The Background of Analysis

ix CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

1.1 The Background of Analysis

Language is a system of communication such that the expression side is either spoken sounds or written symbols often letters. The content side is made up by the meaning Hammarström, 1976:1. It means that language is an instrument for conveying meaning and communicating some ideas either oral or written. Language is realized by text and discourse. Text and discourse deal with the various devices used by speakers and writers when they knit coherence and cohesive utterances. Discourse analysis is the study of the relationship between the language and contexts in which it is used. Whether it is written text of all kinds or spoken data. Referring to Brown and Yule 1984:1 that the analysis of discourse, is necessarily, the analysis of language in use. When it says language in use it means sentences, clauses or a linguistic units, such as conversational exchanges or written texts. Text or discourse admitted as the high level of the language unit. It can stand for the most complex idea of speakers or writers that a sentence has failed to do. It can also be described as one of the most complete highest or largest linguistic unit as the above sentences and clauses, which contains cohesive and coherent continuously Stubbs 1983:1. Hartman and Stork 1972 define discourse as a text which forms a fairly complete unit, which is usually restricted to the successive utterances of a single Universitas Sumatera Utara x speaker conveying a message. The paragraphs that build discourse have relevance to each other. A single sentence or a paragraph was developed and described by another sentence or paragraph in a cohesive and coherent and make a complete unit. Concerning cohesion, Halliday 1994:170 refers to the resources within language that provide continuity in a text, above and over that is provided by clause structures and clause complexes. Therefore, cohesive relations are non- structural relations, which help the text hang together. There are two kinds of cohesion, grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion. Grammatical cohesion consists of reference, substitution, ellipsis, and conjunction. Lexical cohesion consists of reiteration and collocation. The writer chooses abstract as the source text for investigating the data because it has the standard. The contents of an abstract provide the relationships between or among words in a text. Therefore, the writer is interested in doing grammatical cohesion analysis on abstracts of students’ theses of Linguistics Department Postgraduate Studies of University of Sumatera Utara. Regarding to an abstract, Lancaster 1998:94 says it a brief but accurate representation of the contents of a document. The use of abstract is essential in some scientific works, online research, directory, seminar, and paper. Students are obliged to write an abstract as an internal part of their theses. Because of its importance, abstract must be written cohesively so the readers get the message of the abstract clearly. In this thesis, the writer only chooses grammatical cohesion to be analyzed. The reasons of choosing grammatical cohesion due to the clarification Universitas Sumatera Utara xi of abstract writing. Grammatical cohesion can support the cohesiveness of an abstract. Another reason of choosing grammatical cohesion due to the relation of texture. The cohesive relation that exists in text provides the texture. To relate to Halliday topic of this thesis which is forming on grammatical cohesion, the writer applies Halliday and Hasan’s 1976 classification about grammatical cohesion as the base of analysis. The reason to choose this classification because it enables the writer to obtain a practical way of understanding and evaluating the structure of a written in text of an abstract.

1.2 The Problems of Analysis