Cohesion and texture

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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