National open university of nigeria school of arts and social sciences
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- 4.0 Conclusion
| 3.4 Self-assessment Exercises Select a short story and discuss how the text is connected. 3.5 Cohesion and Coherence Cohesion is a term used to describe the relation of meanings that exist within a text. According to Halliday and Hasan (1976: 4), cohesion occurs where the interpretation of some element in the discourse is dependent on that of another They went further define cohesion as A set of possibilities that exists in the language for making text hang together The potential that the speaker or the writer has at his disposal Thus, cohesion as a process always involves one item pointing to another whereas, the significant property of the cohesive relation is the fact that one item provides the source for the interpretation of another. (P) This happens in the sense that the occurrence of one element presupposes the other. That is that element cannot be effectively decoded without recourse to the other element. For instance, in the text we looked at earlier in Section 11.4, the words they, one, the other, both are elements that one cannot effectively interpret without recourse to the text that has gone before them. Cohesion in the text is expressed through the ties of reference. Items referring to others are used to signal cohesion in a text. The interpretation of these words cannot just stop by looking at them, but by looking beyond them to other words in the text. This may not be the case with some other words in the text, such as shoes, black, days, and so forth whose meanings are completely interpreted by just looking at them. Cohesion is signaled both by grammatical and lexical items in a text. Coherence works together with cohesion. Coherence refers to the continuity of ideas in a text and the relations between them. When sentences, ideas, and details fit together clearly, readers can follow along easily, and the writing is coherent, ie, the ideas tie together smoothly and clearly. A text is coherent when the ideas are seen to hang together and present the text as a united whole. Coherence goes beyond just the connection of the sentences, but that of the whole idea. The two terms, cohesion and coherence are the two primary ways of signaling textuality. Someways of signaling 68 cohesion in a text are through the use of pro-forms that indicate co-reference, definite articles, ellipsis, repetition, connectives or conjunctions, substitution and so forth. In the next two units we shall examine these. 4.0 Conclusion A collection of sentences that are well connected are said to be cohesive and coherent. Textuality is a property of such collection because it is what shows that what we have is not just a random collection of sentences, but a well-connected piece. Cohesion and coherence are the two technical terms used to describe the connectedness of sentences and ideas in a text. Cohesion is signaled by the use of certain items that cannot be decoded without recourse to what had gone before them. Download 0.49 Mb. Share with your friends:
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