Examining Textual Cohesion in Articles of Environment Discipline Written by English and Persian Authors

Subject Areas : Journal of Applied Linguistics Studies

Batool Nasiri ¹ , Bahman Gorjian ² , Mohammad Alipour ³ , Arezou Molavi Vardanjani ⁴

1 - PhD Student of Linguistics, Ahvaz Branch, Islamic Azad University, Ahvaz, Iran
2 - Associate professor, Department of ELT, Abadan Branch, Islamic Azad University, Abadan, Iran
3 - Department of ELT, Ahvaz Branch, Islamic Azad University, Ahvaz, Iran
4 - Assistant professor, Department of Linguistics, Omydieh Branch, Islamic Azad University, Omydieh, Iran

Received: 2024-06-01 Accepted : 2024-11-08 Published : 2024-09-01

Keywords: content analysis, cohesive devices, discourse, Environment discipline, systemic functional linguistics ,

Abstract :

Systematic functional grammar is one of the theoretical approaches to linguistics that is opposed to formal linguistics. In this approach, the social and contextual roles of language are emphasized. The design of the study was corpus-based and qualitative research regarding systematic functional grammar (Halliday, 2014). In this study, seven types of cohesive devices (i.e., euphemism, passivization, collocation, reiteration, deletion, substitution, references) were analyzed to examine the coherence of English for specific purposes (ESP) of environment discipline articles in Persian and English articles. The research was to discover the significant difference between cohesive devices in the ESP texts of environment written by Persian and English authors. From among 173 articles in two languages in the last ten years, 100 articles (50 Persian and 50 English) were randomly selected and the number of words in each category was taken into account. The corpus-based data was used and the words in each text type were counted in articles. There were 45791 words in Persian articles and 44918 words in English articles. The Word count was used to collect a homogeneous sample. The results showed that in Persian environment texts, the highest frequency belongs to references, and the lowest one addresses substitution. In English texts, the highest frequency was in references and the lowest one refers to reiteration. There was a significant difference between Persian and English cohesive devices regarding euphemism, passivization, collocation, reiteration, and references were significantly different but there was no significant difference was observed in the use of the deletion.

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