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Taylor 1

Janet Taylor
ENGL 633
Dr. McClelland
24 July 2014
DB Forum 3
In simplest terms, sentence structure varies and is dependent upon genre and overall
purpose of a text. Discourse cohesion and coherence is dependent upon the way in which
individual words, clauses, and sentences, interconnect to form meaning as a whole. Sentences,
clauses and words depend on each other in order to be interpreted correctly by the reader; just as
text structure is dependent upon the cohesion of its functional units.
Text structure is the organizational structure used within paragraphs or longer texts,
appropriate to genre and purpose. Various genres are written using various writing styles and
sentence structure. Sentence structure varies dependent upon the type of text and even the
language. For example, languages in which pronouns are regularly used would cause the person
selection to change with discourse selection. Drama text is not written with a narrator
framework, so 1
st
and 2
nd
person pronouns are utilized. Narratives would be written with 1
st
and
2
nd
person pronouns. (Longacre)
Texts consist of functional units that are hierarchically structured; which each part contributes to
the purpose or intention of the whole. The clearest cases are scripted and task-oriented texts; others are
less obvious, requiring an understanding of the intentional structure of a text. The functional units and
their sub-structure are most evident in relatively scripted discourse. Scripted activities, like legal
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trials, have well-defined parts with particular functions: the opening, the arguments and cross-
examination on each side, instructions to the jury, etc. Task-oriented activities also have a clear
functional organization. Scientific reports are good examples of written task-oriented texts. They
are structured according to specific and academically, rigid conventions.
Texture is created within text when there are properties of coherence and cohesion,
outside of the apparent grammatical structure of the text. Cohesion, the most important principle
and criterion of textuality, is the connection or the connectedness manifested when the
interpretation of one textual element (a word located in one sentence) is dependent on another
element in the text (a word usually but not necessarily in another sentence). Cohesion relates to
the semantic ties within text whereby a tie is made when there is some dependent link between
items that combine to create meaning. Halliday and Hasan identified five different types of
cohesion: reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical cohesion. In the five main
types of cohesion, the interpretation of a discourse element is dependent on another element that
can be pointed out in discourse.
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Works Cited
Halliday, M.A.K., and Ruqaiya Hassan. The Concept of Cohesion. Cohesion in English. 1
st
ed.
Randolph Quirk. London: Longman, 1976. 3-4. Print
Longacre, Robert. Monologue Discourse: Typology and Salience. The Grammar of Discourse.
2
nd
ed. Thomas A. Sebeok and Albert Valdman. New York: Plenum Press, 1996. 1-27.
Print

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