On Cohesive Function Of Parallelism

In the field of discourse analysis, Halliday and Hasan have made great progress in the development of cohesive theory by analyzing cohesion in English discourse. In the year of 1976, they published the book Cohesion in English, which signifies the establishment of cohesive theory. In the book they hold that"The concept of cohesion is a semantic one; it refers to relations of meaning that exist within the text, and that define it as a text."So they regard cohesion as relations of meaning within the text, and the relation between text and context does not belong to cohesion. The sentence is structured internally in its role as the realization of text; and this internal texture is the structural counterpart of cohesion. Neither cohesion, nor internal textual, suffices to make of a set of sentences a text. Texture is a product of the interaction between the two. At the same time, Halliday and Hasan hold that,"Cohesion refers specifically to these non-structural text-forming relations."They divide these non-structural text-forming relations into five types: reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion. Rhyme and parallelism etc. are not included in it.As one of the rhetorical devices used for emphasis, parallelism refers to the arrangement of similarly constructed clauses, sentences, or verse lines in a pairing or other sequence suggesting some correspondence between them. The effect of parallelism is usually one of balanced arrangement achieved through repetition of the same syntactic forms. From the definition we know that parallelism is the dialect of grammar, it refers to the use of grammatically equal elements in sentences and paragraphs. Parallelism is also a dialect of rhetoric, which can add clarity and coherence to what one wishes to communicate, in prose or poetry. Parallelism has the characteristics of natural connection, close cohesion and semantic coherence, so the cohesive function is clearly employed. Except for intensifying meaning and leading to clarity in our writing, repetition in parallelism is essential for text cohesion. So the application of parallelism is one of the devices realizing text cohesion.It is necessary to balance linguistic elements each other. Almost any kind of sentence elements can be placed in a parallel construction. According to the different type of balanced elements, parallelism can be divided into five categories, i.e., phonological parallelism, lexical parallelism, phrasal parallelism, syntactical parallelism and paragraphic parallelism. In the light of the theories of systemic-functional linguistics, this paper points out that parallelism has four cohesive functions. They are anaphora echoing back to earlier text; cataphora making the text clear; joining sentences into text and being well organized; foregrounding the text and clarifying the meaning of the text.To study the cohesive function of parallelism in text can enrich the cohesive theory of text and have guidance to text teaching.