Abstract
The notion of “textuality” encouraged Halliday and Hasan in 1976 to present their model of discourse analysis through raising questions about whether “cohesion” is a semantic concept or a structural relation, whether a text is a structural unit or not or even if there are semantic or structural relationships within a text. Cohesion is like the glue that unifies the meaning within a text through binding the textual elements. Several studies applied the model of Halliday and Hasan on different texts such as legal, political, narrative, etc., but, very scarce attention has been given to scientific texts. The aim of this study is to examine and analyze some medical texts chosen randomly in terms of the Halliday and Hasan’s model by identifying both the lexical and the grammatical cohesive ties. The data analysis shows that the grammatical cohesive ties of reference and the lexical cohesive ties of reiteration carry the highest frequency among other cohesive ties. These results confirmed the significant role of cohesive ties in scientific texts.
Highlights
1.1 Cohesion: A Review of LiteratureText Linguistics emerged in the1960s to surmount the limited scope of the sentence-oriented study and brought to the forefront the study from the sentence level to the textual level. Crane (2006) believes that the importance of text with texture is solid for any shortage in this conception would lead to having just a group of sentences where no relationship between them is found
The data analysis shows that the grammatical cohesive ties of reference and the lexical cohesive ties of reiteration carry the highest frequency among other cohesive ties
The analysis revealed that the lexical cohesive ties of “reiteration” overwhelm those of “collocation” representing (51) making up (84%) while only (10) instances of collocation occur in the data accounting (16%) out of the total lexical cohesive ties (61). (See Graph 4)
Summary
1.1 Cohesion: A Review of LiteratureText Linguistics emerged in the1960s to surmount the limited scope of the sentence-oriented study and brought to the forefront the study from the sentence level to the textual level. Crane (2006) believes that the importance of text with texture is solid for any shortage in this conception would lead to having just a group of sentences where no relationship between them is found. Any text must have the quality of unity, i.e., cohesion. 45) states that the term “cohesion” is a linguistic connection that enables to recognize unity in a text such as that between pronouns and the earlier noun phrase. 4, 8-9) “cohesion is not, strictly speaking, a relation above the sentence. It is a relation to which the sentence or any other form of grammatical structure is irrelevant”. The concept of cohesion is a semantic one which refers to the relations of meaning that exists within the text and that defines it as a text and, so, coherence among elements within the discourse achieved (Beugrande, & Dressler, 1984; Curse, 2006; Yan, & Zhou, 2009)
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