Connective Features Used To Build Text Cohesion in 'Pieces of Life'.

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iii Maranatha Christian University

ABSTRACT

Skripsi ini membahas penggunaan ikatan kohesif (cohesive tie) yang terdapat dalam kumpulan cerita pendek berjudul Pieces of Life. Kumpulan cerita pendek ini ditulis oleh para mahasiswa/i Jurusan S1 Sastra Inggris, Universitas Kristen Maranatha, yang mengambil mata kuliah Creative Writing pada tahun 2008. Data penelitian ini berupa paragraf pertama yang diambil dari empat cerita pendek dengan ketentuan jumlah katanya berkisar antara 90 – 150 kata.

Analisis data dilakukan berdasarkan teori ikatan kohesif dari Michael Halliday dan Ruqaiya Hassan. Hasil analisis data menunjukkan bahwa ikatan kohesif yang paling sering digunakan oleh para penulis adalah

reference, terutama personal reference. Jenis ikatan kohesif lain ternyata jarang

digunakan. Skripsi ini menyarankan salah satu cara perbaikan terhadap penulisan teks yang diteliti. Perbaikan tersebut juga memperlihatkan beberapa kelemahan para penulis dalam aspek gramatika dan kosa kata mereka. Penelitian ini menghasilkan pernyataan bahwa untuk menulis suatu cerita pendek yang baik, mahasiswa perlu menguasai penggunaan berbagai jenis ikatan kohesif di samping meningkatkan kemampuan gramatika dan kosa kata mereka.

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ii Maranatha Christian University

APPENDICES

Title of the book: Pieces of Life

Data 1: “The Cellar Door to the Underground of Death” (Page 132, 145 words)

-My holiday-

(1) I will spend my holiday in Lembang, my mother lives there with her

second husband, Joel Madden, and his son, Louise. (2) My father had passed

away 9 years ago, 4 years after that my mom married with Joel, all of us moved

from New Jersey to Indonesia, and I live in Bandung. (3) I have thanks to God

that I’m not living together with them, they build a farm in Lembang, and then I

study in Bandung, at Maranatha Christian University. (4) Actually I like to spend

this holiday to look for a job. (5) I miss my mother so much. (6) On the other

hand, I still hate her. (7) She didn’t want to know my feeling. (8) She asked me

about her weeding, she said she would do anything I want, but she didn’t. (9) That

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52 Data 2: “Nothing is Impossible!!!!”

(Page 62, 94 words)

(1) My name is Marina Marilova I am school in Vaganova Ballet Academy

in St. Pettersburg, Russia. (2) I was 10 when I got into this school. (3) I lived in

St. Petersburg, Russia with my parents and my sister Tamara Spesivtseva, who is

older 4 years. (4) We live in the same house and we have the same parents but we

are very different even though we are sisters. (5) Tamara has a blue pair of eyes,

she has a perfect blonde hair, and I was shorter than her, in her school she

always gets the first rank.

Data 3: “Meina’s Big Day”

(Page 117, 104 words)

(1) Meina is a sweet nice girl who I ever befriend. (2) What I knew about

her is friendly, help others and generous. (3) I have befriended with her since we

were in Santa Angela High School so as the others such as Dandry, Viona and

Lark. (4) First I knew Meina; I think she is a kind of fierce and proud because of

her appearance. (5) Then I was wrong, she doesn’t like that kind of person. (6) I

like to have a friend as she is. (7) And in one week, she will have her big day and

we will plan our surprise for her. (8) We ask some help from her parents too and

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53 Data 4: “When Wilma Came”

(Page 32, 139 words)

(1) This day is 24 October 2005 in South Florida. (2) Emily who lives in a

little Toy’s shop was playing with her cars. (3) Although she is a 7 years old girl

but she really likes cars. (4) She has 5 cars. (5) One is from her mother in her 4

years birthday, one is from her uncle who is living in Ohio, one is from her

grandfather who has passed away last year, one is from her father in her 6 years

birthday, and the last is from her brother. (6) She gets up earlier this day because

her brother promised her to play cars with her when she comes back from her

school. (7) His name is Dave. (8) Dave is 10 years old and today he does not go to

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1 Maranatha Christian University

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1. BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

Pieces of Life is an anthology of short stories written by the 2008 students of Creative Writing class in the English Department of Maranatha Christian University. It contains thirty-one short stories, divided into five different topics. So far, this anthology is the first written by the students; therefore, it is understandable that the language of the short stories is imperfect. The short stories in the anthology are written to demonstrate the

students’ skills in creative writing. Seen from the numerous grammatical

mistakes in most of the stories, the writers cannot be said to have an advanced level of English writing skill. Nevertheless, there are some who show sufficient knowledge of English grammar.

