The Category of Cohesion

1. Identify the key-words of the text holding together its logico-semantic integrity and account for your choice.

2. What word-combinations with the key-words contribute to the wholeness of the text?

3. What lexico-semantic groups of words are conducive to the lexical cohesion of the text? Which part of speech predominates among such units?

4. Find synonyms proper and contextual synonyms in the text and explain how the use of synonyms makes for the lexical cohesion of the text.

5. How does antonymy (both antonyms proper and the contextual ones) support the lexical cohesion of the present text?

6. What word-building means are productive in the text making for its lexical cohesion?

7. Complete the table with the deictic coheremes of linear joining taking into consideration the function they perform in the logical unfolding of the text information.

8. Select deictic coheremes presented by nouns of broad semantics (process, material, case, etc.) and identify their antecedents pointing out the role of such coheremes in maintaining the lexical cohesion of the text.

9. Pick out the deictic coheremes expressed by pronouns of different types and identify their antecedents. Comment on how deictic coheremes reinforce the logico-semantic wholeness of the scientific text under consideration.

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v Compose and write a coherent essay summing up your observations on the linguostylistic and textlinguistic peculiarities of the scientific writing “Superluminous Laser Pulse in an Active Medium” by D. L. Fisher and T. Tajima.

SUPPLEMENT

Text 1

LITTLE DORRIT

by Charles Dickens (1812 - 1870)

The passage is an extract from the novel Little Dorrit (1855-1857) by the most popular English novelist of the Victorian era, Charles Dickens. It is a work of satire on the shortcomings of the government and society of the period.

In the chapter below much of Dickens’ ire is focused upon a certain Mrs. General, a snobbish, hypocritical and pretentious lady “whose task was to form the minds of the young ladies of distinction”. Mrs. General is inevitably associated with “the cool coach of ceremony” whose pompous and ostentatious behavior was calculated to impress people, and thus win Mrs. General a high reputation in bourgeois society.

Chapter II

MRS. GENERAL

… Mrs. General was the daughter of a clerical dignitary in a cathedral town, where she had led the fashion until she was as near forty-five as a single lady can be. A stiff commissariat officer of sixty, famous as a martinet, had then become enamoured of the gravity with which she drove the proprieties four-in-hand through the cathedral town society, and had solicited to be taken beside her on the box of the cool coach of ceremony to which that team was harnessed. His proposal of marriage being accepted by the lady, the commissary took his seat behind the proprieties with great decorum, and Mrs. General drove until the commissary died. In the course of their united journey they ran over several people who came in the way of the proprieties; but always in a high style, and with composure.

The commissary having been buried with all the decorations suitable to the service (the whole team of proprieties were harnessed to his hearse, and they all had feathers and black velvet housings, with his coat of arms in the corner), Mrs. General began to inquire what quantity of dust and ashes was deposited at the bankers’. It then transpired that the commissary had so far stolen a march on Mrs. General as to have bought himself an annuity some years before his marriage, and to have reserved that circumstance, in mentioning, at the period of his proposal, that his income was derived from the interest of his money. Mrs. General consequently found her means so much diminished that, but for the perfect regulation of her mind, she might have felt disposed to question the accuracy of that portion of the late service which had declared that the commissary could take nothing away with him.

In this state of affairs it occurred to Mrs. General that she might “form the mind”, and eke the manners of some young lady of distinction. Or, that she might harness the proprieties to the carriage of some rich young heiress or widow, and become at once the driver and guard of such vehicle through the social mazes…

… In person, Mrs. General, including her skirts, which had much to do with it, was of a dignified and imposing appearance: ample, rusting, gravely voluminous; always upright behind the proprieties. She might have been taken – had been taken – to the top of the Alps and the bottom of Herculaneum, without disarranging a fold in her dress, or displacing a pin. If her countenance and hair had rather a floury appearance, as though from living in some transcendently genteel mill, it was rather because she was a chalky creation altogether, than because she mended her complexion with violet powder, or had turned grey. If her eyes had no expression, it was probably because they had nothing to express. If she had few wrinkles, it was because her mind had never traced its name or any other inscription on her face. A cool, waxy, blown-out woman, who had never lighted well.

Mrs. General had no opinions. Her way of forming a mind was to prevent it from forming opinions. She had a little circular set of mental grooves or rails on which she started little trains of other people’s opinions, which never overtook one another, and never got anywhere. Even her propriety could not dispute that there was impropriety in the world; but Mrs. General’s way of getting rid of it was to put it out of sight, and make believe that there was no such thing. This was another of her ways of forming a mind – to cram all articles of difficulty into cupboards, lock them up, and say they had no existence. It was the easiest way, and beyond all comparison, the properest.

Mrs. General was not to be told of anything shocking. Accidents, miseries, and offences, were never to be mentioned before her. Passion was to go to sleep in the presence of Mrs. General, and blood was to change to milk and water. The little that was left in the world, when all these deductions were made, it was Mrs. General’s province to varnish. In that formation process of hers she dipped the smallest of brushes into the largest of pots, and varnished the surface of every object that came under consideration. The more cracked it was, the more Mrs. General varnished it.

There was varnish in Mrs. General’s voice, varnish in Mrs. General’s touch, an atmosphere of varnish round Mrs. General’s figure. Mrs. General’s dreams ought to have been varnished – if she had any – lying asleep in the arms of the good St. Bernard, with the feathery snow falling on his housetop.

