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 a grammatical word. We have to make a distinction between lexical words and grammatical words: lexical words are words which have a function rather than a meaning. We call the grammatical part of the link the implicit encoding device like pronouns, demonstratives, definite articles, and comparatives.

Lexical cohesive devices involve ties between lexical or content words: they are ties between expressions which come from 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. Conjunctions may be divided into three main kinds: elaboration, extension, and enhancement. Elaboration is a restatement of information which has been given; extensions add information; enhancement covers a vast range of logical relations such as 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 they refer to similar things/persons.

The fundamental structural pattern in English is that of Theme and Rheme: they seem to correspond to the classical explanation of the meaning of subject and predicate: the subject is what we are talking about and the predicate is what we say about it. The Theme is the element which serves as the point of departure of the message; it is 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, which 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 thematic position is occupied by an element that we usually call the adjunct. In the interrogative sentences, the Theme is made up of 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 as motivated discourse

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