A functional perspective of cohesion in English

by

Holger Koch

Table of contents

1. Introduction 1

2. Functional perspective of cohesion 2

2.1 Reference 2
2.2 Ellipsis 7
2.3 Conjunction 9

3. Conclusion 11

1. Introduction

The phenomena of the human language are examined and analysed by linguists. Linguists mainly examine language for its grammar. They try to describe in which way words and sentences are arranged that they result in a senseful and comprehensible text. Another field of investigation of linguists is described by the item pragmatics. In grammar general rules for using language are established and additional to that pragmatics point out in which way certain combinations of words or sentence structures are communicative in social context. To generalize, the categories grammar and pragmatics represent one of the intentions of linguists that is to establish devices which explain the general and the special use of a language. With the help of the results found out by the linguists one can explain for example why this word is used on that position or why this word must be used on that position. Questions such as “Why do we understand a text as a text?” or “How do we work with language to create a text which is senseful and comprehensible and fits in social context?” could be answered.

Analysing texts of any kind is a very useful method for the aim of describing language functions. When we speak of a text, we speak of “Any passage, spoken or written, of whatever length, that forms a unified whole.”¹ The question that is put first is what is a text and what is not, what are the features that distinguish text from a collection of unrelated sentences. Halliday points out that every text has a texture. “A text derives this texture from the fact that it functions as a unity with respect to its environment.”² There are certain linguistic features that contribute to textual unity. Apart from other concepts this fact is described by the concept of cohesion. “The concept of cohesion is a semantic one; it refers to relations of meaning that exist within the text, and that define it as a text. Cohesion occurs where the interpretation of some element in the discourse is dependent on that of another.”³ Formulated in other words, cohesion implies semantic resources for linking a sentence with was has gone before. The aim of this paper is to give a survey of the textual phenomenon cohesion by describing it with the help of an article of a newspaper. By analysing this article the paper pays attention to the linguistic resources of cohesion which are reference, ellipsis and conjunction, to point out how the resources help to create text, to organize text and experience the interpersonal and the experiential coherence of the text.

2. Functional perspective of cohesion

As I mentioned above cohesion is described as a textual phenomenon whereas coherence is a mental one. In most cases cohesion and coherence are linked and linguistic resources of cohesion are used to express coherent meanings.⁴ The important difference between coherence and cohesion is the fact that coherence also works without cohesion but not the other way around. Therefore a speech or a text with a large amount of cohesive features must not necessarily be coherent. This fact can be explicitely shown in the following example:

Father was home. Home is here. Here is there. There was mother. The last word of one sentence is the beginning of the next sentence. We are confronted with repetition, reference to the sentence before and thus a cohesive device. However these sentences together make no sense. It is just a series of sentences without meaning or aim. That is why „Cohesion does not concern what a text means, it concerns how the text is constructed as a semantic edifice.“⁵ Cohesion helps to create text and thus it is the text forming component of the linguistic system.

2.1. Reference

[...]

1 Halliday, Hasan, Cohesion in English ( London: Longman, 1994 ) 1.
2 Halliday, Hasan, 2.
3 Halliday, Hasan, 4.
4 Thompson, Introducing Functional Grammar ( London: Edward Arnold, 1997 ) 147.
5 Halliday, Hasan, 103.