Cohesion in English
The various kinds of cohesion had been out lined by MAK Halliday in his writings on stylistics and the concept was developed by Ruqayia Hasan in her University of Edinburgh doctoral thesis.
Cohesive relations are relations between two or more elements in a text that are independent of the structure: for example between a personal pronoun and an antecedent proper name, such as John ….he. A semantic relation of this kind may be set up either within a sentence with the consequence that when it crosses a sentence boundary it has the effect of making the two sentences cohere with one another.
reference groupThe major function of cohesion is text formation. As defined: text is a unified whole of linguistic items, this unity of text as a semantic whole is source for the concept of cohesion.
So first we will explore the concept of text.
Text
Text in linguistics refers to any passage spoken written of whatever length that forms a unified whole. A reader can easily identify whether the passage he is reading is a text or otherwise a collection of unrelated sentences. A text may be: spoken, written, prose, verse, dialogue, monologue, single proverb, a single cry for help or all day discussion on a committee. A text is a unit of language in use. A grammatical unit that is larger than a sentence. A text is not something that is like a sentence only bigger or larger. It is misleading. Rather text can be best defined as a semantic unit; a unit not of form but of meaning. If it is semantic unit, we will not expect to find it in structure of a sentence as a grammatical unit as phrase, clause etc.
So text is not consist of sentence but it is realized by sentence or encoded in sentences.
There are certain objective factors involved that constitute a text.
Constituents of Text
1.Texture:
2.Ties:
3.Cohesion
1. Texture:
Texture is that feature of text which made it a unified whole.
According to ‘The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics by P.H. Mathews’ cohesion and coherence are sources which create texture. Crystal adds ‘informativeness’ to cohesion and coherence.
Example:
Wash and core six cooking apples. Put them into a fireproof dish.
Here them reference back to six cooking apples to create cohesion between the two se
ntences. Here we make a presupposition about the relationship between them and six cooking apples but it is not enough only to make a presupposition rather that presupposition must be satisfied to create texture as shown in the example . These two items are co referential and this coreferentiality creates texture.
Here are five cohesive devices to create texture:
(i)Reference
(ii)Substitution
(iii)Ellipses
(iv)Conjunction
(v)Lexical Cohesion
2. Ties
The term refers to a single instance of cohesion.
Example:
Wash and core six cooking apples. Put them into a fireproof dish.
Them and six cooking apples show reference as tie.
If we take the Example:
Wash and core six cooking apples. Put the apples into a fireproof dish.
Here are two ties
(i)Reference
(ii)Repetition
Cohesive analysis of text is made in terms of tie for a systematic account of its patterns which are a source for texture. Onward we will use the term ‘cohesive tie’ in place of ‘tie’.
Here are five different kinds of cohesive ties that are also called cohesive devices:
(i)Reference
(ii)Substitution
(iii)Ellipses
(iv)Conjunction
(v)Lexical cohesion
MAKH and RH have based their model of cohesion on these cohesive ties. A detailed review is given here in the proceeding discussion.
3. Cohesion
‘The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics by P.H. Mathews (1997)’ defines cohesion in term of syntactic unit (sentence).
‘ A Dictionary Of Linguistics And Phonetics by David Crystal (1997)’ defines cohesion in te
rms of a grammatical unit (words)
MAKH and RH (1976) argued that the concept of cohesion is semantic one. For them it refers to relation of meaning that:
exists with in text
gives the text texture
defines the text as text
This relation of meaning between the elements gives the reader presupposition. This is another way of approaching the notion of cohesion that presupposing and the presupposed give us a presupposition at semantic level as a relation of meaning: The one element presupposes the the one element cannot be decoded without the presupposed.
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