Unit VIII. Sentence in the text

Key words: isolation,avoid, syntactic unity, stretch, uninterrupted talk, coherent sequence, purpose, continual succession of sentences, prospective connection, rretrospective connection, ordinary speech.

The sentences in continual speech are not used in isolation; they are interconnected both semantically-topically and syntactically.

When we speak or write we very often want to make some connections with other things that we are saying or writing. There are several ways of doing this and they provide cohesion of the text. The most common way of providing cohesion is by referring back to something that has already been mentioned. There are also a few ways of referring forward to what is about to say. People often avoid repeating words when they are referring back. This phenomenon is called ellipsis. Another way of providing cohesion is by using various cohesive words and phrases such as “firstly” and “in conclusion” that show the connection between things.

Not any sequence of independent sentences forms a syntactic unity. Generally speaking, sentences in a stretch of uninterrupted talk may or may not build up a coherent sequence, wholly depending on the purpose of the speaker.

My brother is a student . It rains cats and dogs.

The cited sequence of two sentences does not form a unity in either syntactic or semantic sense. That is why we cannot call them a text.

The general idea of a sequence of sentences forming a text implies a strictly topical stretch of talk, i.e. a continual succession of sentences centering on a common informative purpose.

Sentences in a text can be connected either “prospectively” or “retrospectively”.

Prospective (“epiphoric”, “cataphoric”) connection is effected by connective elements that relate a given sentence to one that is to follow it. In other words, a prospective connector signals a continuation of speech: the sentence containing it is semantically incomplete.

The prospective connection is especially characteristic of the texts of scientific and technical works.

Retrospective (or “anaphoric”) connection is effected by connective elements that relate a given sentence to the one that precedes it and is semantically complete by itself. Retrospective connection is the more important type of sentence connection of the two; it is the basic type of connection in ordinary speech.

All texts should have a topic sentence. A topic sentence is a sentence, sometimes at the beginning of a paragraph, that states or suggests the main idea (or topic) of a paragraph. When specific details lead up to a generalization, putting the topic sentence at the end of the paragraph makes sense. Occasionally a paragraph's main idea is so obvious that it does not need to be stated explicitly in a topic sentence. Not all paragraphs begin with topic sentences. In some, the topic sentence appears in the middle or at the end. A good topic sentence is concise and emphatic. It is no longer than the idea requires, and it stresses the important word or phrase.

PRACTICE

Exercise 1.Think over the following statements and say whether they are right or wrong:

• All sentences in continual speech are used in isolation.

• All sentences in the text are interconnected both semantically-topically and syntactically.

• When we speak or write we very often want to make some connections with other things that we are saying or writing.

• The most common way of providing cohesion is by referring back to something that has already been mentioned.

• People never avoid repeating words when they are referring back.

• Ellipsis means adding additional information.

• Sentences in a text can be connected either “prospectively” or “retrospectively”.

• A topic sentence is a sentence, sometimes at the beginning of a paragraph, that states or suggests the main idea (or topic) of a paragraph.

• All paragraphs begin with topic sentences.

Exercise 2.See how topic sentences are used and characterize them:

The flavor that salt imparts to food is just oneof the attributes that manufacturers rely on. For them, salt is nothing less than a miracle worker in processed foods. It makes sugar taste sweeter. It adds crunch to crackers and frozen waffles. It delays spoilage so that the products can sit longer on the shelf. And, just as importantly, it masks the otherwise bitter or dull taste that hounds so many processed foods before salt is added.

The very idea of retirement is a relatively new invention. For most of human history, people worked until they died or were too infirm to lift a finger (at which point they died pretty fast anyway). It was the German statesman Otto von Bismarck who first floated the concept, in 1883, when he proposed that his unemployed countrymen over the age of 65 be given a pension. This move was designed to fend off Marxist agitation--and to do so on the cheap, since few Germans survived to that ripe old age.

Television. Why do I watch it? The parade of politicians every evening: I have only to see the heavy, blank faces so familiar since childhood to feel gloom and nausea… .

Anyone who has made the coast-to-coast journey across America, whether by train or by car, has probably passed through Garden City, but it is reasonable to assume that few travelers remember the event. It seems just another fair-sized town in the middle – almost the exact middle – of the continental United States.

What a piece of work is a book! I am not talking about writing or printing. I am talking about the codex we may leaf through, that may be put away on a shelf for whole centuries and will remain there, unchanged and handy.

Exercise 3.In these texts some sentences are missing. The missing sentences are arranged in a jumbled order after the text, and your task is to reconstruct the text by selecting from a list of several options the right sentence to fill each gap in the text.

Text A.

Heart disease in Indians is often more severe and occurs in younger people than in developed countries, a study has found.

