The Effectiveness of Cohesion to Portray Child Abuse in Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child: A Corpus Analysis

Document Type : Original Article

Author

Modern University for Technology and Information (Languages Center)- Egypt

Abstract

This paper is a corpus-based study of the quality of cohesion and coherence in Toni Morrison’s “God Help the Child” (2015). The aim of the study is to evaluate the quality of cohesion in the novel, and to test to what extent coherent texts can reveal the author’s themes and serve to reflect his/her targets. This is achieved via adopting the theoretical framework of Halliday and Hasan (1976) model of cohesion. Analysis of cohesion is carried out using automatic calculations processed by a computer software (TAACO 2.0.4). The analysis is accomplished through the focus TTR (Type Token Ratio) indices testing diversity of parts of speech, connectives, semantic overlap through adjacent sentences and paragraphs, and the occurrence of synonyms. The study adopts quantitative approach via testing the quantity of parts of speech, and how they affect the aim of the writer. Besides, it adopts qualitative approach through the investigation of grammatical and lexical cohesion. Throughout the analysis, special attention is devoted to how cohesive ties enriches textuality and supports the intention of the writer which is portraying abuse and violence against dark-skinned children and women that needs to be voiced out. The study concluded that Morrison is able to focus on child abuse through her coherent text. Thus, this study presents a contribution to solve prevailing issues regarding racial discrimination against dark-skinned children and adds new dimensions to shed the light on the problem.

Keywords

Main Subjects

References

References
Alexander, K, L. (2019) “Toni Morrison.” National Women’s History Museum, 2019. Retrieved from.  https://www.womenshistory.org/educationresources/biographies/toni-morrison
 Baker, P. (2010). Sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics. Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press.
Biber, D. (2011). Corpus Linguistics and the Study of Literature. Back to Future? Scientific Study of Literature, 1(1), 15-23.
Bates, Karen Grigsby (August 06, 2019). "Toni Morrison, Whose Soaring Novels Were Rooted in Black Lives, Dies At 88." NPR. Retreived from https://www.npr.org/2019/08/06/542391535/toni-morrison whose-soaring-novels-were-rooted-in-black-lives-dies-at-88.
Chow, Andrew R. (August 06, 2019)"Toni Morrison Dies at 88." Times.    Retrieved from https://time.com/5630489/toni-morrison-dies/.
Crossley, S. &  Kyle . K. (2017, 7 16). Quick Start Guide and User Manual for TAACO 1.5. Retrieved from Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Cohesion,http://www.kristopherkyle.com/uploads/1/3/9/3/13935189/_taaco_1.5_user_manual_7-16-17.pdf
Eggins, S. (2004). An Introduction to systemic functional linguistics (2nd ed). New York           NY/ London: Continuum.
Flowerdew, L. (2012). Corpora and Language Education. China: PALGRAVE MACMILLAN.
Halliday, M. A. K. (1994). An Introduction to Functional Grammar 2nd ed.  London: Edward Arnold.
Halliday, M. A. K., & Hasan, R. (1976). Cohesion in English.  London: Longman.
Halliday, M. A. K, & Matthiessen, C. M. (2004). An introduction to functional grammar.           London: Arnold.
Halliday, M. A. K., & Matthiessen, C. M. (2014). Halliday's introduction to functional           grammar (3rd ed). London / New York: Routledge.
Hoey, M. (2005). Lexical Priming: A New Th eory of Words and Language.     London: Routledge.
Hunston, S. (2002). Corpora in Applied Linguistics. Cambridge University Press.
McEnery, T., Xiao, R. and Tono, Y. (2006) Corpus- Based Language Studies: An Advanced Resource Book. London: Routledge.
Morrison, T. (2015). God Help the Child. United States: Alfred A. Knopf Inc.
 Sinclair, J.M.  (1991). Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stubbs, M. (1996). Text and Corpus Linguistics. London : Blackwell.
Teubert, W. (2005). My version of corpus linguistics. International journal of corpus linguistics, 10(1), 1-13.

Files

Share

How to cite

Statistics