Difference Between Cohesion And Halliday

Halliday is the first who set up the core basis of Cohesion in English. Thus most of this research is based on his views and studies. If a speaker of English hears or reads a passage of the language which is more than one sentence in length, he can normally decide without difficulty whether it forms a unified whole or is just a collection of unrelated sentences ( Halliday and Hasan, 1976, p. 1). Cohesion is what distinguish between the both. The concept of cohesion is a semantic one , it refers to relations of meaning that exist within the text, and that define it as a text. Cohesion occurs where the interpretation of some element in the discourse is dependent on that of another. The one presupposes the other in the sense that it cannot be …show more content…
Grammatical cohesion is sub-divided into reference, substituation, conjunction, and ellipsis. On the other hand, lexical cohesion, which means the cohesive effect achieved by the selection of Vocabulary (Mehamsadji, 1988, p.40), is sub-divided into reiteration and collocation. Scholars differ in their concentration on the two approaches, some stress on the lexical cohesion and others stress on the grammatical one like …show more content…
‘words that keep each other company’. Collocation is achieved when the lexical items have a tendency to appear in similar lexical environments or when they are related lexico-semantically. For example, boy and girl are cohesive because they have opposite meanings, but laugh and joke, and boat and row are also cohesive, although they are not systematically related, only “typically associated with one another” (Halliday & Hasan, 1976,p. 284–286). Several researchers have noted that collocation is a subtler relation than reiteration/repetition. In fact, the category of collocation is absent from many studies of lexical cohesion exactly because it is so difficult to define and analyse (Tanskanen, 2006, p.12).
The effect of lexical, especially collocational, cohesion on a text is subtle and difficult to estimate. With grammatical cohesion the effect is relatively clear. In lexical cohesion, however, it is not a case of there being particular lexical items which always have a cohesive function. Every lexical item may enter into a cohesive relation, but by itself it carries no indication whether it is functioning cohesively or not. That can he established only by reference to the text (Halliday and Hasan,1976,