Written Discourse

Question 1

Cohesion

Answer 1

Lexical: Lexical repetition, affixation, collocations

Syntactic: Syntactic patterning, ellipsis & substitution

Semantic: Semantic patterning, Synyonymy, Antonymy, Hyponymy, Connotations

Referential: Anaphoric/Cataphoric & Deixis

Conjunctions & Adverbials: Additive, causal, adversative, temporal

Question 2

Lexical Cohesion

Answer 2

Lexical Repetition: Repeat content words at least 3 times

Collocation: Use of words commonly grouped together (e.g. consumer confidence)

Affixation: Lexical repetition of content words which have undergone affixation (e.g category, categorise)

Question 3

Anaphoric vs Cataphoric Referencing

Answer 3

Anaphoric: The anaphoric pronoun refers back to the referent (which is ahead)

(e.g. Aarav bought a new car. He loves it.)

Cataphoric: The cataphoric pronoun refers back to a referent (which is behind/delayed)

(e.g Although this was expected, the results pleased him)

Question 4

Deixis

Answer 4

Meaning depends entirely on the context.

Spatial: Put it there

Temporal: Tomorrow, we will win

Personal: We need to act quickly

Question 5

Coherence

Answer 5

Acronym: FLICC

Features enhancing understandability:

• Logical Ordering
• Inference
• Cohesion

Features enhancing accessibility:

• Consistency & Conventions
• Formatting

Question 6

Inference

Answer 6

A conclusion reached by the audience based on their own reasoning

1) Reduces unnecessary repetition

2) Engages with the audience, prompting them to use their own reasoning/judgements to denote the meaning of the implicature

3) Reduce social distance and elevate informality

Question 7

Consistency

Answer 7

Aspects of the discourse kept the same throughout

• Tense
• Dominant sentence type
• Register
• Tenor
• Semantic field
• Jargon
• Voice (active/passive)

Question 8

Conventions

Answer 8

Aspects which comply to the convention/nature of the discourse

• Political speech: Agentless passive, conative function, formal register
• Legal contract: High modality, imperatives
• Medical Report: Medical jargon, sentence fragments, present tense
• News article: Active voice, emotive/conative function

Question 9

Information Flow

Answer 9

Strategies: Front/end focus, clefting, left/right dislocation
Principles: Topic comment, given-new, end weight

Question 10

Front/end focus

Answer 10

The reordering of phrasal elements for emphasis.

Front focus: Out went the pen. (Prepositional phrase out is fronted for emphasis)

End focus: The single most important skill in life is focus. (Abstract noun phrase focus is emphasises at the end)

• End focus can build suspense, especially by fronting lexically dense phrasal elements to further delay the mentioning of the end positioned constituent

Question 11

Clefting

Answer 11

It-cleft: It was Aarav who attained the top score
(Answer to the question is emphasised at the front)

Pseudo-cleft (Wh-cleft): What she wanted was a break.
(Answer to the question is emphasised at the back)

Existential there-construction: There was a hobbit.
(No grammatical/derivational properties, only adds existency to the former constituents.)

Question 12

Left/right dislocation

Answer 12

Left dislocation: Noun phrase + Pronoun
(e.g. My sister, she bought a new car)
* contains anaphoric pronoun

Right dislocation: Pronoun + Noun phrase
(e.g. She bought a new car, my sister)
* contains cataphoric pronoun

Question 13

Conjunctions & Adverbials

Answer 13

Adverbials
Additive: Furthermore, in addition
Causal: As a result, consequently
Temporal: Meanwhile, previously, subsequently
Adversative: However, nonetheless, on the other hand, then

Conjunctions
Additive: and
Adversative: but, yet
Causal: because, so
Temporal: before, after, when