Grammatical Cohesion

Grammatical Cohesion

Cohesion refers to the linguistic ties that bind a text together, creating connections between sentences and across paragraphs so that the text reads as a unified whole rather than a collection of unrelated sentences. The concept of cohesion was systematically described by M. A. K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan in their seminal work Cohesion in English (1976). They identified five main types of cohesive tie: reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical cohesion. Understanding cohesion is essential for discourse-level analysis at A-Level.

Reference

Reference is a cohesive device in which one element in a text points to another for its interpretation. Rather than repeating the same noun phrase, writers and speakers use pronouns, determiners, and other reference items to point back (or forward) to entities already mentioned or present in the context.

Types of Reference