Introduction

So far we have looked at language from the point of view of several different levels of analysis – from isolated sounds to whole sentences. Traditionally, language analysis stopped at the sentence. More recently, the focus has expanded to take in whole texts, in order to see, among other things, if there is such a thing as a ‘grammar of texts’, that is, rules that give both structure and meaning to units of discourse beyond the sentence level.

Tasks

1 Texts

Do texts have a ‘grammar’? Are there rules that determine their structure? Try putting the following jumbled text in the correct order. Note: there is an extra sentence that does not belong.

• a Inside its round fruits, called bolls, are masses of white fibres.

• b But, in the cotton fields, the bolls are picked before this can happen.

• c Pure copper is very soft.

• d Cotton grows best in warm, wet lands, including Asia, the southern United States, India, China, Egypt and Brazil.

• e Cotton is a very useful plant.

• f When the fruits ripen, they split and the fibres are blown away, spreading their seeds.

What clues did you use to help you unjumble the text?

2 Cohesion

Look at the following text. What binds it together as a text? Can you find examples of the following?

Lexical cohesion, that is, where the same, similar or related words re-occur across sentences, e.g.:

Grammatical cohesion, such as

• • referring expressions: … cotton … its … ; … white fibres … the fibres …

• • substitution: The fruits ripen. When they do [i.e. When they ripen], the fibres are blown away.

• • conjuncts (or linkers): But, in the cotton fields …

I cannot learn for my students. Only they can do that. My main job as a teacher is to create the conditions within which learning is most likely to happen. But what kind of environment is this? Each teacher’s concept of it will differ – but it is a vital question to ask yourself, not least because, without refl ecting on it, you are likely to uncritically reproduce learning environments that you grew up in yourself as a child, even if you hated them at the time.