Identity : a cohesive device in some Persian live sport radio and TV talks

Identity is a cohesive device that helps to have a better understanding of speech. This article analyzes the identity device and its sub-sets in some Persian live sport radio and TV programs. The theoretical framework of this research is Dooley and Levinsohn (2001). A data-driven approach based on the access to the detailed discourse context was used to have a reliable sample for the research. So, around 200 minutes of 20 different live sport radio and TV programs were transcribed. The authors present the identity extent of functionality via comparing its degree of frequency employing the SPSS software while evaluating the meaningfulness of differences in application of each of its sub-categories. This evidenceoriented research supports that the subcategories of identity can also be studied in Persian in the same way as Dooley and Levinsohn’s (2001) view among which pronouns receive the most frequency whereas proforms do the least. Pronouns and ellipsis contain a meaningful difference between their application in radio and TV data. In addition, there is not any significant difference between the applications of repetition, substitution and other pro-forms. Finally, identity is reported as having a significant relation in its application in the research corpora.


Introduction
One of the most significant treatments of cohesion is the one Halliday and Hasan's (1976) framework dealt with.They maintain cohesion has a semantic concept referring to relations of meaning that exist within the text.It comes about wherever the interpretation of some elements in discourse is in need of another element in a text.It is the textual quality that makes the sentences of a text hang together (Morris & Hirst, 1991).Similarly, cohesive devices or 'ties' can be treated as words, phrases or clauses that bond the discourse items together grammatically or lexically.
The cohesive relations are correspondingly made by the ways two or more items are semantically joined to each other (Halliday, 1989).Since the introduction of cohesion by Halliday and Hasan (1976), in fact, different scholars have endeavored to illustrate aspects of this textual relation in discourse, among which are Brown and Yule's (1983) framework as well as Dooley and Levinsohn's (2001) interpretation taken mostly from Halliday and Hasan (1976) toward cohesion devices.Dooley and Levinson (2001) have divided these devices into six main categories, namely, descriptive expressions, identity, lexical relations, morpho-syntactic patterns, signals of relations between propositions and intonation patterns.The identity device, in turn, comprises six elements as repetition, lexical replacement, pronouns, pro-forms, ellipsis, and substitution.
The motive behind such type of analysis also what employed in this article on live speeches is that they have a dynamic genre and formulate the most important aspect of radio and TV programs.A good selection of speech results in a proper reaction of the addressees and contributes radio and TV programmers to appropriately involve with their listeners.However, spoken languages on radio and TV programs have different natures; radio programs are just audible while TV programs are audiovisual.This means that TV programs both benefit from visual elements and verbal interactions.TV programs utilize visual elements such as the speakers' gestures, body movements, written materials, various pictures and many other physical contexts.By contrast, radio programs just focus on sounds like the speakers' discourse and their signature tones.Thus, in order to have appealing radio and TV programs which catch many audiences' attention, the style of radio and TV program presentations should be taken into account (Tolson, 2009).As a result of interacting with their addressees, radio and TV programmers can start social interactions with audiences and request these people to interrelate with them.
Subsequently, it is worthwhile to examine to what extent the use of cohesive devices can upkeep radio and TV programmers in enticing more addressees.For the reason that scrutinizing all types of cohesive devices is further than the scope of the present research, the identity device will simply be studied and other sets of cohesive devices are left to be worked on in other investigations.Besides, as the linguistic items indicating the sub-sets of identity device were frequently employed in live sport radio and TV talks, the authors decided to examine and assess their application in such talks, so as to match their manifestation proportion in the corpora.In this respect, the present research particularly poses the main research null hypothesis (H0) as: 'There is no significant difference between the use of identity device sub-sets in Persian live sport radio and TV talks'.Corresponding to this hypothesis, the minor H0s are presented as the following: 1.There is no significant difference between the use of repetition in Persian live sport radio and TV talks.2. There is no significant difference between the use of lexical replacement in Persian live sport radio and TV talks.3.There is no significant difference between the use of pronouns in Persian live sport radio and TV talks.4.There is no significant difference between the use of other pro-forms in Persian live sport radio and TV talks.5.There is no significant difference between the use of ellipsis in Persian live sport radio and TV talks.6.There is no significant difference between the use of substitution in Persian live sport radio and TV talks.
Addressing the research H0s provides the readers with a worthy opportunity to find the conceivable likenesses and alterations between the use of identity and its sub-sets in the corpora.As a result, the research H0s will be tested.Then, it can be explored that how much the use of each sub-set of identity backs to individuals engaging in Persian live sport radio and TV talks to make these oral texts more interconnected and comprehensible.

