Cohesion in Selected British and American Poems

Scientific Essay from the year 2017 in the subject Literature - Comparative Literature, Ibn Rushd College (English Department), language: English, abstract: The main goal of this study is to investigate cohesive devices in selected british poems and in selected american poems. Firstly, the thesis aims at identifying the lexical and grammatical cohesive devices used in the british poems and in the american poems which are written by a modern poets. Secondly, the thesis aims at conducting a contrastive linguistic analysis between these poems in order to find out the similarities and differences in the use of grammatical and lexical cohesive devices. The present study attempts to find out the frequency and distribution of their occurrence in both texts.This term paper is divided into two parts. One part deals with the theoretical background whereas the other section is about the empirical part of the study. In this section, a number of British poems and American ones will be analysed in the light of the adopted model which is based on Halliday and Hasan's approach to cohesion. Eight poems have been selected for the analysis. Four of them are written by the modern British poet Thomas Hardy and the other four are written by the modern American poet Walt Whitman.Cohesion is a kind of significant connection within a text. Gutwinski defines cohesion as the relations that are established among the sentences and the clauses of a text. Such relations are normally indicated by particular grammatical and lexical features. Hatim and Mason consider cohesion as one of the indications of coherence. They state that cohesion refers to the ways in which this underlying coherence is reflected on the surface of the text- the cohesion, or sequential connectivity of the surface elements -are much more likely to be language-specific or text-specifi. Stoddard points out that cohesion are a mental construct. Remarkably, this definition shows that cohesion is a process of interpretation. In this case, it involves mental effort on the part of the reader. That is to say, cohesion involves looking for certain grammatical or lexical items that contribute to convey meaning and link clauses and sentences. Consequently, information is conveyed in orderly way elements. McArthur states that cohesion is a feature by which it can be determined whether something is a text and not a set of unrelated sentences.