Review

Reviewed Work(s): COHESION IN ENGLISH by M. A. K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan

Review by: Stephen A. Bernhardt
Source: Style, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Winter 1980), pp. 47-50
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/42945277
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COHESION IN ENGLISH, by M. A. K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan. London:
Longman Group Limited , 1976. xv + 374 pp. $12.50.

Cohesion in English provides important new tools for linguistic analysis by de-
lineating those semantic resources of the language which tie idea to idea to create
texts. Unified passages are recognized as texts partly on the basis of mediating ties ,
"the means whereby elements that are structurally unrelated to one another are
linked together, through the dependence of one upon another for its interpreta-
tion" (p. 27). Halliday and Hasan establish five types of ties: reference, substitution,
ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical cohesion. Separate chapters contain detailed ling-
uistic descriptions of each relation, with analysis of sentences and short passages
drawn from diverse sources. The work is seminal in that it defines the concerns of
cohesive analysis, establishes terminology, and serves as a reference point for future
publications on this subject.! Though primarily a reference work of descriptive, in-
tersentential grammar, Cohesion in English has applications for both the close read-
ing of texts and the investigation of style.
An analysis of cohesion, while not providing an interpretation of a text's
meaning, will help support a given reading. The usefulness and the limitations of
the system can be appreciated through applying the system to a text to demonstrate
these ties. I have chosen "Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves" because the poem's difficulty
is in part due to Hopkins' structuring of cohesive relations. A close reading of the
poem will also demonstrate the need to go beyond cohesive analysis to account for
the poem's totality of text-forming relations.

Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves

Earnest, earthless, equal, attuneable, I vaulty, voluminous, . . stupendous

Evening strains to be time's vast, I womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearse-of-all night.

Her fond yellow hornlight wound to the west, I her wild yellow hoar light hung to the height

Waste; her earliest stars, earl-stars, I stars principal, overbend us,

FÍre-featuring heaven. For earth I her being has unbound, her dapple is at an end, as-

tray or as warm, all throughther, in throngs; I self in self steeped and páshed - quite

Disremembering, dismembering I all now. Heart, you round me right

With: 6ur evening is over us; our night I whelms, whelms, and will end us.

Only the beak-leaved boughs dragonish I damask the tool-smooth bleak light; black,

Ever so black on it. Our tale, O our oracle! I Let life, wáned, ah lét life wind

Off héi once skeined stained véined variety I upon, all on tw<S spools; part, pen, pack

Now her all in two flocks, two folds-black, white; I right, wrong; reckon but, reck but, mind

STYLE : Vol. XIV Winter 1980 , No. 1 47

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 48 STEPHEN A. BERNHARDT

But thèse two; ware of a world where but t

Where, selfwrung, selfstrung, sheathe- and

grind.

Reference relations, semantic links realized through personal pronouns,

demonstratives, and comparatives, account for a substantial proportion of sen-
tence to sentence ties. Once the initial predication is established (11. 1-2), the
other lines are tied through pronoun reference. For example, three instances of
her (11. 3-4) initially refer to Evening , while her (1. 5) and the curious compound
throughther (1. 6) refer to earth. The ties require the reader to recover the intended
referents from previous lines.
When considering the forms of pronoun reference, Halliday and Hasan note
that "First and second person forms do not normally refer to the text at all;
their referents are defined by the roles of speaker and hearer, and hence they are
normally interpreted exophorically, by reference to the situation" (p. 48). For the
analysis of cohesion, ties must be endophoric ; that is, one item must depend upon
some other item in the text itself. Once Hopkins establishes that the discourse in-
volves the writer addressing mankind, however, subsequent pronouns have a cohes-
ive effect. Hopkins introduces us (1. 4), referring either to mankind at large, all
those under the stars, or to the poem's readers. The possessive form our (11. 8, 10)
and the personal us (1. 8) have similar referents. Though the first instance of us is
exophoric, subsequent references are endophoric and cohesive. The binding of poet
and reader through reference structure is carried throughout the poem. Sibyl's pro-
phecy, "Our tale, O our oracle! " is for all men, as are the warnings expressed ellipt-
ically (11. 12-13). We must all be "ware" of a world reduced to simple, polar terms:
"black, white; I right, wrong." Each of the pronouns, expressed and elliptical, co-
heres within the text's reference structure.
Substitution and ellipsis are both streamlining devices, providing respectively
for replacement or deletion of repeated items when the information for interpreta-
tion is available to the reader. These ties differ from reference in that they demand
the item and its referent fill identical syntactic slots. Substitution carries some bit
of redefinition; ellipsis leaves unsaid something structurally necessary.
In addition to the warnings discussed above, the poem provides several other
examples of ellipsis. To visualize what is "black, / Ever so black on it" (11. 9-10), the
reader must fill in the subject of the predication, "the beak-leaved boughs," as well
as tying "it" to "light." Similarly, the search for the elliptical noun headword of
"these two" (1. 13) leads the reader back through "two flocks, two folds-black,
white; I right, wrong" to the initial opposition of light and dark. The images co-
alesce through the elliptical "these two" construction. The notion of ellipsis helps
unravel Hopkins' obscure syntax by establishing distinct predications and filling
out semantic import.
Conjunction is not a search instruction but a "specification of the way in
which what is to follow is systematically connected to what has gone before" (p.
227). Since conjunction joins whole sentences or series of sentences, the extent of