Literature review
The introduction of cohesion by Halliday and Hasan (1976) gave rise to a large number of studies on cohesion analysis, most of which surveyed the potential role of cohesion in text analysis.Recent studies on cohesion analysis have mainly been carried out on grammatical cohesion (substitution, ellipsis, reference, and conjunction) of written English (Gutwinski, 1976;Stotsky, 1983;Bennett-Kastor, 1986;Coulthard, 1994;Parsons, 1991Parsons, , 1996;;Rostami Abu-Sa'eedi, 2010).Nevertheless, other languages have been studied in this respect as well, to point out some: (Russian (Simmons, 1981); English-Hindi (Kachroo,1984); English-Persian (Noor-Mohammadi, 1984;San'atifar, 2011); Spanish (Mederos Martín, 1988;Casado Velarde, 1997); English-Japanese (Oshima, 1988); Chinese-English (Yang & Sun, 2012); Persian (Kavoosi-Nejad, 1993);Fazl-Ali, 1995;Mozaffar-Zadeh, 1998;Roberts, Barjasteh Delforooz, & Jahani, 2009).To the authors' knowledge, many previous studies have followed Halliday and Hasan's (1976) vision of cohesion to investigate this discourse devices in diverse Persian texts.They actually found a few studies that have piloted cohesion based on Dooley and Levinsohn (2001) (Roberts et. al., 2009;Ahangar, Taki, & Rahimi (2012); Ahangar, Jafarzadeh Fadaki and Sehhati (2016); henceforth, the literature review is a brief review of the analysis of cohesion as a whole in different texts.Roberts et al. (2009) studied Persian discourse structure based on Dooley and Levinsohn's (2001) view describing different aspects of discourse analysis including cohesion and coherence in 16 Persian stories.Ahangar et al. (2012) focused on conjunctions in Persian live sport radio and TV talks based on Dooley and Levinsohn (2001) and concluded that associatives were most frequently used while adversatives were the least.Additives, adversatives, and developmental markers (but not associatives) held a meaningful difference between their applications in their corpora.Finally, they maintained that conjunctions had a significant relation in their application in Persian live sport radio and TV talks.Ahangar et al. (2016) questioned lexical relations in elderly Alzheimer patients and non-patients' speeches.They concluded that, except for collocation, there was a significant difference in part-whole and hyponymy as well as there was a significant difference between application of lexical relations in speech of elderly Alzheimer patients and non-patients.
It should be noted that the works done adopting Dooley and Levinsohn's (2001) view on cohesion device and its sub-devices are very few in Persian.Nonetheless, the authors' purpose is to illustrate the concepts of Dooley and Levinsohn (2001) on the notion of identity in Persian to see if their viewpoints can be extended to Persian live sport radio and TV talks.

