THE APPROACH OF COHERENCE AND COHESION IN NARRATIVE DISCOURSE OF FIVE PROPHETS ACCORDING TO SURAH AL-ARAF

Coherence and cohesion are two important criteria to elevate the writing of any story to a good narrative discourse that is easy to understand and can influence others. studies that combine coherence and cohesion in narrative discourse received little attention from earlier researchers, in particular in the text of the quran. the quran contains 114 chapters (surah), among which is the chapter of al-a’raf that contains 206 verses depicting a variety of stories in the form of narrative discourse. the combination of several stories within one chapter is one form of narrative discourse used in the quran. this study took the initiative to discuss the cohesion and coherence in each story in the chapter and among the stories of the five messengers that were narrated simultaneously and chronologically, were the story of the prophet noah, prophet hud, prophet salih, prophet lot and prophet shu’ayb. the cohesion theory of halliday and hassan (1976) was used to determine explicit cohesive devices, while the rhetorical structure theory of mann and thompson (1987) was used to determine implicit coherence. this study found several structures of coherence in the narrative discourse of the five messengers, namely abstract that refers to the beginning of the story, invitation, rejection with arguments, counterarguments, and conclusion, whereby the numbers differed from one story to another. these types of cohesion are not subject to specific coherence type and are suitable to be used in every connective verse. only the purposeful coherence uses the conjunctive cohesion. the same lexical cohesion is used frequently and this proves that the quran uses words sparingly, precisely and concisely.