The Cohesive Functions Of The Definite Article The And Its Anaphoric Reference In The English Language

The English word article comes from the Latin word articulus, meaning joint. There are three kinds of articles, namely the zero article, the indefinite article and the definite article. In Old English, there are two demonstrative pronouns: se (= this, that, the) and pes (= this, this one). Only se includes the sense of the definite article. In Middle English, the s in se turned into p. During the late Middle Ages, pat was used equally as that today. In the 18th century, people spelled it as ye. For example, ye olde shoppe (= the old shop). Since the ye was always pronounced as /(?)/, it was written as the. It is at that time that the formally became the definite article in English. Therefore, the definite article is a social product and changes with social development.The use of the is so complicated that it is necessary to study it. The traditional studies of the only scope in traditional grammatical syntax. With the development of modern linguistics, linguists and experts study the in much wider scope, namely from pragmatic, semantic and cognitive perspectives. With Halliday and Hasan's cohesion theories, this thesis discusses the cohesive functions of the definite article the in the English language.What is cohesion? According to Halliday and Hasan, cohesion can be considered as the property that distinguishes a sequence of sentences that form a discourse from a random sequence of sentences. Textual cohesion, in their opinions, is displayed in the ties that exist within a text between a presupposed and a presupposing item. It is a relation concept which includes not only the cohesive element but also the relation between the presupposed element that follows. In the light of Halliday and Hasan's argument, cohesive ties consist of four main groups: 1) reference, including antecedent-anaphor relations, the definite article the, and demonstrative pronouns; 2) substitution, including nominal, verbal and clauses substitutes and several kinds of ellipsis; 3) conjunction, involving words like and, furthermore, yet, but, then, so, etc.; 4) lexical cohesion, which has to do with repeated occurrences of the same or related lexical items (reiteration and collocation).Cohesion is a part of the system of a language. The potential for cohesion lies in the systematic resources of reference, ellipsis and so on that are built into the language itself. Cohesive relations have in principle nothing to do with sentence boundaries. Cohesion is a semantic relation between an element in a text and some other element that is crucial to the interpretation of it.The general meaning of cohesion is embodied in the concept of a text. By its role in...