Textual cohesion – Michael Carroll Materials

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Textual cohesion

A text (any sequence of words that forms a complete whole) is bound together by cohesive devices. (cohesive means ‘sticking together’)

Cohesion is what makes a text meaningful. It is a series of lexical, grammatical and other ‘linking things’ that connect the various parts of a text.
Some kinds of cohesion are linguistic and others are pragmatic

For example:

(a) Mustapha likes dogs.

(b)They, however don’t like him.

Here the word ‘they refers to dogs. This is a linguistic cohesive link.

(c)Have you got any beef?

(d)Japanese or imported?

These sentences are linked too, not by the words, but by the speakers’ understanding of the world. The listener knows that there are two possibilities for beef: Japanese and imported. This is pragmatic cohesion.

Another kind of cohesion is presupposition. This means ‘things that we can guess from what is said, even though it is not said directly.

Presupposition can also be linguistic or pragmatic.

My sister’s coming to stay with me this weekend.

Linguistic presupposition: the speaker has a sister.

Possible pragmatic presupposition: The speaker gets on well with the sister.
(or the speaker doesn’t get on well with the sister – depending on intonation)

The idea of cohesion, as a means of describing how language works, comes from the linguists M.A. K Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan.

Halliday, M. A. K. and Hasan, Ruqaiya. 1976 Cohesion in English. London: Longman.

Kinds of (linguistic) cohesion

Reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion

Reference

When one word or phrase in the text refers to another word of phrase in the same text.

Usually pronouns – he, she, it, they and so on.

(Occasionally a pronoun refers to something in the world outside, rather than in the text:

Please give him a round of applause

(As outsiders, we don’t know who the he is (or who him refers to), but the listeners know. You might hear this at a theatre when a performer has finished his act, or in a classroom after a student has given a speech)

co-reference and repetition are also forms of reference.
For example we can tie the text together by repeating key words :

Toru Hashimoto made some controversial remarks at a meeting last weekend. Hashimoto suggested that Japan should accept that it had been aggressive during the war, and that the use of ‘comfort women’ was an inevitable part of war. Hashimoto claimed, though, that journalists at the meeting had misquoted him.

We can avoid repetition, though, by using co-reference (different words which refer to the same thing:

Toru Hashimoto made some controversial remarks at a meeting last weekend. The mayor of Osaka suggested that Japan should accept that it had been aggressive during the war, and that the use of ‘comfort women’ was an inevitable part of conflict. The co-leader of the Nihon Isshin party claimed, though, that journalists at the gathering had misquoted him.

Hashimoto, the mayor of Osaka, and the co-leader of Nihon Isshin all refer to the same person; and war and conflict refer to the same event, as do meeting and gathering.

Consider this quote, too:

Man makes $4bn in two days explaining Facebook to old people

Mark Zuckerberg‘s supposed blockbuster grilling by Congress was the bust it was always going to be, and he went home victorious largely by default.

co-reference can include synonyms, superordinates/hyponyms and general words.

On my way to work this morning I saw an accident. A girl on a bike came round the corner and was hit by a car coming the other way. Luckily the girl (repetition) wasn’t badly hurt, but she (pronoun) was shaken. The teenager (synonym) was in shock for a while. The car driver, on the other hand, didn’t seem to care at all. The idiot (synonym) didn’t even want to stop and help her. This kind of incident (general word) seems to be on the increase.

or consider:

Japan (hyponym), whose economy developed rapidly after the war, became a role model for other Asian countries (superordinate)

demonstratives, and other place/time reference

Demonstrative reference keeps track of information through location using proximity references like “this, these, that, those, here, there, and then”.

I always drink a lot of beer when I am in England. There are many lovely pubs there.

comparative reference

Comparative reference keeps track of identity and similarity through indirect references using adjectives like “same, equal, similar, different, else, better, more”, etc. and adverbs like “so, such, similarly, otherwise, so, more”, etc.

A similar view is not acceptable.

We did the same.

So they said.

Substitution

Words like, ‘one’, ‘ones’, ‘do’, or ‘do so’, and so on.

Did you get the drinks I asked for? The ones in bottles, not cans.

Did she pass her test? She might have done.

In clausal substitution, an entire clause is substituted.

Did David Beckham announce his retirement the other day?.

I believe so.

I wonder whether he’ll stop playing immediately. If so, what will he do next?

He’s arriving on the 10:35 train.

Yes, but supposing not: what do we do?

Ellipsis

Ellipsis (zero substitution) is the omission of things which the speaker/writer assumes are obvious from the context.

(a) Do you want to hear another song? I know a couple more [songs]

(b) Sue brought roses and Jackie [brought] lilies.

Discourse markers and conjunctions

A third way of creating cohesion is through discourse markers and conjunctions. Discourse markers are linguistic elements used by the speaker/writer to help the reader interpret the text, by signalling a relationship between part of it. These are usually called conjunctions, but they are not simply a way of joining sentences. Their role in the text is wider than that, so we can refer to them as discourse markers.

Additive conjunctions

“and, also, too, furthermore, additionally”, etc.

“nor, and…not, either, neither”, etc.

Adversative conjunctions act to indicate “contrary to expectation”

“yet, though, only, but, in fact, rather”, etc.

Causal conjunctions express “result, reason and purpose”

“so, then, for, because, for this reason, as a result, in this respect, etc.”.

Temporal conjunctions

“then, next, after that, next day, until then, at the same time, at this point”, etc.

(other ways of expressing time relations are verbs such as follow or precede; and other ways of expressing causal relations are verbs such as cause and lead. Also, first, second, third, etc. express not just real time, but the order of items in the text.

Lexical Cohesion

Re-iteration (repetition) and collocation

Examples

Opposites (man/woman, love/hate, tall/short).

Pairs of words from the same ordered series (days of the week, months, etc.)

Pairs of words from unordered lexical sets, such as meronyms:

part-whole (body/arm, car/wheel)

part-part (hand/finger, mouth/chin)

co-hyponyms (black/white, chair/table).

Associations based on a history of co-occurrence (rain, pouring, torrential).

John drove up in his old estate wagon. The car had obviously seen a lot of action. One hubcap was missing, and the exhaust pipe was nearly eaten up with rust.

Lexical cohesion is not only a relation between pairs of words. It usually operates by means of lexical chains that run through a text and are linked to each other in various ways.

In other words, if we look for groups of words in a text that all relate to a key theme (sometimes this is called a schema) we can see there is or is not high lexical cohesion. Often texts will have two or three areas of lexical coherence. For instance the tumblr text had the words, ‘tumblr, blogging, users, site, early adopters, page’ which tells us that the theme is something to do with blogs or web sites; then we have ‘sold, buy, $1.1 billion, CEO, acquisition, owners, profit, ‘ which tells us that another theme is business and buying and selling.