Research Framework and Data Description
As Dooley and Levinsohn (2001) suggest, identity refers to identical forms, meaning, or reference/denotation. Here, a brief explanation for each sub-set of identity will be provided along with an example in Persian: Repetition deals with repeating an expression wholly or partly (Dooley & Levinsohn, 2001).Example (1) shows whole sentence repetition and example (2) represents partial repetition of the sentence (where only the verb phrase is repeated): (1) r@cdp,d cnqtcfzq> r@cdp,d cnqtcfzq (Citizenship Sport, November 3, 2011) "(Is he) Sadeq Doroodgar ?-(Yes!He is) Sadeq Doroodgar!" (2) >@p@,i,d >drshkh rngazs jzqc,zm >@p@,i,d ozquhm In 'lexical replacement' the forms in question are different, but the referent is the same (Dooley & Levinsohn, 2001).Example (3) contains this feature, where 'Doctor Sajjadi' has been replaced by the noun sdekzj 'the poor thing'.
Pro-forms entail identity of reference without identity of form.Besides pronouns, there are other types of pro-forms, like pro-verbs (do, do…it/ so/too), pro-adverbs (then, here, so, etc.) and proclauses (so) that do not bear any semantic relations, but refer to an element in the context and guide hearers to find out to which element they refer to (Halliday & Hasan, 1976;Roberts et al., 2009).Examples ( 10), (11), and (12) represent pro-verbs, pro-adverbs and pro-clauses, respectively: (10) Pro-verbs: Rza,d wta,h c@Rs,d a@R,hc Rnl@ cΖ@if@gd l@ mz,a@izc >hmcΖ@ a@R,d place-EZ we NEG-must here SUB.be.PRES-3SG (Fall in Step with Sport, November 11, 2011) "Now we are at the middle of the table.Actually our place should not be here!" (12) Pro-clauses: g@k@jd lh,w@i,l ad,q,hl st "Now that we are going to the Olympics, if we make any changes to (our) management, other subgroups will be affected.Other fields may do that".
Substitution is a kind of partial identity of denotation, i.e. when two things are of the same type, but are different instances of that type (Halliday & Hasan, 1976), as shown in example (13).
Here, the expression 'these two fields' will be successful in referring to 'recurve' and 'compound' if, at that point, the hearer just has one entity in his mental representation that fits with this expression.
(13) czq >dqsda@s  a@ qhjdqu uz  j@lonmc in communicating with recurve and compound rn>@k jzqc,d atc,zm lngdl,szqhm sze@uns,h (Morning and Sport, November 16, 2011) "Some people asked about recurve and compound.The most important difference between these two fields is the kind of arc which they use".
Ellipsis is semantically related to substitution but grammatically distinct.According to Yang and Sun (2012), it is a set of resources, which avoids full repetition of a clause or an element in the clause and accordingly, the readers can assume that they are to repeat the wording from a previous clause.In ellipsis, a language adheres to economy principle, i.e. it remains a noun, verb or clause unsaid, with this motivation that it can be retrievable by information in other parts of discourse (Martiné, 1960, apud Nasr-e Azadani, 2000).Ellipsis can be classified as nominal, verbal and clausal (Halliday & Hasan, 1976).The following are examples driven from the corpus.The three types are represented respectively in ( 14), ( 15) and ( 16).In example ( 16) the complete answer would be bӕle lh,ctmdrs,ӕl "Yes!I knew there was a meeting", whereas by eliding the old information, the xd ezq@izmc,d >dc@ld,c@q a@R,d one process-EZ continuation-have be.PRES-3SG (Science and Sport, November 9, 2011) "Aims should not be a point, but it should be a continuous process".

Material and method
The present study aims at determining the frequency of utilization of identity device in terms of repetition, lexical replacement, pronouns, proforms, ellipsis and substitution, in those Persian live sport radio and TV talks that are utmost alike to everyday dialogues, where they are less formal and less prearranged.To analyze these sub-categories in the research data, Dooley and Levinsohn's (2001) cohesion system was adopted as the theoretical framework of the research.To this end, the casually selected research corpora encompassed around 30,000 words extracted from 20 Persian live sport radio and TV talks produced in November 2011.The radio programs included: 'The World of Football Sport', 'Towards Glory' 'Science and Sport', 'Fall in Step with Sport', 'Fall in Step with the League', 'Morning and Sport', 'The Cradle of Health' and 'The World of Wrestling Sport'.Also, the TV programs were: 'Sport from the Second Channel Viewpoint', 'Ninety', 'Everyday Sport', 'The Golden Circle of Wrestling', 'Friday with Sport', 'Today Sport', 'People and Sport' and 'Citizenship Sport'.These are the titles of some radio and TV sport programs in Iran.
Descriptive statistics was used to determine the occurrence frequency of the identity device in each set of data.The identity sub-categories -like other cohesive devices-have explicit linguistic signals that can be counted up.The authors looked up accurately through the research corpora and searched for any of the six sub-categories of identity while carefully classifying the examples in each subtype.Hence, in order to give a more accurate account of the above mentioned sub-sets, their number of occurrences appropriately used in the radio and TV data was counted up.By finding the extent to which each subset of the identity device was employed in Persian live sport radio and TV talks, the percentage of occurrence of each subset in the two sets of data were evaluated as well.Accordingly, the most and the least frequently used sub-sets of identity were determined in the research corpora.
The Independent Samples T-test was run in order to clearly compare the research data and to analyze whether the differences between the mean percentage of identity sub-types were meaningful or not.This concept can be assessed by looking at the p-value in the Tables (numbers of the tables).As Goodman (1999a and b) suggests, the amount of p in statistical significance testing is the probability of obtaining a test statistic result at least as extreme as the one that is observed by assuming that the research H0 is true.As far as the identity sub-sets were concerned, it was decided that the differences between the uses of identity sub-types in the two sets of data were statistically significant, i.e.Persian live sport radio and TV programs were different in the use of the given cohesive device.But if it was not the case, the authors concluded that the radio and TV data were similar in the use of that device.Also, it should be noted that sentences in both radio and TV programs were considered to be equal in number in order to have an accurate comparison and analysis.

