Text cohesion is related to comprehension. Thus, understanding cohesion helps teachers predict students' comprehension problems. A cohesive tie can establish cohesion between structurally unrelated sentences. Halliday and Hasan (1976) identified five types of cohesive ties; one of them is ellipsis. The purpose of this study is to argue the importance of recognizing ellipsis, specifically zero (adnominal) anaphor, as one of the main cohesive ties to comprehend Japanese text.
In this paper, we will first demonstrate how zero anaphora (henceforth zeros) are used as cohesive ties and contribute to maintain topic continuity in Japanese text. Zeros are the referential noun phrases (NPs) that are not overtly expressed in Japanese sentences. These NPs can be omitted if they are recoverable from a given context or relevant knowledge. Previous studies on zeros mainly focused on the omissions of the obligatory arguments of verb, i.e., the omissions of subject and object NPs. A Japanese passage will be examined to illustrate how these invisible subjects and/or objects establish cohesion between sentences and help to maintain a topic.
Second, we will present an analysis of a less studied type of zeros, zero adnominal anaphora (henceforth zero adnominals), and argue the importance of recognizing zero adnominlas as a cohesive device. Zero adnominals are a subset of zeros. They are referential NPs (NP1s) that are not overtly expressed in 'NP1 no NP2' construction. In this construction, the NP1 followed by a particle 'no' modifies the NP2. We will demonstrate, with an example, how a failure of recognizing zero adnominlas results in an incorrect understanding of a Japanese text.
Lastly, the implications of the analyses of zeros for teaching cohesion and reading comprehension will be discussed. We hope the analyses in this study will enable Japanese language teachers to predict the potential comprehension problems due to invisible cohesive relationships.