Coherence and Cohesion in English Discourse

1 Introduction
The process of interpreting texts is best seen as analogous to the interpretation 
of the context of situation. The reader tries to make sense of a complex interplay 
between cues and the reader’s resources. As a matter of fact, the reader’s 
resources are in effect a mental map of the social order (cf. Fairclough 2010). 
We can view such mental maps as particular interpretations of social realities. 
Yet a mental map is necessarily just one interpretation of social realities and is 

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open to many interpretations, politically and ideologically invested (Fairclough 
2010: 83). The importance of the context of situation brings us to the realization 
that viewing the context of situation in terms of mental maps enables the reader 
to read and understand the text on two levels. The first level can be characterized 
as reading of the situation: certain elements are foregrounded while others are 
backgrounded, all elements being related to each other in a variety of ways. At 
the second level the reader is aware of certain specifications which are relevant 
to the particular discourse type he is dealing with.
Differences between discourse types are important in many aspects, for 
example socially when the reader understands particular elements of context and 
situation based on his/her social background and experiential complex. In this 
way actional components of a text or its parts create what is generally termed as 
the force of text (cf. Fairclough 2010, de Beaugrande and Dressler 1981). The 
force of text is related to its coherence in many aspects. Coherence is generally 
understood as a property of texts, but some authors suggest viewing it as a 
property of interpretations.
In general a text is coherent when its constituent parts are meaningfully related 
so that the text as a whole makes sense. This does not automatically require or 
guarantee explicitness of formal markers of these meaningful relations, and the 
openness of a text can vary; its coherence can be more or less incomplete and 
cohesive links lacking (van Peer 1989: 279). Still the reader is usually capable of 
integrating and inferring the message in a literary text.
Various theories and approaches concentrate on various aspects of 
coherence. Some of them search for answers identifying the role of a pretext 
in an interpretation of a literary text, pointing out specificities of the context 
of creation and context of reception (cf. Widdowson 2004, 2012). In a social 
theory of discourse the ideological function of coherence has been emphasized 
(Fairclough 2010: 84). The main idea comes from our belief that a text makes 
sense only to a reader who is capable of inferring meaningful relations in the 
absence of explicit markers. As emphasized by Fairclough (ibid.: 83-84) the