GRAMMATICAL COHESION IN FRENCH JOURNAL ABSTRACTS AND THEIR ENGLISH EQUIVALENCE

Abstract

As one of the key sub-genres in academic discourse, the research article’s abstract, has attracted the attention of scholars within the linguistics and applied linguistics literature. This has led to the upsurge in studies that have explored this all-important genre, with different analytical lenses and focuses. Dominant among these studies are those that have explored connectivity in the abstracts of research articles. However, the literature reveals a dearth of studies on the use of cohesive devices in source and target languages, specifically those written in French and their translated versions in English. This study therefore explored grammatical cohesion in research article abstracts written in French and English. The study specifically did a contrastive analysis of the types, frequency and functions of grammatical cohesive devices in these two sub-corpora. In all, a total of 40 research article abstracts formed the corpus of the study; twenty of these taken from erudit.org and another twenty taking from persee.org. Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) cohesive theory was used as the framework to analyse instances of grammatical cohesive devices in the abstracts written in the source language – French – and their translated versions in the target language – English. The findings showed that the French corpus tend to use a slightly higher number of cohesive devices than their English counterparts. It was also found that the most dominant grammatical cohesive device within the two sub-corpora were references, which were in turn dominated by personal references, followed by demonstrative and comparative references. Next were the conjunctive devices which were also dominated by additive (especially et, and its English equivalent, and), temporal, causative, and adversative conjuncts in that order. The least used cohesive devices in each of the two sub-corpora were ellipsis and substitution. The findings add to the ongoing debate on how the act of translating a text in a source language to a target language affects the use of cohesive devices, especially, grammatical cohesive devices.

Keywords

• cohesion
• contrastive rhetoric
• translation
• translation studies
• texture