Publishing their findings in The Lancet last week, an Indian-Canadian team of researchers analysed data on 20,937 people who suffered heart attacks, collected from 89 centres spread across 50 cities in India from 2001-2005.

The researchers found that 60 per cent of the patients had a severe form of heart disease, compared with around 40 per cent in developed countries. Indian patients are also younger, with a mean age of 57 years rather than 63-68 years. ………… The poorer patients receive medical attention late, for reasons including lack of awareness of the symptoms and poor access to ambulances. ….. The poorer patients receive medical attention late, for reasons including lack of awareness of the symptoms and poor access to ambulances. Poorer Indians are also less likely to receive treatments proven to save lives. The study indicates that higher death rates in poor patients are not because of differences in risk factors, but because of differences in treatment. …….. “Prior to this study, we did not have data of similar nature and magnitude from a developing country,” Denis Xavier, associate professor at St. John’s National Academy, Bangalore, and lead author of the study, told SciDev.Net. ……….. Between 1990 and 2020, the number of men with heart disease in developing countries is expected to increase by 137 per cent, and women by 120 per cent, compared to 30–60 per cent in developed countries. “India is a likely representative of other nations facing similar socioeconomic challenges,” says Kim Eagle, cardiology professor at the University of Michigan Medical Center, United States, and author of an accompanying comment article about the research in The Lancet. ……. Eagle says India – and developing countries in general – could take cues from developed countries’ successful strategies to reduce risk factors for heart disease, such as banning smoking from public places, increasing taxes on tobacco and promoting awareness of diet. ……..

A) And the actual number of deaths could be higher as many patients might have died before reaching the hospital, the researchers say.

B) Another important finding of the study is that rich people often seek treatment abroad, mainly in the US.

C) They then compared this data with similar studies in developed countries.

D) Eighty per cent of the 7.1 million deaths due to heart disease in 2001 took place in poor countries, and India is expected to account for 60 per cent of the heart disease burden by 2010.

E) “The increasing obesity epidemic, high rate of smoking in certain populations, and variable availability of modern medications and treatments creates a situation where coronary prevention efforts are far from optimal,” he told the Science and Development Network.

F) Three-quarters of Indian heart disease patients are from low socioeconomic backgrounds.

Text B.

A tropical tree-dwelling lizard has succeeded in a problem-solving test by learning to associate the color of a cap with a food reward, contesting the stereotype that reptiles are extremely limited cognitivelycompared to birds and mammals …….. .

In a color discriminating task, the lizards learned to flip over the correctly colored cap to reveal a worm hidden underneath. The experiment was conducted at Duke University and the results, published in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters, suggest that the problem-solving abilities of reptiles may be greater than previously thought.

The Puerto Rican lizard, (an anole), used in the study, is a well-studied species, known to excel at foraging food by being acutely aware of movement……. .

Researches first wanted to determine if the six lizards used in the study were able to figure out how to flip off the cap to obtain the food. The agile reptiles quickly learned to use one of two ways to move the cap: they closed their jaws on the edge of the cap and dragged it off the food, or ran into the cap with their heads, tipping it over and grabbing the food.

The lizards were then given a choice between two caps; one was blue and the other was yellow and blue; under only one was the food reward of a worm….. .

“They learned to associate the color of the cap with a food reward,” said Manual Leal, the Duke University researcher who led the study….. .

The lizards solved the problem in fewer tries than birds needed to flip the correct cap and pass the test, Leal explained. Lizards get just one chance per day because they eat less, while birds usually get up to six chances a day….. .

And when the color of the caps was switched, after a few mistakes two of the lizards were able to figure out the trick.

A) Their success on a test that is based on worms and usually used on birds was “completely unexpected,” he said.

B) Several lizards of this species were collected from Puerto Rico for the experiment.

C) “We named these two Plato and Socrates,” said Leal.

D) The cognitive abilities of reptiles have rarely been studied.

E) Thus a mistake by a lizard means it must remember until the next day how to correct the mistake, Leal said.

F) They quickly learned to quickly learned to distinguish which cap had the reward.

Exercise 4.Paragraph headings.Title each paragraph of the text.

SONJA HENIE

1. Sonja Henie was born in Kristiania, current Oslo. Her father had been a one-time World Cycling Champion and the Henie children were encouraged to take up a variety of sports at a young age. Henie initially showed talent at skiing, and then followed her older brother Leif to take up figure skating. As a girl, Henie was also a nationally ranked tennis player and a skilled swimmer and equestrienne. Once Henie began serious training as a figure skater, her formal schooling ended. She was educated by tutors, and her father hired the best experts in the world, including the famous Russian ballerina Tamara Karsavina, to transform his daughter into a sporting celebrity.

