Connecting textual patterns to text aboutness

• Main Author: Li, Yuan ke
• Published: University of Liverpool 2011
• Subjects: 415
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.569651

This thesis investigates the relationships between cohesion in texts and the meanings of the texts. I analyze hard news texts and the summaries written by competent readers for the texts in terms of nuclei (i.e. the combinations of Process and Medium) (Halliday, 1994), and examine the characteristics of the nuclei that recur in a text and are also considered as important to the meaning of the text. There are two main findings of my present study. The first is that when two or more recurrent nuclei in a text are considered as important to the meaning of the text, the relationship in the lead that holds between the nuclei are also thought of as important to the text's meaning. This finding provides evidence for the claim made by many linguists that the conjunctive relations that hold between the propositions in a passage are important to the meaning of the passage. The other main finding of my study is that when the nuclei that are considered as important to the meanings of the texts in which they occur are found in leads, they have a strong tendency to occur in primary or independent clauses; on the other hand, when the nuclei occurring in leads are however not considered as important to the meanings of the texts in which they occur, they tend to occur in secondary or embedded clauses. This finding indicates that the distribution of information in leads is not random. The propositions in a lead that are important to the meaning of the text in which they occur are often foregrounded in major types of clause, while those that are not thought of as important to the meaning of the text are often backgrounded in minor types of clause.