Textual Cohesion, Coherence, and Adequacy Analysis
Textual Analysis: Cohesion, Coherence, and Adequacy
Main Ideas
- Subsections
- Structure: Divide the text into cores (linear, convergent, divergent, concentric, chaotic) (deductive, inductive, circular).
- Issue: Abstract, without verbs.
- Summary: No descriptions and examples without changing the subject.
Cohesion
Cohesion involves the repetition of words, synonyms, antonyms, ellipsis (when a sentence is missing the subject or the verb), and connectors (conjunctions, adverbs, conjunctive or adverbial phrases, and links). Content includes enumeration and order, reformulation, rectification, opposition, cause, valuation, addition, and exemplification.
Lexical fields (words that have a common lexeme) and semantic fields (words that share a common meaning). Anaphora and cataphora (if the pronoun precedes the noun it replaces, it’s an anaphor; if it follows, it’s a cataphora).
This text is (quite/very) cohesive because it presents (quite/all or almost all) the mechanisms of cohesion and several examples of each.
Coherence
Coherence involves logic (law of cause and effect), ordered structure, and ensuring all cores are within the same conceptual framework and respond to the same subject.
Deixis
Deixis includes social deixis (proximity between author and reader, using “you”), spatial deixis (spatial proximity between the author and the reader), temporal deixis (time relationship between when the news is written and when the event happened), and personal deixis (how the author includes themselves in the text).
Adequacy
Modalized
Modalized language includes verbs, pronouns, and adjectives in the first person, thought verbs, diminutives, augmentatives, derogatory terms, lexical value (the author is strongly in favor or against something), imperative verbs, periphrasis of obligation, non-declarative sentences, linguistic mechanisms that connect the author and the reader, literary devices, and the author’s opinion.
Sociolect
Sociolect can be worship (technicalities, cultism, difficult lexis, abstract terms, variety of links and synonyms), standard (no specific characteristics), or colloquial (common appeal to the listener, nicknames, interjections, subjective phrases).
Function
Functions include representative (transmitting information), conative (influencing the reader), expressive (expressing feelings), poetic (reporting beautifully), metalinguistic (language spoken about language), and phatic (verifying the channel works).
Form of Discourse
Literature: description, narration, dialogue.
Columns: exhibition (clear and concise language, representative function, objective attitude without polemics, enumeration connectors, verbs in present indicative and preterite imperfect), argumentation (tries to convince with arguments, polemics, proposal-development-conclusion, the speaker’s subjective attitude, accompanied by representative, expressive, and conative functions, arguments from authority, verifiable proof, accepted ideas, weight of tradition or need for change, examples, connotative value).
Discourse Genre
Journalistic (inform, entertain, and offer an opinion objectively, even with government intervention). Declarative sentences, third person, non-personal forms, figures and data, citing sources, primarily a representative function, current events, interesting to the public, owner, etc. Clear and standard sociolect.
- News (brevity, clarity, answers the 6 Ws, unsigned).
- Annotated news (news & commentary, shocking, unsigned).
- Report (news + record + possible consequences from the scene, description of the atmosphere and commentary of the protagonist, signature).
- Interview.
- Editorial (ideological position of a newspaper, unsigned).
- Article of collaboration (individual views of people outside the newspaper, signed, can be sporadic or regular, humorous and literary).
- Letters to the editor (space for newspaper readers to complain).
Pros and Cons
Present to the public interest, original in content and form, connect with your knowledge.