Applying the Discourse-Comprehension Approach to the Analysis to Robert Graves’ Recalling War in First and Second Years at Some Colleges in South Kivu Province
Jul 2026· European Journal of Linguistics· Vol 5, pp. 18-41· 0 citations· 15 references
Abstract
Purpose: The purpose of this study is to apply the Discourse-Comprehension Approach to analyze Robert Graves’ poem Recalling War with first and second-year college students in South Kivu province.
Methodology: The study adopted a qualitative descriptive design based on the discourse-comprehension approach. The poem was analyzed at both formal and semantic levels by examining its structural organization, grammatical categories, rhetorical devices, discourse interactional factors, themes, tone, subject matter, scenario, feelings, effects, punctuation, paralinguistic features and the poet’s communicative intention. The analysis integrated linguistic, stylistic, semantic, pragmatic and reader-oriented perspectives to provide a comprehensive interpretation of the poem.
Findings: The analysis revealed that Recalling War is a five-stanza narrative poem organized around the enduring physical, psychological and social consequences of war. The poem employs a rich combination of nouns, verbs, adjectives, metaphors, imagery, repetition, oxymoron, simile, alliteration, personification, contrast, ellipsis and other rhetorical devices that reinforce its anti-war message. The discourse-comprehension analysis identified war trauma, destruction, fear, hopelessness, psychological suffering and post-war memory as the dominant themes. The serious and warning tone, the selected linguistic and paralinguistic features enable readers to experience pity, compassion, fear and pain while understanding the poet’s intention enables readers to preserve collective memory and warn future generations against the devastating effects of war. The analysis further demonstrated that discourse elements such as language clues, punctuation, interactional context and rhetorical organization work together to facilitate literary comprehension.
Unique contribution to the theory, Policy and Practice: This study contributes to literary studies by demonstrating the effectiveness of the discourse-comprehension approach as an integrated framework for interpreting poetry through linguistic, semantic, stylistic, pragmatic and communicative analysis. It provides literature teachers with a practical model for teaching poetry that promotes deeper comprehension beyond traditional paraphrasing and thematic analysis. The study also offers national curriculum designers a structured analytical framework that can strengthen poetry instruction, literary interpretation and critical thinking in literature courses by integrating discourse analysis into poetry teaching.
This study examines how present tense verbs in their negative and affirmative forms function semantically and stylistically in Maha Al-Attoum’s poetry collection Imra’at Al‑Waqt (The Woman of Time). By tracing the poet’s alternation between negation and affirmation, the research seeks to uncover how verbal choices construct psychological states, negotiate temporality, and articulate a female poetic voice within contemporary Arabic literature. Adopting a descriptive–analytical approach, the study first identifies instances of negated and affirmed present tense verbs across the collection, then analyzes their dominant semantic implications. The analysis is organized into two main sections: negative present tense verbs and their meanings, and affirmative present tense verbs and their meanings, each further divided according to recurring thematic patterns. An introductory section foregrounds the central role of the verb in Arabic grammar and explains why the present tense is particularly significant for expressing continuity, expectation, and inner experience in poetic discourse. The findings reveal that Al‑Attoum’s shifting use of negation and affirmation in the present tense is closely tied to psychological nuance: it encodes tension between despair and hope, constraint and agency, absence and presence. These verbal patterns help to disclose the poet’s stance toward self, time, and surrounding reality, demonstrating how grammatical choices participate in meaning-making and subject formation in modern Arabic poetry. The study concludes by calling for more applied grammatical and semantic analyses of literary texts, arguing that such work not only revitalizes the study of Arabic grammar but also deepens our understanding of how formal linguistic structures shape literary expression and cultural imagination.
Murad Rafik Albayyari· Jordan Journal of Applied Sc...· 0 citations
Abstract The present contribution offers a twofold pragmatic literary stylistic analysis of Kazuo Ishiguro’s speculative fiction novel Klara and the Sun in order to understand how readers engage with non-human, uncooperative narration. Firstly, the narrative style of the text will be analysed in terms of its lexical choices, deictic features, underlying presuppositions, and its adherence to Grice’s Cooperative Principle. Secondly, reader response data will be used to examine how a group of EFL (English as a Foreign Language) readers evaluate and engage with the book’s narrative style. The novel is narrated in the first person by the title character, Klara, an AF (artificial friend), an artificial intelligence avatar companion to a young girl in a dystopian society. Klara’s non-human point of view and her peculiar experience of the world often give rise to Gricean maxim clashes and infringements. Exploring “uncooperative narration”, mind style and narrative indeterminacy, the analysis will examine extracts from the text which require reader inferencing. Furthermore, the reader-response data gathered from a questionnaire reveals the impact of the narrative style on the EFL students’ engagement with and understanding of the novel.
