A functional perspective of cohesion in English

Seminar paper from the year 2001 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 3,0 (3), http://www.uni-jena.de/ (Institute for English Language Sciences), course: Pre-seminar, language: English, abstract: Analysing texts of any kind is a very useful method for the aim of describing language functions. When we speak of a text, we speak of 'Any passage, spoken or written, of whatever length, that forms a unified whole.' The question that is put first is what is a text and what is not, what are the features that distinguish text from a collection of unrelated sentences. Halliday points out that every text has a texture. 'A text derives this texture from the fact that it functions as a unity with respect to its environment.' There are certain linguistic features that contribute to textual unity. Apart from other concepts this fact is described by the concept of cohesion. 'The concept of cohesion is a semantic one; it refers to relations of meaning that exist within the text, and that define it as a text. Cohesion occurs where the interpretation of some element in the discourse is dependent on that of another.' Formulated in other words, cohesion implies semantic resources for linking a sentence with was has gone before. The aim of this paper is to give a survey of the textual phenomenon cohesion by describing it with the help of an article of a newspaper. By analysing this article the paper pays attention to the linguistic resources of cohesion which are reference, ellipsis and conjunction, to point out how the resources help to create text, to organize text and experience the interpersonal and the experiential coherence of the text.