Cohesive Ties in Scientific Texts: An Analytical Approach

Abstract

The notion of “textuality” encouraged Halliday and Hasan in 1976 to present their model of discourse analysis through raising questions about whether “cohesion” is a semantic concept or a structural relation, whether a text is a structural unit or not or even if there are semantic or structural relationships within a text. Cohesion is like the glue that unifies the meaning within a text through binding the textual elements. Several studies applied the model of Halliday and Hasan on different texts such as legal, political, narrative, etc., but, very scarce attention has been given to scientific texts. The aim of this study is to examine and analyze some medical texts chosen randomly in terms of the Halliday and Hasan’s model by identifying both the lexical and the grammatical cohesive ties. The data analysis shows that the grammatical cohesive ties of reference and the lexical cohesive ties of reiteration carry the highest frequency among other cohesive ties. These results confirmed the significant role of cohesive ties in scientific texts.