You are viewing a free preview of this lesson.
Subscribe to unlock all 10 lessons in this course and every other course on LearningBro.
Cohesion is the network of linguistic ties that binds the sentences of a text together so that it reads as a connected whole rather than a list of unrelated statements. Where the earlier lessons worked at the level of the word, phrase and clause, cohesion is a discourse-level property: it operates across sentence boundaries, knitting one sentence to the next and one paragraph to another. The foundational account remains M. A. K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan's Cohesion in English (1976), which identifies five principal types of cohesive tie: four grammatical — reference, substitution, ellipsis and conjunction — and one lexical, lexical cohesion. For AQA 7702 this matters because grammar is a method integrated across Paper 1, Paper 2 and the NEA, and cohesion is the strand of grammar that lets you analyse whole texts rather than isolated sentences. Naming a cohesive device satisfies AO1 (terminology), within the full grid of AO1 26 · AO2 26 · AO3 23 · AO4 15 · AO5 10; the higher marks follow when you show how a text's cohesive choices construct its texture, perspective and relationship with the reader (AO2–AO3).
Before the categories, one orienting idea. A cohesive tie always has two ends: a cohesive item (such as a pronoun) and the thing it depends on for interpretation (its antecedent or referent). The reader's eye is sent from one to the other, and it is this constant cross-referring that creates the felt unity of a text. Halliday and Hasan call each such link a cohesive tie, and a text's "texture" is, in their terms, the sum of its ties.
Reference is the cohesive relation in which one item points to another for its interpretation, sparing the producer from repeating a full noun phrase. The reference items are mostly closed-class function words — personal pronouns (she, it, they), demonstratives (this, that, these, those), the definite article the, and comparatives (another, such, the same). Reference is classified by the direction in which the item points.
Key Definition: Anaphoric reference points backwards to a previously mentioned entity; cataphoric reference points forwards to one about to be mentioned; exophoric reference points outwards to the situational context. Anaphora and cataphora are endophoric (text-internal) and so create cohesion; exophora is text-external and depends on shared context. Distinguishing the three lets you analyse precisely how a text manages its chains of reference and how far it relies on the reader's outside knowledge.
A referential chain is the full sequence of items that all refer to the same entity across a text, and tracing one is among the most revealing things you can do in analysis. A news article might refer to a single person as the Prime Minister, then she, then the PM, then the embattled leader, then Mrs Smith — and each link in the chain carries a different level of formality and a different connotation, so the chain as a whole encodes an evolving stance towards its subject. Because reference chains can be tracked for every participant, comparing how richly different entities are referred to (one named and re-named in detail, another reduced to a single bare they) exposes a text's priorities and its representation of people — a direct route into AO2 and AO3.
Reference also depends on the reader's ability to resolve each item to the right antecedent, and where that resolution is difficult or contested the grammar becomes analytically interesting. Ambiguous reference arises when a pronoun has more than one possible antecedent (When the manager met the director, she was furious — which woman?), and while careful expository prose avoids it, literary and persuasive texts sometimes exploit it for suggestiveness, irony or to blur agency. The default convention is that an unstressed pronoun continues the most salient recent referent — usually the current topic or the previous subject — so a producer who breaks that expectation forces a re-reading that can itself be meaningful. Demonstratives add a further layer: the contrast between this and that can encode psychological or evaluative distance (this proposal drawing a referent close, often with approval or immediacy; that proposal holding it at arm's length, sometimes with disdain), so the choice of demonstrative is rarely neutral. Tracking not just whether a text coheres referentially but how securely, and what its demonstratives do with proximity, is the kind of fine-grained observation that distinguishes a strong response.
Substitution replaces a word or phrase with a shorter substitute form to avoid repetition. Halliday and Hasan are careful to distinguish it from reference: reference is a semantic relation (the pronoun and its antecedent denote the same thing), whereas substitution is a grammatical relation operating at the level of words and structure — the substitute stands in for a grammatical slot, not necessarily the same referent. There are three types:
Ellipsis is the omission of an element that the reader can recover from the surrounding context. Halliday and Hasan neatly describe it as "substitution by zero": instead of replacing an item with a substitute word, the producer simply leaves a structurally expected slot empty, trusting context to fill it. The three types parallel those of substitution:
Ellipsis is pervasive in spontaneous speech and informal writing, where the shared context between participants lets material be omitted without loss; it is one of the chief sources of the economy and naturalness of conversation, and a give-away marker of mode. Formal written registers, which cannot rely on a co-present reader, use ellipsis far more sparingly, so a text's reliance on ellipsis is itself an index of how speech-like and interactional it is.
