmatic notion that is closely associated with the use of the definite article (or determiner) in languages like English, Hungarian, Hebrew, and Lakhota. The definite article can be used in different conditions: deictic, anaphoric, unique, and certain indirect uses, often also called “bridging uses.” Accordingly, there are different semantic theories of definiteness, such as the salience theory, the familiarity or identifiability theory, and the uniqueness or inclusiveness theory. Definite expressions cover personal pronouns, proper names, demonstratives, definite noun phrases, and universally quantified expressions. Noun phrases with the definite article, known as “definite descriptions,” are a key issue in semantics and analytic philosophy with respect to the interaction of reference and description in identifying an object. The research and analysis of definiteness is of great importance not only for the linguistic structure of languages but also for our understanding of reference and referring in philosophy, cognitive science, computational linguistics, and communication science.


ELT in Focus ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-18
Author(s):  
Hanif Nurcholish Adiantika

This study aims to investigate the use of lexical cohesion in students’ expository texts. It reveals thetypes of lexical cohesion employed by the students in their expository texts and the contribution oflexical cohesion to the text’ cohesion. This study employs qualitative research by using a case studydesign. Nine students of twelfth grade in a public senior high school in Kuningan regent, West Java,are chosen as the participants. The data in this study include the documents of students’ expositorytexts. The data are analyzed by using the concept of cohesive devices proposed by Halliday andHasan (1976). The findings show that there are two lexical cohesions identified in nine students’expository texts i.e. reiteration (covering i.e. antonymy, repetition, synonymy, meronymy, andhyponymy) and collocation. This study also indicates that lexical cohesion contribute to the processof keeping track of the participants and engaging the readers to the core argument of the text.Moreover, it can be stated that the contribution of lexical cohesion towards students’ expositorytexts is considered low. Therefore, there must be an encouragement for the students to use properlexical cohesion to make their text more cohesive.


2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-127
Author(s):  
Sonia Montero Gálvez

The present paper addresses the contrast between the definite article (el/la/los/las) and the indefinite article (un/a/os/as) from a cognitive approach that not only poses a single meaning for each kind of article, but also highlights the pragmatic (or contextual) aspects that underlie that meaning and establish the use of one form or another. The article’s meaning is shaped by the way we conceptualize the reference: the definite article implies an inclusive reference characterized by the uniqueness of the referent, while the indefinite article implies an exclusive reference characterized by the lack of uniqueness. The possibility to choose one or other way depends on contextual aspects related to the common knowledge shared by the interlocutors, the communicative context (linguistic and situational) and the space (physical or mental) where the referent is located.


2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Anis Firdatul Rochma ◽  
Sulis Triyono

<em>As an effort to give contribution to the existing knowledge, it is expected for the undergraduate students to compose an engaging research article in order to convince the readers about the importance of the research article. However, there is only a little attention given to the articles written by the undergraduate students although it is considered very critical to examine whether the exposure of English academic writing has significantly enhances the writing competence of the students. Furthermore, as it is also very crucial to build a meaningful semantic meaning among the sentences in order to disclose the worthiness of the research article, it is essential to analyze the cohesion of the research article written by the undergraduate students. Henceforth, the present research is projected to investigate the cohesion of the research articles written by the undergraduate students of English Language Teaching. As the introduction section of research article is likely to be an area to portray the logical explanation of the research, the present research solely focuses on examining the cohesion of the introduction section of research article. By adopting a qualitative design and involving several steps to analyze the introduction section, it is revealed that the grammatical cohesion is considered to be the most utilized type of cohesion in writing the introduction section. Still, the lexical cohesion is also necessary to build an eloquent semantic meaning about the topic as well the importance of the research article.</em>


Author(s):  
Richard Swedberg

This chapter looks at the role of theory in theorizing. Knowing theory, in order to be good at theorizing in social science, is not the same as having a knowledge of the history of social theory. It is true that it is helpful to have some of the skills of an intellectual historian when one tries to figure out what a concept means, why a theory looks the way it does today, and similar issues. However, this is not the kind of knowledge that one basically needs to have in order to be good at theorizing. The two types of knowledge that are needed in order to theorize well are knowledge of the basics of social theory and knowledge of a number of concepts, mechanisms, and theories.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jelena Lukić ◽  

The aim of this paperis to determine the quality of TV classes World around us and Nature and Social Science,which were broadcasted on Radio Television of Serbia during the pandemic in the school year 2019/20. Although the work was indirect, so the immediate interaction between the teacher and student is missed. Therefore, teacher's questions were the way of establishing some kind of interaction in such classes organized in this manner. For this reason, we wanted to establish the types of questions that teachers were asking to students through small screens. Considering that the achievements of learning are based on Bloom's Taxonomy, we were analyzing sixteen TV classes and classified the questions the teachers asked according to cognitive area, on six educational levels. The results indicate that the most common were question within lower cognitive levels were (knowledge, understanding and application), and that there are no statistically significant differences in cognitive levels on questions asked between lower (1st and 2nd grade) and higher grades (3rd and 4th grade), on the other hand, on the classes of determination of educational content teachers were asking statistically significant quality questions compared to the classes of interpretation.


2019 ◽  
pp. 13-42
Author(s):  
Wyatt Moss-Wellington

This chapter goes into greater detail regarding the history of humanist thought and the way a narrative-based humanism might be exhumed from humanism’s philosophical lineage. It looks at the differences between Renaissance, canonical, and contemporary secular humanisms and the set of values that are conjured when a narrative is described as “humanistic.” It makes a case for humanism as both a style of storytelling, and a reading method, and thus establishes a “humanist hermeneutics” that will be carried through the remainder of the book. In so doing, this chapter sets up some core values of narrative humanism: it describes the difference between narrative and character complexity, the use of social science as a hermeneutic tool, the value of incomplete striving for understanding rather than grand theories that totalise people’s worlds, and finally describes some of the alternatives to humanism before concluding.


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