Text and Cohesion

Text

Van Dijk (1977 in Stubbs, 1983: 9) says that the term of text to rifer to an abstract theoretical construct which is realized in discourse. In other words, text is to discourse as sentence is to utterance. The term of text is a conceptual thing.   

The word text is used in linguistics to refer to any passage, spoken or written, of whatever length, that does form a unified whole, and as a general rule, whatever any specimen of our own language constitutes a text or not (Halliday and Hasan, 1976: 1, 1985: 10). It is stated that a text is a unit of language in use, not grammatical unit.  Text is a semantic unit that is a unit not of form but of meaning. Thus, it is related to a clause or sentence not by size but by realization. Moreover, a text does not consist of sentences, but it is realized by sentences, and a set of related sentences is the embodiment or realization of a text. Hence, the expression of the semantic unity of the text lies in the cohesion among the sentences of which it is composed.

Text may be of any length. Since it is not a unit of the grammatical rank scale, and does not consist of sentences, it is not tied to the sentence as its lower limit. Equally, there is no upper limit on the length of the text (Halliday and Hasan, 1976: 294).

Cohesion

Cohesion in discourse means solidity form which structurally establish syntactical tie. Moeliono (1988:34 in Mulyana, 2005: 26) asserts that a good and solid discourse occurs from cohesive sentences. Furthermore, cohesion refers to the various linguistic means (grammatical, lexical, and phonological) by which sentences ‘stick together’ and are linked into larger units of paragraphs, or stanzas, or chapters (Bussmann, 1998: 199).

A text needs text-forming component as stated by Brown and Yule (1983: 191) in Rani (2006: 87) that the text forming component itself distinguishes a sequence of sentence as a text or not. Then according to Halliday and Hasan, cohesion is one of important text-forming components (1976: 299).

Halliday and Hasan (1976: 4) say that cohesion occurs when the interpretation of some element in the discourse is dependent on that of another. It means the one element presupposes the other. The element cannot be effectively decoded except by recourse to it.

Cohesive relation is signed by using cohesive device. According to Halliday and Hasan (1976: 6) there are two cohesion devices namely grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion. Grammatical cohesion is realized through the grammar and lexical one is realized through vocabulary. Cohesion is one of sentence element that tied sentence with another.