Cohesion and text development in written Arabic

Mehamsadji, M

Abstract

Many English teachers posed the problem that their Arab students were able to construct grammatically correct sentences, but were frequently unable to form them into paragraphs or cohesive texts.

In my attest to investigate this problem, I started from the assumption that differing patterns of cohesion in English and Arabic probably account for many difficulties Arab students have in writing English. Sane attempts to look at this, based on a contrastive approach, have already been carried out. For my part, I felt the time had came to look at the systems of Arabic in their own terms, which has not yet been done. For this I followed two avenues of study: Functional Sentence Perspective as developed in the Prague School and Halliday and Hasan's work on textual cohesion. For my purpose I selected four lengthy Arabic texts belonging to different text-types which I first analysed from the Functional Sentence Perspective point of view. For this, I followed Dane's (1974) study of thematic progressions, in order to find out what theme-rheme patterns the different Arabic text-types use.

In the next step, I investigated the cohesive ties used in written Arabic Halliday and Hasan's model of textual cohesion (1976). I also compared my texts in order to discover if there is a difference in textual cohesion between text-types in Arabic.

My analysis of textual cohesion and text development
suggests that:

1. Arabic descriptive texts tend to reiterate the same there in successive sentences.
2. Arabic instructive texts favour the use of the linear
thematization of rhemes.
3. Arabic makes inter-clausal relationships explicit.
4. Repetition and parallelism are favoured cohesive devices in all text-types.

The thesis consists of an introduction followed by a chapter
reviewing various approaches to discourse analysis, a chapter on the text-typological approach which has governed my selection of texts; followed by an account of my methodological approach and my analysis.

Citation

Mehamsadji, M. Cohesion and text development in written Arabic. (Thesis). University of Salford

• Thesis Type: Thesis
• Deposit Date: Jul 9, 2009
• Publicly Available Date: Jul 9, 2009
• Award Date: Jan 1, 1988