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Devices used to achieve and maintain thematic cohesion Function Oral-style
Literate-style Linking events
together Verbal Complements: adding
information about verbal processes Nominal Complements: adding
information about nominals Coreference
relations Prosodic Cues: vowel elongation
and high rise-fall contour Complex Nominal Syntax and
LexicalGrammatical Parallelism Causal
relations Prosodic Cues: then with stressed
high fall contour Lexicalization: so, but, etc.
Shift of agent focus
Prosodic Cues: then with low fall contour
Nominal Complements: prepositional phrases
This is broader than Halliday and Hasan’s use of the term “cohesion” as a functional notion to cover some technical aspects of discourse at the level of interclausal and
intersentential syntax e.g. conjunction, reference, lexical cohesion, and substitution. Michaels and Collins’ “thematic cohesion” approximates what Halliday and Hasan call
“texture” i.e. cohesion + textual structure internal to the sentence + the “macro-structure” of the text [features which establish its status as narrative, conversation, etc.]. See also
Bamberg’s comments on the notions of cohesion and coherence in chapter 2, pp. 54–55. Michaels and Collins’ subjects two black and two white first-graders all watched a six-
minute film, known in the literature as “the pear film”; two fourth-graders’ narratives, both oral and written, of the same film were also included in the study. Michaels and Collins
looked at four particular areas and report their findings under the headings: intraclausal complements, interclausal complements, interclausal connectives, and agent focus.
3.7.2.1 Intraclausal Complements: Prepositional Phrases
Under intraclausal complementation, they looked at nominal and verbal complexity and conclude that raw counts of items and constructions give little insight into narrative style
and strategy; however, they do find clear differences between oral-style narratives and literate-style narratives when it comes to the type of complements used within, and across,
clause boundaries “to provide ties between events in the narrative”. In the oral-style narratives, complements tend to be verbal complements:
1 and then he dro
.
ve off with ’em
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how he drove off 2
and he had a wreck on his bike indicates
how he had a wreck 3
and the peaches fell out on the ground indicates
where they fell out In contrast, in literate-style narratives, complements tend to be nominal.
4 he um…saw ’em with the pears
identifies “’em”
5 this boy on this bike came along
identifies “this boy” 6
one of the kids there…was the one…on the bike identifies
which “kid”
The identifying information is then used to maintain the identity of referents between events in the narrated episodes i.e. to signal and maintain referential cohesion in the
narrative. However, it needs to be pointed out that it is not just a matter of the type of complement used, but the way such structures are used—a point which is crucial to the
discussion of the work being presented in this thesis. All the prepositional phrases exemplified here could be regarded as nominal complements, in that each contains a noun
or pronoun, but they are used differently by the two groups of subjects. Comparing these findings with our own data and taking the opening of Shvinder’s Story B
as representative of the rest, we discover an oral discourse style. 1
Once upon a time Father Christmas was looking in his cupboard where 2
and he saw this strange, green, shiny box. 34
He said, “I didn’t put this in the cupboard. where
5 I put something else.”
67 So he went and looked in the box.
where 8
and there was six magic footballs
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So he said, “O-oh footballs.” 10
They were shiny, black and white footballs. 11
And Father Christmas said, 12
“I can’t keep them till next Christmas. when
1314 I must sell them to a worsest team to whom
that never won before.… Here we have five examples of verbal complements, which add information about a given
verbal process, and one non-prepositional example of a nominal complement, that never won before which modifies the noun team. These findings tie in with other studies of grammatical
structure and language modalities. Halliday 1967 discussed the differences between verbal and nominal structures; he observed that nominals allow more information to be packed
into single clauses and facilitate the signalling of links between clauses, hence their importance in scientific and technical writing. Chafe 1982 contrasted formal prose with
dinner table talk and reported that the predominance of nominalizations was one of the most salient aspects of written language when compared with spoken language.
In chapter 2, page 41, we suggested that nominalizations, and complex and compound explicatives, involve a level of syntactic complexity which is beyond the language of infant
school children. Then, on page 39, while talking about external evaluation, we noted that Tannen 1982b describes external evaluation as “a feature of literate-based strategies”
because it makes explicit the whole point of a story. We then commented that there are no examples of external evaluation in the data.
3.7.2.2 Interclausal Complements and Participant Reference
