Linguistic Features that Mark Cohesion in Selected Gikuyu Texts

Abstract

The present study was aimed at identifying and describing elements that help to join different sentences in selected Gikuyu texts. This study falls in the broad area of discourse analysis. The texts selected for this study were those written in continuous prose and were from the literary and the reportage text categories.  The work followed the Halliday and Hasan’s model of Cohesion to identify and describe cohesive devices in these texts. Gikuyu texts analysed showed evidence of cohesion as proposed in the Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) model of cohesion. The paper describes affixes, words, phrases, clauses and syntactic gaps that have been identified as creating cohesion in Gikuyu texts. The paper explains how these linguistic features that create cohesion relate with other parts of the texts being analyzed to realize cohesion. Yule (1985) argues that cohesion is marked differently in different languages. He further observes that these differences pose difficulties when texts are being translated from one language to another. Theory governed descriptions of cohesive relations in different languages would provide valuable insights to translators. By describing cohesion in Gikuyu, the present study adds to the body of knowledge on Gikuyu, and language in general.

Keywords: Cohesion, Gikuyu, Features, Linguistic, Texts