Cohesion In English Discourse Analysis

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I. Theoretical Background 1. Scope of the Study The more important a thing the more it is objected to analysis. Nowadays, life can be called the media world. Media has conquered people 's minds. According to BNI INDIA statistics, youth spend one third of their pastimes reading newspapers and magazines. In accordance to this importance, one must study the cohesive ties within the text; in order to know whether this text can be easily interpreted or it is a group of unrelated sentences. 2. Objectives of the Study/ Research Questions This study has two objectives. The primary objective, related to the theoretical part, is intended to explain and define cohesion and its types: lexical and grammatical; and discuss their role …show more content…

Theoretical framework Cohesion is an integral part of any set of discourse. Discourse is not just a random set of utterances, but it also shows connectedness. The central objective of discourse analysis is to characterize this connectedness. In their famous Cohesion in English, Halliday and Hasan analyse text connectedness in terms of reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical cohesion. All these explicit cohesive ties give the text clear meaning. In their book Cohesion in English, Halliday and Hasan define cohesion as:
The concept of cohesion can be usefully supplemented by that of register, since the two together effectively define a text. A text is a passage of discourse which is coherent in these two regards: it is coherent with respect to the context of the situation and therefore consistent in the register; and it is coherent with respect to it, and therefore, cohesive. Neither of the two conditions is sufficient without the other, nor does the one by necessity entail the other. Just as one can construct passages which are beautifully cohesive, but which fail as texts because they lack consistency of register there is no continuity of meaning in relation to the situation. The reader reacts to both of these things in his judgment of texture. (Halliday and Hasan, 1976, …show more content…

Grammatical Cohesion On the other hand, grammatical cohesion concentrates more on grammar rather than vocabulary. Halliday states: "however luxuriant the grammatical cohesion displayed by any piece of discourse, it will not form a text unless is matched by the cohesive pattering of lexical kind." (As cited in Tanskanen, 2006, 31) Thus, grammatical cohesion is based on items related to each other. Halliday classifies grammatical cohesion into four major classes: reference, substitution, ellipsis and conjunction. Moving forward, in the