Learning vocabulary effectively in clt through language games at high school

Reiteration in Text and in Reiteration in Discourse Chapter 2: Reiteration as a cohesive device brief on Iraq war in English press news-in-2.1.. Obtaining a sufficient awareness of the e

Table of contentPart A: Introduction

1 Rationale of the study

2 Aims of the study

3 Scope of the study

4 Methods of the study

5 Design of the study

Part B: Development

Chapter 1: Theoretical background1.1 Theory of Discourse

1.1.1 Concept of discourse

1.1.2 Spoken discourse and written discourse

1.1.3 Text and discourse

1.3.2 Types of lexical cohesion

1.4 Reiteration

1.5 Types of Reiteration

1.5.1 Reiteration in Text and in Reiteration in Discourse

Chapter 2: Reiteration as a cohesive device brief on Iraq war in English press

news-in-2.1 General structure of news stories

2.2 General information of materials selected

2.3 Reiteration occurrences in separated parts of news-in-brief texts

2.4.2 Synonyms and near synonyms

2.4.3 Superordinates and General words

Part A : Introduction

1 Rationale

1.1 During both processes of producing and perceiving in learning English, learners are usually guided to pay their attention on the logicality of the text In other words, they are taught how to recognize (in listening and reading) or create (in speaking and writing) coherence of the text Textual coherence can be obtained by various linguistic devices including grammatical and lexical ones However, it is traditionally the case that almost learners’ attention has been drawn onto grammatical devices (such as reference, ellipsis, substitution ) and very little on lexical ones despite the fact that the latter can…contribute a significant part in creating coherence, as David Nunan (1995: 31) puts it: ‘lexical cohesion is the single most important form of cohesion, accounting for something like forty percent of cohesion ties in text’. Among

lexical cohesive devices, reiteration is considered the most common one and to contribute the most to textual coherence

Obtaining a sufficient awareness of the extensive and vivid existence of reiteration as a type of lexical cohesive device, of its significant role in generating textual coherence as well as proper ways in which it is used by native speakers (or writers) can make a helpful contribution to English learners

in more correctly, properly and lively producing and perceiving in their English learning

1.2 Press, in the civilized society, has become one of the most popular and powerful means of communication and nowadays plays a displaceable part in man’s life It is not only where people get themselves expressed, knowledge-enriched, information-updated and entertained, but also one of places where a language can interestingly manifest its own existence with its certain features Unexceptionally, we can amusingly trace many of characteristics of English language in press published in English, possibly in any forms of writing there

Being interested in Reiteration in English, we find it very interesting, and proper also, to apply related theories into the brief news daily updated on Iraq war in English press, the source of material that has never been used for any discussions involving Reiteration in Discourse so far

For all reasons above, we decided to choose “Reiteration as a cohesive device in news-in-brief on Iraq war in English press” to be the theme of the thesis

2 Aims of the study

The aims of the thesis are:

- To emphasize the important role of Reiteration in creating textual coherence

- To give a statistic and description of types of Reiteration used in a specific form of writing in English press: News-in-brief

- To study the reasons leading to the different degrees of fondness in using each types of reiteration there

- To suggest some practical implications of Reiteration in teaching and learning English

3 Scope of the study

Our research deals with types of Reiteration in discourse provided by Halliday and Hasan (1976) including Repetition, Synonymy, Subordinates and General words Other types of lexical and grammatical cohesion are out of the scope of the thesis

The statistic synthesized in the thesis is taken from news-in-brief texts available on CNN, which is – in our opinion – among the most well known online newspapers It has nowadays become an internationalized newspaper on which English is the major language to be chosen for the information display The news-in-brief texts are about Iraq war, an international security event initiated in March 2003 by the United States, and then followed by her allies,

against Iraq The war is still believed by public to be unfinished up to the day the material for this thesis is selected (April 8th, 2006) The event has been drawing the attention of all nations and people all over the world And it comes

as no surprise that online newspapers are where the hottest news about the war has been most frequently and fastest updated to the public

As the title of the thesis implies, most of the examples given in chapter 2 are taken from this source and reference is made for each Examples taken from other sources are clearly marked with specific references as well