2. Henie won her first major competition, the senior Norwegian championships, at the age of 10. She then placed eighth in a field of eight at the 1924 Winter Olympics, at the age of eleven. During the 1924 program, she skated over to the side of the rink several times to ask her coach for directions. But by the next Olympiad, she needed no such assistance.

3. Henie won the first of an unprecedented ten consecutive World Figure Skating Championships in 1927 at the age of fourteen. The results of 1927 World Championships, where Henie won in a 3-2 decision (or 7 vs. 8 ordinal points) over the defending Olympic and World Champion HermaSzabo of Austria, were controversial, as all three of five judges that placed Henie first were Norwegian while Szabo received first-place ordinals from an Austrian and a German judge.

4. Henie went on to win the first of her three Olympic gold medals the following year. She defended her Olympic titles in 1932 and in 1936, and her World titles annually until 1936. She also won six consecutive European championships from 1931 to 1936. Henie's unprecedented three Olympic gold medals haven't been matched by any ladies single skater since; neither are her achievements as ten-time consecutive World Champion.

5. Towards the end of her career, she began to be strongly challenged by younger skaters. However, she held off these competitors and went on to win her third Olympic title at the 1936 Winter Olympics, albeit in very controversial circumstances with Cecilia Colledge finishing a very close second. Indeed, after the school figures section at the 1936 Olympic competition, Colledge and Henie were virtually neck and neck with Colledge trailing by just a few points. The closeness of the competition infuriated Henie, who, when the result for that section was posted on a wall in the competitors’ lounge, swiped the piece of paper and tore it into little pieces. The draw for the free skating then came under suspicion after Henie landed the plum position of skating last, while Colledge had to perform second of the 26 competitors, which was clearly in Henie’s favor.

6. In addition to traveling to train and compete, she was much in demand as a performer at figure skating exhibitions in both Europe and North America. Henie became so popular with the public that police had to be called out for crowd control on her appearances in various disparate cities such as Prague and New York City. It was an open secret that, in spite of the strict amateurism requirements of the time, her father demanded “expense money” for his daughter's skating appearances. Both of Henie’s parents had given up their own pursuits in Norway in order to accompany Sonja on her travels and act as her managers.

Exercise 5.Put the sentences of the following stories in the correct order.

TEXT A. THE ADVENTURE OF THE EMPTY HOUSE

The public has already learned those particulars of the crime which came out in the police investigation, but a good deal was suppressed upon that occasion, since the case for the prosecution was so overwhelmingly strong that it was not necessary to bring forward all the facts.

Let me say to that public, which has shown some interest in those glimpses which I have occasionally given them of the thoughts and actions of a very remarkable man, that they are not to blame me if I have not shared my knowledge with them, for I should have considered it my first duty to do so, had I not been barred by a positive prohibition from his own lips, which was only withdrawn upon the third of last month.

It was in the spring of the year 1894 that all London was interested, and the fashionable world dismayed, by the murder of the Honourable Ronald Adair under most unusual and inexplicable circumstances. Only now, at the end of nearly ten years, am I allowed to supply those missing links which make up the whole of that remarkable chain.

The crime was of interest in itself, but that interest was as nothing to me compared to the inconceivable sequel, which afforded me the greatest shock and surprise of any event in my adventurous life.

Even now, after this long interval, I find myself thrilling as I think of it, and feeling once more that sudden flood of joy, amazement, and incredulity which utterly submerged my mind.

TEXT B. SUDOKU

1.Judge Peter Zahra of the Sydney District Court had earlier lauded the jury's apparent attentiveness and diligence, but following the revelation, he told the forewoman that she and her fellow sudoku players had let down everyone involved in the trial.

2. The co-accused, Holland, made the same observation, and their defense counsel lodged an appeal to the judge.

3. “It helps me keep my mind busy, and pay more attention”, she said in her defence.

4. A drug trial in Sydney, Australia was aborted yesterday after several jurors were found to be playing sudoku puzzles during proceedings.

5. She claimed it helped them concentrate on the proceedings.

6. The jury was discharged, but no penalty will be given to the sudoku players.

7. The New South Wales sheriff's office will update its guidelines to instruct jurors not to play games during proceedings, and the co-accused will be facing a new trial at a later date.

8. The trial, in which Andrew Daniel Lonsdale and Kane Holland were accused of conspiracy to manufacture a commercial quantity of amphetamines, had been running for over three months, involved 105 witnesses and cost over A$1 million, and was scheduled to end soon with both parties prepared to deliver final statements this weel.

9. Yesterday, the forewoman gave unsworn evidence to the judge confirming that she and several other jurors had been filling out the puzzles since the second week of the trial, comparing solutions during meal breaks.

10. While giving evidence last week, Lonsdale noticed the jury forewoman apparently writing notes vertically rather than horizontally, in the manner of someone solving a Sudoku.