COHESION
AND TEXTURE
Cohesion is one part of
the study of texture, which considers the interaction of cohesion with other aspects
of text organization.
Texture, in turn, is
one aspect of the study of coherence,which takes the social context of texture
into consideration. The goal of discourse analysis in this tradition is to
build a model that places texts in their social contexts and looks
comprehensively at the resources which both integrate and situate them.
Cohesion can be defined
as the set of resources for constructing relations in discourse which transcend
grammatical structure (Halliday 1994: 309). The term is generally associated
with research inspired by Halliday (1964) and Hasan (2968) in systemic
functional linguistics (hereafter SFL) and by Gleason ((2968) in Hartford- based
stratificational linguistics.
All three variables -
cohesion, texture, and coherence -will be illustrated from the children's story
Piggybook by A. Brown. Section 1 looks at traditional approaches to cohesion as
nonstructural resources for textual organization. Then in section 2, a more semantic
perspective on cohesion in relation to texture is presented. Subsequently, in section
3, the social motivation of texture is considered.
1 Cohesion
Early work on cohesion
was designed to move beyond the structural resources of grammar and consider
discourse relations which transcend grammatical structure.
Halliday (e.g. 1973:
141) modeled cohesion as involving nonstructural relations above the sentence,
within what he refers to as the textual metafunction (as opposed to ideational
and interpersonal meaning). Pn Halliday and Hasan (2976) the inventory of cohesive
resources was organized as:
- · reference
- · dlipsis
- · substitution
- · conjunction
- · lexical cohesion.
Some
languages, including English, have in addition a set of place holders which can
be used to signal the omission - e.g. so and not for clauses, do for verbal
groups, and one for nominal groups. This resource of place holders is referred
to as sub~titution.~Reference, ellipsis, and substitution involve small, closed
classes of items or gaps,and have accordingly been referred to as grammatical
cohesion (e.g. Hasan 1968;Gutwinski 1976).
Also included as
grammatical cohesion is the typically much larger inventory of connectors which
link clauses in discourse, referred to as conjunction. For Halliday and Hasan
(1976) this resource comprises linkers which connect sentences to each other,
but excludes paratactic and hypotactic (coordinating and subordinating) linkers
within sentences, which are considered structural by Halliday. Gutwinski,
however,includes all connectors, whether or not they link clauses within or
between sentences.
2 Discourse Semantics
Halliday's
nonstructural textual resources were thus reworked as semantic systems
concerned with discourse structure, comprising:
- · identification
- · negotiation
- · conjunction
- · ideation.
I dentification is concerned with resources for tracking participants in discourse. This system subsumes earlier work on referential cohesion in a framework which considers the ways in which participants are both introduced into a text and kept track of once introduced.
Negotiation is
concerned with resources for exchange of information and of goods and services
in dialog. This system subsumes some of the earlier work on ellipsis and
substitution in a framework which considers the ways in which interlocutors initiate
and respond in adjacency pairs.
Conjunction is
concerned with resources for connecting messages, via addition,comparison, temporality,
and causality.
Ideation is concerned
with the semantics of lexical relations as they are deployed to construeainstitutional
activity.
3 Modeling Social
Context: Register and Genre
Types of meaning in
relation to social context
"Reality
construal" Contextual
variable
|
Interpersonal Social reality Tenor
Ideational
(logical, experiential) "Natural"
reality Field
Textual
Semiotic
reality Mode
|
social context in a
functional. theory which looks at what cohesion is realizing alongside the ways
in which it is realized. In SK social context is modeled through register and
genre theory.
4 Cohesion, Texture,
and Coherence
Following Martin (19921,
I described the ways in which cohesion can be recontextualized as discourse
semantics (identification, negotiation, conjunction, ideation).
Subsequently,the study
of texture was briefly reviewed, drawing attention to work on patterns of
interaction among discourse semantic, lexicogrammatical, and phonological
systems (cohesive harmony, method of development, point, and modal
responsibility).
Finally, I approached
coherence from the perspective of social context, suggesting that texture is
motivated by tenor, field, and mode, and the way in which genre phases these
register variables together into a trajectory of meanings that naturalizes a
reading position for reader/listeners. From an SPL perspective, I expect that
in the future our understandings of cohesion, texture, and coherence will be enhanced
by further work on cohesion in relation to other modules (both linguistic and
social) - so that our sense of how the social motivates patterns of cohesion is
improved.
REFERENCES :
Aziz, Y. Y. 1988. Cohesion in
spoken
Arabic texts. In B. Steiner and
R.
Veltrnan (eds), Pragmatics,
Discourse
and Text: Some
Systemically-inspired
Approaches. London: Pinter (Open
Linguistics Series). 148-57.
de Beaugrande, R. and W.
Dressler. 1981.
Introduction to Textlinguistics.
London:
Longman (Longman Linguistics
Library 26).
Benson, J. D. and W. S, Greaves.
1992.
Collocation and field of
discourse.
In W. A. hlann and 5. A. Thompson
(eds), Diverse Analyses of a Fund
Raising Text. Amsterdam:
Benjamins.
397-409.
Berry, M. 1981, Systemic
linguistics and
discourse analysis: a
multi-layered
approach to exchange structure.
In M. Coulthard and M. Montgomery
(eds), Studies in Discourse
Analysis.
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
120-45.
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