Discourse Syntax

This book aims to describe cohesive links beyond sentence borders in Contemporary Hebrew, and to contend that structure is a trait, which extends beyond the boundaries of the sentence. A comprehensive and methodological study of cohesion in Hebrew has not been made prior to this book, and only partial descriptions existed. U. Ornan, for instance, explained the phenomena of definiteness versus indefiniteness and delimitative attributes versus non-delimitative attributes in Hebrew by means of rules operating beyond sentence borders (Ornan, haMishpat haPashoot [The Simple Sentence], Jerusalem 1979, 14-17, 59-61).

In this book, the cohesive links have been classified into four categories: (1) Grammatical  (2) structural (3) Lexical (4) Semantic. Such cohesive links also operate within the borders of the sentence, but this book does not deal with intra-sentential cohesive links but only with inter-sentential ones.

It may be noted that the use of the term cohesion in this study, differs from that of known linguists whose field is discourse analysis in that we stress the structural traits of cohesive links. For example, Halliday and Hasan defined cohesion as a semantic concept (M.A.K. Halliday, R. Hasan, Cohesion in English, London 1976: 4) and stressed that the term, as they use it, does not denote a structural relation (id. p. 6).