2. Analysis of Written Discourse

Unlike conversation, written discourse, whether written to be read or to be spoken, is typically pre-planned. This allows writers a greater opportunity to control the structure of their texts. Clearly, structure exists in both spoken and written texts, but it is on written texts that much of the research has been focused. Written discourse analysis has concerned itself with various levels of structure or patterning in texts from cohesive devices linking clauses and sentences, to topic organisation, to stages within genres. We begin with work that grew out of dissatisfaction with grammatical description which stopped at the level of the sentence or clause.

3. Approaches to Cohesion and Rhetorical Structure Analysis

Analysing clauses or sentences is the work of the grammarian. Moving beyond the clause as the unit of analysis involves attending to how clauses are connected or related to each other to make a coherent text. It is a focus of work in semantics – examining how the text as a whole functions as a unit of meaning. A coherent text relies on cohesion and cohesion is a defining feature of discourse. One of the most comprehensive and influential studies of cohesion was that by Michael Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan. These linguists looked at cohesion as a function of the semantic relations between sentences, that is at the discourse level: ‘Where the interpretation of any item in the discourse requires making reference to some other item in the discourse, there is cohesion’. To describe the forms of cohesion they systematically analysed systems of reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion to identify ways in which the meanings in a text are established through the interrelations of different language resources.

4. Forms of Cohesion

Reference refers to a word or phrase that links to another word or phrase and can only make sense in relation to that other meaning, e.g. Three blind mice. See how they run.

Substitution refers to the replacement of one expression in a text with another, e.g. A: Are we leaving at three? B: I think so.

Ellipsis refers to the omission of an item which can be inferred from the surrounding text, e.g. A: Am I too late? B: No, [you are] just in time.

Conjunction is indirectly cohesive as it refers to elements which presuppose the presence of other discourse components, e.g. using the words ‘secondly’ or ‘after’ implies that something was mentioned previously.

Lexical cohesion refers to cohesion achieved through the choice of vocabulary. Repetition of a word or phrase, use of a near synonym or an opposite create lexical cohesion, e.g. ‘Bunny-proofing’ means encasing electric cords in heavy-duty plastic, or blocking cords and outlets with furniture so the rabbit cannot reach them. It is the single most important step in preparing an indoor area for a rabbit. Lexical cohesion can take a variety of forms. In the example:

Jan sat down to rest at the foot of a huge beech-tree. Now he was so tired that he soon fell asleep; and a leaf fell on him, and then another, and then another . . .

The lexical tie is between beech-tree and leaf. They are not synonyms but their proximity in the text leads us to assume that the leaves in question are beech leaves from the beech tree mentioned.

Further work on cohesion was initiated by Eugene Winter and Michael Hoey’s analysis of clause relations.

At much the same time as Hoey and Winter were working on clause relations in a British context, rhetorical structure theory (RST) was examining some of the same issues in the United States. RST was the work of William Mann, Christian Matthiessen and Sandra Thompson and grew originally from computer-based text generation research. In order to generate comprehensible text by computer, models of how texts work needed to be robust. RST is an attempt to describe texts systematically and particularly to account for their coherence as discourse units. Like Winter, RST analysts focus on relations between clauses in a text. Of particular significance is the claim–evidence relation, though many others are also described. More recently, the focus has shifted from the computational; RST analysts have become more expansive, seeking connections with other linguistic approaches to text and trying to describe coherence in different languages and text types (Taboada 2007).