Dr Elena Martínez Caro
English Studies Department
Complutense University Madrid
DISCOURSE ANALYSIS – TASKS
Tasks extracted from: A. Downing (2015) English Grammar:
a University Course. 3rd. ed. Routledge, Nunan (1993), Biber et al. (1999)
Task 1
The following extract of ‘The lost Van Gogh’ is part of a news item in The
Week.
(a) Analyse the text in terms of cohesion, paying attention to reference,
lexical choice, connectors and ellipsis.
(b) Identify the thematic progression type used to link each clause to the
next in the paragraph.
When Vincent Van Gogh left his home in the Dutch village of Nuenen in
1895, having had a blazing row with the parish priest over his use of
female models, he left hundreds of his early pictures behind in his
mother’s keeping. Soon after, his mother, too, left the village for the
nearby town of Breda. She packed all her belongings, including a chest
containing her son’s works, onto a cart, and then left the chest in storage
with a family friend. The friend, a local merchant, threw many of the
pictures away and sold others off the back of his cart for about five cents
a piece.
Reference – Connectives – Lexical choice - Ellipsis
Task 2
In order to consider in greater detail the issue of the interconnections
between the sentences in a piece of discourse, consider the following
sentences taken from Hoey (1983) [On the Surface of Discourse. London:
Allen and Unwin]. The sentences originally formed a coherent passage, but
have been jumbled up.
(A) Read all the sentences and look up those words which you do not know
in a dictionary so that you can understand the meaning of all sentences.
[Recommended dictionary: www.macmillandictionary.com]
