What are the important components of cohesion
Answers
1) To reach the movie theater you will need to turn right on the next intersection and then go straight for about 5 minutes. You will see it on your right-hand side.
(2) A cat catches a mouse. The car broke down. I go swimming
While the set of sentences in (1) seems to make sense, i.e. we could easily find the movie theater if we were in the given situation, the set of sentences in (2) does not qualify as unified text, but simply as three completely unrelated sentences. There is no possibility to relate the three sentences in (2) to each other, not even by changing their position.
The difference between (1) and (2) is the presence and absence of cohesion, or better, of so-called cohesive ties. A cohesive tie refers to one “single instance of cohesion” and is a term to indicate “one occurrence of a pair of cohesively related items” (HALLIDAY & HASAN 1994:3). By using the concept of cohesive ties, it is possible to count the amount of instances of cohesion within a given text. Looking at the first examples, it is possible to identify a number of such cohesive ties in (1), while there are no such ties in (2). To illustrate this, one instance of cohesion in the table above can, for example, be identified between “movie theater” in the first sentence and “it” in the second sentence. The “it” refers back to “movie theater” and makes it clear to the hearer that the speaker is talking about the exact same building the hearer wants to reach. Since there are more such cohesive ties in (1), the set of given sentences can be identified as a text, because