Cohesion refers to which of the following?

• A. Cohesion
• B. Adverbial
• C. Appraisal
• D. Lexical field

Answer: (A)

Cohesion is the overall linking of a text, created by devices that tie sentences and clauses together so the text flows and feels connected. It’s not just one specific tool, but the system that uses things like reference (pronouns and synonyms pointing to the same thing), substitution, ellipsis (omitting obvious repetition), conjunctions (therefore, however, and so on), and lexical cohesion (repetition of key terms, synonyms, antonyms, or related words) to make the parts fit as a unified whole.

The best choice identifies cohesion itself because it describes this guiding property of how a text hangs together. The other options point to pieces that can contribute to cohesion—an adverbial can signal a relation between clauses, appraisal deals with evaluative language, and a lexical field is a type of lexical cohesion—but they are not the umbrella concept that explains how the text stays coherent overall.