Cohesive Devices in Literary texts: Analysis of Stephen King’s The Mist for Students of Foreign Languages, Linguistics and Translation

Abstract

Text analysis constitutes one of the most challenging and complex practices for every student. Owing to this fact, linguists need a theoretical framework that would explain every linguistic device in text cohesion. Those cohesive devices may identify those units that are part of the analysed text. Among the huge amount of literary works that might be analysed, we chose one by Stephen King, one of the most prolific thriller writers of the 20th century. The aim of this study is to analyse one of his bestsellers in American Literature, The Mist, a psychological horror novella published in 1980. The main work used in this research is Hasan and Halliday’s Cohesion in English, which will be the centre of the linguistic study. Thanks to this investigation, we shall establish certain linguistic parameters to help students build a linguistic analysis to ease their academic and professional areas, such as linguistics and translation. The excerpt analysed will include certain linguistic cohesive devices, such as anaphora-cataphora, the use of direct speech, relative clauses, or Hasan and Halliday’s terms of field, tenor, and mode, among others. As a result of this, EFL students from different disciplines, such as foreign languages, translation, or linguistic studies, will therefore increase their knowledge of this literary model in order to be applied to other literary and non-literary works.