CC BY
50COHESION IS AN IMPORTANT ASPECT FOR CREATING MEANING WITHIN THE TEXT Markayev Ya.K.
Markayev Yashin Komilovich - Senior Teacher,
DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS, INSTITUTE OF TRAINING AND RETRAINING, KARSHI, REPUBLIC OF UZBEKISTAN
Abstract: the article deals with the problems of how cohesion functions within text to create semantic links. Studies have shown that 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.
Keywords: cohesion, coherence, project, communication, information, summarization, research, theory, summary.
Cohesion, or coherence, is the intangible glue that holds paragraphs together. Having good coherence in a writing project means that your ideas stick together and flow smoothly from one sentence to the next, so that readers of your work can easily understand where you are taking them. Without cohesion, a written work can seem choppy and may not flow well; a lack of coherence challenges the reader and can hurt comprehension, thus rendering your attempt at communication ineffective at best.
As critical technology for managing information dissemination and use, document summarization has become the subject of active research. However, with no coherent theory of summarization, and with no rigorous computational model of the summarization process, it is very hard to focus on specific aspects of it with the goal of improving the overall performance of a summarization system. Without knowing what factors contribute, and how, to the quality of a summary, the question of targeting just the right factors becomes one of propitious intuition, rather than informed judgment.
Still, a variety of strategies have been proposed to alleviate some of the problems associated with the summarization-by-sentence-extraction model: the notion is to exploit some of the
factors contributing to the coherence of the source text by carrying their effects over to the text's summary.
Summaries generated as a concatenation of sentences extracted (by some method) from the original document are, typically, suboptimal. Of particular relevance to this research are the related problems of coherence degradation, readability deterioration, and topical under-representation. In essence, the deletion of arbitrary amount of source material between two sentences which end up adjacent in the summary has the potential of losing essential information. Examples like 'dangling' anaphors, whose antecedents have been lost, have been cited often enough; simple strategies like including the immediately preceding sentence in the summary have some effect. Still, these are simple strategies, prone to misfiring; moreover, other effects like the reversal of a core premise in an argument, or the introduction, and subsequent elaboration, of a new topic, are not easily handled by similar heuristics.
One way of addressing problems arising from sentence deletion would be to eschew the notion that sentences are suitable units for representing salient document highlights. Instead, we propose that phrasal units of certain type, presented to retain strong ties with their context in the source, offer a characterization of the document content, which is more sensitive to topical shifts than a sentence-based summary. While such an approach clearly focuses on the topical under-representation problem, it deliberately compromises on readability, and thus produces document abstractions which are less than coherent. As we argue, there are situations where this may be acceptable.
Addressing the problems listed above now becomes a matter of somehow introducing a mechanism for independently assessing, and using, the degree of cohesion between individual sentences in the source document. Having some notion of how these sentences map onto the underlying themes in the document becomes equally important. Analysis of English text from works of modern American writers for the purpose of identifying cohesive elements in text: which type of cohesion is the most substantive contribution to texture; and whether this type is effective or not showed, that 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 (1976) identified five different types of cohesion: reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical cohesion [2]. 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" [4].
Understanding how cohesion functions within text to create semantic links could be beneficial to students of English as a second or foreign language to help "decode" meaning. Cohesion analysis has shown what principles exist that create semantic links within text between sentence and paragraph boundaries. Cohesion in texts creates one kind of texture through the ties that coordinate ideas and experiences and texture is one of the three meta-functions for creating meaning within language. The most often cited type of cohesion is reference. Another type of cohesion which function to create texture, is lexical cohesion. Lexical cohesion is the central device for making texts hang together experientially. Therefore, the textual analysis proves that cohesion is an important aspect for creating meaning within text.
References
1. Diane P. The Cohesive Role of Cognitive Metaphor in Discourse and Conversation. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter, 2000.
2. Halliday M.A.K. and Hasan R. Cohesion in English. London: Longman group Ltd., 1976.
3. Jackendoff R.S. Semantic structures. Cambridge (Mass.): MIT, 1990.
4. Renkema J. Discourse Studies. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1993.
