INSTRUCTION: Read the text and answer the item.

COHESION

Following Halliday & Hasan (1976) I shall consider cohesion under the headings “grammatical cohesion”, “lexical cohesion” and “conjunction”, which the authors describe as “on the borderline of the two; mainly grammatical, but with a lexical component in it” (op cit.p.6). Again, our concern will be with those items that contribute to an understanding of the main ideas of the text.

Lexical cohesion

By lexical cohesion is meant relationships between ideas in the text indicated either by the use of repetition of lexical items, or synonymous lexical items, or again items in a hyponymous (“class” names co-occurring with instances of that class) or even an antonymous relationship.

When a notion, concept or referent in a text is referred to more than once, the repeated reference may be indicated by grammatical markers of cohesion, notably definite articles, pronouns, demonstrative adjectives, etc. This repeated reference also helps us, as readers, to structure the meaning and development of the text, although explicit reference to these features and other similar identification tasks would probably only arise when we are at the level of detailed comprehension.

Although it might be expected that such cohesive ties are less frequent across paragraph boundaries than within paragraphs (see Halliday & Hasan, op.cit. p.297), the lexical cohesion in the present text is, in fact, quite extensive both within the paragraphs and between them.

(DEYES, T. Applications of Discourse Analysis. Towards a Minimum Discourse Grammar. In: Celani, M.A.A. et. al.
ESP in Brazil: 25 years of evolution and reflection, 2005, São Paulo, Editora da PUC.)

According to the text, grammatical markers of cohesion