4 Methods of the study

- Revision of published related theories

- Quantitative methods

- Analysis and systematic of selected data

5 Design of the study

There are three main parts in this research paper:

Part A: Introduction

In this part, the rationale, aims, scope, methods and design of the thesis are introduced

Part B: Development

This part consists of three chapters:

Chapter 1 Theoretical background

Chapter 2 Reiteration as Cohesive device in brief news of Iraq war in

Part B: Development

Chapter 1: Theoretical background

1.1 Theory of Discourse

1.1.1 The concept of discourse

Until the first half of 20th century, traditional linguists had been working under the orientational point of view that sentences are the largest complete units to be studied It has, however, gradually been realized to be a mistaken one Many problems concerning with both linguistic theories and practices appeared to be unthoroughly solved with this viewpoint This fact eventually led to the appearance of a new subject in the 1960s and early 1970s, studying languages through units above sentence level Discourse Analysis (as the new subject was termed), as Michael McCarthy (1991:5) puts it, ‘is concerned with the study of the relationship between language and the contexts in which it is used’, under the assistance of traditional linguistics, semiotics, psychology, anthropology and sociology

Since the time Discourse Analysis came into being as a branch of linguistics, the term “discourse” has been defined in different ways A discourse, according to David Nunan in the introduction of his Introducing Discourse Analysis (1995), “is a stretch of language that may be longer than

one sentence.” Barbara Johnstone (2002:2) claims that: “discourse usually means actual instances of communication in the medium of language” In this thesis, the notion by Guy Cook (1995:198) seeing discourse as “stretches of language perceived to be meaningful, unified and purposive” seems to be the

best to adopt

1.1.2 Text and Discourse

The viewpoints of the distinction between the two terms text and discourse are

rather controversial To some linguists, the two can be interchangeably used, as they state:

(1) A text, or a discourse, is a stretch of language that may be longer than a sentence

[17:1]

(2) A text may be spoken or written, prose or verse, dialogue or monologue

It may be anything from a single proverb to a whole play, from a momentary cry for help to all day discussion in a committee

[6: 1]

On the other hand, some linguists suppose that it is worth seeing the two terms

in different ways Widdowson (1979), for instance, suggests that:

One way sees it (the language beyond the limit of sentence) as a text, a collection of formal objects held by the pattern of equivalences, or frequencies, or by cohesive devices The other way sees language as discourse, a use of sentences to perform act of communication which cohere into larger communicative units, ultimately establishing a rhetorical pattern which characterizes the pieces of language as a whole as a kind of communication

(quoted in Nguyen Thi Phuong Ngoc, 1999 – MA Thesis)

Widdowson’s differentiation is more or less similar with that of Brown and Yule (1983:6) who ‘use text as a technical term to refer to the verbal record

of a communicative act’; and that of Crystal (1992:25) defining discourse as ‘a

continuous stretch of (especially spoken) language larger than a sentence, often constituting a coherent unit, such as a sermon, argument, joke or narrative’ and

text as ‘a piece of naturally occurring spoken, written or signed discourse

identified for purposes of analysis It is often a language unit with a definable function, such as a conversation, a poster.’

This thesis supports the short discrimination of Raphael Salkie (1993) suggesting that the term text is best used to refer to any written record of a

communicative event and discourse, on the other hand, to the interpretation of

the communicative event in context That means any complete piece of news taken for analyzing in this study is best seen as a text, or a discourse unit

1.1.3 Spoken discourse and written discourse

Spoken and written discourse simply means speech and writing It has been widely agreed by linguists that there are common features as well as different ones between these two forms of language

According to Halliday (1985), writing emerged in society as a result of cultural changes which created new communicative needs that could not be readily met by the spoken language

Approvingly, Raphael Salkie (1993) contributes that the contexts for using written language are very different from those in which spoken language

is used For example, in the case of information, written language is used to communicate with others who are removed in time and space, or for those occasions of which a permanent or semi-permanent is required

One, as a result, cannot deny that spoken discourse is often considered to

be less planned and orderly, more open to intervention by the receivers while written discourse is much better structured and the possibilities for subordinate participants are limited Brown and Yule (1983) claim that spoken and written discourse serve the various functions, the former is used for the establishment and maintenance of human relationships (interactional use) and the latter for the working out of and transference of information (transactional use) (cited in To Viet Thu 2001 – MA Thesis)

On the other hand, some linguists see common points between these two forms of language David Nunan (1995) believes that they both perform an

equivalent range of broad functions, i.e they both are employed to get things done, to provide information and to entertain

Michael McCarthy (1991:150) additionally proposes, ‘both spoken and written discourses are dependent on their immediate contexts to a greater or lesser degree’, and ‘implicitness and explicitness (of the language being used) will depend on what is being communicated to whom, rather than merely on whether the discourse is spoken or written.’

