TYPES OF REFERENCE – ACHIEVING COHESION BY CREATING LINKS BETWEEN ELEMENTS

Abstract

In this paper we follow the model of cohesion set up by Halliday and Hasan in 1976 in Cohesion in English. According to them, cohesion and coherence can be studied only within a text pointing out that in fact we study the product of the process of talking or writing,
listening or reading. Generally, we refer to text as a written product because it is easier to notice its structural organization.
The organization of text is both formal and semantic, but it is important to think of it as “an outgoing process of meaning” (Halliday & Matthiessen 2004: 524). Cohesion studies the textual metafunction of the text which refers to the system of
Theme, achieved by marked or unmarked Theme selections, giving prominence to a certain pattern (also known as “method of development”, Halliday 1995), e.g chronology and focus on Subject in narrative and biographical discourse, and angle of assessment, e.g. hypothesis
in scientific discourse. The textual metafunction develops a set of lexicogrammatical systems which, alongside the semantic and contextual resources, create and interpret a text. There are four ways by which cohesion is created in English: conjunction, reference, ellipsis and lexical organization. In this paper we are concerned with reference as a relationship between things or facts which may be established at various distances in texts and which can also turn any passage of text into a clause participant.