**Description:** Textual cohesion refers to the linguistic elements that connect sentences and paragraphs within a text, creating a network of relationships that facilitates the understanding of the message. These elements can include pronouns, conjunctions, ellipsis, and references, allowing ideas to flow logically and coherently. Cohesion is essential for the reader to follow the argumentative thread and understand how different parts of the text relate to each other. Without cohesion, a text can become fragmented and confusing, hindering the interpretation of the content. Textual cohesion not only focuses on grammatical connections between sentences but also encompasses semantic aspects, where the meaning of words and phrases intertwines to form a meaningful whole. In the field of natural language processing (NLP) and large language models, textual cohesion becomes a crucial aspect for generating coherent and fluid text, as these models must be able to replicate the linguistic connections that humans intuitively use in their written communication.
**History:** The notion of textual cohesion was largely developed by linguist M.A.K. Halliday and his colleague Ruqaiya Hasan in their work ‘Cohesion in English’ published in 1976. This work laid the groundwork for the study of how linguistic elements interrelate in a text, establishing a theoretical framework that has influenced linguistics and discourse analysis. Over the years, research on cohesion has evolved, integrating into the field of natural language processing, where it has become essential for the development of algorithms that generate and analyze text.
**Uses:** Textual cohesion is used in various areas, including language teaching, academic writing, and digital content creation. In language teaching, the importance of cohesion is emphasized to help students construct coherent texts. In academic writing, proper cohesion is required for arguments to be clear and persuasive. In the field of natural language processing, language models use principles of cohesion to generate texts that mimic the fluency and coherence of human language.
**Examples:** An example of textual cohesion is the use of pronouns to avoid repetition of names, as in the sentence: ‘Maria went to the market. She bought fruits.’ Here, ‘She’ refers to ‘Maria’, creating a clear connection between the sentences. Another example is the use of conjunctions, as in: ‘I wanted to go out, but it was raining.’ The conjunction ‘but’ establishes a contrast relationship between the two ideas.
