Cohesion (linguistics) - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Cohesion is the grammatical

Grammar

In linguistics, grammar is the set of 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, syntax, and phonology, often complemented by phonetics, semantics,...

and lexical

Lexicon

In linguistics, the lexicon of a language is its vocabulary, including its words and expressions. A lexicon is also a synonym of the word thesaurus. More formally, it is a language's inventory of lexemes. Coined in English 1603, the word "lexicon" derives from the Greek "λεξικόν" , neut...

relationship within a text or sentence

Sentence (linguistics)

In the field of linguistics, a sentence is an expression in natural language, and often defined to indicate a grammatical unit consisting of one or more words that generally bear minimal syntactic relation to the words that precede or follow it...

. 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

Coherence (linguistics)

Coherence in linguistics is what makes a text semantically meaningful.It is especially dealt with in text linguistics. Coherence is achieved through syntactical features such as the use of deictic, anaphoric and cataphoric elements or a logical tense structure, as well as presuppositions and...

There are two main types of cohesion: grammatical

Grammar

, referring to the structural content, and lexical

Lexicon

, 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

Ruqaiya Hasan

Ruqaiya Hasan is a professor of linguistics who has taught and held visiting positions at various universities in England, America and Australia. Her last appointment was at Macquarie University, Australia, from where she retired as Emeritus Professor in 1994...

identify five general categories of cohesive devices that create coherence in texts: reference, ellipsis

Ellipsis (narrative device)

Ellipsis is the narrative device of omitting a portion of the sequence of events, allowing the reader to fill in the narrative gaps.An ellipsis in narrative leaves out a portion of the story. This can be used to condense time, or as a stylistic method to allow the reader to fill in the missing...

, substitution, lexical cohesion, and conjunction

Grammatical conjunction

In grammar, a conjunction is a part of speech that connects two words, sentences, phrases or clauses together. A discourse connective is a conjunction joining sentences. This definition may overlap with that of other parts of speech, so what constitutes a "conjunction" must be defined for each...

Referencing

There are two referential devices that can create cohesion:

Anaphoric
Anaphora (linguistics)
In linguistics, anaphora is an instance of an expression referring to another. Usually, an anaphoric expression is represented by a pro-form or some other kind of deictic--for instance, a pronoun referring to its antecedent...

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
Exophora
In linguistic pragmatics, exophora is reference to something extralinguistic, i.e. not in the same text, and contrasts with endophora. Exophora can be deictic, in which special words or grammatical markings are used to make reference to something in the context of the utterance or speaker...

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
Endophora
In linguistics, endophora is a term that means an expression which refers to something intratextual, i.e. in the same text.For example, in the sentences "I saw Sally yesterday. She was lying on the beach", "she" is an endophoric expression because it refers to something already mentioned in the...

): 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 (narrative device)

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

Grammatical conjunction

sets up a relationship between two clauses. The most basic but least cohesive is the conjunction and. Transition

Transition words

Transitions, transition words, or transitional expressions, et cetera, are certain words, expressions, or other devices that give text or speech greater cohesion by making it more explicit, or signaling, how ideas are meant by the writer or speaker to relate to one another...

s 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

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

, 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.

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