THE MECHANISMS OF TEXTUAL COHESION

1. INTRODUCTION: COHERENCE AND COHESION.

Coherence is understood as the fundamental property inherent to the text that makes it
that can be perceived as a communicative unit and not as a succession of
disconnected statements. Thanks to coherence, the parts of the text appear
related to each other in terms of the whole, and the set is perceived as suitable
the context in which communication takes place.
A boy named Pepito was playing in the yard.
his house. His mother told him to come in and told him to start doing his homework, but
He didn't feel like it. So he punished him by not letting him watch television.
An incoherent text example: A boy named Pepito was playing in the yard.
from his house. His daughter told him to come in. The doorman said to turn them off but he had
hunger. Then he was examined in Latin.
Textual cohesion refers to the network of relationships between the different elements of
a text that linguistically manifests its coherence. Therefore, the mechanisms of
Cohesion is the linguistic procedures that ensure or reinforce coherence
textual.
These procedures are numerous and very varied, to the point that it is quite
It's complex to even attempt a complete analysis of all of them. To systematize, the
we will classify based on the level of the language they affect, and thus we will distinguish the
grammatical mechanisms, the lexico-semantic ones and the suprasentential ones.

2. COHESION MECHANISMS AT THE GRAMMATICAL LEVEL

2.1 Deixis
Deixis (a term from Greek meaning 'to show', 'to point') is
the function represented by certain linguistic elements, which consists precisely of
to point out or designate something present among the speakers (extratextual deixis) or in the own
statement (textual deixis).
We talk about extratextual deixis when a language element makes
direct reference to some element of the communicative situation: to the participants of the
communicative act (personal deixis) or to the spatial-temporal circumstances in which it
produce (spatial or temporal deixis).
Personal pronouns, demonstratives, possessives, and some
adverbs designate objects by pointing them out and situating them in relation to the people who
they intervene in the speech.
For example, to properly understand the sentence 'You, give me that'.
"immediately and right here right now", we must know the situation in which it has been.
issued, since 'you' points to the recipient, 'that' situates a specific object to a
a certain distance from the sender (neither too close nor too far), "here" indicates the space
that corresponds to who speaks, while "now" indicates the moment of the
communication between the interlocutors, etc.
However, there are also linguistic elements that do not refer directly
to the objects of reality, but to other elements or fragments of discourse that are
within the text itself. In this case, we are talking about textual deixis.
In the message, 'Juan threw a paper on the floor. The teacher told him to go to his...'
He immediately dispatched. He followed them and after a while came out very dejected from there.
we know the reference of the pronoun 'le' (to Juan), of the adverb 'allí' (the office)
...because all of them are within the discourse itself.
 Textual deixis operates through two distinct mechanisms: anaphora and
cataphora. Both are used in discourse to refer to some element
present in it.
We call a anaphora the linguistic unit that lacks lexical meaning.
and that establishes its reference through its relation to another element of the discourse that has
appeared before.
Example: We have a new colleague. It is a joy for everyone and we are going to
welcome it with a round of applause. This is the second grade classroom and here you will receive almost all of your
Classes. You can ask me any questions you have.
Anaphoric words are grammatical units without inherent meaning. Their
meaning is precisely given by the lexical element to which they refer.
Thus, in the previous example, he/she invited a new classmate here to the second-grade classroom.
the relative that the noun doubts.
The words that most frequently function as anaphoric terms are
personal pronouns, some demonstratives and possessives, relatives and the
adverbs that have a referential value (here, there,...).
Lacatáforaes is the phenomenon that consists of anticipating some word or part of the
speech that will appear in the subsequent context.
Example: He told me the following: that he was resigning. Everyone attended the inauguration.
mayors of the area, the counselor, the minister... Even though I repeated it, María did not take me in.
case.
In this example, the following advances to the receiver information that appears later, and it
The same happens with the indefinite pronoun 'everyone', and with the personal 'se', which refers to
Maria.
2.2 The ellipsis
We call ellipsis the suppression of some lexical element of the statement without it
change its meaning. The omitted lexical elements can be words, phrases or
Sentences. Generally, the ellipsis is logically deduced from the preceding information.
which indicates that something has been omitted.
When having to rely on the nearby context, elision is also a mechanism
linguistic that allows relating some statements to others.
This suppression occurs frequently in two circumstances:
When a lexical element has appeared earlier in the text and is easily identifiable.
This is the case, for example, of the omission of the subject in a sentence when it is
continue talking about the same subject as the previous sentences.
Example: The teacher arrives at the school. She leaves her bag in the room and enters the classroom.
When a lexical element can be easily inferred from the verbal context.
You know, slowly and in a very loud voice.
In this example, taken from a text that reflects the school environment, the has been omitted
the verbal form reads, deducible from the context (previously the teacher had said: _Well, and
now we are going to start a poem).
From the point of view of textual cohesion, the ellipsis that interests us the most is
the first.

