Grammatical means of textual cohesion in appellate court decisions

Abstract

The submitted paper deals with analysis of grammatical means of textual cohesion in English in a specific genre of legal register, i.e. in appellate court decisions. The theoretical framework of analysis is the theory of textual cohesion introduced by Halliday and Hasan in their work Cohesion in English (1976), which considers only intersentence cohesive ties to be textually cohesive and which distinguishes four categories of grammatical cohesion: reference, substitution, ellipsis and conjunction. In the analysed texts, all the instances of these four categories of grammatical cohesion are identified and statistically evaluated. The aim of the analysis is twofold. The first goal of research is to find out what kinds of cohesive devices appear with the highest frequency. Another focus of analysis is to find out whether the grammatical means of textual cohesion under analysis contribute to the stylistic qualities of the analysed texts and make them unambiguous and clear enough for interpretation. The findings of the analysis as well as their subsequent comparison with other registers indicate that the most frequent grammatical means of textual cohesion, namely demonstrative reference and additive conjunction, significantly contribute to precision, formality and logical organization of the analysed genre of legal English. DOI: 10.20420/rlfe.2015.0010

Keywords

• textual cohesion
• reference
• substitution
• ellipsis
• legal English