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2 Maranatha Christian University The single instance of cohesion in a text is indicated by a cohesive tie which shows “one occurrence of a pair of cohesively related items” (3). Moreover, the

cohesive tie, which is the cohesive relation that exists between the presupposed and the presupposing elements in the text, provides the texture of the text (Halliday & Hassan 2).

Considering that cohesive ties are very important in creating a unity or coherence of a text, I am interested in investigating the cohesive ties in the texts; besides, I myself was a member of this Creative Writing class. I also noticed that the course had put emphasis on finding and developing ideas but it did not give any knowledge about how to present the ideas appropriately. This course did not give any explanation about how to build a good paragraph that would form an appropriate text containing a main idea and its supporting sentences. In fact, some of the short stories contain sentences that are not related to each other and do not support the main idea of each paragraph. In theory, a text is a unit of meaning that should be realized by sentences that are related to each other (Halliday & Hassan 2). should have mastered the appropriate use of cohesive ties in writing a text.

The theories that I use to analyze the data are taken from Michael Halliday

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3 Maranatha Christian University (a) substitution, which is the replacement of a word (group) or sentence segment

by a “dummy” word (88); (b) ellipsis, the omission of a word or part of a

sentence, which is closely related to substitution, and can be classified as

“substitution by zero” (88); (c) reference, which concerns the specific nature of

the information that is signaled for retrieval (31); (d) conjunction, the relationship that indicates how the subsequent sentences or clauses should be linked (226); and (e) lexical cohesion, which refers to the link between the content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) which are used in subsequent segments of discourse (274).

No students of the English Department in Maranatha Christian University have ever chosen to solely study cohesive ties. This fact has been my first motivation in choosing this topic. The second motivation is that cohesive ties are essential in writing. Therefore, I decide to study the cohesive ties in the texts written by the students of Creative Writing class in 2008.

The original data, which are the students’ texts, have significant grammatical mistakes, although these written texts already have the elements of a paragraph, such as a topic sentence and supporting sentences. Therefore, to analyze the texts, I am going to mention the cohesive ties that are used in the data, show how the cohesive ties create the texture in the opening paragraph of the texts, and give my suggestions to improve the text cohesion of the data.

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4 Maranatha Christian University (786 words)

1.2. STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

With the background previously presented, the research problems are formulated as follows:

1. What cohesive ties are used to achieve text cohesion in the data?

2. How do the cohesive ties create the texture in opening paragraph of the texts?

3. How can the text cohesion of the data be improved?

1.3. PURPOSE OF THE STUDY

Based on the statements of the problem, the purposes of this study are presented as follows:

1. To identify the cohesive ties that are used to achieve text cohesion in the data.

2. To show how the cohesive ties create the texture in the opening paragraph of the texts.

3. To give suggestions in order to improve the text cohesion of the data.

1.4. METHODS OF RESEARCH

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5 Maranatha Christian University Of all the short stories, there are four that have the opening paragraph containing 90 - 150 words. Despite many grammatical mistakes in the data, it can be seen that each of Data I, II, III, and IV still has some cohesive ties. Therefore, the research data can still be analyzed without grammatical revision. Then, after identifying the kinds of cohesive ties in the analysis, this study discusses how the cohesive ties create texture in the texts. Finally, the study suggests one of the possible ways to improve the text cohesion of the data.

1.5. ORGANIZATION OF THE THESIS

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CHAPTER FOUR

CONCLUSION

This study investigates the cohesive ties in the first paragraph of four short stories taken from an anthology entitled Pieces of Life, written by the students of Creative Writing class in 2008. The opening parts of the four short stories were chosen to be analyzed because of the 31 short stories in the book, only these four have the opening paragraph consisting of 90-150 words. The same range of the word number of the paragraphs has made the analysis more acceptable.

In this chapter, the researcher presents some concluding points that are concerned with the purposes of this study, which are (1) to show how the writers achieve cohesion in their texts, (2) to identify the cohesive ties that are used to achieve text cohesion in the data, and (3) to provide the suggested revision of the four texts in order to result in the texts that are more cohesive and show better textures.

