Discourse – semantics: cohesion in text

This chapter concentrates on exploring the nature of the highest stratum of language: the stratum of meanings, or the discourse-semantics of language.

Halliday and Hasan (1976: 1) offer the definition of the text that provides a starting point for an exploration of text. They suggest that a text is: “any passage (of language), spoken or written, of whatever length, that does from a unified whole (1976:1). In describing how a text forms a unified whole, Halliday and Hasan introduced the concept of texture. Texture is the property that distinguishes text from non text: a text “has texture”. Texture is what holds the clauses of a text together to give them unity.

Coherence refers to the way a group of clauses or sentences relate to the context (Halliday and Hasan 1976:23).

A text has situational coherence  when we can think of one situation in which all the clauses of the text could occur.

A text has generic coherence when we can recognize the text as an example of a particular genre.

Cohesion refers to the way we relate or tie together bits of our discourse.

When we identify of a referent item is retrivied from within the text, we are dealing with endophoric reference. There are three kinds of them, they are:

1.      Anaphoric, when the referent has appeared at an erlier point in the text.

2.      Cataphoric, when the referent has not yet appeared, but will be provided subsequently.

3.      Esoporic, when the referent occurs in the phrase immediately following the presuming referent item (within the same nominal group/ noun phrase, not in separate clauses).

One further type of endophoric reference which can operate anaphorically, cataphorically or esphorically is comparative reference. With comparative reference, the identify of the presumed item is retrieved not because it has already been mentioned (or will be mentioned) in the text, but because an item with which it is being compared has been mentioned.  

The cohesive resource of lexical relations refers to how the writer/ speaker uses lexical items (noun, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) and event sequences (chain of clauses and sentences) to relate the text consistently to its area focus. Lexical relations analysis is a way of systematically describing how words in a text relate to each other, how they cluster to build up lexical sets or lexical strings.

In short, there are two main types of patterns to be described, they are:

1.      The semantics patterns of experiential, interpersonal and textual meaning. We uncover and describe these meanings by examining the lexico-grammatical organization of the clauses that make up the text. Thus, to fully describe the semantics, we need to explore the next level down, the lexico-grammar.

2.      The discourse patterns of cohesion (reference, lexical relations, conjunctive relations, conversational structure), the texture-forming resources of language through which the clauses of a text come to have a semantics unity.

Reference:

Eggins, Suzzanne, 1994, An Introduction to systemic Functional Lingustics.Printer Publisher Ltd. United Kingdom. P: 81-113.