The meeting and it in the second half of the sentence is to be interpreted by reference to the meeting, “as they would have had to be if there had been a sentence boundary in between”.

Deciding “the way in which cohesion is expressed”, sentence is an important unit for cohesion for it is the utmost unit in terms of grammatical structure. If an identical item is “referred to twice in the same sentence”, “there are rules governing the form of its realization”. “These are the rules of “pronominalization”(Halliday & Hasan, 1976: 36).

2.3 Cohesion: “A Necessary but Insufficient Condition of Coherence” 

Coherence means that a text is an organic unity instead of an accumulation of irrelevant phrases and sentences. Studies on textual coherence began from the 1960’s and 1970’s, however, it is Cohesion in English that has really aroused people’s attention on the study of textual coherence. 

2.3.1 The Concept of Cohesion

Some scholars like Brown and Yule (1983: 66) assumed that cohesion is just “a formal language feature which exists merely in the formal structure of language”. Cohesion is indeed reflected through language form, but it plays a role of more than organizing and connecting sentences. It also refers to semantic connection. It is through various cohesive devices that one part is connected semantically with another in a certain text. Thus, we must first of all make it clear that cohesion is a “semantic” concept.

2.3.2 The Scope of Cohesion

In Cohesion in English, Halliday and Hasan elaborated the scope of cohesion as “within the discourse” (Halliday & Hasan, 1976: 412). For instance, if a referential item “it” appears in a text but what the item “it” refers to is “in the context of situation instead of in the text itself”, then the item “it” is not a cohesive one. According to Halliday, cohesive devices are “an important standard to evaluate textual coherence”. Actually, Halliday has never admitted that cohesion equals to coherence or vice versa. Cohesion is essential for textual coherence, or rather, “cohesion is a necessary but insufficient condition of a coherent text”(Halliday & Hasan, 1976: 298). The coherence of one text also relies on a carefully-designed textual structure, logical reasoning and reasonable elaboration of arguments and so on. But it stands true that cohesion and coherence are “two major principles of texts”. 来!自~优尔论-文|网www.youerw.com

From my view of point, to conclude, in a coherent text, there must be some cohesive devices employed while employing some cohesive devices dose not necessarily lead to a coherent text.

2.4 Previous Studies on Cohesion and Coherence

Under the guidance of the textual cohesion theory, domestic scholars also have studied cohesive devices and textual coherence from different perspectives.