Coherence and Cohesion in English Discourse

6 Conclusion
The aim of this investigation into coherence and persuasion in political 
speeches was to show that the persuasion strategies used by political speakers 
to represent themselves as credible and reliable political actors are closely 
interwoven with devices contributing to construal of discourse coherence at the 
interpersonal, ideational and textual planes of discourse.
As this study has demonstrated, political speakers strive to persuade the 
audience to accept their ideologically biased representation of reality by 
enhancing their credibility through the establishment of a dialogic framework 
which allows them to negotiate a coherent representation of value systems, social 
actors, actions and events and by constructing coherent logical argumentation to 
support their claims and actions. The persuasion strategies used in the salutation 

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are associated with the establishment of the reliability and existential coherence 
of the speaker together with the construction of his/her relationship with the 
audience. In the body of political speeches persuasion strategies are coherently 
threaded into discourse topic development based on a continuous representation 
of social actors involved in a logical sequence of temporally framed actions 
and events the interdependence of which is fostered by cohesive relations. The 
persuasive force of the argumentation is enhanced by expressive and evaluative 
lexical items which convey a consistent categorization of actors, actions and 
events and emphatic evaluation of the issue under consideration. Since the 
results of this investigation have shown that the interpretation of ideational 
meanings and cohesive relations depends on the alignment of the speaker with 
the audience and the ideological perspective from which the speaker conveys 
his/her evaluative judgments and attitudes, it can be claimed that interpersonal 
meanings are primary in the perception of coherence in political discourse.
To conclude, it should be noted that while this investigation hopes to have 
shed light on the interdependence between persuasion and the perception of 
coherence in political speeches, it has certainly not provided an exhaustive 
analysis of all linguistic means that politicians have at their disposal to enhance 
the persuasive force of their rhetoric. However, what seems to be clear is that 
the interpretative perception of discourse coherence is a result of the interplay 
of meanings pertaining to all – interpersonal, ideational and textual – planes of 
discourse.