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Discourse Analysis: Mr. Trương Văn Ánh

The document discusses various linguistic elements that contribute to cohesion in discourse, including reference, substitution, and ellipsis. There are five main types of reference: personal, demonstrative, comparative, cataphoric, and anaphoric. Substitution involves replacing an element with a pronoun, verb, or clause, while ellipsis is the omission of an element that can be recovered from the context. Together, these linguistic devices help tie sentences together and establish relationships across utterances.

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Bich Huyen Pham
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198 views13 pages

Discourse Analysis: Mr. Trương Văn Ánh

The document discusses various linguistic elements that contribute to cohesion in discourse, including reference, substitution, and ellipsis. There are five main types of reference: personal, demonstrative, comparative, cataphoric, and anaphoric. Substitution involves replacing an element with a pronoun, verb, or clause, while ellipsis is the omission of an element that can be recovered from the context. Together, these linguistic devices help tie sentences together and establish relationships across utterances.

Uploaded by

Bich Huyen Pham
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PPT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Mr. Trương Văn Ánh

1
Chapter 2
Linguistic elements in discourse
Cohesion
There are words and phrases which enable
the writer or speaker to establish the
relationships across sentence and utterance
boundaries and which help to tie the
sentences in a text together.
There are five types of cohesion: reference,
substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical
cohesion.
2
Reference (Referential cohesion)
Ex: He loved her very much, but he got
married to another girl.
Who is he? Who is she? We don’t know.
However, when we read the beginning of the
above text:
Lan and Diep were intimate friends in a
small village. They grew up together. He
loved her very much, but he got married to
another girl.
Then we know clearly that “he” is Diep and
“she” is Lan.
3
There are two reference items: cataphoric and
anaphoric.
Cataphoric reference points the reader or
listener forward – it draws us further into the
text in order to identify the elements to which
the reference items refer.
Ex: He Diep; her Lan; …
Anaphoric reference points the reader or
listener backward to a previously mentioned
entity, process or state of affairs.
Ex: Diep he; Lan her; Lan and Diep they

4
Personal, demonstrative and comparative
reference.
There are three sub-types of referential
cohesion: personal, demonstrative and
comparative.
Personal reference
Pronouns and determiners serve to identify
individuals and objects that are named at
some other point in the text.
Ex: Margaret Thatcher died on April 8th, 2013.
She is a great prime minister in Britain.
5
Demonstrative reference.
Determiners and adverbs express
demonstrative reference. These items can
represent a single word or phrase, or much
longer chunks of text – ranging across
several paragraphs or even several pages.
Ex: Lan and Diep were intimate friends in a
small village. They grew up together. He
loved her very much and swore to get married
to her. However, this did not take place.

6
Comparative reference.
Comparative reference is expressed through
adjectives and adverbs and serves to compare
items within a text in terms of identity or
similarity.
Ex: A: Would you like these seats?
B: No, as a matter of fact, I’d like the other
seats.
C: How do you enjoy living in HCMC?
D: I enjoy living here more than anywhere
else.
7
Substitution and ellipsis
At first Halliday and Hasan deal with
substitution and ellipsis separately. Ellipsis
is described as a form of substitution in
which the original item is replaced by zero.
Later Halliday combines substitution and
ellipsis into a single category.
Substitution
There are three types of substitution –
nominal, verbal and clausal.

8
Nominal substitution
Ex: There are black and white coffee. He likes
the black one.
Verbal substitution
Ex: She went there yesterday. So did I.
Clausal substitution
Ex: A: She is beautiful.
B: I think so.
In each of these examples, part of the
preceding text has been replaced by one, did,
and so respectively. These words can only be
interpreted in relation to what has gone before.9
Ellipsis
Ellipsis occurs when some essential
structural element is omitted from a
sentence or clause and can only be
recovered by referring to an element in the
preceding text.
Ex: A: Which hat do you prefer: blue, green
or brown?
B: I prefer the brown.
The full sentence should be: I prefer the
brown hat.
10
As with substitution, there are three types of
ellipsis – nominal, verbal and clausal.
The point at which material has been omitted
from the second sentence of each text is
marked by (0).
Nominal ellipsis
Ex: My two books are foreign. Both (0) were
printed in Australia.
Verbal ellipsis
Ex: A: Will you go to the meeting?
B: Yes, I will (0).
11
Clausal ellipsis
Ex: A: Mary will attend the meeting.
B: Really? She didn’t tell me (0).

12
THE END

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