Grammatical Cohesion in Thai Cave Rescue News in International Newspapers

Abstract

Cohesion, in general, is the linking within a text that enables text to hold together by use of various means of cohesion. Halliday and Hasan (1976:4) argue that cohesion refers to relations of meaning that exits within the text and that define it as a text. Thus the main idea of cohesion, in general, is to create a text that is to be understood by its readers and Tanskanen (2006:14) points out that cohesion refers elements of a text which form connections between parts of the text. There have been described two main types of cohesion and they are grammatical and lexical. Grammatical cohesion is based on the structural content of text cohesion, which is under the scope of this thesis, is based on grammatical content and background knowledge of the text. Halliday and Hasan (1976:6) specify the difference between grammar and lexical cohesion as the more general meanings are expressed through the grammar and the more specific meanings through the vocabulary. Cohesion is used for the analysis of text beyond the clause level. It is used not only to characterize the text structure but also to study language development and written composition. Moreover, it is necessary to stress that cohesion cannot be described always as only lexical or grammatical. Cohesion according to Halliday and Hasan (1976:4) is a semantic relation and thus it cannot be implied that it is a purely formal relation.