Text Linguistics and Cohesion: How It is Accommodated to Arabic from the Viewpoint of Contemporary Arab Scholars

Text linguistics and the related areas of studies including the knowledge of cohesion is a recent branch of study in linguistics and literary criticism. Like many other linguistic and literary theories, this field has emanated from the western thoughts. Theories of the western society have caused different reactions among the Arab scholars in linguistics and literature. Some insist that such theories and ideas as intersexuality, perception, interpretation, and structuralism originate from Arab societies as part of the Arab heritage as they have already been developed by Arab scholars. Indeed, they are right to some extent. On the other hand, some consider them as totally new and unprecedented. Still there are others who take a more moderate stance, believing that they belong to the west, but trying to accommodate the theories to Arabic distinct features and its rich lexical and literary resources. This article sets out to examine the theories of contemporary Arab scholars in Arabic text linguistics, and suggests that many of them believe that the model of cohesion developed by Haliday cannot account for the Arabic language, attempting to accommodate the model by the deletion or addition of some factors.