INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH TEXT LINGUISTICS

Professor Christopher Gledhill
(Notes de cours, Linguistique du texte anglais, 48LGAN23, EILA, Université Paris Diderot)
• Evaluation
IMPORTANT: it is important to remember that not all texts have this Rhetorical
Structure (this is just a prototypical structure for very basic Narratives)
Cohesion
The explicit connections (lexical, grammatical, formal) which serve to link the
different parts of a text and make a text ‘hang together’. These links can be
categorised in terms of:
• Reference (repetition or replacement by determiners, pronouns, etc., as in
the soldier > this guy, him, etc.)
• Substitution (replacement by general words, as in Which soldier did he
shoot? That one over there).
• Ellipsis (replacement by zero, as in Who did he shoot at? ... The enemy.)
• Conjunction (binding or linking items, such as He saw an enemy soldier.
And then he shot at him...)
• Lexis (repetition or replacement by anaphoric items, as in the enemy > the
enemy soldier...)
Note that there are five subtypes of cohesion: Reference (personal, demonstrative,
comparative, exophoric), Substitution (nominal, verbal, clausal), Ellipsis (nominal,
verbal, clausal), Conjunctive (additive, adversative, causal, temporal) and Lexical
(reiteration, synonymy, taxonomy, collocation). Examples of these are given in the
following ‘example analysis’. 6
3.3 Example analysis
In this exercise, we are going to look at cohesion in two extracts from the same text:
Lutgens, Frederick K. & Edward J. Tarbuck, 2012. Essentials of geology [3rd edition]. New Jersey:
Pearson Prentice Hall, p103).
Extract 1
(from page iv)
6 This analysis is based on Halliday, Michael & Ruqaiya Hasan, 1976, Cohesion in English, London: Longman.
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