Aoife Beville· Journal of Literary Semantic...· 0 citations
This article examines women’s discourse in Nawāl as-Saʿdāwī’s Al-Ḥubb fī Zamān al-Naft through corpus linguistics-based literary research and Qāsim Amīn’s reformist perspective. The study responds to the limited integration of corpus evidence, textual quotation analysis, and Islamic reformist thought in Arabic literary criticism. It applies to an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design: the first stage produces quantitative corpus evidence, while the second stage provides qualitative interpretation through selected quotations from the novel. The corpus consists of 28,419 tokens and 9,327 types, with a vocabulary density of 0.328, a readability index of 9.818, and a mean sentence length of 29.1 words. Sixty-one quotations were selected through purposive sampling and categorized into six thematic fields. The findings show that women’s discourse is constructed through profession and work, education, hijab, marriage, divorce, and socio-political participation. Profession and work form the dominant discourse with 33 quotations or 54.1%, followed by education and hijab with 10 quotations or 16.4% each, marriage with 5 quotations or 8.2%, divorce with 2 quotations or 3.3%, and socio-political participation with 1 quotation or 1.6%. Close reading of Arabic quotations shows that women are represented as rational, speaking, working, educated, and socially negotiated subjects. The study contributes to Arabic literary studies by demonstrating how corpus-based thematic distribution can guide Qāsim Amīn-based interpretation of women’s discourse in modern Arabic fiction.
Ferawati Ferawati, Saifulah Samsudin, Muhammad Syukri Abdurrahman· Insyirah: Jurnal Ilmu Bahasa...· 0 citations
This corpus-based study investigates the near-synonymous cognitive nouns idea, thought, and notion using the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The analysis examines genre distribution and verb–adjective collocational patterns to identify usage-based constraints on their interchangeability. Frequency results show that thought is the most frequent overall, idea occurs most often in informal genres such as blogs and TV/movie subtitles, and notion is strongly associated with academic texts. To examine semantic behaviour, the top 20 verb and adjective collocates of each noun were extracted using combined frequency measures and a Mutual Information threshold (MI ≥ 3). These collocates were grouped into semantic categories based on shared meanings, with reliability ensured through expert validation, yielding an inter-coder agreement rate of at least 85%. The findings reveal both overlap and distinction: all three nouns share evaluative themes such as NEGATIVE SENSE, UNCERTAINTY, and CONCEPTUAL meaning, while idea aligns with proposal-oriented contexts, thought with temporal and clarity-related meanings, and notion with accepted and distributive meanings in academic discourse. Pedagogically, the results highlight the value of teaching these nouns through genre awareness and collocational patterns. Explicit comparison of expressions such as reject an idea, share a thought, and support a notion can enhance EFL and ESL learners’ lexical accuracy and contextual appropriateness.
Thayakorn Klomkaew· The New English Teacher· 0 citations
This study investigates how grammatical cohesion, particularly reference, is used to build meaning and narrative depth in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Tell-Tale Heart. The aim is to examine what types of reference are used and how they contribute to the story’s overall cohesion and psychological atmosphere. Using a qualitative descriptive approach, the analysis applies Halliday and Hasan’s model of reference, which includes personal, demonstrative, and comparative forms. The findings show that personal references, such as “I,” “my,” and “he”, are used extensively, shaping the story’s intense first-person perspective and reflecting the narrator’s obsessive mindset. Demonstrative references like “that eye” or “this work” highlight specific objects of fixation and carry symbolic meaning. Although less common, comparative references help express the narrator’s inflated sense of control and precision. Overall, the study finds that reference in Poe’s story does more than link sentences, it acts as a powerful stylistic tool that reveals character psychology and intensifies the narrative’s suspense.
Keywords: grammatical cohesion, reference, stylistics, narrative, Edgar Allan Poe
Anna Maria Bertiana, I. Putri· ELYSIAN JOURNAL : English Li...· 0 citations
The internet-popular construction “méi X yìng Y” has emerged with high frequency in recent years, and its holistic meaning exhibits non-compositionality, meeting the defining criteria of constructions in Construction Grammar. Drawing on Goldberg’s Construction Grammar theory, this paper systematically analyzes the formal features, component functions, and syntactic distribution of the “méi X yìng Y” construction. On this basis, it introduces Appraisal Theory to reveal the nature of its evaluative semantics, its evaluative meaning is not a simple positive-negative dichotomy, but rather forms an attitudinal continuum ranging from criticism, ridicule, helplessness and affirmation, with the shift in evaluative orientation constrained by contextual factors, speaker stance, and communicative intent. Finally, grounded in the Sān-Yī Yǔfǎ (Form-Function-Context) approach, this paper proposes a four-step pedagogical pathway for Chinese learners, form recognition, function understanding, contextual judgment and productive application, and designs specific teaching plans with typical contexts, providing a reference for the teaching of internet-popular constructions in L2 Chinese education.
Huang Si-li· English Language Teaching an...· 0 citations