ª ASSIGNMENTS

1. Read the belles-lettres writing above, formulate its main concern and summarize its factual information.

2. Find the facts of socio-historic significance commenting on the background information underlying them.

3. Formulate the conceptual information of the present text. Segment it into conceptual cores and identify those stylistic devices which explicate the author’s artistic message in each particular case.

4. Compose and write a coherent essay summing up your observations on the linguostylistic and textlinguistic peculiarities of сhapter II “Mrs. General” from the novel “Little Dorrit” by Ch. Dickens.

Text 2

As English sweeps the world, small languages will disappear.

Will Hutton warns that British English could be next

English will be spoken but not as the British know it

Each new language you learn means you have acquired another soul, according to an east European proverb. You don’t have to be a romantic to believe that your language, much more than your currency, defines a national community and culture. English speakers are fortunate – our language is becoming the universal form of linguistic exchange. But every other language is at the receiving end of English’s triumph, raising all manner of fundamental fears. It is one of the reasons that globalisation is regarded with increasing suspicion; it implies the slow death of the cultures that are embodied in languages other than English.

The disappearance of the world’s small languages is now happening at a rapid pace. David Crystal, honorary Professor of Linguistics at the University of Bangor, says that half the world’s currently spoken 6, 000 languages will have died out over the next century. But it is not just 3, 000 means of technically talking to each other that will have disappeared; 3, 000 means of understanding the world will have died as well.

Wittgenstein is the most famous exponent of the notion that the structure of language is the essence of being. “The world is all that is the case” was the first of his famous propositions in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, but the last was “The limits of my world are the limits of my language”; language, in other words, is all. It is not merely the key to meaning; it defines our very humanity.

But the issue is not only the future of small languages; larger languages are under pressure too. Wittgenstein would have had understood the growing tensions over the use of language in the European Union, and which is going to become more acute if the EU expands to 27 countries. Translation between the 11 languages of the EU consumes a third of the commission’s administrative budget, and every country assuming the presidency of Europe’s Council of Ministers has to decide how much money it will spend on translation.

It has fallen to Finland, during the current presidency, to stir up the linguistic hornet’s nest. It has elected not to translate German, so that for four months there has been a running battle between the Germans and Austrians, outraged that their language should be relegated to the same standing as Greek or, worse, Catalan. German may be spoken by 100 millions members of the EU, but it is not one of the EU’s official languages.

But the Germans themselves are not their language’s most ardent defenders. “Schrö der go home” shouted the placards at a union demonstration in Berlin recently. Equally, the language of most of Germany’s top companies is English. Daimler-Benz, having taken over Chrysler, speak English at board and senior management level; same story at Deutsche Bank, Siemens and BMW. The European Central-Bank, based in Frankfurt, has given up completely; its working language is English. English words and sentences pop up all over Germany, inserting English values into the bedrock of Germanness.

The Germans are on the way to becoming like the Dutch, Scandinavians and Swiss; English is, in effect, their second language, in which a growing number of citizens are effectively bilingual. You cannot pursue an international career without English or even understand the lyrics of most popular music; the German top 20 always contains songs in English. It is no accident that one of Britain’s booming industries is English teaching; the UK earns more than $3 by a year teaching English to 600, 000 students annually.

The open question is whether the increasing role of English in Europe portends it driving out the native languages. Crystal argues that bilingualism tends to be a phase before the dominant language, even in such countries as Denmark or Sweden, it will be because the political, economic and social elite will have taken a deliberate decision to drop their native language and adopt English.

The more probable outcome is that Europe’s will continue to speak their own language together with English, rather as the Boers in South Africa speak both Afrikaans and English. The dropping of your own language is not something you do voluntarily; it contains too much meaning and culture for that. It is only if your language is overwhelmed by the size and power of others that it is extinguished because the dominant economic and political forces in the culture have not the power to sustain their own language before the challenge; the 3, 000 languages that Crystal predicts will disappear will be the languages of tiny native tribes and groupings.

So the likelihood is that the large, native, non-English national languages in the EU will survive, at the same time as most Europeans acquire English as a second language. In the process, Europe will have achieved a vital goal – the common language it needs to begin the establishment of a genuine common European economic and political culture.

The British look on this process with benevolent indulgence; it is our language, after all, that is becoming the new common second language. The more dangerous threat we do not appreciate is that British English is under the same threat as German and French; the dynamism of English comes from the United States. American English contains ideas and values that are as foreign to us as English is to German and French, but which are immediately transparent when French and German speakers use English and makes them so hawklike about the consequences.

The British don’t have that advantage. While other Europeans may manage to sustain their cultures and gain access to a new common language, we risk simply becoming the melting-pot. Unless we are as attentive as other Europeans to our culture; to speak English as our native tongue could be as much a curse as an advantage.

American English contains ideas and values that are as foreign to us as English is to German or French

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ª ASSIGNMENTS

1. Read the newspaper publication above, analyze its linguo-stylistic peculiarities and define the genre it belongs to.

2. Formulate the main concern of the text and summarize its factual information.

3. Find in the text the lexical means of cohesion integrating it into a global logico-semantic whole.

4. Compose and write a coherent essay summing up your observations on the linguostylistic and textlinguistic peculiarities of the newspaper text “English will be spoken but not as the British know it”.

Text 3