Abstract
This paper uses the Halliday and Hasan model of cohesion to study graffiti at the University of Nairobi. The paper argues that although many studies have been undertaken on graffiti at various universities, most of them have focused on toilet graffiti and on non-cohesive strategies and so there is need to turn to library desk graffiti as well and its cohesion styles. Although the study also notes that other cohesion types are present in the University of Nairobi graffiti data, it focuses only on lexical cohesion which seems to be the most salient and pronounced. Further, few studies on graffiti have focused on cohesion that involves multiple writers of a text and the challenges of establishing a reference process and communication of meaning and hanging together of elements in a text. This study reveals a heavy presence of lexical cohesion with all the types of lexical cohesion viz reiteration that subsumes, repetition, synonymy, and hyponymy and collocation that subsumes antonymy. It is argued in this paper that most lexical cohesion at the University of Nairobi desk graffiti tends to exhibit a lot of repetition that is largely non co-referential. This repetition is used to guide which way the discussion goes and to reinforce the topic of discussion and even signal change of topic. By and large there is a heavy presence of synonymy and hyponymy with antonymy being minimal. Nominal relationships seem more pronounced with a small percentage of it being verbal.