Her early PhD research began a long interest in language and verbal art. In the 1960s she worked at the Sociolinguistic Research Centre with Basil Bernstein,on issues concerning the relation of language and the distribution of forms of consciousness. This engagement spawned both her later work on semantic variation,[3] and provided the impetus and data for her early studies of what underpins text unity—in her terms, texture and text structure. in 1976, with MAK Halliday she published what remains the most comprehensive analysis of cohesion in English.[4] In their further co-authored book, Language Context and Text: Aspects of Language in a Social-Semiotic Perspective,[5] Hasan set out the interrelationships of texture and text structure (i.e. her notion of "generic structure potential", or "GSP").