A Discoursal Approach to Analysing English Nursery Rhymes

Sheet, Hiba Ahmed

doi:10.33899/berj.2021.167754

	A Discoursal Approach to Analysing English Nursery Rhymes
College Of Basic Education Research Journal
Article 40, Volume 17, Issue 1, 2021, Pages 1009-1036 PDF (677.87 K)
Document Type: Research Paper
DOI: 10.33899/berj.2021.167754
Author
Hiba Ahmed Sheet^*
Department of English Language University of Mosul
Abstract
Nursery rhymes are simple poetry written in nature, in a particular language that children can understand and enjoy. The present study investigates nursery rhymes in English from a discoursal point of view. The study aims at making a discoursal analysis of nursery rhymes in English through examining their thematic, schematic and linguistic features. To achieve these aims, the study hypothesizes that 1) English shows various discourse principles in their composition of nursery rhymes. 2)English nursery rhymes have macrostructural, superstructural and microstructural organization. To attain the data relevant to the topic of the study, five English nursery rhymes have been selected to be investigated. Data analysis is conducted on the basis of Van Dijk's socio-cognitive approach of discourse analysis. The study has revealed the following main findings. First, English nursery rhymes vary in their themes. They concentrate on social and emotional issues. Second, at the microstructural level, English nursery rhymes show differences in their semantic, syntactic, stylistic and rhetorical features. Such differences are represented either in the type of the used discoursal elements or in the frequency of their occurrence.
Keywords
English nursery rhymes,,; ,،,؛Discoursal study,,; ,،,؛thematic organization

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