Cohesion in Dan Brown’s "The Da Vinci Code"

The theme representations, comprehension strategies, and pragmatic assumptions differ substantially among the various literary genres. In the context of textual interaction and discourse analysis, cohesion resolution and comprehension are considered important factors in comprehending the ideas of source text and transferring them into target text (in translation, for instance).
Cohesion might exist within or between sentences in a text, and is about preserving meaning in text. It concerns the way in which items grammatically and lexically relate to each other and to other cohesive devices, so that textual continuity is created. The most fundamental work on lexical cohesion is Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) Cohesion in English, where it is nevertheless given the shortest treatment of the five types of cohesion identified by the authors. Halliday and Hasan (1976) identified five types of cohesion: reference, conjunction, substitution, lexical and ellipsis. According to Halliday and Hasan (1976), apart from grammatical, lexical cohesion concerns two distinct but related aspects: reiteration and collocation. Reiteration is ‘the repetition of a lexical item, or the occurrence of a synonym of some kind, in the context of reference; that is, where the two occurrences have the same referent’ (Halliday and Hasan, 1976:318–9), while collocation is the use of ‘a word that is in some way associated with another word in the preceding text, because it is a direct repetition of it, or is in some sense synonymous with it, or tends to occur in the same lexical environment’ (Halliday and Hasan, 1976:319).
Corpus linguistic work that raises theoretical discourse issues (e.g. Cutting, 2002; Dijk, 1997; Hoey, 2005) suggests that lexis in the discourse analysis needs more attention than it has received in traditional approaches to language. Consequently, lexical and grammatical cohesion also need more attention. However, innovative approaches to cohesion do not only play a role in corpus linguistics, but also have implications for language teaching and the way in which cohesion is dealt with in the classroom. Studies of literary comprehension therefore should help the researchers understand the complex relationships among discourse, cognition, and emotional perception of the text. To be able to read, analyze and fully comprehend, and then translate specialized texts of all the text types described above, the students and future writers must be able to apply advanced reading skills and to synthesize meaning from the different sources in the text. Therefore, a deeper insight into the theory of cohesion has been considered of major importance for the author of current research.…