cohesion (n.)

A term often used in GRAMMAR to refer to a defining property of the WORD, seen as a grammatical UNIT; also called cohesiveness. The criterion states that new ELEMENTS cannot usually be inserted into words in normal speech, but only at word boundaries. An alternative name for this criterion is ‘uninterruptibility’. The criterion works well for English (apart from such examples as abso-blooming-lutely), but has to be modified if applied to languages where INFIXES are used.

The term is used by some linguists to refer to the property of larger units than the MORPHEME to bind together in CONSTRUCTIONS, e.g. ARTICLE + NOUN. In this use, any group of words which acts as a CONSTITUENT of a larger unit can be said to be internally cohesive. In the HALLIDAYAN approach to grammatical analysis, cohesion is a major concept, referring to those SURFACE-STRUCTURE features of an UTTERANCE or TEXT which link different parts of SENTENCES or larger units of DISCOURSE, e.g. the cross-referencing function of PRONOUNS, ARTICLES and some types of ADVERB (as in The man went to town. However, he did not stay long . . . ). A distinction is usually drawn with the notion of a text’s UNDERLYING COHERENCE.