Gahman P (2021)
Publication Type: Journal article
Publication year: 2021
Book Volume: 44
Article Number: 100551
DOI: 10.1016/j.dcm.2021.100551
With Halliday and Hasan's (1976) discussion of cohesion in text, linguists have long established the relation between cohesive devices employed, discursive context and register (González 2013; Guijarro 2016). However, cohesion studies in the realm of comics have largely revolved around the visual alone so far (Groensteen 2007; Kress & van Leeuwen 1996). Further, the question of how cohesive devices are employed in comics so as to attain specific discursive functions both as a reflection of the genre and as a multimodal medium remains unexplored. Based upon Halliday & Hasan's treatment of cohesion, the present research therefore addresses these deficits by examining cohesion in 20 Marvel and 21 DC modern-era comics, comprising a corpus totaling 70,865 words (tokens) and 9,805 lexemes (word types). Where cohesion was maintained, personal deixis (38.59%), endophora (12.80%), lexical repetition (11.11%) and discourse deixis (10.32%) were the most frequent (fi ≥ 10%) cohesive ties. In incohesive sentences, the cohesion breaks could be attributed to changes in narrative stage (16.85%), ellipsis (12.68%), exophora (12.08%) and so-called delayed cohesion (11.53%), whereby cohesion amongst a series of sentences is interrupted by topic digressions or prefaces beyond the discursive context but immediately re-established thereafter. These findings illuminate the multimodal interdependency between text and image in superhero comics and its effect on realizing and resolving (non–)cohesive language.
APA:
Gahman, P. (2021). Where to draw the line when the lines are blurred: A computational and functional analysis of cohesion in superhero comics. Discourse, Context and Media, 44. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2021.100551
MLA:
Gahman, Paul. "Where to draw the line when the lines are blurred: A computational and functional analysis of cohesion in superhero comics." Discourse, Context and Media 44 (2021).
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