3. COHESION PROCEDURES AT THE LEXICAL-SEMANTIC LEVEL

3.1 Lexical Recurrence

Lexical recurrence consists of the repetition of the same word in

different statements of a text. It constitutes one of the fundamental elements for
that the requirement of textual cohesion is fulfilled.
 Example: Inés had bought a dress for the party. She was convinced.
what would be the most beautiful dress of all.
Lexical recurrence can also be understood as a rhetorical figure if it has
a clearly expressive or poetic purpose.

3.2 Semantic Recurrence

In any text, elements of semantic cohesion repeatedly appear.
related to the meaning of the words that appear in it. The relationships
The meaning between terms can be of four classes: synonymy, antonymy,
hypernymy or hyponymy.

Conceptual and contextual synonymy

We say that two terms are synonyms when in a certain context
they are interchangeable without changing the meaning of the statement.
Example: Agustin started/commenced the reading of the poem.
Some synonyms are interchangeable in all contexts and, therefore, are
terms that have exactly the same meaning (conceptual synonymy). But in
the common lexicon strict or conceptual synonyms are extremely rare: what
It is normal for two synonymous terms to have some common meanings and others
different and, for that reason, cannot be exchanged in all contexts.
The word teacher, for example, can be replaced by professor in The teacher.
He called me to the blackboard (The teacher called me to the blackboard), but not Velázquez was a
master in the use of color (*Velázquez was a teacher in the use of color). In that case
we say that 'master' and 'professor' are contextual synonyms (because they are not
interchangeable in all cases).
In texts, it is very common to substitute a word that has already appeared before.
for a synonym or for a synonymous expression to avoid its repetition.
Example: I heard the laughter of the other kids. Their chuckles rang in my
ears like whips.
There were some statues in the garden. They were modern sculptures.

Antonymy
Antonymy is the relationship established between those words in the text that
they have opposite meanings. It helps to give cohesion to the text because normally
contrasts a term with another that has appeared before, establishing between them an
contrast relationship.
Examples:
Pedro kept a good memory of the end-of-term trip. Marta had a bad one.
The lists are arranged and the tones succumb.
The children went out; the older ones stayed.

Hypernymy and hyponymy

It is said that a term A is a hypernym of another term B when A names the
genre or the class to which the named by B belongs. For example, flower is a hypernym.
of pink, and furniture is a hyperonym for table. And, conversely, we say that a term A is
A hyponym of another term B when A names a type of B. Thus, rose, daisy,
tulip... (cohyponyms among themselves) are hyponyms of flower; just like table, wardrobe,
library... are hyponyms of furniture.
The substitution of a word by its hypernym or by its hyponym is a
a frequent mechanism to avoid repetitions in the text and contributes to coherence and
cohesion that must exist among its elements.
Examples:
The lion escaped from the cage. The beast was hungry.
 She had some roses in her hand. She left the flowers in a vase and approached.
They have brought the furniture, but neither the bed nor the wardrobe fit in the room.
The shoes are pinching me. I'm going to have to change my shoes.

