Grammatical or lexical relationships that bind different parts of a text together and give it unity. Cohesion is achieved through:

• various devices such as connectives, ellipses and word associations (sometimes called ‘lexical cohesion’). These associations include synonyms, antonyms (for example, ‘study / laze about’, ‘ugly/beautiful’), repetition (for example, ‘work, work, work – that’s all we do!’) and collocation (for example, ‘friend’ and ‘pal’ in, ‘My friend did me a big favour last week. She’s been a real pal.’).