CERTIFICATE OF ORIGINALITY I, the undersigned, hereby certify my authority of the study project report entitled “An analysis of coordinating conjunctions as cohesive devices in “The Call of the Wild” by Jack London in comparison with its Vietnamese translation” submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master in English Linguistics. Except where the reference is indicated, no other person‟s work has been used without due acknowledgement in the text of the thesis. Hanoi, 2015 Truong Hai Ha Approved by SUPERVISOR Associate Professor Vo Dai Quang, PhD Date:…………………… i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis could not have been completed without the help and support from a number of people. First and foremost, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Assoc.
Võ Đại Quang, my supervisor, who has patiently and constantly supported me through the stages of the study, and whose stimulating ideas, expertise, and suggestions have inspired me greatly through my growth as an academic researcher. A special word of thanks goes to many teachers of Faculty of English and teachers of Faculty of Postgraduate studies of Hanoi Open University who have enthusiastically given lectures in my MA course and many others, without whose support and encouragement it would never have been possible for me to have this thesis accomplished. In addition, I am greatly indebted to my family, my friends for the sacrifice they have devoted to the fulfillment of this academic work. Last, but not least, my debt to the authors and publishers of the books listed in the References is equally great.
To these all scholars, I offer my deep gratitude. ii ABSTRACT This thesis deals with the coordinating conjunctions as cohesive devices in “The Call of the Wild” by Jack London at the sentence level. The thesis gives a systematic presentation of the uses of coordinating conjunctions as cohesive devices in the English novel “The call of the Wild” and its Vietnamese translated version. In addition, the thesis makes a contrastive analysis of these coordinators in “The Call of the Wild” and their Vietnamese translations in order to find out the similarities and differences in terms of syntactic and semantic features.
The thesis also makes a contrastive analysis of the three central coordinators AND/BUT/OR in English and their equivalents VÀ/NHƢNG/HAY-HOẶC in the Vietnamese translated version in order to find out whether they are the only equivalents of AND/BUT/OR in all contexts. Last but not least, the thesis provides some suggestions for English language teaching and translation. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS CERTIFICATE OF ORIGINALITY. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS.
iv LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES. Rationale for the study. Aims of the study. Objectives of the study.
Scope of the study. Significance of the study. Structural organization of the thesis. Review of previous studies related to the research area of the thesis….
Discourse and text. Spoken and written discourse. Cohesion and Coherence in Discourse. Cohesion and Discourse Structure.
Conjunction as cohesive devices. Research-governing orientations. Principles for intended data collection and data analysis. Major methods vs.
Data collection techniques. Data analysis techniques. FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION. An overview of coordinating conjunctions usages in the English novel and the Vietnamese translated version.
Similarities and Differences in coordinating conjunctions usages in the English novel and the Vietnamese translated version. AND/OR/BUT in English and their Vietnamese equivalents. Implications for teaching and translating coordinating conjunctions. Implications for teaching coordinating conjunctions.
Implications for translating coordinating conjunctions. Suggested types of exercises. Concluding remarks on each of the thesis objectives. Concluding remarks on objective 1.
Concluding remarks on objective 2. Concluding remarks on objective 3. Limitations of the current research. Suggestions for further study.
76 vi LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES Table 2.1: Types of grammatical and lexical cohesion.2: Functions of English coordinating conjunctions .1: Coordinating conjunctions in the English and Vietnamese novels 25 Table 4.2: English coordinating conjunctions in “The Call of the Wild” by Jack London .3: Vietnamese coordinating conjunctions in “Tieng goi noi hoang da” by Manh Chuong .4: The similarities and differences between English and Vietnamese coordinating conjunctions in terms of syntactic, semantic features .5: Vietnamese equivalents to AND denoting the examined implications .6: Vietnamese equivalents to BUT denoting the examined implications .7: Vietnamese equivalents to OR denoting the examined implications. 61 vii Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION 1. Rationale for the study Cohesion is an important factor of discourse which has attracted a lot of attention from linguists. The most significant research on cohesion is “Cohesion in English” by Halliday and Hasan (1976).
They say that the concept of cohesion accounts for the essential semantic relations whereby any passage of speech or writing is enabled to function as text. They discuss the cohesive relationships under five main headings: reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion. Quirk (1973) primarily covers three main factors of sentence connection. The first is the implication in the semantic content.
The second is lexical equivalence. The third is syntactic devices. Guy Cook (1989) on the other hand, includes also verb forms, parallelism, repetition and lexical chain as cohesive devices – formal links within the sentence or across the sentence boundaries. In Vietnamese, Tran Ngoc Them (1985) has written an insightful book about cohesion.
He discusses ten cohesive devices namely repetition, antithesis, synonymic substitution, association, linearity, pronoun substitution, weak ellipsis, loose conjunction, strong ellipsis and tight conjunction. Diep Quang Ban (2004), however, states that reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion are five major cohesive devices. Based on the knowledge, many MA theses about cohesive devices were also conducted in different fields. Most of them made an analysis of cohesive devices in certain types of discourse such as information and communication technology advertisements, letters of enquiry, job application letters and business contract discourse.
