On Implicit Cohesive Devices Of Lyrics

Holliday and Reqaiya Hasan wrote the book Cohesion in English, in which Halliday and Hasan put forward that cohesive devices in English consisted of grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion. The former included: reference, substitution, ellipsis and conjunction; the latter included: reiteration, repetition and collocation. They emphasized on the importance of cohesive devices in forms for many times, considering cohesion in forms to be one of the important conditions of coherence. However, with the development of the research, many scholars at home and abroad showed that this explicit cohesion in forms are not the only way for a coherent text, and there was another implicit cohesion which was achieved by the implication existing in the text.Many scholars have made rich researches on explicit cohesive devices, but few scholars do research on implicit cohesive devices and fewer make research on lyrics from the implicit cohesive devices. Based on this situation, the paper analyses lyrics from this new perspective---implicit cohesive devices. Not only can the researches on implicit cohesive devices extend cohesion and enrich the theory of cohesion, but they can also help us have a profound understanding and appreciation of lyrics.The research on implicit cohesive devices in lyrics opens a new way of thinking for the creation of poetry. The richer implicit cohesive devices there are in poetry writing, the more charming, more appealed and more worthy of appreciating the image of the poetry is. At the same time, the research can effectively help the teaching and learning of poetry. Students can have a deep understanding for the implied meaning in lyrics as long as they clearly find out the implicit cohesive devices in it.During the researches on the implicit cohesive devices in lyrics, the author finds that we can analyze the implicit cohesive devices of lyrics, which works as a special text, from phonological level, lexical level, grammatical level and pragmatic level. There are different kinds of implicit cohesive devices on these levels, such as implicit cohesive devices on rhyme and rhythm, implicit cohesive devices on irregular collocation and the figures of speech, implicit cohesive devices on ellipsis, inversion and parallel structure, implicit cohesive devices on context and image, etc. These implicit cohesive devices are mainly represented on the fact that we understand the lyrics not through the literal meaning of the lines but through the implicatures implied between the lines or certain pragmatic knowledge. Therefore, in order to understand and appreciate the implicit cohesive devices in lyrics, the readers are required to have more extensive knowledge and more abilities to judge and reason its phonology, lexis, grammar and pragmatics. At the same time we must be good at finding out the implicit cohesive devices of lyrics, and then we can understand the cohesion and coherence in lyrics not by a lot of hard work, and finally understand and appreciate the connotation and essence of lyrics.