Lingua inglese - Appunti

Riassunti di Lingua Inglese, Corso progredito

Chapter One: Sticky business: a case study of cohesion in the language of politics in the Economist

Thanks to the analysis of an Economist’s article we can see the grammatical cohesive devices; they are

called grammatical because at least one of the elements in the tie is grammatical word. We have to make a

distinction between lexical words and grammatical words: lexical word are words wich have a function

rather than a meaning. We call the grammatical part of the link the implicit encoding device like pronouns,

demonstrative, definite articles and comparativies.

Lexical cohesive device involve ties between lexical or content words: they are ties between expressions

wich come some the same semantic field, or general area of meaning. Words which we would like to claim

come from the same semantic field are synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy and meronymy.

Conjunction may be divide into three main kinds: elaboration, extension and enhancement. Elaboration is a

restatement of information which has been given; extenions adds information; enhancement covers a vast

range of logical relations such ad location, extent, manner, cause, contingency, accompaniment, matter and

many others.

We call the cohesive links which are repeated in a text cohesive chains. The lexical links form a similarity

chain because the refer to similar things/persons.

The fondamental structural pattern in English is that of Theme and Rheme: they seems to correspond to the

classical explanation of the meaning of subject and predicate: the subject is what we are talikng about and

the predicate is what we say about it. The Theme is the element which serve sas the point of departure of the

message; it si that with which the clause is concerned. The rest of the message, the part in which the Theme

is developed is called the Rheme. English sentences start with a Theme, the first element in the sentence,

which normally contains information which we somehow know about and they continue with a Rheme, wich

normally tells us something new about the Theme.

Theme can be marked and unmarked: it is unmarked when the subject is occupying the thematic position, it

is marked when the tematic position is occupying by an element that usually we call the adjiunct.

In the interrogative sentences the Theme is made up the auxiliary “will” or the “wh-questions”.

Paragraphs are indicated by the presence of a marked Theme either at the end of the paragraph or at the

beginning of the new one; when a marked Theme opens a paragraph, what follows is linked to it; when it

closes a paragraph, it is linked to what has gone before it.

Chapter two: advertising ad motivated discourse

If we consider the important role that advertising plays in our society and the level of sophistication and

artistic expression which some ads reach, we can begin to appreciate how ads can be a source of learning

about effective communication and a discourse genre worthy of study in its own right.

The most recent advertising strategy identified is referred to a the “lifestyle” format, where the product is

associated with a desiderable lifestyle.

Advertising language prefers coordination to subordination, and coordination without linking words to

coordination with linking words. This lack of grammatical cohesion can be seen in two different forms of

coordination typical of advertising language: apposition, in which two noun phrases have the same referent,

and parataxis, where constituents of equal status are linked solely trough juxtaposition or

punctuation/intonation.

The linguistic feature of the ads are (Leech studies):

- Large number of imperative

- Large number of non-finite (no subject) and minor (no predicator) clauses