Grammatical Cohesion

• Cohesive relations in and between sentences create texture, which makes a set of sentences a text

• Cohesive relations in text are constructed where the interpretation of one element is impossible without reference to another

Conjunction

• Conjunctive relations is one kind of cohesive relations established in text (Halliday & Hasan 1976)

• Conjunctives, explicit markers of conjunctive relations, relate text to co-text (i.e. the verbal or linguistic context of a text)

• Conjunctive relations fall in different categories…

Conjunction

• Additive: and, or, furthermore, similarly, in addition

• Adversative: but, however, on the other hand, never the less

• Causal: so, consequently, for this reason, it follows from this

• Temporal: then, after that, an hour later, finally, at last

Co-reference

• Wash and core six cooking apples. Put them into a fireproof dish

(Halliday & Hasan 1976: 2)

• Them refers back to six cooking apples• This kind of reference is anaphoric

reference• The anaphoric function of them provides

cohesion between the two sentences such that we interpret them as one text

Co-reference

• Co-referential forms are forms which ‘instead of being interpreted [...] in their own right [...] make reference to something else for their interpretation’ (Halliday & Hasan 1976: 31)

• Co-referential forms exist in an endophoric relation with one and other (See exophoric versus endophoric reference below)

Co-reference

• Two kinds of endophoric relations:

• Anaphoric reference – requiring reader to ‘look back’ in the text

• Cataphoric reference – requiring reader to ‘look forward’ in the text

• Endophoric relations contribute to cohesion

Co-reference

• Exophora: Look at that

• Endophora:

– Anaphoric: Look at the sun. It’s going down quickly

– Cataphoric: It’s going down quickly, the sun

Co-reference

• The sun is a full lexical expression and it is a pronominal (pronoun ≈ ‘instead of’ noun)

• However, other forms can also be co-referential and thus create cohesion:

e.g. (a) substituted forms

(b) ellided forms

Substitution

• One expression is replaced by another, which ‘stands for’ it

• Words like one, do, so are common pro-forms:‘I bought a blue jumper and then I saw a green

one’

‘I bought a blue jumper and my sister did too’

‘Are you buying the green jumper?’ ‘I don’t think so’

Ellipsis

• Part of an utterance is omitted• Explicitly ‘recovered’ in the co-text

Examples:– Subject ellipsis: Jack fell down

And [ ] broke his crown…

– Answers to questions:‘Are you a cricketer, sir?’‘I was [ ] once upon a time. I subscribe

to the club here, but I don’t play [ ]’

Co-referential Chains

• One thing was certain, that the white kitten had had nothing to do with it: it was the black kitten’s fault entirely. For the white kitten had been having its face washed by the old cat for the last quarter of an hour (and bearing it pretty well, considering); so you see that it couldn’t have had any hand in the mischief.

(Lewis Carroll, Alice Through the Looking Glass)

• The white kitten – the white kitten – its – it

• It – it – the mischief

Co-referential Chains• Implication of co-referential chains is that

however far into the text the reader is, all subsequent co-referential forms must be traced back to original which alone displays exophoric reference

• Brown and Yule say this must be implausible: more likely readers establish a referent in mental representation and relate all subsequent references to that referent back to mental representation rather than co-referential form