english cohesion

8/2/2019 English Cohesion

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/english-cohesion 1/9

Cohesionby RJ Phillips

Halliday and Hasan (1976) identify twotypes of cohesion:

Grammatical cohesion, including reference,identification, ellipsis and conjunction.

Lexical cohesion, including repetition andcollocation.



Grammatical cohesion

Reference This often involves the use of third person

pronouns (he, she, it or they).

My father is a naturalised British citizen. Hewas born in Bombay.

Demonstrative pronouns (this, that) can beused similarly.

He couldn·t carry it on his own, but he knewthere was no one around who could help him.That was the problem he faced.



Anaphoric & CataphoricReference A single word can refer to not only

another word, but also whole clauses orsentences.

When a word refers back to somebodyor something that has already beenmentioned, this is called anaphoric

reference, as in the example on theprevious slide. References forward arecalled cataphoric references.



Example

In the following sentence is thereference anaphoric or cataphoric?

She ended the affair with me and citedthe following reasons.



Ellipsis

When elements are omitted from sentence itis called ellipsis. This becomes a cohesivedevice if an earlier part of the text allow us

to deduce the missing elements. There were discarded clothes scattered allover the floor, plates and cups under thebed, books and papers all over the desk. A bit

of a mess.



Identification

This is the use of determiners such asthe, this, that in order to indicate thata noun has been mentioned previously.

The first use of the noun is usuallypreceded by the indefinite article.

A ship appeared on the horizon. Whenmy companion returned, I pointed theship out to him.



Conjunction

The use of conjunctions and conjunctiveadverbs as cohesive devices. Wordsused in this way include and, but,

because, however, thus, although etc.

Johnny has promised to turn over a new

leaf and meet his deadlines. Although Ihave yet to see any proof of thischange.



Lexical Cohesion

Repetition At its simplest this can merely be the

repetition of a single word.

I have taken a long time over this decision. Itwas a difficult decision to make.

Sometimes the word is not repeated but asynonym is used.

He looked nervously at the damage to thecar. Then gingerly ran his fingers along thescratches and indentations along its side.



Collocation

This is the tendency for certain wordsto occur together e.g. the adjectiveterraced collocates with the noun

house. Collocation can apply to shortexpressions, such as the previousexample, or longer passages of a text.

In a theatre review we would expect tofind words such as actor, director,audience, cast.

english cohesion

Documents