The Concept of Cohesion and Coherence in Modern Linguistics with Reference to English and Kurdish

Abstract

The study tackles the two notions of cohesion and coherence in modern linguistic study. Cohesion is the relation of meaning, the connections or the ties which exists within a text and provides the semantic unity required in the structure of that text. The semantic unity is expressed, partly through the grammatical resources and partly through the vocabulary. There are two kinds of cohesive ties: grammatical such as reference, ellipsis, substitution and conjunctions and lexical, including reiteration and collocation. In fact, the importance of cohesion lies in the fact that it does not only provide the structure of grammatical unity but it, also, participates in creating the semantic unity or the coherence of a text. Texts, presumably, the main area of operation for cohesion, are seen as language units which have a definable, communicative function, characterized by such principles as cohesion, coherence and informativeness which can be used to provide a formal definition of what constitutes their identifying textuality of a texture. A text, plainly, has to be coherent as well as cohesive. In short, cohesion is not a simple unitary concept. It has been one of the most controversial issues in modern linguistic studies.

Keywords

• cohesion
• coherence
• linguistic cohesion
• text
• cohesive ties
• texture
• grammatical cohesive ties
• lexical cohesion
• presupposition