Coherence and Cohesion in English Discourse

participants, or even by the same participant under different communicative 
conditions, and that coherence cannot be taken for granted but, depending on 
situation, genre or text type, rather viewed as being more or less temporary, since 
it is permanently in need of being checked against new information. Discourse 
is approached from a functional perspective, in accordance with which language 
can be seen as a system of meaning potential (Halliday 1978: 39) which is 
instantiated through text in discourse. Within the interpretative process affected 
by the background encyclopaedic knowledge of and the mutual relationship 
between all discourse participants, meaning is negotiated and recreated in a 
particular context in order to reflect the communicative intentions of interactants 
in a given communicative situation (Mey 1991). Thus discourse is derived 
from a text in the process of purposeful interaction via verbal and non-verbal 
means between a speaker/writer and a listener/reader which takes place in a 
certain context (Seidlhofer and Widdowson 1999: 207). This approach assumes 
the potential of discourse to (re)construct a representation of reality which is 
affected by the point of view of the interactants, i.e. in the process of a particular 
interpretative decoding the hearer/reader creates his/her own discourse from 
the text by assigning it intentionality (not necessarily the one intended by the 
speaker/writer) and recreating its meaning. As a result, discourse interpretation 
cannot be seen as definite and constant; it is rather viewed as being more or less 
temporary and constantly open to reinterpretation in the light of the intentions and 
purposes that interactants are striving to achieve in a particular social, historical 
and situational context (cf. Widdowson 2004).
The research presented in this volume explores cohesion and coherence in 
different genres of spoken and written English discourse. While applying the 
tools of (critical) discourse analysis, pragmatics, stylistics and sociolinguistics, 
the studies analyse authentic language data using both qualitative and quantitative 
perspectives, which are regarded as complementary.
The studies comprised in the book investigate cohesion and coherence in 
different types of discourse, namely spoken and written 
academic discourse, 
literary discourse, newspaper discourse, and political discourse. The volume 
opens with two studies dealing with academic written discourse represented by the 
genre of 
research articles. The first chapter explores the contribution of 
cohesive 
devices to the perception of coherence, focusing on the role of indexical devices 
such as personal pronouns and 
demonstratives. The findings of the investigation 

---

4
show that by indicating the continuity of referents and discourse organization 
indexicals with both anaphoric and deictic interpretation enhance the perception 
of discourse coherence. The second chapter investigates cross-cultural variation 
in degree of dialogicality resulting from the use of text-organizing devices such 
as conjuncts which contribute to the negotiation of meaning between discourse 
participants, thus on the one hand enhancing the interactive and dialogic character 
of otherwise rather monologic academic texts and on the other fostering coherent 
interpretation.
The third chapter studies the permanent negotiation of meaning between