4. TEXTUAL LEVEL: DISCOURSE MARKERS

Finally, the so-called markers are essential for cohesion.

discursive: linguistic elements that allow establishing relationships between ideas with
the context and the communicative situation.
Within the sentence structure, we have analyzed some of them as
supplementary clauses, since they qualify, specify or comment on the formed unit
by the subject and the predicate. The meaning that those elements express (of addition, of
contraposition, of temporal succession, of consequence...) establishes diverse relationships
with other sentences and statements, and contributes, therefore, to textual cohesion.
According to their function within the text, two types can be distinguished:
Pragmatic function markers. They refer to the elements of the
communication that is involved in the text. For example, the vocatives and the
appeals refer to the addressee (Juan, come on, don't stay there), certain
elements with phatic function refer to the channel (Well, I would like an ice cream,
No?) and numerous adverbs and prepositional phrases inform about the attitude of the
speaker before the stated idea (Fortunately, nothing serious happened) or before the statement
same (Honestly, I don't know what you intend).
The latter, with a modalizing character, are quite common in the texts.
argumentativos:claro, en efecto, naturalmente, desde luego, sin duda, por supuesto,
etc.
_ Textual function markers (or supra-sentential connectors). They establish
connections between the different statements or paragraphs of a text. They form a very
heterogeneous, both by the category to which they belong (adverbs, conjunctions,
phrases, etc.), as well as the variety of meanings they can bring to the
speech.
The ones that appear most frequently are the following:

TEXTUAL MARKERS

Addition
(sum of ideas to others
previous)
Sum of ideas: and also, also...
Intensification: it is more, even more...
Culmination: even, on top...
Comparison: likewise, in the same way…
Opposition
(introduce relationships of
contrast or contradiction
among the statements)
Adverse effect: however, well then, on the other hand, nevertheless...
Concession: with everything, still, in any case...
Restriction: if so, except that, at least, in any case, except...
Exclusion: on the contrary, rather, rather
Causality
(connect the statements)
 establishing relationships of
cause-effect
Cause: well, because, given that,…
Consequence: Therefore, consequently, then, thus, so
there...
Condition: in such/this case, that being so, with things set this way...
Reformulation
(it is stated again the
content of one or several
previous speakers
Explanation: that is to say, in other words...
Correction: rather, I mean, even better, that is to say...
Resumen In summary / in conclusion, summarizing...
Example for example, like this
Order of discourse
(they mark different parts in the)
that the information is ordered
of the text)
Presentation: to begin with, above all...
Continuation: then, after, well then, so, as for...
Transition: on another note, on the other hand...
Digression: by the way, incidentally, that said...

Enumeration: en primer lugar, en segundo lugar, por último, por un lado, por el
another...
Closure: in short, to conclude, to finish...

BREAD AND CINEMA

One cannot live without food, of course. And without fables? Perhaps not either. The
newspapers have been talking with real alarm about the writers' strike that began
last Monday in the US. They refer to her as if she were going to provoke the lack of a
essential product for daily life. Some, to explain its magnitude, remember
the one from 1988, which lasted twenty-two weeks and cost the American industry 350
millions of euros. The current one could double that figure. But the numbers always
they hide or conceal a moral panic. What would happen if that gang of crazy people -
screenwriters - will they spend a year without inventing stories? How would it affect you and us?
me? Is it true that these people, while crafting the arguments of television series,
Do we also, without being aware of it, write the argument of our life? Is it
Imagine a world without fiction?
Definitely not. We are as much children of the flesh and blood as we are of the
Little Red Riding Hoods, of Snow Whites, of stepmothers, of Thumbelinos, of the cats
with boots, but also of the Madame Bovarys and the Ana Ozores and of the
Raskolnikovs and the Batlebys, not to mention the Sopranos and the Fraziers, of the
Seinfelds, or the House doctors. Since the world has existed, while some
they bake the bread we eat in the morning, others weave the stories we devour
the night. We are made of bread and novels.
The problem is not, then, the millions of euros that the industry could lose,
but the dysfunctions that a sudden collapse would cause in the social body
fiction. Imagine a world without cinema, without novels, without comics, without television series, without
soap operas; only reality raw, or substitutes of fables like those we
politicians serve. That strange man who goes to bed when you get up is
screenwriter. A respect.
Juan José Millás, El País, November 9, 2007

