A comparative study of cohesion in English and Ewe: A case study of some written texts

Abstract

This study investigated how the Ewe language realizes cohesion in comparison with English. The study also sought to find out the extent to which either language in question interferes with the other in the use of cohesive devices among coordinate bilinguals, specifically Ghanaian undergraduate students reading Ewe as a major course of study. The findings revealed that both English and Ewe realize cohesion almost the same way, that is, by means of reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion. There are, however, some differences when we focus onthe individual cohesive devices, especially reference and ellipsis. The study further revealed that English, the second language of the respondents, had significant influence on Ewe, their first language, while Ewe had no significant influence on English as regards the realization of cohesion. These findings disprove the popular view in contact linguistics thatonly first languages have the capacity to interfere with second languages in the use of language among bilinguals. The findings indicatethat the otherwise is also true and it is only that too much attention has been given to the former phenomenon to the neglect of the latter.