Advantages And Disadvantages Of Cohesion

Cohesion as described by Halliday (1991) is one of the features that combine to make up the textual component in grammar. The textual components include the structural components (theme – rheme), information and focus structure (the given and new) and cohesion (Grammatical and Lexical). Halliday and Hasan (1976), refer to grammatical cohesion as including reference, substitution and ellipsis while the lexical refers to the different forms of lexical repetitions. Therefore, cohesion as Halliday and Hasan (1976) describe is a semantic relation that is realized through the lexico grammatical system. These elements as pointed out determine the texture of a text. Cook (1992) also agrees Hasan (ibid). and Butler (1985) on the fact that cohesion is a non-structural resources used for creating texts. He refers to the cohesive devices as formal links that create relationship between sentences and clauses. These formal links enable the writer to

He points out that in linguistics it is the language forms used to indicate semantic relations between elements in a discourse. These relations as Halliday and Hasan (1976) earlier describe are not concerned with structure (Unifying relation, parts of a sentence or clause) but non-structural relations that may be found within as well as between sentences. The non-structural resources which are used for organization of a text has been described as including reference, ellipsis, conjunction, substitution and lexical. These are resources used to create text. Yule (1989) also describes the significance of analysis of cohesion. He notes that analysis of cohesive links within the text gives some insights into how writers structure what they want to say and may help to judge whether something is well written or not. Yule stresses that the conventions of cohesive resources defer from one field or one register to