Coherence and Cohesion in English Discourse

4 Coherence in newspaper discourse
Discursive meaning should not be narrowed just to the processes of encoding 
and decoding meanings; what also has to be taken into account are particular 
discourse practices and 
genre-specific or professional practices and techniques, 
which naturally influence and help to construct discursive meaning (Richardson 
2007).

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As advocated above, newspaper discourse is ‘a form of communication’ 
which, as any other type of communication, has its underlying principles which 
enter the processes of both discourse production and discourse consumption, 
and thus both the creation/transmission of meaning and meaning interpretation. 
Drawing on the Hallidayan terms of ‘field’, ‘mode’ and ‘tenor’ (Halliday and 
Hasan 1989), a newspaper report can be defined as an act of communication 
which involves primarily transmission and consumption of information (i.e. 
field) conducted between the sender, i.e. the newspaper, and the recipient, i.e. 
the implied reader (i.e. tenor) in written form (i.e. mode). These categories help 
to define the situation, i.e. the context in which the interaction takes place, as 
they reflect aspects that govern the language choices in any language use. In this 
regard, the reader’s expectations play a fundamental role both in the process of 
meaning interpretation and the discourse production. These expectations stem 
mainly from the reader’s background knowledge and previous experience of 
the same ‘discourse type’ or ‘genre’. It is useful to mention here that within 
his framework of critical discourse analysis of the media, Fairclough (1995: 76) 
views the two as distinct categories, ‘genre’ being “a way of using language 
which corresponds to the nature of the social practice that is being engaged in”; 
as such it can be described as “the overarching category for analysing discourse 
types”. ‘Discourse types’, as Fairclough states, “often draw upon two or more 
genres”, although there are also discourse types which “are closely modelled 
on single genres” (ibid.). Discourse types typically found in newspapers include 
‘hard-news’, ‘soft-news’, editorials, feature articles, etc. In this sense, what 
contributes to the coherence of the text/discourse is mainly the typical generic 
structure of these discourse types. As for newspaper reports, it is 
the headline 
– lead – body copy 
structure, which in van Dijk’s framework (1988) represents 
the so-called ‘schematic structure’ of this particular discourse type.
The ‘headline’ has two basic functions – a summary of ‘what’ and ‘who’ and 
an ‘eye catcher’, but it does not necessarily have to fulfil both these functions at 
the same time. The headline may primarily attract the readers’ attention and the 
factual information will follow in the sub-headline and/or the ‘lead’ (Example 
1). The repetition of information (in the headline and the lead) contributes to the 
dramatic effect and emphasizes the main theme. On the other hand, the headline 
may be purely factual, i.e. a summary of the main facts elaborated on in the 
lead (Example 2). Mainly in quality newspapers (i.e. broadsheets), where any 
open judgements or evaluations are ‘forbidden’, the headline and the lead will 
primarily summarize the facts (Example 3).
(1)