Beyond Guthrie?: Text-linguistics and New Testament Studies 37 a relational and directional40 manner, but not a feature directly linked to structure41. On the other hand, for Guthrie, cohesion is the central, if not exclusive42, linguistic characteristic of his interpretive methodology, serving primarily to mark spans rather than links, and taking a prominent role in his determination of structural boundaries. Brown and Yule, who note the common struggle in clearly grasping Halliday and Hasan’s discussion of cohesion, provide an illustration that demonstrates well one problem inherent in Guthrie’s approach. Their example follows: A: There’s the doorbell. B: I’m in the bath43. If this text was subjected to Guthrie’s analysis, it would be classified as a high-level boundary reflecting a cohesive shift in topic (which counts double in Guthrie’s system)44, location, actor, subject, person, reference, the linguistic system, of which cohesion is one part. The textual component as a whole is the set of resources in a language whose semantic function is that of expressing relationship to the environment” (298–99). They later add, “Texture involves much more than merely cohesion. In the construction of text the establishment of cohesive relations is a necessary component; but it is not the whole story. . . . The main components of texture . . . are the theme systems and the information systems” (324–25). Halliday and Hasan, Cohesion in English, 298–99, 324–25. 40 Ibid, 12, 18–19. Halliday and Hasan state, “‘Cohesion’ is defined as the set of [relational] possibilities that exist in the language for making text hang together. . . . But cohesion is also a process. . . . A text unfolds in real time, and directionality is built into it”. 41 Ibid, 10. Halliday and Hasan state, “[C]ohesion is not just another name for discourse structure. Discourse structure is, as the name implies, a type of structure; the term is used to refer to the structure of some postulated unit higher than the sentence, for example the paragraph, or some larger entity such as episode or topic unit. The concept of cohesion is set up to account for relations in discourse, but in rather a different way, without the implication that there is some structural unit that is above the sentence”. At first glance, this may appear to be inconsistent with the question they raise at the end of their study (see above), but it should be noted that they are not there implying that cohesion, or the lack thereof, is itself a structural indicator, only that it may be related somehow to the structure of a text. 42 Cohesion is the only linguistic characteristic discussed by Guthrie. A review of any text from the broader field of linguistics will reveal a much more complex picture of communication. For example, see below regarding Guthrie’s synonymous interpretation of cohesion and coherence. 43 Brown and Yule, Discourse Analysis, 196. See also p. 195 for the confusion of many regarding the role of cohesion in a text. They suggest that Halliday and Hasan are referring to the underlying semantic relationships that actually provide the cohesive power of a text, rather than merely the presence, or lack, of cohesive ties, as illustrated in the above example. In this case, the first expositional statement is really a request answered by a second statement that offers a reason for the unstated negative response. 44 Guthrie, Structure, 59, n. 2.