The Effectiveness of Cohesion to Portray Child Abuse in Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child: A Corpus Analysis | ||
| International Journal of Childhood and Women’s Studies | ||
| Article 2, Volume 1, Issue 4, October 2021, Pages 1-29 PDF (1.42 M) | ||
| Document Type: Original Article | ||
| DOI: 10.21608/ijcws.2021.98595.1008 | ||
| Author | ||
| Esraa Hasab Al-Naby* | ||
| Modern University for Technology and Information (Languages Center)- Egypt | ||
| Abstract | ||
| This paper is a corpus-based study of the quality of cohesion and coherence in Toni Morrison’s “God Help the Child” (2015). The aim of the study is to evaluate the quality of cohesion in the novel, and to test to what extent coherent texts can reveal the author’s themes and serve to reflect his/her targets. This is achieved via adopting the theoretical framework of Halliday and Hasan (1976) model of cohesion. Analysis of cohesion is carried out using automatic calculations processed by a computer software (TAACO 2.0.4). The analysis is accomplished through the focus TTR (Type Token Ratio) indices testing diversity of parts of speech, connectives, semantic overlap through adjacent sentences and paragraphs, and the occurrence of synonyms. The study adopts quantitative approach via testing the quantity of parts of speech, and how they affect the aim of the writer. Besides, it adopts qualitative approach through the investigation of grammatical and lexical cohesion. Throughout the analysis, special attention is devoted to how cohesive ties enriches textuality and supports the intention of the writer which is portraying abuse and violence against dark-skinned children and women that needs to be voiced out. The study concluded that Morrison is able to focus on child abuse through her coherent text. Thus, this study presents a contribution to solve prevailing issues regarding racial discrimination against dark-skinned children and adds new dimensions to shed the light on the problem. | ||
| Keywords | ||
| Corpus Stylistics; TAACO (2.0.4); cohesion; connectives; Child abuse | ||
| References | ||
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