UDC

811.133.1:811.111:81’42

Authors

Lina V. Dudnikova
Southern Federal University; ul. Bol’shaya Sadovaya 105/42, Rostov-on-Don, 344006, Russian Federation;
e-mail: dudnikovalina@mail.ru
Tat’yana V. Milevskaya
Southern Federal University; ul. Bol’shaya Sadovaya 105/42, Rostov-on-Don, 344006, Russian Federation;
e-mail: tmilevsky@yandex.ru

Abstract

The authors of this paper suggest a hypothesis that cohesion in academic discourse can be treated as an invariant realized in subdiscursive variants. In this sense, cohesion can be considered as a typological sign of academic discourse and as a kind of invariant, which finds concrete expression in variants – different spheres of knowledge representing this discourse (i.e. subdiscourses). The article focuses on grammatical and lexical means of cohesion in English and French linguistic discourses. It is in these languages that works had been created which determined the development of linguistics in the 20th and 21st centuries. We studied the following linguistic works: A University Grammar of English by R. Quirk and S. Greenbaum and Larousse: Grammaire by J. Dubois and R. Lagane. We found that the means of expressing cohesion in English and French linguistic texts are almost identical. Such texts contain numerous connectors ensuring logical-grammatical relationships between the sentences and their consistency, as well as summarizing what had been said earlier or drawing conclusions from it. In addition, degrees of comparison of adjectives are actively used. Along with conjunctions, in English linguistic works cohesion is often achieved by the adjectives former, latter, same, and the combinations such ... as, as follows. In French linguistic works, we observed a regular use of the means of antonymous cohesion: un archaïsme/un néologisme, intransitifs/transitifs and others. The results of the analysis confirm the importance of the invariant-variant approach to the study of the means of cohesion in academic discourse. This research can be extended to other languages and other subdiscourses. It will broaden the understanding of academic discourse originality and its mechanisms of text production.

Keywords

cohesion, grammatical cohesion, lexical cohesion, academic discourse, subdiscourse, invariant-variant approach

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