Page 218 - Beyond Methods

206 Contextualizing linguistic input
hang together.” It refers to relations of semantic meaning between sentences in a text (by the way, the term text stands for any passage with more than one sentence). It occurs where the understanding of one element of the text is dependent on that of another. One can- not be decoded without the other. For instance, the exchange
A: Have the kids gone to bed?
B: No, they haven’t.
is cohesive because B’s response is dependent on and is commu- nicatively appropriate to A’s question. In addition, the pronoun they cohesively refers back to the kids. In contrast, the exchange
A: Have the kids gone to bed?
B: Roses are red.
is not cohesive because B’s response is a separate propositional statement not connected to A’s question. When we read a text, gram- matical and lexical cohesive features help us recognize whether it is a unified whole or just a collection of unrelated sentences.
Extending the Hallidayan notion of cohesion, Henry Widdow- son (1978, p. 26) points out that cohesion also “refers to the way sentences and parts of sentences combine so as to ensure that there is propositional development.” What he means is that the sentences
A: What happened to the crops?
B: The crops were destroyed by the rain.
A: When were the crops destroyed by the rain?
B: The crops were destroyed by the rain last week.
may appear to be related, but they are not considered cohesive be- cause they all represent separate and independent statements. The sentences
A: What happened to the crops?
B: They were destroyed by the rain.
A: When?
B: Last week.
are indeed cohesive because they have been fused together “by re- moving redundancies so that propositional development is carried forward” (ibid., p. 26).
As the above examples show, the appropriateness of linguistic