项祎霖
西北工业大学 外国语学院
1.1 Theoretical Framework
Lexical cohesion has many functions in conversation, such as emphasis, imitation of others’ words, identification and confirmation. Based on cohesive harmony theory by Hasan (1984)[ Hasan, R. Coherence and cohesive harmony [A]．In J． Flood. (ed.)．Understanding Reading Comprehension[C]. Delaware: International Reading Association,1984．181-219．], repetition-re-placement relations theory by Winter (1974)[ Winter, E. Replacement as a Function of Repetition: A Study of Some of Its Principal Features in the Clause Relations of Contemporary English [D]．University of London, 1974．], and long-distance organization theory by Phillips (1985)[ Phillips, M. Aspects of Text Structure: An Investigation of the Lexical Organization of Text [M]. Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1985．], Hoey put forward a new model of discourse analysis, namely lexical repetition pattern theory according to the analysis of lexical cohesion in discourse.
1.2 Analysis
The Repetition Matrix is made to figure out all the repetition phenomena appear in the message. Each sentence in the speech was marked with a number, and the repetition points between each sentence and other sentences were found and programmed into a table.
Through the Matrix, it can be found that this message covers most types of Repetition. Among all those types, simple repetition and complex paraphrase account for more, which is about 70% in total. Moreover, the incidence rate of links, which is formed by three repetitions, is up to 82.2%, with sentence no.2 and no.9 having the most and thus being as main information.
Therefore, the main idea of this message can be easily drawn --- “Volunteers contributes a lot to our society. At International Volunteer Day, this message is delievered to recognize those efforts and appeal the world to promote volunteer work.”The high links rate indicates those close-related sentences; Simple repetition and complex paraphrase show how simple but well-chosen words are. They are used to help the audience get the meaning easily and quickly, without being tedious.
1.3 Textual Comprehension Strategies with Lexical Repetitions
Based on the analysis above, some strategies can be summarized to guide textual comprehension. Especially in the reading comprehension test, not only requires detailed reading, skimming often plays a more important role.?Lexical Repetition Theory provides an effective way to solve reading comprehension tests from vocabulary, syntactic and textual levels.
1.3.1 Vocabulary
At the vocabulary level, the question usually asks for the explanation of a word that may be unfamiliar to the candidate, and the explanation of the word can be found in the context.?For this kind of propositions, looking for repetitions is undoubtedly a better solution. It is easy to get the correct answer C because the information in this statement has the most repetition with the statement.
1.3.2 Syntax
Syntactic questions usually ask for an explanation to a sentence or part of a sentence in the passage. Two pieces of information in the statement have been underlined. “Death rate” in option C has a complex repetition with “chance of death” in the statement. Among the four options, only the information provided by C is contained in the information of the original sentence and has less information than that of the original sentence.
1.3.3 Text
Multiple choice questions at the textual level require that reading comprehension at the sentence level be improved to the textual level. This kind of question mainly tests the understanding of the full text situation, relatively is more complex, but with the help of repeated cohesion theory the same kind can be better solved, like how did the main idea in the message come about.
II. Conclusion
In conclusion, the use of lexical repetition can be helpful when it comes to dealing with text to evaluate whether a text is closely related or not, to get the main idea quickly and so on. Additionally, in reading comprehension training, we can consciously use this theory to find out the sentences related to the question stem in the discourse as quickly as possible, so as to select the correct answer.