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46 Maranatha Christian University Only four types of cohesive ties mentioned above are used in Data 1, 2, 3 and 4. Out of the four types, the most frequently used type is reference, whereas the substitution becomes the type that is rarely used by the writers. However, there is no use of ellipsis found in the data.

In Data 1, 2, 3, and 4 reference has been used 50 times whereas conjunction has been used twice and lexical cohesion has been used five times. Many of the reference used by the writers are personal reference. The frequency of reference in all the data shows that most of the instances of reference are personal reference (46), which consists of 18 personal pronouns, 23 possessive adjectives, and 5 possessive pronouns. Compared to reference, substitution has been used only in Data 4. In this data, the writer has used a nominal substitution one.

In addition, the researcher offers some possible reasons for the writers to use the reference type most frequently:

(1) The use of reference is relatively easier and simpler than the use of the other types of cohesive ties.

(2) The application of reference is often found in a daily conversation, which makes the reference seem familiar and thus easier to understand by the writers.

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47 Maranatha Christian University (4) The writers’ limited writing practice may also become their reason for

not using other types of cohesive ties frequently.

The last point seems to be the strongest reason for avoiding the use of other types of cohesive ties; on the other hand, it is also true that the use of other cohesive ties, such as substitution, conjunction, and ellipsis, are not as simple as they might seem to be because the writer will need to master more complicated rules.

Besides analyzing the cohesive ties, this study also presents the suggested revisions of the original texts. The revisions deal with grammar, vocabulary, spelling, punctuation and order of sentences. In the suggested revisions, the most frequently revised aspect of all the texts is grammar because grammar has a significant role in forming a good text, which is to achieve text coherence and cohesion. The grammatical improvement suggested by the researcher deals with the use of tenses because most of the writers have used wrong tenses. The writers have also used the wrong relative clauses and the wrong prepositions.

The next revised aspect of the original texts is the order of sentences. This aspect has been revised because some chronological events in the story are placed in the wrong order, which can make the readers confused. The improvement is expected to make the storyline in each text become easier to follow. In other words, the revised texts will be more cohesive.

The researcher is also concerned about the poor vocabulary in the original texts as the inappropriate use of vocabulary will lead the readers to confusion and different interpretations. For example, sentences (1) and (5) of Data 2 have used

the inappropriate English expression “I am school in…”, which has been revised

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been revised into “arrogant” because in the context, this word has a more

appropriate sense than “proud.”

Two spelling revisions have also been made by the researcher, which indicates that the writers were rather careless in writing the paragraphs. This poor writing practice can degrade the quality of the texts. For example, the word

“weeding” in sentence (8) of Data 1 has been revised into “wedding”, and the

word “St. Pettersburg” in sentence (1) of Data 2 has been revised into “St.

Petersburg”.

Punctuations are also crucial in a piece of writing but they have been neglected in the data. For example, in the original Data 1, the message of sentence (3) will become clearer if there is a colon after the first clause I have thanks to God. Besides, in the original Data 2, the indication of a new clause My name is

Marina Marilova I am school in… in sentence (1) is not clear because there is no

full stop (.) at the end of the first clause. Moreover, the use of a hyphen (-) in Data 4 to form a compound adjective is also neglected by the writer.

From all these findings, it can be estimated that the students have made insufficient efforts to practice their writing skills regularly. The findings also

reveal that the students’ grammar and vocabulary do not reflect standard English.

It would be useful for the students if the writing lecturers gave them additional information about the role of cohesive ties in making a coherent text before the students began to write a text.

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49 Maranatha Christian University involves vocabulary building; (b) lexical linkage; (c) punctuation; and (d) grammatical devices, before they write a text. A writing lecturer is also expected to teach students about using Haliday and Hasan’s cohesive ties in writing a text. In practice, all of these expectations may become a challenge for a non-native English writer to produce a good text.

This study has analyzed only the opening paragraph of each of the chosen short stories. In future, more studies are recommended to analyze the whole short stories in order to result in more findings and a deeper discussion and interpretation of the student’s creative writing.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books

Halliday, MAK & R. Hassan. Cohesion in English. Twelfth Impression. New York: Longman Inc., 1993.

Lilyana, S., comp. and ed. Pieces of Life. Bandung: Creative Writing Class, 2008. Quirk, R, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik. A Comprehensive