Coherence and Cohesion in English Discourse

particular readers’ comprehension (cf. e.g. Bublitz 1999). “Coherence … resides 
not in the text, but is rather the outcome of a dialogue between the text and its 
listener or reader”; it necessarily follows that “… some texts may be coherent 
and meaningful to some receivers but uninterpretable to others” (Tanskanen 
2006: 7). Unlike coherence in spoken discourse (cf. Chapter Three in this book), 
which can be negotiated constantly by all discourse participants (Povolná 2007, 
2009), coherence in written discourse cannot be negotiated explicitly, since the 
context is split (Fowler 1986) and consequently the writer has to anticipate the 
“expectations of the reader and to use explicit signals” (Dontcheva-Navratilova 
2007: 128). The appropriate use of such explicit guiding signals is undoubtedly 
an important strategy in academic written discourse, especially if the author 
intends to achieve the academic literacy required by Anglo-American academic 

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conventions, which entails features such as complexity, formality, precision, 
objectivity, explicitness and accuracy (cf. e.g. Hamp-Lyons and Heasley 2006, 
Bennett 2009).
As regards their function in the sentence structure, conjuncts represent one 
of the four possible broad categories of grammatical function adverbials can 
perform (Quirk et al. 1985: 501, Greenbaum and Quirk 1990: 162), i.e. adjunct, 
subjunct, disjunct, and conjunct. As the term itself suggests, ‘conjuncts’ connect 
two linguistic units which can be very large or very small, such as constituent 
of a phrase realizing a single clause element, clauses, sentences, paragraphs, or 
even larger parts of a text, by expressing a semantic relation between them. Some 
other frequently used labels for what is discussed under the term ‘conjuncts’ in 
this chapter are ‘linking adverbials’ (Biber et al. 1999: 761), ‘sentence adverbials’ 
(Leech and Svartvik 2002: 187) and ‘connective adjuncts’ (Huddleston and 
Pullum 2002: 775), to name just a few. It is indisputable that all these labels 
emphasize the fact that this group of adverbials primarily serves a connective 
function. It may also be interesting to compare ‘conjuncts’ (traditionally called 
‘half-conjunctions’) and ‘conjunctions’ using Sweet’s description (1891), in which 
the author states that “the difference between half- and full conjunctions is that 
half-conjunctions connect logically only, not formally also, as full conjunctions 
do” (Sweet 1891: 143, as quoted in Greenbaum 1969: 231).
Since the present study follows Biber et al.’s semantic classification of 
adverbials (1999: 875-879), it is necessary to mention here the six general 
semantic categories the authors distinguish. These are: 1. enumeration and 
addition; 2. summation; 3. apposition; 4. result/inference; 5. contrast/concession; 
and 6. transition. Accordingly, the adverbials in this chapter will be labelled as 
listing (which include both enumerative and additive conjuncts), summative, 
appositive, resultive/inferential, contrastive/concessive, and transitional 
conjuncts. As for their possible formal realizations, conjuncts can be realized by 
the classes that follow: 1. adverb phrases (including simple adverbs, e.g. 
next, 
finally, then
, compound adverbs, e.g. 
however, nevertheless
, and two or more 
words with an adverb as a headword, e.g. 
even so
); 2. prepositional phrases (e.g. 
in addition, on the other hand
); 3. finite clauses (e.g. 
what is more
); and 4. non-
finite clauses (e.g. 
to summarize
).