A Profile and Discourse Analysis of an English Short Story

Abstract

This paper presents a discourse analysis of a short story written in English, It shows how the profile of the story with the peak correlates with other features of discourse, such as participant reference, verb ranking, cohesion and coherence, and clause combining. While nominal forms are used to refer to participants, verb phrases signal different types of information, such as eventline and background. Cohesion and coherence are maintained through conjunctions, adverbial expressions, paraphrases and parallelism, and frame and script. Clause-combining devices are also analysed.