A Study of Textual Cohesive Elements in Surah Luqman Using Halliday and Hasan’s Functional Theory

 Qur’anic scholars have so far made many efforts to explain the relationship between ayahs of a surah. Although ayahs of a surah may deal with various subjects, all of these subjects are interrelated through cohesive elements that create textual connectedness. One of the major topics of textual linguistics is the textual cohesion theory proposed by Michael Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan (1976). Cohesive elements refer to a set of syntactic and lexical relations which either connect sentences together or create links between the components of a sentence. The present study aimed to explain the possibility and the extent of applying textual cohesive elements in Surah Luqman using Halliday and Hasan’s Functional Theory. Lexical cohesive elements and relevant subcategories in this surah constitutue the highest number with 316 cases, while syntactic cohesive elements rank second with 139 cases, followed by logical links between sentences having 106 cases. All these elements create a kind of cohesion in the text, connecting the beginnings and endings of the ayahs, thereby helping the reader better perceive the themes. Since one of the main topics of this surah is monotheism, the words “Allah”, “Rab”, and attributes of God have been repeated 29, 2, and 19 times, respectively, and this repetition contributes to the textual cohesion of the surah. The findings show that it possible to apply all the elements of functional textual cohesion in Surah Luqman.