Cohesion and Coherence in the Registers of Medicine, Religion and Law

Abstract

Language, a means of communication that is peculiar to humans, is a phenomenon that has attracted the attention of various disciplines: Linguistics, Sociology, Anthropology and Psychology among others. Within Linguistics, various approaches have been adopted to the study of language. One of such approaches is semantics. Semantics in linguistic analysis is a technical term used to refer to the study of meaning. The concepts of Cohesion and Coherence have a lot to do with the meaning of conversation and texts in relation to issues of context of situation, linguistic setting, linguistic environment and linguistic relationship both of which are very useful in analyzing discourses in English Language. This paper, therefore, examined the concepts of Cohesion and Coherence in the registers of medicine, religion and law with a view to pointing out their relevance to meaning. Halliday and Matthiessen’s Systemic Functional Grammar Theory served as the theoretical framework. Existing studies have not examined the two concepts together in a paper as the present study has done. The study adopted the purposive sampling technique in collecting the data. The selected data are in three professions of medicine, religion and law.  The choice of these three areas was informed by their significant use of the concepts of cohesion and coherence. Each of the data was analyzed qualitatively. Findings in the study show the centrality of these concepts to meaning-making in the mentioned fields.  Further finding shows the relationship between the use of language and contextual situation. The paper recommended that Language use in a particular field should be explicated in terms of its cohesive devices and coherence means. The paper also recommended that at the tertiary level of education, departments should incorporate courses on the use of language in their fields into their syllabi. The contents of such courses should include Cohesion and Coherence in linguistic study.