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REVIEW : M.A.K. HALLIDA Y and RUQAIYA HASAN 49

the presupposition is typically larger and more indeterminate than for ot

The four sorts of conjunctive relations specified by Halliday and Hasan- a
adversative, causal, and temporal- can be signaled by a number of structu
vices, including conjunctions, prepositions, adverbs, verbs, or simple juxt
These ties can be either external , referring to the content of the text, or
referring to the organization of the text.
Several examples of conjunctive relations are present in Hopkins' poe
causal For (1. 5) attributes the effects of previous lines to the fact that "e
being has unbound." Temporal relations are maintained by the adverb now
12), and the present immediacy is further reinforced by the consistent p
framing. The adversative but (11. 12, 13) stresses Hopkins' cautions about
manifold reality to simple dichotomies.
The final sort of relation, lexical, is probably the most useful aspect o
system for analyzing text-forming relations in literary texts. Halliday an
establish a cline of lexical relations, extending from reiteration of a word
of synonyms, superordinates, general terms, and collocational items, or w
tend regularly to co-occur. The simple fact that two words are present in
forces the likelihood that latent associations will be brought to the surfa
not ordinarily thought collocational can become so via the special context
poem. As the poem redefines its lexical set by establishing unthought of
metaphorical connections are reinforced by networks of semantic ties wi
poem.
The long chain of dichotomous items in Hopkins' poem- day/night, womb /
hearse, earth/heaven, hornlight/hoarlight- contributes collocational cohesive force.
Within a second lengthy chain, evening becomes a metaphor for death as images of
evening, hearses, night, the west, the end, and darkness coalesce. The force of such
collocational ties is additive and convergent; one tie builds upon another, reinforc-
ing associational meanings. The net effect is a movement along the continuum
from collocation toward synonymy, a process which cohesion analysis helps de-
scribe.

The five sorts of ties outlined by Halliday and Hasan help explain a great deal
about text relations, but it should be noted that the features categorized ignore
many of the text-forming relations particularly active in poetry. In Hopkins' poem,
for instance, the use of parallel structures, meter, and rhyme is cohesive but not
considered part of Halliday and Hasan's model. Cohesion will account for expressed,
surface level, non-structural ties of item to item; but for the analysis of other, fre-
quently important, text-forming relations, appeal will have to be made to poetics
and discourse analysis.
Halliday and Hasan's schema can be useful for comparing texts for the density
and variety of ties, as Waldemar Gutwinski has recently shown in a study of short
passages from James and Hemingway.^ Though descriptions of cohesion can aid
stylistic description, making exact statistical counts will prove difficult. No one, to
my knowledge, has attempted to analyze longer texts; the sheer number of ties is
awesome. The indeterminacies of cohesive relations, especially collocation and con-

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 50 STEPHEN A. BERNHARDT

junction, demand subjective judgem

whelming preponderance of lexical
thematic unity rather than deliber
ive force than, for instance, intern
to insure the reader's comprehensio
development of more delicate mode
force of various ties and the effects of deliberate versus incidental cohesion. The
careful and insightful linguistic description of relations above the sentence level pro-
vided by Cohesion in English offers a solid base for the development of more finely
tuned systems for particular stylistic analyses.

Stephen A. Bernhardt

NOTES

1 Research for Cohesion in English was undertaken at University College London

under the Nuffield Programme in Linguistics and English Teaching. The first three chapters are
a revised version of Grammatical Cohesion in Spoken and Written English , Part /, by Hasan,
Communication Research Centre (University College London) and Longmans, Green & Co.,
Programme in Linguistics and English Teaching: Papers, No. 7, 1968. The three middle chap-
ters were written in collaboration and the final two composed by Halliday. The manuscripts
were circulated privately for some three years before publication.

^Waldemar Gutwinski, Cohesion in Literary Texts (The Hague: Mouton, 1 976). An ex-
ample of poetic analysis which treats cohesive relations without the framework of Cohesion in
English is Poetic Closure , by Barbara Herrnstein Smith (Chicago : University of Chicago Press,
1968).

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