A Brief Analysis of Cohesion and Coherence in Text.docVIP

A Brief Analysis of Cohesion and Coherence in Text 　　Abstract: Cohesion and coherence are the two important factors which are used to link the language together. In order to create the coherence in the discourse, writers and speakers have to realize the relationship among cohesion and coherence and text. This paper makes a research on it and is helpful for others. 　　Key words: cohesion; coherence; text 　　I. The definifion of cohesion and Coherence 　　Cohesion is the network of lexical, grammatical, and other relations which provide links between various parts of a text (Baker,1992: 180). Cohesion is the connectivity between sentences in a text. And a cohesive tie is the basic unit of cohesion and is made up of two items, an arrow and a target. (Ting Yen-RenHauck, 2001:304). Ting and Hauck give us such a lively metaphor that it helps us make better sense of the concept of cohesion. From their point of view, the arrow is the item which requires another item for its interpretation; the target is the one which provides the information necessary to make that interpretation. Cohesion can be classified as the following. Halliday and Hasan (1976: 5) point out that cohesion is realized through grammar and partly through vocabulary. And there are four general devices of grammatical cohesion: reference, substitution, ellipsis and conjunction. 　　Reference refers to “A participant or circumstantial element introduced at one place in the text can be taken as a reference point for something that follows.” (Halliday, 1994: 309) To put it in a simple way, reference refers to the item (arrow) which directs listener to look elsewhere for its interpretation(target). 　　Substitution is a linguistic token which is “the replacement of one item by another.” (HallidayHasan, 1976: 88) 　　Ellipsis can be interpreted as “that form of substitution in which the item is replaced by nothing, the omission of an item.” (HallidayHasan, 1976: 88) 　　Conjunction, language users often exploit a