awej 5 no.4 full issue 2014

AWEJ Volume.5 Number.3, 2014Explication of Conjunction Errors in A Corpus of WrittenArabi & AliIntroductionThe ubiquity of the influence of English as the lingua franca of the 21 st century can be littledoubted. It is the global language of commercial transactions, international communication bothin formal settings such as electronic media and at the popular levels of creoles. The hegemony ofEnglish extends to the academia where, as Hyland (2007) asserts, English is the predominantmedium of instruction in post-graduate domains even where it does not hold a formal status.Within research, English is the undisputed language or Tyrannosaurus Rex (Swales,1997) ofpublication , particularly in the realm of science and technology. It can thus be concluded that themastery of English is crucial to personal, professional and academic success in our contemporaryworld. This entails competence in both spoken and written discourse in both transactional andinteractional aspects of the language. As a communicative skill, writing has a diversity offorms such as argumentative texts, expository prose, narrative compositions, academic discourse,etc. Indeed, according to Grabe and Kaplan (1996), in their everyday life, people engage in manytypes of writing, and the use of writing in our increasingly literate world is more pervasive thanis normally acknowledged. Yet, many scholars such as Richards and Renandya (2002) concedethat, of all language skills , writing is the most accomplished and, hence, the most challengingfor EFL students and native speakers alike. The primary difficulty of writing emanates from thedual need to generate and organize ideas and to translate them into readable texts (Prommas andSimwongsuwats, 2011). Moreover, writing is a peculiar and solitary form of communicationaddressed to an absent addressee and lacking the aid of extra-textual elements such as physicalcontact or verbal signs. This necessitates, in the view of Crystal (2000), a level of formality andcomprehensiveness of devices and complexity alien to other language skills. The composingprocess involves combining structural sentence units (words, phrases and clauses) into cohesiveand coherent larger structures as opposed to shopping lists, for instance. One of the mostimportant characteristics distinguishing writing involving composing is the presence of surfacefeatures (cohesive devices) holding together discourse (Halliday and Hasan, 1976) as well as anunderlying logic of organization (coherence) which is more than the mere sum of sentences . Inother words, mastering the techniques of effective writing entails familiarity with the underlyingprinciples of English discourse. Of the two above interlocking terms , the present research willconcentrate on the employment of cohesion by a sample of Sudanese English majors.Literature ReviewThe Notion of CohesionIn any serious discussion of cohesion, Halliday and Hasan‟s ground-breaking bookCohesion in English (1976) is the place to begin. In line with their functional linguistics, theauthors assume the unit of text to be the building block of language and, hence, assert that A texthas a texture and this is what distinguishes it from something that is not a text (ibid:3). They alsopoint out that cohesion is one of the linguistic system‟s major resources for text construction. Infact, cohesion embodies the existence of overt textual cues rendering it possible for readers tosense the semantic relations within it in order to enhance the semantic potentials in the text.Halliday and Hasan‟s (1976) taxonomy of cohesion included four categories. These comprisereference (i.e., the indication of preceding information such as pronominal, demonstratives,definite articles, comparatives) ; substitution (i.e., the replacement of one component by anotherincluding nouns, predicates and adverbials) ; ellipsis (i.e., the omission of a component such asnoun phrases, predications and adverbials) ; conjunctions (i.e., the indication of specific meaningArab World English JournalISSN: 2229-9327www.awej.org112