Importance Of Grammatical Cohesion

Chapter 1 Concepts of Cohesion

To understand the importance of grammatical cohesion in financial articles, the notions of grammatical cohesion and cohesion as such have to be understood. This chapter presents cohesion as a system for making the text cohesive and other important terms related to the cohesion. Then, the author provides detailed information putting an emphasis on grammatical cohesion and its main devices. Furthermore, grammatical cohesion in explained from the perspective of its location among the sentences of the text. Finally, to gain a deeper insight and make some correlations between grammatical cohesion and financial articles, financial discourse and genre of articles are inspected.
1.1 Text, Coherence and Cohesion
When

(Halliday, 2002:223) In online source coherence is defined as “factual content” and “consistence of the text”. (Online 1) According to Baker and Ellece (2011), “coherence refers to the ways that a text is made semantically meaningful”. (Baker and Ellece, 2011:16) Moreover, coherence is one of the seven standards of textuality referring to “the ways in which the components of the textual world, i.e. the configuration of concepts and relations which underline the surface of the text, are mutually accessible and relevant” (De Beaugrande and Dressler, 1981:4) Coherence is realized by binding ideas in a text together so that the text sounds natural. There are different ways to achieve coherence. Firstly, this unity is created by using repetition to link ideas. If an author carries out the same notion through a text it is clearly understood and helps the reader to keep focus. Secondly, one can make a text coherent by transitional expressions like “however”, “because”, “therefore” etc. This is a way to keep relationship between the ideas and this way it is easier for the reader to perceive a text in more logical and systematically way. Thirdly, coherence is created by the use of the pronouns. If pronouns are used in the right manner, a text sounds smooth and fluent. Another way to achieve coherence is by using synonyms. With the use of synonyms authors avoid unwanted repetition. And finally,

Grammatical cohesion is easier to detect than lexical cohesion, and effects of grammatical cohesion are more obvious than effects of lexical cohesion. Halliday and Hasan (1976) explain that grammatical cohesion is achieved by text-forming devices which are created by the use of grammar. The sentences and the elements in a sentence are interrelated with each other creating a specific linguistic environment. Although, Halliday and Hasan emphasizes the significance of cohesion in creating coherence, some authors do not approve that, for example Widdowson presents an instance “A: That’s the telephone. B: I’m in the bath. A:O.K.” (1978:29). There is no textual cohesion among those utterances and the situation can simply be interpreted by the content. (Widdowson, 1978:29) Grammatical cohesion can be divided in referencing, substitution, ellipsis and conjunction. (Halliday and Hasan, 1976:286) It is hard to explain grammatical cohesion as it works as a complex and structured system. Therefore, each of those cohesive types will be explained in the following chapters in order to find out how cohesion contributes to the creation of the text. The following table by Halliday and Hasan (1976) “Grammatical Cohesion” gives an insight in grammatical cohesion signals, meaning what they look like within the text in form of