11
and Widdowson 1997, Táryiková 2002, Miššíková 2007, Povolná 2012). The
most important difference between these discourse properties stems from the
understanding that cohesion is a property of text, while coherence pertains
to discourse (e.g. Bublitz 1999, Widdowson 2004). Thus coherence is not
regarded as inherent to a text; it is rather seen as a property of
discourse which
is derived within the process of instantiation of the interpretation potential of
a text (Dontcheva-Navratilova 2011). Cohesion, on the other hand, is a textual
property which fosters coherence as cohesive devices guide the reader in text
processing. It should be mentioned that the interpretation of cohesive relations is
also context-dependent and affected by the
background knowledge of the reader;
therefore the relations established by different readers need not be identical.
Cohesion stems from the potential of overt linguistic mechanisms (lexical and
grammatical) to establish internal links between parts of the text as well as between
the text and its context, thus serving as signals available to,
but not necessarily
utilized by the writer (Brown and Yule 1983: 198), and to guide the reader towards
an intended discourse interpretation. Since the publication of a seminal work by
Halliday and Hasan (1976), cohesion has been conceptualized as comprising
four types of grammatical cohesive ties (conjunctives, reference, substitution and
ellipsis) and two categories of lexical cohesion (reiteration and collocation); in
addition, some authors take into consideration the cohesive role of parallelism,
theme-rheme articulation and given-new information organization, which are
referred to as structural cohesion. There is, however, variation in the analytical
models suggested for the analysis of cohesive relations (cf.
Halliday and Hasan
1976, 1989, Martin 1992, Hoey 1991, 2001, Tanskanen 2006). Thus the existing
taxonomies of conjunctives vary in the number and types of external logical
relations between experiences of the participants, and internal logical relations
holding between discourse components (cf. Halliday and Hasan 1976, Martin
1992, Kehler 2002). As to the categories of reference, substitution and ellipsis, the
function they perform is basically the same – to refer repeatedly to the same entity,
action or state in the discourse, thus keeping them available
in the active memory
of the participants in the interaction – and the boundaries between these categories
are considered to be rather fuzzy (cf. Hoey 1991, Tárnyiková 2002).
The treatment of reference, a category central to the present research, is also
not unified. While for Halliday and Hasan (1976) the cohesive force of reference
is restricted to endophoric relations, which can be decoded by reference to
other elements in the discourse without recourse to the situation, other linguists
extend the scope of reference to include exophoric reference, the meaning of
which is recovered by reference to the situational context or
the shared cultural
knowledge of the interactants for the supplying of the identity of things, people,
ideas or spatial and temporal settings mentioned in the discourse. Within this
cognitive conception of reference, deixis and endophora (understood here as
12
reference to shared representation in discourse rather than to previous text) can
be considered as “complementary discourse referring procedures which the
user exploits when processing, modifying and assessing the contents of mental
models of an unfolding discourse within the minds of speaker and addressee”
(Cornish 2008: 999). Moreover, reference may be seen as a cline including
two polar types – ‘pure’ deixis and ‘pure’ endophora – and transitional cases of
what have been termed ‘anadeictic’ (Cornish 2008: 1000) or ‘quasi-anaphoric’
(Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 1471) expressions
combining anaphoric and
deictic reference. In agreement with this approach, the present research considers
exophoric reference indicated by indexical devices such as personal pronouns,
e.g.
I, you, we
, demonstratives, e.g.
this, those
, or adverbials, e.g.
here
,
now
, as
contributing to the continuity of shared mental representations in the minds of
the interlocutors.
Finally, there is also some variation in the categorization of the lexical
coherence categories reiteration and collocation. While reiteration is generally
clearly defined as a
cohesive link achieved by repetition of the same lexical
item and
by the use of synonyms, paraphrasis, opposites and lexical items with
more general or more specific meaning, there are so many divergences in the
understanding of the category of collocation that it has been called “a ragbag
of lexical relations” (Hoey 1991: 7). Probably the most adequate, and most
recent, conceptualization of collocation is that suggested by Tanskanen (2006),
who considers three types of cohesive relation – ordered set, activity-related and
elaborative collocation.
Despite differences in their views on the relationship between cohesion and
coherence and the analytical models applied to the study of cohesive relations, all
researchers agree that cohesive relations enhance the perception of continuity and
semantic unity in discourse and thus constitute an important aspect
of discourse
coherence. The analysis of indexical devices carried out in this study strives to
bring further evidence of this by showing how indexicals with anaphoric and
deictic interpretation contribute to the construal of discourse coherence.
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