International Journal of Arts & Sciences, CD-ROM. ISSN: 1944-6934 :: 09(04):423–432 (2017) THE SEMANTIC CONCEPT OF COHESION IN THE PUBLIC DISCOURSE: ON THE EXAMPLE OF ASSERTIVE TEXTS IN THE MEDIA-TRANSMITTED PUBLIC DISCOURSE Tamara Gazdi -Aleri , Bernardina Petrovi and Marko Aleri University of Zagreb, Croatia Cohesion is one of the most important factors of text creation. It is a semantic concept which occurs when the interpretation of one element in the text depends on some other element. Two mutually dependent elements form a cohesive connection, which means that one element presupposes the other in such a way that it cannot be decoded and understood without that other element with which it is semantically related. Due to the fact that cohesion is confirmed in the connections among the utterances within the text and it is represented through the use of lexical and semantic means, the use of cohesive means makes the communication easier for the recipient. Cohesion refers to the ways in which the components of the surface structure of the text are interconnected in the sequence. These surface components are mutually interdependent and are in accordance with grammatical forms and conventions. The paper presents the analysis of the semantic aspect of cohesive links in the assertive texts and media-transmitted public discourse in the Croatian language. Special attention will be paid to the description of functions of the four basic types of cohesion: reference, ellipsis, cohesion realized with connectors and lexical cohesion. These will be studied with regard to the outer and inner relationships which are established among those linking devices and which occur in the corpus collected. In the analysis of the examples of cohesive types, semantic as well as syntactical and pragmatic aspects of linking will be brought together. In other words, linking within a text will be studied in the entirety of the communication process. Keywords: Cohesion, Public communication, Semantics. Introduction In the frame of text linguistics and discourse analysis cohesive means are one of the most important factors in creating text, the semantic concept in which interpretation of one element in text depends on another element. The cohesive relationship thus creates two interdependent elements in which one element presupposes the other in such a way that it cannot be decoded and understood without the other element to which is semantically related. As cohesiveness is asserted through relationship among statements within a text and it is presented with lexical and semantic resources, the use of recipient’s cohesive means certainly facilitates communication. Cohesiveness in fact refers to the ways in which components of the text surface structure are connected in sequence, whereby the surface components depend on each other according to the grammatical forms and conventions. In construction of each text, cohesive means are the ones which are connecting sentences in a text unit. This textual principle refers to 423