Comment model on the cohesion mechanisms of the text 'Bread and Cinema'
We are faced with an opinion piece published by the writer Juan José
Millás in the newspaper El País in November of last year. The strike by screenwriters that
was developing in the United States around that time served the author as an excuse
to reflect on the importance of fiction in our lives.
Millá believes that it is a product as essential to us as it could be
the bread itself (hence the title of the text, Bread and Cinema), as it is impossible for him to conceive
a world without novels, without movies, without television series… Therefore, it demands of its
readers, a respect for the screenwriters, because they are the ones who invent all that
stories that help us escape from reality for a while every day.
Within the linguistic mechanisms that help reinforce coherence of
Text at the grammatical level highlights deixis on one hand and ellipsis on the other.
Regarding the first of them, we can observe that the text has an extratextual deixis.
that refers to the elements of communication, in this case a sus
participants. In sentences like “How would austedy amí affect us?”, the author of the
the text is present in it through a first person singular pronoun
("me"), and, at the same time, directly appeals to its readers using the pronoun of
Second person in the form of courtesy ('you'). But the most common throughout all of
the text is that the 1st person plural pronoun of inclusive character is eliminated, with the
Millás manages to connect with his readers and involve them in his reasoning:
[We] are children of flesh...; We are made of bread and novels.
Also, as is customary, we find in the text elements that point to
others present in the speech itself (textual deixis). They function as elements
anaphoric some third person personal pronouns ("They refer to her" [to the
strike]; "without us being aware of it" [that by writing their stories they are
also counting our life) and numerous relative pronouns ("the strike of
screenwriters who started last Monday”, “while some knead the bread we eat
in the morning", "that strange man who goes to bed", etc.).
Laelips is another prominent cohesion mechanism in the text. We have already
previously commented that we found several cases of elliptical subject: [We] Are
made of bread and novels; [You] Imagine a world without cinema... The ellipsis is more
striking in other cases where the verb and other elements are also elided: "And
Is it possible to live without fables? Perhaps it is not possible to live without fables either.
Definitely, no [it is imaginable in a world without fiction], etc. Another verbal elision
important is the one that occurs in the third sentence of the second paragraph, in which the
verb and the attribute (“We are children”) do not repeat themselves throughout the entire
enumeration because they are understood.

At the lexical-semantic level, coherence is ensured through repetition,

both lexically and semantically. As an example of lexical recurrence, one must mention the
repetition throughout the text of certain words that are directly related to the
theme of it (for example, 'fables' appears in line 1 and in line 23; 'screenwriters' in
the 2, in the 8 and in the 24; “fiction”, in the 12 and in the 21, etc.)
Regarding semantic recurrence, we find several cases in the text of
sinonimia: “historias”, “fábulas” y “argumentos”; “urdir” e inventar”; “esconder” y
“disimular”; “cifra” y “números”; “comemos” y “devoramos”…
 We also find throughout the text several pairs of antonyms.
"this one" against "that one"; "some" against "others"; "morning" against "night"; and,
above all, 'reality' versus 'fiction') and numerous examples of hyponymy: for
for example, the hypernym 'fiction' is replaced throughout the text by numerous
hyponyms (novels, cinema, television series, soap operas, comics...), and, in turn,
some of those terms become hypernyms of other expressions (for
"Madame Bovary" could be considered a hyponym of novel, while
"doctor houses" would be a television series.
Finally, discourse markers are essential for cohesion.
in this text, we could distinguish the markers of pragmatic function of the
textual markers. Within the first category, it is worth noting the presence of a
interjection whose sole purpose is to establish communication with the readers giving
By the way, the first sentence of the text in quite a colloquial way (Not
You can live without food, of course) and from a modal adverb that informs us about the
the author's attitude towards the question just posed (Definitely not).
Within the second category, we can point out:
The coordinating conjunctions 'and' (line 1) and 'but' (line 6), which function as
supra-sentential links, the first with a sense of addition, and the second, of adversation.
- The subordinating conjunction 'since' (line 19) and the conjunctive phrase 'so that' (line
24), which express consequence.
For all these reasons, we can affirm that we are facing a coherent text, and
that various and numerous mechanisms contribute to reinforcing that coherence
linguistic at all levels of language: in the grammatical, in the lexical-semantic and,
also, at the textual or pragmatic level.

