Cohesion in Texts: A Discourse Analysis of a News Article in a Magazine

This paper aims to analyse an English text from a magazine for the purpose of identifying cohesive elements in text : which type of cohesion is the most substantive contribution to texture ;and whether this type is effective or not. Texture is created within text when there are properties of coherence and cohesion, outside of the apparent grammatical structure of the text. Cohesion, the most important principle and criterion of textuality, is the connection or the connectedness manifested when the interpretation of one textual element (a word located in one sentence) is dependent on another element in the text (a word usually but not necessarily in another sentence). Cohesion relates to the “semantic ties” within text whereby a tie is made when there is some dependent link between items that combine to create meaning. Halliday and Hasan (1976) identified five different types of cohesion: reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical cohesion. In the five main types of cohesion ,’’the interpretation of a discourse element ,is dependent on another element that can be pointed out in discourse.’’ (Renkema 1993: 40.