An Analysis of Textual Cohesive Devices in Surah AL-Nas: An Application of Halliday and Hasan's Text Coherence Theory

Abstract

The structure of the text of the Quran has always attracted the attention of researchers from every era. Today, this topic has found a special place in interdisciplinary studies, especially in the field of religious and Quranic knowledge. This study aims to analyze the textual coherence elements in Surah Al-Nas based on the theoretical foundations of textual coherence by Halliday and Hasan within the framework of textual linguistics. Therefore, I examine the textual coherence elements of Surah An-Nas based on the theoretical framework of research, using a descriptive-analytical and statistical method. I collect the research data from the Quran, reliable interpretive sources, and comprehensive software for Quranic interpretations. Through analysis, we have reached some results: the cohesive devices detected in Surah AL-Nas comprise grammatical elements like reference, ellipsis, substitution, coherence, and lexical components such as repetition, super-ordinate, synecdoche, hyponymy, and synonymy. The total count of cohesive devices in Surah AL-Nas amounts to 30. Among these, lexical devices prove to be more effective and contribute more significantly than grammatical cohesive devices to the coherence of textual segments in Surah AL-Nas. The cohesive devices of reference, repetition, and superordinate collectively account for 16.66% of the frequency, surpassing other elements and boasting the highest occurrence rate. Conversely, the usage of synecdoche is 2.77% less prominent compared to these cohesive devices.

Keywords

• Cohesive Devices, Surah AL-Nas, linguistic text analysis, grammatical devices, lexical devices.