Abstract
Cohesion is Volume 133 of a Linguistic Insights series that started 10 years ago with a study of modality. Christiansen, from the Università del Salento, sets his own work in the context of well established names such as Halliday, Hasan and others in the 1970s to 21st-century sources. Many questions are answered but also, in the spirit of research, more questions are asked.
The first chapter discusses differing definitions of cohesion and cohesive ties within and between sentences. Of course, not everything can be defined tidily. ‘While it is difficult to define discourse and say what precise form it takes in the mind . . . its effect on text or actual instances of language can be shown’ (p. 36). The author shows these effects at various levels. At the macro-level, discourse and textual aspects of cohesion are examined; at the micro-level, lovers of the semi-colon will find ammunition for a campaign to retain it. An end-of-chapter summary lists five types of cohesive ties which are examined in the following five chapters. It occurred to me that a person could try and weave all five types of cohesion into a review, but reading the many sub-categories in the following chapters was a deterrent.
Chapter 2 is about reference. Illustrating his points with examples from sources that include BBC news and Shakespeare, Christiansen shows the many ways in which listeners and readers have to be ready to make connections as they search for meaning. Take these opening lines from a Somerset Maugham story. ‘He came back into the kitchen. The man was still on the floor, lying where he had hit him, and his face was bloody’ (p. 83). Illustrations like that, which make a point as powerfully as the commentary, suggest that amidst his research work at his university, the author perhaps also introduces students to his topics. They would be fascinated by the weaving together of theory and examples.
Chapter 3 moves to substitution. ‘I’m dreaming of a White Christmas, just like the ones I used to know’ (p. 97). Although the book’s focus is English, the occasional example shows that some principles of cohesion are generalizable across languages.
Ellipsis is the topic of Chapter 4. Here the author differs from Halliday, whose original functional grammar included ellipsis under substitution. Christiansen believes that while both categories aim to avoid repetition and to be economical, there is a strong case for separating them. In non-anaphoric ellipsis, which aims to shorten the message, the addressee must make sense of ramblings like one quoted from the ‘Just a Minute’ corpus. I did wonder whether making frequent use of that particular corpus might be slightly unfair, given that this radio game has coherence as its goal. Still, it was fun working out the links and waiting for a player to press the button for an objection when the cohesive devices overtook the coherence.
Chapter 5 deals with conjunctions, those words and phrases given so much emphasis in writing classes, and described here as ‘the most explicit and obvious cohesive devices in a text’ (p. 161). This chapter would provide useful points for teachers to pass on to students, such as the fact that the category goes beyond ‘what are called conjunctions in conventional sentence-based grammar’ (p. 162). Prepositional phrases also belong here, as do fixed expressions such as ‘having said this’ (p. 162). The various subcategories conclude with what is called ‘the conjunctive force of intonation’ (p. 208). Readers could try asking themselves whether, when meeting sarcasm and irony, they pay more attention to intonation or to the content of what is being said as a guide to the speaker’s intention.
A fifth type of cohesion is lexical, the subject of Chapter 6. Again there are many, many sub-groups. Yet despite the huge amount of detail, the chapter ends with a reminder of how much more research is needed, particularly ‘in different registers and in specialised discourses’ (p. 267). This chapter flows into ‘Lexical Patterns’ in Chapter 7. Here the author examines the work of Hoey, who recommends a functional and holistic approach to the study of cohesion. In order to prove his point that a particular form of analysis will reveal its strengths and weaknesses only as it is tried out, Christiansen examines Wordsworth’s ‘The Solitary Reaper’. Insights are to be gained by examining ‘the effects of related ties, not of individual ties’ (p. 312).
Chapter 8, ‘The Informative Function of Cohesion’, relies entirely on newspaper articles. Of course, one effect of reading news extracts is that they can be distracting in their content. It was hard to stay focused on theoretical points, interesting as they were, while reading the poignant juxtaposition of a young mother’s death from a car driven by an unlicensed driver with the day on which it happened: Mothering Sunday.
The final chapter reviews the book’s content, stressing the importance of cohesion to all communication, since ‘spoken discourse display[s] as much cohesion as carefully crafted written texts’ (p. 352). That sentence sent me listening to the speech of young children. The youngest person I listened to made extensive use of ‘and’ in an apparent effort to hold the wandering attention of the adult as she planned what to say next, while an older child used ‘speaking of . . .’ as an entry into his comment, which actually had nothing to do with what the adults were discussing. Using cohesion starts early.
As indicated through this review, the author draws on a rich variety of texts to illustrate his examples. There are extracts from The Tale of Peter Rabbit, from a history text, from literature and from a dictionary. Also supporting the main text are numerous footnotes, some of which stand alone as interesting details. The many graphics include a hand-drawn sketch early in the first chapter illustrating a set of shapes, and a complex diagrammatic representation of bonded sentences in the Hoey chapter.
Looking at the list of titles in this series one is tempted to ask, ‘Is there anything left to examine?’, but by the end of the book the answer is clear. The author describes cohesion as ‘this still often-neglected aspect of linguistics and social semiotics’ (p. 359). Corpus studies have much to answer for. On the one hand, they make analysis so much easier; on the other, they remind us of how much is waiting to be examined and take away the excuse that it would take too long.