Cohesion is the

grammatical In linguistics, grammaticality is determined by the conformity to language usage as derived by the grammar of a particular variety (linguistics), speech variety. The notion of grammaticality rose alongside the theory of generative grammar, the go ...

and

lexical Lexical may refer to: Linguistics * Lexical corpus or lexis, a complete set of all words in a language * Lexical item, a basic unit of lexicographical classification * Lexicon, the vocabulary of a person, language, or branch of knowledge * Lex ...

linking within a text or sentence that holds a text together and gives it meaning. It is related to the broader concept of coherence. There are two main types of cohesion: * grammatical cohesion: based on structural content * lexical cohesion: based on lexical content and background knowledge. A cohesive text is created in many different ways. In ''Cohesion in English'',

M.A.K. Halliday Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday (often M. A. K. Halliday; 13 April 1925 – 15 April 2018) was a British linguistics, linguist who developed the internationally influential systemic functional linguistics (SFL) model of language. His gramma ...

and

Ruqaiya Hasan Ruqaiya Hasan (3 July 1931After government birth records were lost in Pratapgarh, Hasan's mother re-registered Ruqaiya's birthdate as 3 July 1931, slightly earlier than her real birthdate, to enroll her in school earlier. – 24 June 2015) was a p ...

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

ellipsis The ellipsis (, also known informally as dot dot dot) is a series of dots that indicates an intentional omission of a word, sentence, or whole section from a text without altering its original meaning. The plural is ellipses. The term origin ...

, substitution, lexical cohesion and

conjunction Conjunction may refer to: * Conjunction (grammar), a part of speech * Logical conjunction, a mathematical operator ** Conjunction introduction, a rule of inference of propositional logic * Conjunction (astronomy), in which two astronomical bodies ...

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

formulaic sequence Formulaic language (previously known as automatic speech or embolalia) is a linguistic term for verbal expressions that are fixed in form, often non-literal in meaning with attitudinal nuances, and closely related to communicative-pragmatic contex ...

s 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. 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 Endophora refers to the phenomenon of expressions that derive their reference from something within the surrounding text (endophors). For example, in the sentences "I saw Sally yesterday. She was lying on the beach", "she" is an ''endophoric'' ex ...

): 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 are never identified by the writer. Halliday and Hasan considered exophoric reference as not cohesive, since it does not tie two elements together into in text. A homophoric reference is a generic phrase that obtains a specific meaning through knowledge of its context. For example, the meaning of the phrase "the Queen" may be determined by the country in which it is spoken.

Ellipsis

Ellipsis The ellipsis (, also known informally as dot dot dot) is a series of dots that indicates an intentional omission of a word, sentence, or whole section from a text without altering its original meaning. The plural is ellipses. The term origin ...

is another cohesive device. It happens when, after a more specific mention, words are omitted when the phrase must be repeated. A simple conversational example: *A: Where are you going? *B: To dance. The full form of B's reply would be: "I am going to dance". 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."

Lexical Cohesion

Lexical cohesion refers to the way related words are chosen to link elements of a text. There are two forms: repetition and

collocation In corpus linguistics, a collocation is a series of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. In phraseology, a collocation is a type of compositional phraseme, meaning that it can be understood from the words th ...

. Repetition uses the same word, or synonyms, antonyms, etc. For example, "Which dress are you going to wear?" – "I will wear my green frock," uses the synonyms "dress" and "frock" for lexical cohesion. Collocation uses related words that typically go together or tend to repeat the same meaning. An example is the phrase "once upon a time". This is lexical cohesion.

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.

Referencing

Ellipsis

Substitution

Lexical Cohesion

See also

Sources

Further reading