Halliday and Hasan treat conjunction (conjunctive cohesion) as a distinct tie: conjunctive items signal the logical relation between one part of a text and the next, telling the reader how to connect what they have just read with what comes next. The category includes coordinating and subordinating conjunctions, but the most analytically rich members are the conjunctive adverbs — also called linking adverbials or discourse connectives — which join across sentence boundaries:
These connectives are the visible signposting of a text's logic. Their presence makes reasoning explicit and easy to follow, which is why argumentative and academic writing leans on them heavily; their absence leaves the reader to infer the connections, an effect literary and some journalistic writing exploits for compression or for a more demanding, allusive texture. The density and type of conjunctive ties is therefore a quick, reliable index of register and purpose.
It is worth being precise about where conjunctive cohesion sits grammatically, because the distinction often trips candidates. True conjunctions (coordinating and, but, so; subordinating because, although) work within a sentence, joining clauses into a single grammatical unit; they are fixed in position and cannot float. Conjunctive adverbs (however, therefore, moreover, nevertheless), by contrast, are adverbials, not conjunctions: they signal a logical relation across a sentence boundary but do not grammatically fuse the clauses, which is why joining two independent clauses with only a comma before however produces a comma splice (It was late, however we stayed), whereas a full stop or semicolon is required (It was late; however, we stayed). A diagnostic feature of conjunctive adverbs is their mobility: however can sit at the start, middle or end of its clause (However, the plan failed; The plan, however, failed; The plan failed, however), and that very mobility lets a producer place the contrastive signal where it falls with most weight. For analysis, noticing that a text uses conjunctive adverbs rather than conjunctions tells you it is building cohesion across sentences as discrete units — a more planned, written texture — and the position chosen for a mobile connective is itself a small stylistic decision worth reading.
Lexical cohesion is the fifth tie and the only non-grammatical one: it binds a text through vocabulary choices, via repetition and the sense-relations between words. The principal mechanisms are:
Key Definition: Lexical cohesion is the cohesive effect achieved through vocabulary — repetition, synonymy, hyponymy, meronymy, collocation and semantic-field patterning. It works alongside the four grammatical ties (reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction) to hold a text together. Analysing it means tracing chains and patterns of related vocabulary across the whole text, not merely noting a single repeated word.
A distinction that examiners reward is the one between cohesion and coherence:
The two can come apart in instructive ways. A text can be cohesive but not coherent — strung together with pronouns and connectives that link grammatically while the underlying ideas make no sense ("The picnic was ruined. However, photosynthesis requires light. Therefore, she bought a hat." has impeccable conjunctive ties and no coherence). Conversely a text can be coherent but not overtly cohesive, the reader supplying the connections despite an absence of explicit ties — as in the famously sparse exchange "Coffee? — I've got an essay due.", where no cohesive device links the two utterances yet the refusal is perfectly understood. Recognising that explicit cohesion and felt coherence are separable is exactly the kind of conceptual control that lifts discourse analysis.
To analyse cohesion well, work through four moves. (1) Identify the cohesive ties precisely — is this anaphoric reference, nominal substitution, clausal ellipsis, an adversative conjunctive adverb, a chain of lexical synonymy? (2) Trace the patterns rather than isolated instances: follow a reference chain through the text, or map the semantic field, because cohesion is about cumulative texture. (3) Analyse the effect — what the dominant cohesive strategy does for clarity, perspective, pace and the reader's experience, including the perspective encoded in how different participants are referred to. (4) Connect to context — genre, register, mode and audience — where AO3 marks live. The besetting trap is the inventory: a list of every pronoun and connective with no argument earns AO1 acknowledgement only.
Task: Analyse how cohesion works in this opening of a campaigning article: "The river is dying. Every day, more of it turns the colour of rust. The water company knows this. It has known for years. And still nothing is done."
Subscribe to continue reading
Get full access to this lesson and all 10 lessons in this course.