In the realm of applied linguistics, and one of its major branches, discourse analysis, the interpretation of reference as an inter-sentential relationship that contributes to cohesion gained popularity with Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) Cohesion in English, which is still a seminal text. Halliday and Hasan (1976) focus on text-level phenomena and do not regard sentence-internal relationships cohesive, because they “obviously cohere” (6) or “hang together”, simply because they are “internally structured” (7). Instead, they identify cohesive ties, which connect two or more sentences by establishing cohesive relations between them and claim that there is one specific meaning relation that is “critical for the creation of texture” – and indeed, cohesion – and that is reference, “in which one element is interpreted by reference to another” (11). According to their definition,

When this happens, a relation of cohesion is setup, and the two elements, the presupposing and the presupposed, are thereby at least potentially integrated into a text (Halliday & Hasan, 1976, 4). This definition of cohesion applies to all the five types of cohesion they distinguish: reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion. Nevertheless, their distinction between these seems somewhat arbitrary, especially when it comes to drawing a line between reference and lexical cohesion.

 

 

Table 3 shows the linguistic forms that the first mention of an item in a chain of reference may occur in. In this book, this item is called the presupposed item. Subsequent items that co-refer with the referent have the common characteristic that they all refer to the same entity in the text-world and need an appropriate antecedent. In Table 3, the first item in the list of subsequent linguistic forms is a repeated noun or a synonym. This category is generally agreed to belong to the territory of lexical cohesion analysis (Károly, 2002; Hoey, 1991; Hasan, 1984). When the anaphoric noun phrase is accompanied by the definite article or a demonstrative determiner, the phrase is regarded as referential and therefore, as traditionally belonging to grammatical cohesion on the grounds that the definite article and demonstrative determiners usually have the property of pointing to some other linguistic entity elsewhere in the text. Still, the boundary between lexical and grammatical cohesion is not so straightforward. The clearly grammatically referential categories are pronouns and demonstratives used as heads, but this is very rare in academic writing. With possessive pronouns, demonstratives and the definite article, the identity of reference can only be achieved by considering the meaning of the content word. Consequently, the meaning of the noun that follows the function word needs to match the first mention form or the referent, which means that one cannot carry out an analysis of cohesion without considering lexical categories of cohesion. This issue will be discussed further in Section 3.2 on cohesive and non-cohesive types of reference.