In short, despite the fact that written and spoken discourses are two different forms of language, they both carry out many functions of communication and the differences are not absolute, and the characteristics that

we tend to associate with written language can sometime occur in spoken language and vice versa This means that some spoken texts will be more like written text than others and vice versa

1.1.4 Discourse context

1.1.4.1 The context of situation

David Nunan (1995:7) suggests a concept and a classification of context

of situation (or context in short) as follows:

Context refers to the situation giving rise to the discourse, and within which the discourse is embedded There are two different types of context The first of these is the linguistic context – the language that surrounds or accompanies the piece of discourse under analysis The second is non- linguistic or experiential context within which the discourse takes place Non-linguistic contexts include: the type of communicative event (for example, joke, story, lecture, greeting, conversation); the topic; the purpose

of the event, the setting including location, time of day, season of year and physical aspects of the situation (for example, size of room, arrangement of furniture); the participants and the relationships between them; and the background knowledge and assumptions underlying the communicative event.

This viewpoint of Nunan is much similar to that of Halliday and Hasan (1976) who claim that when responding to a spoken or a written passage (discourse or text), the receiver employs not only linguistic clues, but also situational ones: linguistically, he responds to specific features which bind the passage together, the pattern of connection, independence of structure, that we are referring to as cohesion Situationally, he takes into account all he knows of the environment: what is going on, what part of language is playing, and who are involved.

And the importance of context toward discourse interpretation is apparently undeniable, as Cook (1989:10) asserts: ‘There are good arguments for limiting the field of study to make it manageable, but it is also true to say that the answer to the question of what gives discourse its unity may be impossible to give without considering the world at large: the context.’

For all the facts above, both linguistic and non-linguistic contexts will be taken into account in this study It is because Reiteration, as a cohesive device and as an actual use of lexis, is obviously concerned with linguistic factors but how that use is carried out also greatly depends on non-linguistic features of discourse

1.1.4.2 Context versus co-text

It is necessary to tell these two terms from one another David Nunan (1995) holds that co-text is considered the linguistic element and context the

non-linguistic one More specifically, Brown and Yule (1983) claim that ‘any sentence other than the first in a fragment of discourse will have the whole of its interpretation forcibly constrained by the proceeding text’ and ‘the words occur

in discourse are constrained by their co-text.’

In his Pragmatics (1996), Yule gave another concept that considers

co-text as linguistic material, accompanying the referring expression The role of co-text is illustrated with the example as follows:

Brazil wins World Cup.

The referring expression ‘Brazil’ occurring initially in the utterance may evoke a range of references (as the nation, the government, the army, the people of Brazil) Part of the co-text (‘wins World Cup’, here) clearly limits…the range of possible interpretations one might have for a word like ‘Brazil’ and,

in this case, he might as well have quite little difficulty in perceiving it as the Brazilian national football team

In short, both context and co-text are important in discourse interpretation but they clearly differ from one another Context is concerned with non-linguistic (external) elements whereas co-text with linguistic (internal) ones

1.1.5 Discourse structure and information structure

1.1.5.1 Theme and Rheme

‘Theme and Rheme’ is a grammatical notion first introduced by V Mathesius and Halliday Halliday (1985) defines ‘Theme and Rheme’ as follows:

‘Theme is the element which serves as the point of departure of the

message, it is that with which the clause is concerned’

‘Rheme is the remainder of the message which consists of what the

speaker states about that point of departure’

Hence, Theme can be understood as a formal category which refers to

the initial element in a clause It is the element around which the sentence is arranged, and the one to which the speaker wants to give the prominence Everything that follows the theme is known as the Rheme Let us have a look at

the example below:

(1) John broke the vessel

(2) The vessel was broken by John.

