Cohesion (linguistics)

Cohesion is the grammatical and lexical relationship within a text or sentence. Cohesion can be defined as the links that hold a text together and give it meaning. It is related to the broader concept of coherence

There are two main types of cohesion: grammatical, referring to the structural content, and lexical, referring to the language content of the piece. A cohesive text is created in many different ways. In Cohesion in English, M.A.K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan identify five general categories of cohesive devices that create coherence in texts: reference, ellipsis, substitution, lexical cohesion, and conjunction.

Referencing

There are two referential devices that can create cohesion:

• Anaphoric reference occurs when the writer refers back to someone or something that has been previously identified, to avoid repetition. Some examples: replacing "the taxi driver" with the pronoun "he" or "two girls" with "they". Another example can be found in formulas such as "as stated previously" or "the aforementioned".

• Cataphoric reference is the opposite of anaphora: a reference forward as opposed to backward in the discourse. Something is introduced in the abstract before it is identified. For example: "Here he comes, our award-winning host... it's John Doe!" Cataphoric references can also be found in written text, for example "see page 10".

There is one more referential device which cannot create cohesion:

• Exophoric reference is used to describe generics or abstracts without ever identifying them (in contrast to anaphora and cataphora, which do identify the entity and thus are forms of endophora): e.g. rather than introduce a concept, the writer refers to it by a generic word such as "everything". The prefix "exo" means "outside", and the persons or events referred to in this manner will never be identified by the writer. Halliday and Hasan considered exophoric reference as not cohesive, since it does not tie two elements together into a text.

Ellipsis

Ellipsis is another cohesive device. It happens when, after a more specific mention, words are omitted when the phrase needs to be repeated.

A simple conversational example:

• (A) Where are you going?
• (B) To town.

The full form of B's reply would be: "I am going to town".

A simple written example: The younger child was very outgoing, the older much more reserved.

The omitted words from the second clause are "child" and "was".

Substitution

A word is not omitted, as in ellipsis, but is substituted for another, more general word. For example, "Which ice-cream would you like?" – "I would like the pink one" where "one" is used instead of repeating "ice-cream." This works in a similar way to pronouns, which replace the noun. For example, 'Ice-cream' is a noun, and its pronoun could be 'It'. 'I dropped the ice-cream because it was dirty'. – Replacing the noun for a pronoun. "I dropped the green ice-cream. It was the only one I had'. – the second sentence contains the pronoun (It), and the substitution (one). One should not mix up the two because they both serve different purposes: one to link back and one to replace.

Conjunction and transitions

Conjunction sets up a relationship between two clauses. The most basic but least cohesive is the conjunction and. Transitions are conjunctions that add cohesion to text and include then, however, in fact, and consequently. Conjunctions can also be implicit and deduced from correctly interpreting the text.

Grammatical cohesion

In linguistics, grammar refers to the logical and structural rules that govern the composition of clauses, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology and syntax, often complemented by phonetics, phonology, semantics, and pragmatics.

See also

• coherence (linguistics)
• M.A.K. Halliday
• Systemic functional linguistics

Sources

• Halliday, M.A.K; and Ruqayia Hasan (1976): Cohesion in English. London: Longman.
• Hoey, Michael (1991): Patterns of Lexis in Text. Oxford: OUP.
• Kunz, K. & Steiner, E. Towards a comparison of cohesion in English and German – concepts, systemic contrasts and a corpus architecture for investigating contrasts and contact, in: Taboada, Maite, Suárez ,Susana Doval and González Álvarez, Elsa. Forthcoming. Contrastive Discourse Analysis. Functional and Corpus Perspectives. London: Equinox

Further reading

A Bibliography of Coherence and Cohesion by Wolfram Bublitz at Universität Augsburg