Types of cohesive relationships according to Halliday & Hasan

10Jul10

by Juliane Koch

Daily, we are surrounded by masses of words presented in all forms imaginable- whether it are advertisements or books, letters or mediums like the internet which everybody who has access to it employs regularly. Misleadingly, though, almost all written sentences are referred to as being a text. But what is it that a text really makes a text?

The linguists Halliday and Hasan say it is texture that sets apart a text from a non-text. To find out whether texture is present or not, one has to take a look at the cohesive relationships between the elements of the ‘text’ in question. These cohesive relationships are established when the interpretation of one element depends on the interpretation of another one in the discourse.

According to Halliday and Hasan, the following types of cohesive relationships can be identified:

Reference occurs when the identity of one element of a text can be retrieved from either outside the text (exophoric relationship) or from within the text (endophoric relationship).

Endophoric relations are divided into anaphoric reference, where an item refers back to something or someone already mentioned in the text, and its opposite, the cataphoric reference, an element referring forward in the text.

Anaphoric reference: it refers back to coffee(source: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/ABPub/2009/05/06/2009186184.jpg)

Substitution means that, instead of repeating one element, it is replaced by another element in the text.

Substitution: tourists is substituted by one(source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eszter/162389844/)

Ellipsis occurs when an identical element of a text is omitted.

Conjunction constitutes a relationship between two phrases by using words like because, nevertheless, and or then.

Ellipsis: of the keyboard is omitted Conjunction: and

Lexical relationships describe relations in meaning between lexical elements.

Why does this little boy wriggle all the time? Girls don’t wriggle.

(Halliday and Hasan, 1976: 285)

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