The two sentences present the same information but one cannot deny that there is something different here That is, in (1), the theme is John It is John

and what he does that are of primary interest In (2), on the other hand, it is the theme vessel and what happens to it that receives the prominence given by the

speaker

A theme can be marked or unmarked If the subject coincides with theme, it is called unmarked theme (for example, William in ‘William didn t’ come to the party’) If the theme is something rather than the subject, it is

called marked theme, like Surprisingly in ‘Surprisingly, William didn t come to’

Them-is called given information, and by contrast, the information that is introduced

for the first time (not yet in the addressee’s mind at the moment of uttering) is known as new information And there is a noticeable point that in discourse, it

is the speaker or writer to decide what information to be treated as given and what is new Moreover, Theme of a clause coming first is more often given information than other parts In that sense - let us deal again with the utterance

John broke the vessel

“ ” – the theme ‘John’ is associated with the given information and ‘broke the vessel ’with new information

1.1.6 Sense relation

According to Michael McCarthy, “sense relation” is the semantic relation existing among words on the vertical axis Les us examine this:

A vertical axis is made up by the words in the box It provides the

addressor with a range of related choices and which one to be used depends much on the addressor himself Among these words exist semantic relations: synonym (break fracture crack– – ), antonym (break/fracture/crack - heal),

and hyponym (damage - break/fracture/crack) These relations are called sense

relations The three relations mentioned above are among the ones that can be instead called the relations of sameness, oppositeness and inclusion and that most frequently appear in everyday language teaching In this thesis, only two

of these relations, sameness and inclusion, will be discussed in terms of types of reiteration

1.2 Cohesion

1.2.1 Concept of cohesion

The concept of cohesion is strongly connected with discourse In Halliday and Hasan’s view, cohesion is a semantic concept which refers to the relations of meaning that exist within the text, and that differ it from what is not

a text More specifically, they hold that: ‘cohesion occurs where the interpretation of some element in the discourse is dependent on that of another The one presupposes the other, in the sense that it cannot be effectively decoded except by recourse to it’ (1976:4)

A text is often constituted by a group of sentences but it is not the case that any set of sentences can compose a text To be a text, such a set must

brokefractureddamagedcrackedhealed

consist of related elements This condition is referred to as texture, which is widely agreed to be created by cohesion Cohesion thereby can be called formal links between elements (within or beyond sentence-boundaries) that make a text cohesive It is much involved, but not coincided, with another notion known as coherence

1.2.2 Cohesion and coherence

It is necessary to first confirm that cohesion is of great significance to coherence, but not coherence itself Many linguists approve of Nunan’s

separation (1993:116) between coherence and cohesion that claims ‘coherence

is the extent to which discourse is perceived to hang together rather than a set of

unrelated sentences or utterances’ and cohesion is ‘formal links showing the

relationships among clauses and among sentences in discourse’ (quoted in Diep Quang Ban, 2004: 52)

Coherence therefore can be considered as the feeling that the text hangs together and that it makes sense It is something invisible and attributed to the creation of the addressee’s mind, very often with the assistance of cohesion Whereas, cohesion occurs visibly in discourse but only serves as signals, guides

or clues to coherence Cohesion itself does not guarantee coherence and coherence sometimes can be realized without any recourse to cohesion Let us have a look at two simple instances:

(1) Although he knew that driving a car to work was very costly, he used

his bike

(2) The price of petrol in Viet Nam has been sharply increased More

and more people are thinking of bikes or public means of transport

In (1), despite the existence of ‘although’ as a cohesive device, one could hardy say that the two clauses are well unified, i.e to say they are coherent Conversely, without having a formal link, the two sentences in (2) can still be perceived to hang and make sense together in the reader’s/hearer’s mind with

the assistance of his schemata (background knowledge) that using a bike or public means of transport is less expensive for one than having an own motorized vehicle which needs petrol to work).

