10
Widdowson 1979, “a text is a collection of formal objects held together by patterns of equivalence or frequencies or by co
hesive devices”. A text may be prose or verse, dialogue or monologue. It may be anything from a single proverb
to a whole play, from a momentary cry for help to an all-day discussion on a committee. That is geographical length is not important for a text.
11
For example: a. A single word: “DANGER” on a warming sign. b. A stretch of language even though not a sentence: “NO
SMOKING” printed on a wall.
12
A text is a unit of language in use. It is not a lexico-grammatical unit like a clause or a sentence, and it is not defined by size. A text does not consist of sentences. It
is realized by or encoded in sentences. A text is best regarded as a semantic unit, a unit not of form but of meaning. Thus it is related to a clause or sentences not by
size but by realization, the coding of one symbolic system in another.
13
2. Texture
A text must have Texture, as what Halliday and Hasan proposed in their book
the unity of text has strong connection with texture. The concept of texture is entirely appropriate to express the property of being text. A text has texture, and
this is what distinguishes it from something that is not a text. It derivers that texture from the fact that is function as a unity with respect to it environment.
14
11
Mizan Mahbub, Text, texture, and Cohesion www.englishstudyhelp.blogspot.com
downloaded on 23 April 21, 2015
12
Ibid
13
Ibid
14
Halliday and Hasan, 1976 op.cit p.2
11
Texture is shown by relations of meaning which exist within a text. The study on
relation of meaning which exist within a text is then called Cohesion.
15
Example: If we find the following instructions in the cooking book;
Wash and core six cooking apples. Put them into a fireproof dish.
It is clear that „them‟ in the second sentence refers back to the „six cooking
apples‟ of if first sentence. This anaphoric function of them gives cohesion to the two sentences, so that we interpret them as a whole; the two sentences together
constitute a text. So it is the texture which makes these two sentences a text.
16
3. Cohesion
The term of cohesion is familiar in the study of language. Cohesion is part of the system of language. It is introduced by Halliday and Hasan in 1976, through
their book Cohesion in English. The simplest definition proposed by Halliday and Hasan is that “it refers to relation of meaning that exist within the text, and the
define it as a text‖.
17
Cohesion occurs where the interpretation of some element in the discourse is dependent on that of another. The one presupposes the other, in the sense that it
cannot be effectively decoded except by recourse to it. When this happens, a relation of cohesion is set up, and the two elements, the presupposing and the
presupposed, are thereby at least potentially integrated into a text. Cohesion is correlation between clauses within a text or discourse grammatically or lexically.
15
Ibid p. 4
16
Mizan Mahbub, Op,Cit
17
Halliday and Hasan, Op,Cit
