Page 300 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

286 CHAPTER 11
bly the most lexicallysimple means of developing text cohesion (Halliday& Hasan, 1976). Among the various types of conjunctions, coordinating con- junctions in particular determine a parallel relationship of ideas and syn-
tactic units:
1.Labor,management, owners,andbuyersinacorporationarenolonger confined to a single society. The laborersin Hong Kong, the owners in New York, the managers in both Hong Kong and New York, and the customers in Africa all make up the modern corporate world. (Charon, 1999, p. 129)
Unofficially, however, coordinating conjunctions can be used to make sentences of practically any length one wishes:
2. Some people seem to disagree with some of the aspects of advertising because they feel thatsomeadvertisementsaretoodangerousfor theirchildren,and oneoftheexamplesis alcohol advertisement, but according to the advertisers, the purpose of the advertisers is to attract morecustomers, and unique and attractive advertisements will leadpeople tobuy- ing moreproducts, goods, and services, and companies attract their consumers by adver- tising in magazines or newspapers or TV, and most advertisements are shown on TV, especially during breaks of sports events and popular shows, and the customers can see theseadvertisements and find outaboutnewproducts. (Extracted from apaperwrit- ten by an Arabic-speaking student on social impacts of advertising.)
Coordinating conjunctions such as and, but, yet, and so can establish par- allel relationships between and among virtually any types of syntactic units: nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, phrases, and sentences. Forex- ample, the phrase labor, management, owners, and buyers consists of parallel nouns, all ofwhich constitute the subject noun phrase of the sentence in(1). (Subject-verb agreement rules for parallel noun phrases in the subjectposi- tion are discussed in chap. 4.)
However, the structure the laborers in Hong Kong, the owners in New York, and the managers in both Hong Kong and New York, in fact, represents two dif- ferent parallel constructions: (1) the phrase the laborers in Hong Kong is par- allel to the owners in New York and the managers in ... and (2) the next phrase both Hong Kong and New York contains yet another parallel construc- tion—Hong KongandNew York—conjoined bythe both... and... coordinator.
On the other hand, two simple parallel sentences or two subordinate clauses can also be conjoined into parallel constructions:
[Parallel simple sentences] Marcus Tullius Cicero was a distinguished orator, and he was also a student of Greek philosophy.
[Parallel subordinate clauses] Cicero adopted the Stoic belief that natural law governs the universe and that all belong to common humanity.
(Adapted from Perry, Peden, &Von Laue, 1999)
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