The Cohesive Strategies used to Construct Thematic and interactional Meaning in Selected Nandi KASS TV interviews on Agriculture

Author: Ruth Jerop Mutai, Dr. Simon Nganga. Prof. Mary Lonyangapuo

Date: 2026

Abstract: Effective use of cohesive resources is central to the communication of agricultural knowledge, particularly in oral, community-based broadcast discourse in indigenous African languages. This paper draws on a broader Master of Arts thesis to report on the first objective of a study that examined the cohesive strategies used to construct thematic and interactional meaning in selected Nandi KASS TV interviews on agriculture. The study was guided by Halliday and Hasan's theory of cohesion, extended to include discourse-pragmatic and prosodic resources. An interpretive qualitative design grounded in discourse analysis was adopted, and five purposively sampled KASS TV agricultural interviews broadcast between August 2023 and March 2025 were transcribed using Jefferson conventions and analysed inductively. Findings show that Nandi speakers deploy a wide repertoire of cohesive strategies: lexical cohesion dominated by same-item repetition; grammatical cohesion realised mainly through pronominal and demonstrative reference and additive and causal conjunctions, with restrained substitution and an almost exclusive reliance on nominal ellipsis; discourse-pragmatic strategies such as topical management, enumeration, code-switching and contrastive pairs; and prosodic devices including lexical tone, intonation, tempo and pause. The study concludes that cohesion in spoken Nandi broadcast discourse is multidimensional and extends beyond Halliday and Hasan's original model. It recommends that broadcasters and agricultural extension officers deliberately deploy these strategies to strengthen clarity and audience engagement.

View Full Text