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Cohesion is a semantic or grammatical relation that connects the sentences and organizes the parts of the text. According to Halliday (1976), all cohesive ties may be divided into two groups. The first is lexical cohesion and the second - grammatical cohesion.  The latter refers to the combination of all grammatical links that join the parts of the text together, thus, forming the grammatical aspect of it. For example, a speaker says, “I went downtown this afternoon and bought a pair of sandals”, and an interlocutor answers, “Which one did you buy?” The question refers to the previously mentioned pair of sandals. In this case, cohesion is established.


Wright and Hope state that ellipsis is a cohesive device involving the deliberate omission of at least one component of the sentence. It is mainly used in dialogues in order to depict everyday colloquial situation. There are two methods of using ellipses. The first way includes the usage of three dots for any kind of omissions in the sentence, the second - a period and three dots used to create an omission between the sentences.  The example of the ellipsis in the sentence may be as following, “She was always in the centre of attention, but…” She paused again, “…but she was as lonely as a wolf.”  In the following example ellipsis is used in order to achieve the authenticity of the dialogue, as well as its situational nature. The intentional abruption creates the truthful atmosphere of the colloquial conversation.

Contextual assumption

According to Blakemore, the contextual assumption is the shared background comprehension between a speaker/author and a listener/reader. It plays a crucial role in reader’s understanding of what an author intended to express or imply in the utterance. It may be also denoted as the assumption used by an interlocutor to interact with what is linguistically communicated by a speaker. When the latter addresses an interlocutor directly, the contextual effect is created. For instance, the question “How is the new job?” requires a description or explanation for the type of  the job another person has. It depends on the interlocutor whether the description is approving or disapproving. However, when speaking indirectly, more detailed contextual assumption has to be put into consideration. In this case, it is viewed as a set of the interlocutor’s values and suppositions. An example within a conversation is: “What about your roommate? Do you get on well? - Yes, but it is not so easy. She is too Margaret Thatcher.” Here an interlocutor is intended to remind oneself that Margaret Thatcher was famous for her well-disciplined and unscrupulous way of behaving. Afterwards, he/she draws a conclusion that the speaker’s new roommate may have the same personal characteristics.  As the result, the intended interpretation of the following dialogue is achieved. 

Nominal pre-modification

Wright and Hope (1995) state that noun phrases are divided into four slots. Words in the first slot include pronouns, numbers, and determiners; words in the second slot are adjectives or nouns, the third slot is the head noun; and the fourth slot is a relative clause or a prepositional phrase. The following two sentences can serve as the examples to this type of modification: a) “The silvery ring is from the shop”; b) “The kids remembered all the other attractive animal books.” In the first case, article the is the determiner, silvery is the pre-head modification, ring is the noun, and from the shop is the post-head modification. In the second case, the pre-modification of the nominal groups consists of determiners all, the, other, adjectives attractive and nouns animal. In the sentence (b) no further explanation is required.

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