A systemic functional investigation of lexical cohesion and schematic structure in research articles on Islam and science / Aiman Abdul Aziz Ahmed

Aiman Abdul Aziz Ahmed, Abdullah (2013) A systemic functional investigation of lexical cohesion and schematic structure in research articles on Islam and science / Aiman Abdul Aziz Ahmed. Masters thesis, University of Malaya.

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Abstract

This dissertation is concerned with a systemic functional linguistic analysis (SFL) of academic articles in the discourse of Islam, Science and Religion. The aim of this research is to reveal the kind of semantic relationships and schematic structure that constitute the text and the role they play in the creation of meanings. An integrated lexical cohesion framework of Halliday and Hassan (1976), Martin (1989 & 1992) and Halliday and Matthiessen (2004) is used to investigate the lexical ties found in the texts. The schematic structure framework of Eggins (2004) is used to investigate what kind of linguistic realizations make up the schematic structure and how writers achieve the purpose of disseminating information through their scholarly work. The corpus of this study consists of selected articles sourced from two journals entitled Islam and Science and Religion and Society which explore philosophical and religious implications of research in the physical, biological, and social science. The findings obtained from the analysis indicate that repetition is the most predominant lexical relation in four texts, T1, T2, T3 and T4 with 66.6%, 70%, 63.6% and 50 % occurrence respectively. This is followed by hyponomy relation with 16% and meronomy relation with 12 % in T1. The findings on schematic structure reveal that all the texts have 8 stages except T2 which only has 5 stages. The obligatory stages found in all texts are Purpose of study, Explanation, Argument and Conclusion. These stages could be described as the defining stages of this type of discourse. The findings from this dissertation could be exploited in the realm of ESP to assist learners of English as a second language to have a better understanding and interpretation of their texts. Since elaboration relation that covers repetition, synonymy and hyponymy as well as extension relation that covers meronymy were explored in the current study, future research may explore enhancement relation covering collocation to investigate the relevance and associations of words with each other in technical and non-technical discourse.

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