Results and discussion
This section represents the results of the analysis of identity device sub-sets individually:  In accordance with Table 1, partial repetition is considerably more used in the corpora than whole repetition.To address the first minor research hypothesis, the employed T-test is presented in the Table 2.
The results of Table 2 illustrate that, as to whole repetition, p (Sig.(2-tailed)) is 1.000 (p > 0.05).In addition, for partial repetition, p is 0.222 (p > 0.05).Total analysis of the repetition device reports p as being 0.822 (p > 0.05).Consequently, there is no significant difference in the application of repetition sub-types in the radio and TV data.As a result, the first minor research H0 is approved.

b) Analysis of Pronouns
The frequency and percentages of occurrence of pronouns and their sub-types are demonstrated in Table 3.
Table 3 highlights that the TV talks utilize pronouns and their sub-types significantly more than the radio ones and also that personal pronouns in both groups have the most frequency than other sub-types of pronouns.To examine the second minor research hypothesis, Table 4 summarizes the T-test results.
As shown in Table 4, p is less than 0.05 for reflexive, indefinite and demonstrative pronouns, whereas it is more than 0.05 for interrogative and reciprocal pronouns.Totally, p is 0.000 (p < 0.05) for pronouns.These data evidence that pronouns (more specifically personal, indefinite and demonstrative pronouns) have a significant relation in their application in the corpora, in other words, there are differences in the utilization of pronouns between the two groups of talks.For that reason, the second minor research H0 is rejected.The results of Table 5 pinpoints that the number of occurrence of pro-forms is almost the same in both corpora.To investigate the third research minor hypothesis, T-test results are given in Table 6.
As highlighted in Table 6, p is more than 0.05 (p = 0.623).Thus, this is not a statistically significant relation between the corpora resulting in similarities in the application of pro-forms in the corpora.Accordingly, the third minor research H0 is approved.

e. Analysis of Ellipsis
Table 7 reports descriptive statistics for the score of ellipsis and its sub-types.
Here, nominal ellipsis is the most frequently used sub-type of ellipsis in both corpora.Clausal ellipsis is the less frequent type in the TV data and verbal ellipsis is the least one in the radio data.The T-test is used to validate the fourth research minor hypothesis.Table 8 displays the result of T-test considering ellipsis and its sub-types.
Table 8 indicates that, for both nominal and clausal ellipsis, p is more than 0.05.However, in verbal ellipsis p = 0.000 (p < 0.05), indicating a statistically significant relation.Totally, results of ellipsis analysis designate that p is 0.025 (p < 0.05).So, there are significant relations between the use of ellipsis in the corpora.So the fourth minor research H0 will be disproved.

