Marking Logical Connection in Presentations

Abstract

This paper focuses on cohesion in presentations in two languages: English and Hungarian. One type of cohesion, conjunction was observed and compared in presentations given in English and in Hungarian to see if the two languages have similar or differing systems in this respect. The results suggest that English and Hungarian presentations differ both quantitatively and qualitatively in terms of the way in which they mark logical connections via conjunctions. In the English presentations, there are fewer conjunctions than in the Hungarian ones on the whole, and conjunctions are also used differently in the two corpora, especially in the opening and closing sections of presentations. As cohesion is claimed to significantly contribute to discourse comprehension, it is important to raise students’ awareness of its role in discourse structuring as well as of its possible variation across languages.