Coherence and Cohesion in English Discourse

5 Cohesion in newspaper discourse
As mentioned above, in written discourse cohesion and cohesive devices 
contribute largely to the coherence since negotiation of meaning between the 

---

113
sender and the recipient is not possible, and thus the context of the situation as 
well as the ‘actors’ have to be described explicitly. Coherence as “the result of 
the interpretation process” (Tanskanen 2006: 20) is derived from text/discourse 
by the receiver and it does not necessarily have to be the same for all receivers. 
It has also been pointed out previously that apart from providing readers with 
news newspapers communicate certain views and attitudes, or even ideology. 
In view of a particular paper’s implied readership it can be assumed that a 
certain meaning interpretation is encouraged, whether overtly or covertly, since 
it is expected that there will be a certain consensus about what is considered 
acceptable or moral within a particular community. Thus, issues of immigration 
or the country’s involvement in foreign wars, for example, can be depicted 
differently in a primarily right-wing newspaper and in a left-wing one. On the 
other hand, there are issues on which there is a wide consensus in society, such 
as filicide or child abuse, so the interpretation of meaning itself will not differ; 
the newspapers will, however, use different language means to convey the same 
facts/information.
Apart from information, views and attitudes are communicated to readers; 
it is in the first place language that has the capacity to transmit these, whether 
overtly or covertly. The interplay of grammatical and lexical devices, which at the 
same time may also have a cohesive function, thus contributes to the coherence 
of discourse and also the effectiveness of news.
It should be pointed out that extensive research has been carried out on the 
topic of cohesion since Halliday and Hasan (1976) published their seminal work 
Cohesion in English
and described cohesion as being realized by ‘grammatical 
cohesive ties’ (i.e. conjuctives, reference, substitution and ellipsis) and ‘lexical 
cohesive ties’ (i.e. reiteration and collocation), although as others later pointed 
out (e.g. Tárnyiková 2002, Hoey 1991), and the authors themselves further 
acknowledged, these categories are not always strictly distinguishable; the 
original model was modified to reflect the fuzziness of the original categories. 
As other researchers (e.g. Martin 1992, Tanskanen 2006, Dontcheva-Navratilova 
2011) emphasize, the reader’s background knowledge and experience as well 
as knowledge of certain discourse types and strategies (often 
genre specific) 
also have to be taken into account in the interpretation of cohesive devices. 
Dontcheva-Navratilova (2005: 29) offers a comprehensive and useful summary 
of cohesive relations, which reflects the complexity of cohesion and can be 
used to explore cohesion in various genres. She defines cohesive devices as 
a) grammatical (conjunction, reference, substitution and ellipsis), b) lexical 
(repetition, synonymy, antonymy, meronymy and hyponymy) and c) structural 
(parallelism, given-new information and theme-focus organization).

---

114