Reference in English and Lithuanian Literary Texts Essay

Reference in English and Lithuanian Literary Texts

Introduction
The middle of XX century is an age of variation in linguistics. Scientists took an interest into one of the best known linguistics branch- text linguistics. This branch is closely related to terms cohesion and coherence which describe the properties of written texts. According to Crane,coherence is a semantic property of discourse formed through the interpretation of each individual sentence relative to the interpretation of other sentences, with "interpretation" implying interaction between the text and the reader, whereas cohesion is defined "the use of explicit linguistic devices to signal relations between sentences and parts of texts." A text may be cohesive without necessarily being coherent: Cohesion does not spawn coherence. "Cohesion," Connor writes, "is determined by lexically and grammatically overt intersentential relationships, whereas coherence is based on semantic relationships." M.A. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan identify five general categories of cohesive devices that signal coherence in texts: reference, ellipsis, substitution, lexical cohesion, conjunction.
The aim of research is to identify and examine one of cohesion’s categories – reference and its significance in Lithuanian and English literary texts. In semantics, reference is generally construed as the relationships between nouns or pronouns and objects that are named by them. Hence, the word "John" refers to John. The word "it" refers to some previously specified object. The object referred to is called the "referent" of the word. Sometimes the word-object relation is called "denotation"; the word denotes the object. The converse relation, the relation from object to word, is called "exemplification"; the object exemplifies what the word denotes. In syntactic analysis, if a word refers to a previous word, the previous word is called the "antecedent". There are two different ways in which reference items can function within...