Although a number of 1 theses on cohesive devices in different types of discourse were conducted, they didn‟t focus on coordinators as cohesive devices in literary works. That has encouraged the author to conduct "An analysis of coordinating conjunctions as cohesive devices in “The Call of the Wild” by Jack London in comparison with its Vietnamese translation” as the topic of this study. This study will provide a close analysis of coordinating conjunctions employed in the English novel “The Call of the Wild” and their equivalents in the Vietnamese translated version. Aims of the study Based on the contrastive analysis of two literary corpora, an original text in English and its translation into Vietnamese, this study aims at providing a close analysis of coordinating conjunctions employed as cohesive devices in English and their equivalents in the Vietnamese translation.
The study mainly aims at providing some implications for teaching coordinating conjunctions and translating them from English into Vietnamese. Objectives of the study The study tries to: - Identify the similarities and differences between coordinating conjunctions used in “The Call of the Wild” by Jack London and those in the Vietnamese translation by Manh Chuong (2011) with respect to their syntactic and semantic features. - Find out the equivalents of the three coordinating conjunctions AND/BUT/OR in the Vietnamese translated version in all relations. - Put forward some suggestions for teaching English coordinating conjunctions and translating them from English into Vietnamese.
Scope of the study Within the limited time and knowledge as well as shortage of reference materials, it is not the author‟s ambition to investigate various types of conjunctions as cohesive devices but discuss only the most frequently coordinating conjunctions used in “The Call of the Wild” by Jack London and “Tieng Goi noi hoang da” by Manh Chuong (2011). The main focus is on the descriptive and contrastive analysis of coordinating conjunctions usages in the two novels with respect to the syntactic and semantic features. Significance of the study Theoretically, this study provides a better understanding of cohesive devices in general and coordinating conjunctions as cohesive devices in particular. Practically, this study helps learners of English be more aware of the role of coordinating conjunctions as cohesive devices in creating discourse.
Thus, the study may help learners to avoid some common mistakes and overcome the difficulty in using coordinating conjunctions. Its results are also beneficial to those who are engaged in English language teaching as well as those who want to communicate via English. Structural organization of the thesis Apart from the acknowledgements, the contents, the list of tables and figures, the references and bibliography, the thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter 1: Introduction This chapter gives a brief account of relevant information such as rationale, aims and objectives, scope, significance and structure of thesis.
Chapter 2: Literature review and theoretical background This part reviews some previous studies on similar issue and gives an overview on Discourse, Cohesion, and Conjunctions as cohesive devices. 3 Chapter 3: Methodology This chapter presents research methodology which consists of research orientations and research methods. For the research orientations, it is planned to present research questions, research setting, and research approach. For the research methods, it is planned to present major method vs.
supporting methods, data collection techniques and data analysis techniques. Chapter 4: Findings and Discussion This section presents and discusses the results of the study. Chapter 5: Conclusion This chapter gives a summary of the main points presented in the thesis, a brief restatement of the findings, some implications, limitations and suggestions for further research. 4 Chapter 2 LITERATURE REVIEW 2.
Review of previous studies related to the research area of the thesis While investigating coordinating conjunctions in both English and Vietnamese, it took the author a long time to read books regarding the research matter. One of the best reference books, “A University Grammar of English” (1973) by Quirk et al., claimed that coordinating conjunctions or coordinators fulfil certain following criteria: Clause coordinators are restricted to clause initial-position. Coordinated clauses are sequentially fixed. Coordinators are not preceded by conjunction.
Coordinators can link clause constituents. Coordinators can link subordinate clauses. Coordinators can link more than two clauses. In the book, Quirk also puts forward eight implications by AND, two by BUT and four by OR.
Those semantic and syntactic features will be discussed in this thesis. Another good reference study named “Ngữ pháp tiếng Việt” (2007) written by Diep Quang Ban. This book gives the background knowledge of the Vietnamese coordinators such as: the definition, the classification, and the syntactic and semantic features which are really useful for this thesis. In addition, some master theses related to coordinators as cohesive devices have been studied.
After consulting a number of such studies, the author would like to review here some among of them: The first research was an M.A thesis named “A study on coordinators AND, OR, BUT as cohesive devices” by Vo Thi Thao Ly (1999). In this thesis, Ly proves the variety and flexibility in meaning of the three 5 coordinators AND, OR, BUT; and reminds learners of some linguistic theories on semantics and pragmatics in order to equip themselves with suitable knowledge on different semantic relations and implications. The analysis has shown that AND denotes 9 implications, OR: 4 and BUT: 3.A thesis is “English coordinators: AND, BUT, OR as cohesive devices: an analysis of errors made by secondary students” Van (2005) by Nguyen Thi Van. The thesis lists some difficulties faced by Vietnamese learners in understanding and using conjunctions.
At the end of the graduation paper, some suggested solutions to solve Vietnamese learners‟ difficulties in learning conjunctions which were given as an effective source for learners.A thesis is “Ngữ nghĩa của liên từ tiếng Việt” (2006) by Lai Nha Truc. The thesis finds out the semantic and pragmatic features of the Vietnamese coordinators. It helps the author have more understanding about Vietnamese coordinators. A number of studies relating to the topic of coordinators in English as cohesive devices have been conducted.
Despite different approaches to the field, the researchers share the same point of view that coordinators play important part in text to create cohesion.