In short, cohesion and coherence are two major issues in theories of discourse analysis Cohesion, manifested by cohesive devices, plays a greatly

important part in creating coherence but does not guarantee coherence, which is

best seen as the feeling that the discourse hang together and that it makes sense

1.2.3 Types of cohesive devices

In this thesis, we adopt the division of cohesive devices by Halliday and Hasan (1976), which can be illustrated by the graph below:

ReferenceGrammatical cohesion Substitution

EllipsisConjunctionCohesion

Collocation

Synonyms orReiteration Near-synonyms

Superordinates General words

1.3 Lexical cohesion

1.3.1 Concept of lexical cohesion

Linguists have been introduced similar definitions of lexical cohesion For instance, Halliday and Hasan (1976:318) holds that lexical cohesion is

established through the structure of the lexis, or vocabulary Raphael Salkie (1993: 28) similarly states: ‘lexical cohesion occurs when two words in a text are semantic related in some way – in other words, they are related in terms of their meaning’.

Hence, lexical cohesion can most generally be seen as the textual cohesion existing between linguistic elements in discourse thanks to the exploitation of semantic relations of lexis.

1.3.2 Types of lexical cohesion

As seen from the graph given, lexical cohesion holds two main types: Reiteration and Collocation Although out of the scope of the study, collocation deserves some mention here for a clear-cut differentiation from our concern – reiteration

Collocation is concerned with the tendency of linguistic items to occur in the same lexical environment without depending on any semantic relationships like in the following example:

co-‘Put that gun down,’ said one of the lawyers at the table His name

was Rafter He was a hard man in a courtroom, maybe the hardest

lawyer that Drake & Sweeney had

1.4 Reiteration

1.4.1 Concept of reiteration

Reiteration, contrary to collocation, is characterized by the condition that there must be some explicit semantic relation between or among cohesive linguistic items Halliday and Hasan (1976: 319) introduce a definition of reiteration which states: ‘Reiteration is the repetition of a lexical item, or the occurrence of a synonym of some kind, in the context of reference; that is, where the two occurrences have the same reference’ Later on, McCarthy (1991:65) likewise holds that ‘Reiteration means either restating an item in a later part of the discourse by direct repetition or else reasserting its meaning by exploiting lexical relations’.

In brief, reiteration is a type of formal cohesive device in which the two cohesive items refer to the same entity or event, and is considered a major

characteristic that makes discourse coherent

1.4.2 Types of Reiteration

So far, linguists have widely adopted the classification of Reiteration by Halliday and Hasan (1976) according to which Reiteration embraces four main types: Repetition, Synonyms or Near-synonyms, Superordinates and General words

They illustrate these 4 types with the examples below:

There’s a boy climbing that tree

a The boy’s going to fall if he doesn’t take care.

b The lad’s going to fall if he doesn’t take care.

c The child’s going to fall if he doesn’t take care.

d The idiot’s going to fall if he doesn’t take care.

In (a), boy is directly restated in the second sentence and this is call

repetition; the reiteration in (b) takes the form of a synonym lad; of a

superordinate child in (c) and in (d), of a general word idiot.

McCarthy (1991:66) uses slightly different terms for the third and forth types He calls them immediate superordinate and general superordinate

which are sup-kinds of superordinate simply In spite of the difference of the

terms, the criteria to distinguish them are the same This will be discussed more precisely in later sections

1.4.3 Reiteration and Reference

Grammatical cohesion is not intended to be of the concern in this thesis However, for the admission so far by many linguists to the fact that in many cases, there is a combination of lexical cohesion and reference - a type of grammatical cohesion - the concept of reference deserves some brief mention

1.5.3.1 Reference

Reference, according to Halliday and Hasan (1976:308), is the relation‘

between an element of the text and something else by reference to which it is interpreted in the given instance’ The item something else ‘ ’ in this definition is general enough to hold both cases that, what the referring item refers to may be

in or out of the text Reference-in-text may be anaphoric (looking backwards)

or cataphoric (looking forwards) and out-of-text reference is called exophoric

(looking outwards) These 3 dimensions of reference can be in turn illustrated

in the following examples:

(1) Policemen came running from all the offices ‘Are you hurt?’ one of

them asked me

[5:9]

