The Textual Function Of English Academic Writings

Leech and Short’s Style in Fiction has made great contribution to the field ofstylistics, and as an influential English monograph, even up to today it is still of greatimportance for the learners of stylistics in the whole world. As famous scholars, theymust have their unique techniques to make their monograph excellent in both contentand language. Thus, their techniques are also worthy to be studied. This thesis is goingto probe into the textual function of this academic writing. Textual function covers threerespects, and according to Geoff Thompson (2008), textual function is often realized bythematic structure and cohesion. This thesis will discuss the textual function from theperspective of cohesion.The problem to be solved in this thesis involves two respects. First, it probes intothe textual function of the book on the basis of cohesion theory. The theory of cohesionhas evoked wide application and discussion since the first publication of Halliday andHasan’s Cohesion in English in1976. The study on cohesion has made greatachievement through years’ development these years. But, arising from the wideinfluence of Halliday and Hasan’s initial theoretical model in1976, this thesis willemploy this cohesion theory as the basic theoretical foundation to explore how Leechand Short have realized the textual function of their book. Aside from the theoreticalmodel, Halliday and Hasan’s coding scheme will also be used in this analysis. Second,in accordance with the discussion of the textual function, Leech and Short’s local stylelocated in textual function will be investigated. Halliday and Hasan (1976) believe thatit is practicable to concern the difference between speech and writing and explorepossible differences among various authors and among various genres based on thestudy of cohesion. Besides, for Halliday, style can be located in ideational metafunction,interpersonal metafunction and textual function (Leech and Short,2001:33).This thesis attempts to analyze the textual function of English academic writingsfrom the perspective of cohesion. That is, the textual function of English academicwritings can be realized by cohesive devices, mainly reiteration, collocation, referenceand conjunction. These devices work together to form different cohesive chains and make a text coherent in language and cohesive in form.Further, Leech and Short’s local style of lexical cohesion and that of grammaticalcohesion cover three respects respectively. As for lexical cohesion, reiteration is usedmore frequently than collocation, and two sentences often contain two or more lexicalcohesive ties. Moreover, immediate ties are used more widely than remotenon-mediated ties in this book. As for grammatical cohesion, the ties Leech and Shortemploy are variable and they have no particular preference for a certain type of the ties.Besides, adjacent sentences usually have fewer ties and non-immediate ties are usedmore frequently. Finally, the extremely low frequency of substitution and ellipsis isconspicuous, and the frequent use of reference and conjunction, especially the highfrequency of referential items, is also very obvious.