Discourse Analysis and Cohesion
Domain 5 - Discourse Analysis and Cohesion - asks how a text holds together beyond the sentence. You are tested on naming the devices that create cohesion and, more demandingly, on diagnosing where a paragraph fails to cohere and on repairing it.
The cohesive toolkit
- Reference: pronouns, demonstratives and comparatives pointing back or forward - this, those, such, the former. The antecedent must be unique and recoverable.
- Substitution and ellipsis: “I think so”; “Some agreed; others didn't.”
- Conjunction: additive, adversative, causal, temporal. Logical relations may also be implicit, carried by juxtaposition and punctuation.
- Lexical cohesion: repetition, synonymy, hyponymy (vehicle → van), meronymy (engine → car) and collocation.
Information structure
- Theme is the clause's starting point; rheme is what follows. English defaults to given information first, new information last.
- End-weight places long, complex constituents at the end; end-focus gives prominence to the final lexical item.
- Marked themes - “Rarely have we seen…”, “That proposal, the board rejected” - signal contrast or emphasis and should be used sparingly.
Diagnosing cohesion failure
- Test each pronoun: is the antecedent unique, or could the reader recover two referents?
- Test each connective: does it name the actual relation? “However” introducing a consequence is a category error.
- Test the lexical chain: does the topic stay stable, or does it drift behind a screen of synonyms?
Worked example
Original: “The ministry published the review in March. This caused considerable criticism. It was later revised.”
Reasoning: “this” has no noun to attach to - was the criticism caused by publication or by the review's contents? “It” could be the review or the ministry's position. Both pronouns are formally possible and referentially empty. Revision: “The ministry published the review in March; its findings drew considerable criticism, and a revised version appeared in June.” The noun “findings” anchors the first link, and the second sentence names its own subject.
Traps
- Connector inflation: every sentence beginning with Moreover or Furthermore.
- “However” used as a conjunction after a comma, producing a splice.
- Vague “this” with no following noun.
- Chains of nominalisations that hide the agent (“the implementation of the evaluation of the reform”).
- Topic drift masked by near-synonyms that are not actually co-referential.