The notion of text: its structural and functional interpreta-tions. Structural types of text. Grammatical means of text cohesion

Grammatical means of text cohesion
In linguistic literature cohesion is defined as the use of explicit linguistic devices to signal relations within a text or sentence. Cohesion can be defined as the links that hold a text together and give it meaning. There are two main types of cohesion: grammatical and lexical.
Grammatical cohesion of the text is mainly achieved through co-reference, i.e. the relationship between the verbal signs designating the same entity in the “world” of the text. Co-referential items in English include: personal pronouns (he, she, it, they), demon-stratives (this, that, these, those), the definite article and items like - such a.
Linguists identify three main types of the co-referential devices: a) looking back-ward, i.e. anaphoric reference, b) looking forward, i.e. cataphoric reference and c) looking outward, i.e. exophoric reference.
Anaphoric reference is the most common type of reference, used subconsciously in everyday conversation and writing. It occurs when the writer refers back to someone or something, that has been previously identified, in order to avoid repetition and be more compact (in Greek “anapherein” meant “to carry back”, “refer”). It is known that human mind is rather limited in its capacity to store surface materials long enough to work on them. Anaphoric use of pronouns shorten and simplify the surface text without any diffi-culties for the reader. For instance:
“There was an old woman who lived in a shoe.
She had so many children, she didn’t know what to do.”
In this well-known children’s rhyme the pronoun she makes it unnecessary to keep saying “the old woman who lived in a shoe”, “the old woman”, or even “the woman”.
Usually, items such as he/him, she/her or they/them can be decoded without major difficulty, whereas other items such as it, this and that may be more troublesome because of their ability to refer to longer stretches of text. Let’s borrow an example from Halliday and Hasan:
“It rained day and night for two weeks. The basement flooded and every-thing was under water. It spoilt all our calculations.”
Here the pronoun it seems to mean “the events of two weeks”, or “the fact that it rained and flooded”, that is, the situation as a whole rather than one specified entity in that situa-tion. Anaphora is the most common directionality for co-reference, since the identity of the conceptual content being kept current is made plain in advance.
The second type of co-referential devices is the