Helga Mannsåker, University of Bergen
Halliday & Hasan (1976) were among the first to study the phenomenon of cohesion, and their work has had a seminal influence within text linguistics (Renkema & Schubert 2018: 126), serving as a basis for later models, such as the one found in Tanskanen (2006). However, there are fundamental problems with the way Halliday & Hasan (1976), and hence existing models, view textual cohesion. They treat meaning mostly as residing in texts and individual words rather than as created in the mind of the addressee on the basis of active interpretation of textual input. Furthermore, they rely too much on formal aspects and semantic relations between word stems and too little on the contextual reference of phrases. The flaws in the existing models become evident when one tries to employ them in analyses of authentic texts. Even Halliday & Hasan’s (1976: 2) initial and seemingly very basic example of cohesion in the form of full coreference, Wash and core six cooking apples. Put them in a fireproof dish, where the pronoun them is claimed to refer anaphorically to six cooking apples, is debatable, according to Brown & Yule (1983: 202), as them actually does not refer to the apples in their original state, but to their cored form.
The paper proposes an entirely new model of cohesion and a new method of cohesion analysis based on relations between the referents of phrases rather than on formal or semantic properties of textual constituents. The purpose of the work has been to try to find a solution to the challenges associated with denotation and reference in the analysis of cohesion. The proposed new model is based on insights from Wilson & Sperber’s (2006) Relevance Theory and from Cognitive Linguistics, such as Langacker’s (2008) work on nominal grounding elements, and Fauconnier’s (2010) work on Mental Spaces.
References
Brown, G. & Yule, G. (1983). Discourse analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fauconnier, G. (2010). Mental spaces. In: The Oxford handbook of cognitive linguistics, edited by D. Geeraerts & H. Cuyckens. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199738632.013.0014
Halliday, M.A.K. & Hasan, R. (1976). Cohesion in English. London: Longman.
Langacker, R.W. (2008). Cognitive Grammar – a basic introduction. Oxford: Oxford university Press.
Renkema, J. & Schubert, C. (2018). Introduction to discourse studies: New Edition. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Tanskanen, S.-K. (2006). Collaborating towards coherence: Lexical cohesion in English discourse. Philadelphia: Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.