In (1), the meaning of ‘them’ can only be specified with reference

backwards to ‘policemen’ and someone in (2), contrarily, with reference

forwards to ‘Mordecai Green’ ‘Washington Post’ in (3), however, is of a great difference in comparison with the two former: it refers to a real entity (a press

in USA) in the world but not any item elsewhere in the text To be correctly interpreted, this third dimension (out-of-text or exophoric reference) requires

shared knowledge between the addressor and addressee or/and the assistance of the situational context

Halliday and Hasan also introduce a common classification of reference including personal (e.g he, she, it, they, them, our, etc.), demonstrative (e.g that, this, those, there etc.) and comparative (e.g another, such a, the same,

etc.) that in turn can be exemplified in the following instances:

(4) Mister’s real name was DeVon Hardy He was 45 He had found in

(6) There were two wrens upon a tree

Another came, and there were three

[6: 31]

1.5.3.2 Reiteration with and without identical reference

Halliday and Hasan (1976) are probably among the ones who make the deepest discussions in this point They claim that in many cases, when the two nouns (the reiterated and the reiterating) have the same reference, it is not the

meaning of the former to convey the cohesive effect but the latter does, accompanied by an anaphoric reference item (the, that, this…) For example:

a John took Mary to dance John was left alone.

b Just then a Fawn came wandering by: it look at Alice with its large gentle eyes, but didn’t seem at all frightened ‘What do…you call yourself?’ The Fawn said at last.

In (a), the second John is a repetition However, one cannot say for sure

if it is the same John in terms of reference In this case, a reference item (he)

would work better in clarifying that it is the same John In (b) it would seem

that not the repetition of the item Fawn to have the cohesive force, but only its

repetition accompanied by an anaphoric reference item ‘the’ This might

suggest that what is called ‘lexical cohesion’ is merely the repetition of a

lexical item in a context of grammatical cohesion, and is simply a matter of reference [6:281]

With that point of view, Halliday and Hasan would imply that in order for two lexical items to be cohesive, it is not obligated for them to have the identical referent A lexical item, in that sense, coheres with a preceding occurrence of the same item even if the two have the same referent or not, or indeed whether or not they hold any referential relationship As a result, as far

as reference is concerned, the second occurrence may be either (a) identical or

non-identical; the possibilities of ‘non-identical’ vary to: (b) inclusive, (c) exclusive or (d) simply unrelated For examples:

There’s a boy climbing that tree

a The boy’s going to fall if he doesn’t take care

b Those boys are always getting into mischief

c And there’s another boy standing underneath

d Most boys love climbing tree

[6: 283]

In (a) the boy has the same referent but the other three don’t: in (b) those

boys includes a boy; in (c) another boy certainly excludes a boy and most boys

in (d) is not at all related to a boy

It seems necessary to restate Halliday and Hasan’s definition of reiteration more fully to prove that they keep consistent in this view:

Reiteration is the repetition of a lexical item, or the occurrence of a synonym of some kind, in the context of reference; that is, where the two occurrences have the same referent Typically, therefore, a reiterated lexical item is accompanied by a reference item, usually ‘the’ or a demonstrative The complex consisting of ‘the’ plus reiterated item is therefore cohesive by reference But ( ) reiteration is itself cohesive in its own right, as shown by … the fact that cohesion takes place even where there is no referential relation

In brief, the conclusions that can be drawn out are: 1 in lexical cohesion, when two lexical items have the same referent and the reiterated one is preceded by a reference item, it can be treated as the co-operation of reiteration

of some kind and grammatical cohesion In this thesis, however, such an instance is only discussed in the aspect of reiteration; 2 Reiteration may be carried out by two lexical items of either identical or non-identical reference Both cases are intended to be compared with one another in the progression of the study

Chapter 2: Reiteration as a cohesive device in brief news of Iraq war in English press

2.1 General structure of news stories in English press.

News stories, of which news-in-brief is one sub-type, is a concept widely

used by most pressmen and press researchers to refer to a type of news in which the reporters usually inform the readers only about the facts without overtly expressing their own opinions (Tiersky & Chernoff, p.48) Typically, a news story is arranged in 3 parts: the headline, in which the main idea is given, the lead (opening paragraph) which repeats the main idea in more detail, and the body (the rest of the story) where full details and quotes from the people

involved are added This organization is often applied in news-in-brief texts Let

us have a look at a specific piece of new as illustration:

U.S soldiers killed in bombing, attack

BAGHDAD (CNN) Three U.S soldiers died Wednesday in Iraq, two

in a roadside bomb and the third in an improvised explosive device (IED) and small arms fire attack, the military said Thursday.

