Lexical Cohesion. Text-internal standard of textuality

Seminar paper from the year 2015 in the subject American Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1, University of Salzburg (Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: DELS 2, language: English, abstract: Cohesion is, such as coherence, a text-internal standard of textuality . Therefore, it is not a user-centred but a text-centred notion. According to de Beaugrande/Dressler, cohesion "concerns the ways in which the components of the SURFACE TEXT, i.e. the actual words we hear or see, are mutually connected within a sequence" (1981, 3). Halliday/Hasan in turn underline that cohesion is based on semantic relations within a text (1976, 4). From these explanations we learn that cohesion is about how spoken or written words are linked to each other, and that cohesive ties are the devices that hold a text together. These cohesive ties can be distinguished on a grammatical as well as on a lexical level.