The main a i m of this stud y is to contri bute t o the e x pl i cation
of the central discourse notion , ' co herence ' , by comparing t he
d e ns i ties of differen t te xtual features in more cohe rent a nd
l e s s cohe rent studen t a c ademic writing . The l a tte r ty pe of
writing i s defined as that sub-genre of e x posi t ory wr i ting tha t
is required f rom studen ts in the study o f "co ntent " sub j ects ,
with composition writi ng e xcluded . A corpus o f studen t academ i c
te x t s was assessed i mpressionistic al ly f or c ohere nce by three
rater s, using Bamberg ' s Ho lis t i c Coherence Sca l e ( Bamberg 1983 ;
1984) as a gu id e , an d s o eac h t e x t ' s Holi stic Coherence Rat ing
(HCR ) was der i v ed .
The te x t ual fea tu r es investiga t ed are r e f erence and c onjuncti ve
cohes i o n and errors in these domains, a n d also relat i onal
coherence, th i s l atter term ref erring to the wa y s in whic h the
funct i onal units of te x t cohere wit h one another in terms of
binary r elation s (c f . Crombie 1985a; 1985 b) such as
Reason-Res ult a nd Means- Purpose.
One of the k e y bac kground assumptions of the study is that te xts
are c ommunicati ve phenomena , and a f ter a cr i tical review of
various approac hes t owards the e x p li cation of ' coherence ' in
text l inguistics and in quanti t ative ( corpus-based) writing
research, an a n al y t i cal f ramework is developed in which
subcategories of reference and conjunctive cohesion, and errors
in these domains, are defined not only formally, but also in
terms of how they function in the conte x t of communication -
with specific reference to the pragmatic conte x t of student
academic writing . Relational coherence is also included i n this
framework, and the study develops a measure for the
quantification of the amount of relational coherence in a text -
the Relational Coherence Quotient. Sample analyses demonstrating
the application of the framework to the texts form part of the
study.
The main findings of the study are: that the application of the
analytical framework identifies considerably more features that
correlate significantly with Holistic Coherence Ratings than do
two other quantitative writing research approaches; that the
functionally defined features correlate more significantly with
the HCR ' s than the formally defined features; and that the most
strongly significant correlation with HCR ' s was revealed by
relational coherence, as quantified by the Relational Coherence
Quotient. / Linguistics and Modern Languages / D. Litt. et Phil.(Linguistics)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:unisa/oai:uir.unisa.ac.za:10500/25081 |
| Date | 01 1900 |
| Creators | Hubbard, Ernest Hilton |
| Contributors | Cluver, August D. de V.(August Dawid de Villiers) |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 1 online resource (335 leaves) |
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