The first two died when their convoy struck an IED in east Baghdad, the military said They were assigned to Task Force Baghdad

The third soldier, assigned to the 1st Corps Support Command (COSCOM), died and four soldiers were wounded in the attack that occurred about 11:15 a.m Thursday near Ashraf, Iraq The soldiers were conducting a combat logistics patrol at the time, the military said Both incidents were under investigation, the military said The soldiers' names were withheld pending notification of relatives The soldiers' deaths bring the number of U.S troops to die in Iraqi to 2,004 (Posted 5:06 a.m.)

One of our attempts in this thesis is to survey the degree of reiteration occurring in each part of the selected news

2.2 General information about the materials selected

As once mentioned in Scope (part A Introduction), all the pieces of news

to be analyzed and synthesized in this thesis are taken from the online English press CNN All of them belong to a sub-type of article in English press –

news-in-brief A news-in-brief text, as the term ‘in brief’ implies, is rather short and in many cases, an individual sentence is also a paragraph on its own Some general statistics of the selected materials is given in table below:

Total of

pieces

Total In average Total In average Total In average

Table 1 General statistics of material selected–

2.3 Reiteration occurrences in parts of news-in-brief texts

2.3.1 Headline

In a news-in-brief text, a headline briefly introduces the main content of the whole news Another aim of the headline is to attract readers’ attention and offer them a choice whether to continue reading Just by having a glance at the headline, readers can get the main idea of the news and if it is of their interest, they may decide to read whole of the rest It may explain why a headline is often very briefly written (6,6 words/headline in average), usually a narrative sentence with articles, auxiliaries and some prepositions omitted, containing most content words, maybe in full form like in (1), (2) and (3) or shortened like

in (4), (5) and (6):

(1) Bomb attacks kill 13 Iraqis

(CNN, Oct 7, 200)

(2) Soldier dies from non-battle related causes

(CNN, Nov 4, 2005)(3) Kerry calls for goal of withdrawing most U.S troops from

Iraq before 2007.

(CNN, Nov 4, 2005)(4) Nine bodies identified as U.S soldiers.

(CNN, Apr 6, 2003)(5) 6 police killed, 12 wounded in checkpoint clash with gunmen.

(CNN, Nov 4, 2005)(6) 2 dead, 2 kidnapped in Iraqi violence

(CNN, Nov 4, 2005)Survey results show us that it is extremely uncommon for reiteration to occur in headline Actually, all pieces of news analyzed observe only one

occurrence of reiteration (the general – hyponym relation of bodies and soldiers in (6) above) in headline It is explainable for the fact that the headline

conveys the information that is for the first time introduced within the news, so the readers do not need to link the headline to any previous co-text section If there is any occurrence of reiteration in headline, it must be to refer to a previous item occurring right within the headline itself Therefore, except for extremely necessary (but rare) cases, a headline with a lexical item reiterated can hardly be considered an attractive one and reporters try their most to avoid

(Nguyen Hoa: 2003) This supplementary restatement is carried out mainly via reiteration

For these characteristics, the lead of a news-in-brief text is probably the part that possesses the highest density of reiteration Surveys give an extremely great amount (91,3%) of content words in the headlines reiterated in the leads

In correlation to the whole text of news, an average lead contains 29 –

30 words in which there are 7 – 8 words as reiteration occurrences This fact can be summed up in the table below

Occurrences of reiteration 7.62 words 24.84 %

Table 2 An average body of news-in-brief text–Lets us examine an extract for illustration:

(7) HEADLINE: Military: 5 al Qaeda leaders killed in Oct 29 air strikes

LEAD: BAGHDAD (CNN) The military on Friday identified

five suspected al Qaeda leaders killed during Oct 29 air strikes in Husayba.

(CNN, November 4, 2005)This lead provides readers with information about:

Who: The military

What: identified five suspected al Qaeda leaders killed

Where: Baghdad

When: on Friday