Reference and Its Role in Cohesion of Poetry: A Study of the Poem “Azab al-Hallaj” by Abdolvahhab al-Bayati

Text linguistics is one of the most important studies that survey the text from the perspective of the criteria of text research. It has an important role in recognizing text from non-text. One of the most important criteria is cohesion which will be examined in three levels. These levels are grammer, vocabulary, and phonetics. Reference has the main presence in the text among cohesion tools such as ellipsis, subsituation, and conjunction. De BeauGerande believes it to be the most prominent criterion in the realization of context because it refers to the existing semantic relationship in the text that convert the text into a developed and interconnected unit. Reference in the text is made through pronouns, determinatives, Wh- clauses, simultaneity tools, and articles. Since the use of these items and their influence on the cohesion of the text is less noticed, this research surveys the references in the poem “Azab al-Hallaj” by Abdolvahhab al-Bayati. The results indicate that references have a significant role in the cohesion of the poem and its six sections with each other. Situasional references link the text to the external context and make the reader receive the meaning and link it with its references, while textual references have the important role of the cohesion of the poem and creating correlation between its different parts. In addition, Albayati uses a variety of reference tools such as pronouns, determinatives, Wh- clauses, simultaneity tools, and articles. Pronoun references are among the most frequent items which make the text coherent. Although the transposition of the roles between the two main characters makes it hard to detect the antecedent, it creates an excellent and coherent context.