A CORPUS-BASED STUDY OF CONJUNCTIVE COHESION IN PAKISTANI RESEARCH ARTICLES

Abstract

Conjunctive cohesion is an indispensable linguistic signpost that writers use to create a logical relationship between the parts of the text (Halliday and Hasan, 1976). In the present study, the conjunctive analysis of Pakistani Social Science Articles (PSSA) has been carried out. This study is corpus-based, and the corpus comprised 250 articles that were taken from five Social science disciplines: Applied Linguistics (AL), English Literature (EL), Business Administration (BA), Sociology (SL), and Psychology (PL). The distribution of 50 articles from each discipline had been retrieved from online sources. The frequencies of conjunctive features (CFs) were counted and compared, and conjunctive features (CFs) were studied functionally. A comprehensive model on conjunctive cohesion (CC) has been proposed for the classification of cohesive devices. The results revealed that all the writers used extension conjunction more frequently than other conjunctions. Additive cohesion, a sub-category of extension conjunction,  was used more frequently across the academic writings of all disciplines in general and discipline of EL in particular. The sub-categories of elaboration and enhancement conjunction, exemplification and causative, were also found to be used more frequently in addition to the additive cohesion. Consequently, it was concluded that the academic writings of EL had high frequencies of conjunctive cohesion, and various categories of conjunctive cohesion were used to serve certain purposes. This study has practical implications for social science teachers and scholars in addition to EFL/ESL students.