Other texts to work on cohesion mechanisms:

LIVING LANGUAGES
Each language is a world. Each language is the world, the entire universe, with its
geology and its botany, with its complete catalog of celestial bodies, of the
human passions, from the names of the animals, from what is so close that it almost
it would be enough to indicate them with a gesture and also the most distant and what does not exist. That
Adam's task did not end with Eden and things are being named from
new at every moment is discovered by those who see a child who is just starting to speak,
point with your index finger at the most everyday objects and ask what they are called, and when repeating
with clumsiness and delight that word, as if savoring a new taste, is
venturing one step further in their learning of the world that will not end with the
childhood, and not even with life, and it begins every time one tries to venture out
in another language [...]
The Greeks called anyone who did not speak Greek a barbarian: it seems that this
the same word, barbarian, is originally an onomatopoeia, an allusion to what we
it seems like the speech of an unintelligible language. But a barbarian is rather one who
He vanishes by not speaking anything other than his language, considering it so important, and himself
so privileged to master it, that any other is inferior, and does not deserve the effort of
to be learned.
In a recent article, which I would recommend translating and distributing in schools,
Daniel Barenboim, who was born in Argentina to Jewish and Russian parents, was educated in Israel and
he works in Germany, he wonders what his identity is, which of all the possible homelands
by which he has gone through is more his, and he ends up saying that he feels German when
plays or directs German music, and Italian in which he is making Italian music.
Madrid, last year, was seen to brilliantly direct the most German of all the
music, Wagner's Tristan, and a few weeks later he was Italian while conducting the Don
Giovanni, which is, by the way, an Italian opera written by the Austrian Mozart. When
one inhabits, even if temporarily, another language, it is as if one inhabits another music,
another country, and the pleasure of speaking it, even that of reading it, is like taking a trip and
change life and country.
But countries have borders, and sometimes they are at an unreachable distance. The
closed, the one who cannot travel embarks on his modest and brave escape with a
foreign grammar, and surrounded by compatriots among whom he feels alone, finds in
another language the true vocabulary of its peers. The student without money, who does not
no ticket can be paid for on the night train to the nearest border, it goes
learning new words, unknown expressions, and every word you discover is
a shining coin that is added to the treasure of his memory and that no one will be able to take away from him
never. There is a greed for words just as there is for money, and if this debases the soul,
that one enlarges as its wealth grows, although both have in common that they do not
they swallow easily.
Learning a language is above all about discovering the breadth of everything that is
ignore the nuances that will never be possessed, the jungle proliferation of the
words we do not know.
Full citizenship cannot exist without the inquisitive and respectful awareness of
the lands and ways of life that do not resemble ours very much, and that, without
embargo, they have a lot in common with us. It is often said that to write one must
There is a lack, above all, of mastery of one's own language, but I am sure it is equally...
it is necessary to travel and get lost in other languages, to learn again in them the mystery
inaugural that exists in each word.
Antonio Muñoz Molina, El País Semanal.

THAT BOY
That boy won't get out of my head. I'm talking about the guy who witnessed without doing anything.
nothing about the aggression of the Ecuadorian teenager on the train. We have seen it time and again.
creepy scene and verified its passivity, the embarrassing and pathetic way in which
he struggled to look the other way. And I say embarrassing because, upon seeing it, you felt
second-hand embarrassment and pity for him; and also the enormous unease of asking you what
you would have done in his/her place.
That boy is another victim of the madman. In his paralyzing fear, it is likely
that his status as an immigrant influences him. He himself has stated that these attacks
racists are quite common, and that creates a feeling of insecurity, of
fragility. Draining you from within and making you more vulnerable to intimidation,
more resigned to defeat. To the very humiliation of your cowardice. But there is also that,
It was undoubtedly dangerous to confront that type (I don't understand why the judge didn't either.
he imprisoned someone so fierce). It is dangerous to oppose the violent, hence the merit of
who does it.
By one of those eloquent coincidences of chance, the video of the attack on the train
it became public at the same time as the story of Daniel Oliver, the 23-year-old hero
who died from a blow while helping a girl. Here is another disturbing case that
Peck at your guts again: would you be able to act like Daniel?
That doubt is inherent to the human condition, the doubt of one's own limits, the
uncertainty about the most extreme depth of oneself: there, at the very bottom, what
Which will weigh more, fear or one's own dignity? Would you have hidden a Jew in the
Hitler's Germany? I hope life doesn't put us in one of those extreme situations.
because we can react like the boy on the train. And I don't know if the poor guy will be able to
overcome it.
Rosa Montero, El País, October 30, 2007