Textual Cohesion

The question of textual cohesion is of fundamental importance in any analysis of text organization, including that of audiovisual texts, which are what interest us in this volume. Two of the most authoritative works on the question of textual cohesion remain those of Halliday and Hasan (1975) and de Beaugrande and Dressler (1972, English translation 1981) both dating back to the 1970s, in which the various identified forms of cohesion were discussed at length. As a fundamental constituent in discourse analysis or text linguistics, cohesion can be considered metaphorically as the glue that holds the text together. In some texts cohesive ties are abundant, in others more sparsely arranged over long stretches of discourse. But without any such ties, a text has little textuality and will be difficult to follow, if not incomprehensible. But what is cohesion in textual terms? Cohesion is created in a number of ways within a text and indeed refers only to the links within the discourse, within the co-text, that is created by the words themselves. (Taylor, 1998) (the semantic connections within a text are referred to as coherence and, of course, work together with cohesion to create meaning, but are not the concern of this chapter)