f. Analysis of Substitution
Due to similarities between lexical replacement and substitution, they are regarded as having the same function in this research.Thus, substitution analysis also includes analysis of lexical replacement.The descriptive statistics for the score of substitution is shown in Table 9.
Results of Table 9 depict that substitution is mostly used in the TV talks.To address the fifth research minor hypothesis, the T-test results are presented in Table 10.
From the Table 10, we consider that p is less than 0.05 (p = 0.02), showing that this is a statistically significant relation, therefore there are differences in the application of substitution in the two groups resulting in the rejection of the fifth minor research H0.Table 11 illustrates the frequency and total percentages of the identity sub-sets.
Table 11 shows that totally there are 2418 cases of the identity device sub-sets in the radio corpus and 2898 cases in the TV corpus, among which pronouns are the most and pro-forms are the least frequently used sub-types.So, pronouns are the most productive sub-type of identity and play an important role in making these talks cohesive.Moreover, the TV corpus exceed the radio data in the use of substitution, pronouns and ellipsis.As a result, speakers in TV talks are likely to talk more comprehensibly by using these sub-types of identity.Also, both the radio and TV talks display the least extent of pro-forms application.So, speakers in live talks do not resort to pro-forms to talk cohesively which do not deserve further analyses in such programs.To address the research major H0, the final T-test is shown in Table 12.
Here, p is 0.02 (p < 0.05).It displays that there is a significant difference in the use of identity device in the research corpora.In consequence, the main research H0 which states that there is no significant difference between the use of Identity device in Persian live sport radio and TV talks is rejected.Furthermore, the statistic information in Table 11 suggests, the TV data rather than the radio sample is richer in the application of the identity sub-types.Moreover, the order of occurrences of identity subtypes in the radio and TV corpora is: Pronouns, Ellipsis, Repetition, Substitution, and finally other pro-forms.Similarly, as Table 9 and 7 picture, ellipsis and substitution are frequently adopted in the research data that are representative samples for spoken discourse.This indicates that for further studies on the investigation of cohesion of spoken style, it is important to include these sub-types of cohesion in other researches.It is worthy noting that Bae assumes ellipsis and substitution as being mostly exploited in spoken discourse not written texts.He believes that these two devices usually occur in responses to spontaneous conversation (Bae, 2001).In the present study, ellipsis and substitution were used a lot, too.However, other similar studies on written data have illustrated that these two devices are rarely employed in writing (Dijkstra, Bourgeois, Allen, & Burgio, 2004;Liu & Braine, 2005;Rostami Abu-Sa'eedi, 2010;Gonzalez, 2010).Thus, it may not be important to examine the extent of the application of these two sub-types in studies on cohesion of written language, because ''[…] they are more characteristically found in dialogues'' (Halliday, 2000, p. 337) and seldom seen in writing.In addition, speakers in live sport TV talks rather than people in live sport radio talks have a tendency to have a more understandable and cohesive speech by resorting to identity.The data analysis also illustrates that speakers in live sport radio and TV talks apply all sub-types of identity to have a more cohesive speech.Signals of cohesion in such talks help speakers to have a cohesive speech and to provide adequate mental representation for the audiences.In other words, the extent of the use of each device in each corpora illustrates how speakers in Persian live sport radio and TV talks applied each sub-type of identity to best transfer their intention to their audiences and help them find an adequate mental representation to entirely understand what they really say.Correspondingly, the findings of this research makes useful contributions to radio and TV programmers to be informed that it is necessary for the participants in such programs to get familiar with factors which make their speech cohesive, and to learn how to use these devices in live sport radio and TV talks.However, the conclusions on this type of prescriptions do not seem sound to be compared with the reporters' talks because it is what the reporters do and it is not clear whether it is successful or not.Thus, it deserves being a topic for further researches.

Final considerations
The present study dealt with comparing the frequency of the sub-sets of identity device in live sport radio and TV talks.The linguistic analysis was conducted on 30,000 words.Many implications can be drawn from this research, an important one of which is that in live sport radio and TV talks, people are wont to employ a considerable amount of identity sub-types.This contrastive study discloses that, as to repetition, there is not any significant difference in the application of repetition in the research corpora.Conversely, the application of pronouns (as a whole) and ellipsis illustrate a significant difference in the radio and TV corpora.Personal pronouns are the most frequently used sub-type of pronouns, while demonstratives and reciprocals are the least.Nominal ellipsis is reported as the most frequently used sub-type of ellipsis.There is a statistically significant relation in the application of verbal ellipsis between the research data.So, there is a difference in their degree of utilization in the research data.Nominal and clausal ellipsis do not report any statistically significant relation.
Thus, the occurrences of the two sub-types are almost the same in the two groups of data.Further, the analysis of pro-forms reveal that there are similarities in the application of the associated device in the data.Finally, there is a statistically significant relation in the application of substitution between the data under study that suggests a difference between its applications in live sport radio and TV talks.
The authors suggest other researchers to compare the results of the present article with the results of similar topics done in other languages to see whether Dooley and Levinsohn's (2001) opinion is applicable and generalizable in other languages.They also put forward the issue of analyzing the identity device in other on-live radio and TV programs which have social, cultural or economical genres.

Table 1 .
The frequency and percentages of occurrence of repetition and its sub-types.

Table 2 .
Independent Samples Test for repetition and its sub-types.

Table 3 .
The frequency and percentages of occurrence of pronouns and their sub-types.

Table 4 .
Independent Samples Test for pronouns and their sub-types.

Table 5 .
The frequency of pro-forms.

Table 6 .
Independent Samples Test for pro-forms device.

Table 7 .
The frequency and percentages of occurrence of ellipsis and its sub-types.

Table 8 .
Independent Samples Test for ellipsis and its subtypes.

Table 9 .
The frequency of occurrence of substitution device.

Table 10 .
Independent Samples Test for substitution device.

Table 11 .
The frequency and percentages of identity device sub-sets.

Table 12 .
Independent Samples Test for identity device sub-sets.