Lecture 1 Fundamentals of grammar

2. Cohesion and Coherence
Cohesion can be defined as the links that hold a text together and give it
meaning. The term cohesion was introduced by Halliday and Hasan in 1976 to
denote the way in which linguistic items of which texts are constituted are
meaningfully interconnected in sequences. Each piece of text must be cohesive
with the adjacent ones for a successful communication.
There are two main types of cohesion: grammatical, referring to the
structural content, and lexical, referring to the language content of the piece and a
cohesive text is created through 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.
Reference (realized by nouns, determiners, personal and demonstrative
pronouns or adverbs) either points out of the text to a real world item (i.e., to its
denotate), hence exophoric reference (deixis: Can you see that?), or refers to an item within the text, hence endophoric reference. The two possible directions of endophoric reference are backward (anaphoric r.; direct anaphora: I met a man. He was wearing ..., indirect anaphora: It is a solid house. The walls are thick ...) or forward (cataphoric r.: ... the house whose walls are thick); in the case of a reference to an item of which there is (in the given situation) only one instance, we talk about homophora (e.g. Place the books on the table please). The relationship between two items in which both refer to the same person or thing and one stands as a linguistic antecedent of the other is called coreference (compare He saw himself in the mirror with He saw him in the mirror).
Reference (semantic level)
EXOPHORA ENDOPHORA
(situational) (textual)
ANAPHORA CATAPHORA
(referring to preceding text) (referring to following
text)
Examples:
ANAPHORA: Three blind mice see how they run.
CATAPHORA: I would never have believed it. They've accepted the proposal.
EXOPHORA: (a child making noise). Mother: Stop doing that here. I'm trying to work.
Types of reference:
a. PERSONAL – lexical items replaced with personal pronouns, possessive
adjectives, possessive pronouns …
b. DEMONSTRATIVE – realised by deictic terms: demonstrative adverbs (here,
now …), nominal demonstratives (this, these …), definite article (the).
c. COMPARATIVE – on the basis of identity (same), similarity (such),
difference (other, else), numerative (more, less), epithets (better).
Examples of types of reference:
PERSONAL: John has moved to a new house.
He had it built last year.
DEMONSTRATIVE: I like the push-ups and the sit-ups.
These are my favourites.
COMPARATIVE: Mary was a lady in mid-20s.
Such people can't change a flat tyre.