Cohesion-Conjunction (original) (raw)

CONJUNCTIONS IN ENGLISH: MEANING, TYPES AND USES

This paper contains an in-depth study of conjunctions, including their meaning, types as well as uses or functions in English. Conjunctions are words that link or connect two words, phrases, clauses or sentences together, either in speech or in writing. Conjunctions are one of the eight parts of speech in English, according to the traditional grammar. Apart from the coordinating, subordinating and correlative types, the author has also researched into other kinds of conjunctions that can be of great interest to the reader. The author deemed it necessary to carry out a study of this kind because over the years, this important area of language study has received less attention from language scholars and students of English/linguistics in comparison with other parts of speech like nouns, verbs, adjectives and prepositions. As this paper had unveiled, the author had not only conceived of conjunctions as one of the eight parts of speech in English, as upheld in traditional grammar, but also went beyond to examine the meaning and uses of conjunctions semantically and pragmatically as well as in propositional logic. This study is very significant, as it provides an impetus for those who hitherto have not thought of researching into this area of language study. Furthermore, the paper has presented before the reader a myriad of sentential examples for easy understanding or comprehension.

Conjunctions as the constituents of SDs

BOOK OF ABSTRACTS — EXPLORING INNOVATIONS IN LANGUAGE EDUCATION AND LINGUISTIC RESEARCH, 2024

As notional parts of speech, structural parts of speech also have an undeniable role in the formation of stylistic devices. Most stylistic devices emerge with the combination of notional and structural parts of speech. Rigid studies in this field show that structural parts of speech fail to generate any stylistic device(s) in isolation or in solitude. Conjunctions forming stylistic devices are usually “as”, “like”, “as…as”, “not so….as”, “not as….as”, etc. The major stylistic devices formed by means of the so-called conjunctions are simile, meiosis, hyperbole, etc. The afore-mentioned conjunctions are usually accompanied with nouns, adjectives and adverbs in terms of covering parts of speech. Meiosis and hyperbole are often connected with quality of the object or action which means that they should be observed with adjectives or adverbs. The conjunctions “as…as”, “not so….as”, “not as….as” are absolutely used with adjectives or adverbs in relation with any noun, pronoun or verb. It means that the adjectives or adverbs used in the place of dots are related to noun, pronoun or verb. Hence, stylistic devices emerge in combination of, at least, two parts of speech. Conjunctions used here build up relationship between noun, pronoun and adjectives which play the role of mediators apart from creating any stylistic device(s). Unlike the discussed conjunctions, “as”, “like” are not mediators between different parts of speech. They usually join the same part of speech mainly nouns. This is the only subtle distinction between them. Sometimes verbs can also be used to make resemblance. From this point of view, the conjunctions can be divided into “quality” conjunctions and “resemblance” conjunction.

Compositionality Through Sentence Interfaces

In a compositional semantic theory it should be possible to determine the interpretation of each expression irrespective of the contexts in which it possibly occurs. However, in order to account for the inter-sentential anaphoric links a coherent text usually contains, it seems that each sentence in the text should be interpreted with respect to the context set up by the interpretation of the sentences which precede it. A problem thus arises concerning whether a compositional theory of text interpretation is possible at all and, in case, what the distinctive features of such a theory should be. According to [JvEB81] and [Jan97], a non compositionl semantic theory can be made compositional by refining the notion of meaning it is based on. By assuming the formal framework of Discourse Representation Theory (DRT), in the paper it will be considered how the notion of (sentence) meaning DRT is based on should be refined in order to support a compositional theory of text interpretation. By considering texts as systems in which, through inter-sentential anaphoric links, information concerning entities flows from sentence to sentence, it will be argued that a compositional theory of text interpretation should be based on the "anaphoric possibilities" allowed by each sentence in the text. In order to represent such possibilities, the concept of "sentence interfaces" will be introduced which allows a description of the composition of representation structures in terms of communication through anaphoric ports.

Textual colligation and thematic progression in English

Context and Language, 2012

In the previous chapters, attention has been paid particularly to lexis and to how meaning arises from word combinations. In this chapter, lexical choice will be considered from the perspective of thematic choice in the English language. According to Hoey (2003:171), "lexical choice has a major effect on features such as cohesion, Theme choice and paragraph division" and corpus analysis may also help the linguist to identify the nature of lexical choices. As repeatedly described in the previous chapters, items should not be considered in isolation and should not be used as a slot and filler model or open choice principle would suggest (see chapter 3). Items are not arbitrarily combined but attract each other. As already seen, these attractions may be of different nature: lexical, grammatical, semantic or pragmatic. All these attractions considered together help identify units of meaning which should be interpreted as the basic units of language. Hoey (2003:174) identifies a fifth type of attraction which he defines textual colligation. What he firmly believes in is that lexical items are primed for use in textual organization, that is to say every lexical item is expected to be used in a certain way in the organization of the structure of texts. This attraction constrains us, as writers or speakers, to use words just as the other types of attractions identified by Sinclair do (see chapter 3). According to Hoey (1985) whenever we encounter a word we note subconsciously the words it occurs with (its collocations), the meanings with which it is associated (its semantic associations), the pragmatics it is associated with (its pragmatic associations), the grammatical patterns it is associated with (its colligations), whether it is typically cohesive (its textual collocations), whether the brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk

Grammatical Cohesion of Conjunctions in Short Story Collection Kompas March 2014 Edition

Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Languages and Arts (ICLA 2018), 2019

Writing short stories is very concerned about the relevance of the content so that the stories made can be understood and liked by the reader. This will be seen in the relationship between lines, sentences, and paragraphs which can be realized in one form of cohesion. The linkage of content in the short story is the basis of the researchers to conduct research on the grammatical cohesion of conjunctions. This study aims to describe grammatical cohesion of conjunctions in short stories collection Kompas March 2014 edition. This research method uses descriptive methods. The results of this study were found to be coordinative conjunctions, subordinative conjunctions, correlative conjunctions, intersentences conjunctions, and between paragraphs conjunctions. However, from these findings, there were several improper conjunctions, namely intersentences conjunctions, and between paragraphs conjunctions.