Kohäsionsmarker

Kohäsionsmarker, or cohesive markers, are linguistic devices that express or signal cohesion in a text or discourse. They connect sentences, clauses, and propositions, helping readers and listeners interpret relationships across unit boundaries. These markers contribute to coherence without adding new content, by signaling reference, structure, or stance.

Major types include:

- Reference: pronouns, demonstratives, and definite articles that point to previously mentioned items or to things in the discourse (anaphora and deixis).

- Substitution: using a word or phrase to stand in for another unit, as in one for a previously mentioned object.

- Ellipsis: omission of repeated material that can be inferred from context.

- Conjunctions and connectives: words like and, but, therefore, however that encode logical and temporal relations.

- Lexical cohesion: repetition of key terms, synonyms, antonyms, or collocations that tie related meanings together.

- Discourse markers: elements such as well, anyway, or you know that manage topic, stance, or alignment without necessarily adding propositional content.

Functions and significance:

Kohäsionsmarker support cohesion and guide interpretation by signaling relations such as addition, contrast, causality, temporality, and reference. They interact with syntax and semantics and can vary in prominence across languages. In some languages, cohesive devices rely more on morphology or verb agreement, while others use explicit particles or connectives.

Applications and study:

In linguistics, these markers are analyzed to understand text structure, readability, and discourse organization. They are relevant in second language instruction, where teaching cohesive strategies improves comprehension, and in natural language processing, where cohesive features are used to assess text quality and coherence. See also: cohesion, discourse analysis, text linguistics.