Coherence and Cohesion in English Discourse

1 Introduction
However simple it may sound, the primary purpose of reading a newspaper 
for readers is still to get information (rather than entertainment), i.e. to learn the 
latest local and/or national and international news – ideally, to obtain reliable and 
objective accounts of events and affairs relevant and newsworthy to readers, who 
‘live and exist’ in a particular social and cultural context. Therefore, the primary 
task of a newspaper, its editors and journalists should be to meet this expectation 
and provide their readers with such information – a task relatively easy to define 
in theory but extremely difficult to perform in practice. This assumption naturally 
raises a number of essential questions and issues to consider, such as what kind of 
news is newsworthy to the readers of a particular paper, what the readers expect 
to find in ‘their’ paper, what language a newspaper uses to present information, 
etc. Another important issue for both journalists and researchers is the issue of 
objective reporting, if such reporting exists at all, as some newspaper analysts 
argue (e.g. Fowler 1991).

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Considering the prominent roles of modern media, newspapers are no longer 
mere transmitters of information; they also act, or at least attempt to act, as creators 
and promoters of particular social views and attitudes as well as moral guardians 
and agenda setters (cf. e.g. Temple 2008). In this regard the interpretation of 
meaning in newspaper discourse becomes an issue more crucial than ever before. 
It is a widely acknowledged belief that more is communicated than actually 
written or said, and in newspaper discourse it seems to be particularly true.
Newspaper discourse as a type of written discourse differs from 
spoken 
discourse mainly in that it is planned, prepared and well thought-out and it does 
not allow negotiation of meaning between the sender and the recipient; in other 
words, there is no “explicit construction of meaning” (Dontcheva-Navratilova 
2011: 1). Yet despite the absence of contact between the two, newspaper 
discourse still is and should be approached as a ‘form of communication’; it can 
be seen as ‘a communication process’ which involves the encoding and decoding 
of messages and thus naturally also ‘interpretation of meaning’ and ‘discourse 
interpretation’ in general. In this regard, cohesion and cohesive devices play a 
central role in newspaper discourse since they enhance coherence and enable the 
reader to make sense of discourse.
It is worth noting that not all linguists understand the relationship between 
coherence and cohesion in the same way. In Hasan’s (1989) framework, the 
interaction of cohesive devices (labelled by Hasan as ‘cohesive harmony’) 
serves as a basis for perceived coherence, so coherence and cohesion are 
viewed as mutually interdependent; in other words, coherence is seen as 
following from cohesion. Other linguists, for example Hoey (1991), Tanskanen 
(2006), Dontcheva-Navratilova (2011) and Povolná (2007), view the two as 
complementary but in essence independent of each other. In this perspective, as 
Tanskanen (2006) explains,
... coherence is not inherent in text as such, but rather it is the result of the 
interpretation process and ultimately depends on the relation between the receiver 
and the text; …. cohesive devices predispose receivers to find the coherence … 
(ibid.: 20).
Since in this view coherence is not a property of text or discourse itself but 
is derived from text or discourse by the receiver, it is not unusual that some 
receivers will find a particular text meaningful and coherent, whereas to others 
the same text may be uninterpretable, for example, due to a lack of background 
knowledge (ibid.). Nevertheless, whether coherence and cohesion are seen as 
interdependent or independent of each other, they unarguably aid or even govern 
the interpretation of meaning, and are indispensable constituents of human 
communication, whether spoken or written.

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If follows from the above that language must be interpreted and not just 
‘passively consumed’ in order to be meaningful to a language user. Language 
itself enables humans to communicate their meanings but if communication is 
to happen and be successful, the interpretation of meaning by the recipient has 
to happen too. With regard to newspaper discourse, which is the focus of the 
present chapter, it would be simplistic and wrong in essence to assume that the 
journalist encodes a particular meaning and the receiver – the reader – decodes 
it, i.e. interprets it, in exactly the way intended by the journalist. It should also 
be noted that the sender in this context is not an individual journalist because a 
journalist’s original report undergoes a number of changes during the strict and 
elaborate process of editing by several editors and sub-editors, and the report 
published finally in the newspaper is thus ‘a joint product’ rather than a ‘product 
of an individual’, so the meaning is not encoded by an individual, i.e. a journalist 
himself/herself. Moreover, the ‘joint product’ should be in accordance with the 
paper’s ‘editorial line’, which is to a large extent governed by the intended/
implied readership of the paper, to whom the discourse should be coherent in 
the first place. 
At this point it needs to be emphasized that the readers of a particular 
newspaper represent a heterogeneous rather than a homogenous group. Still, 
newspapers need to and do work with the concept of ‘implied readership’ 
(cf. below), because they need to identify their ‘target group’ in terms of age, 
profession or social status, as these will determine the range of topics and type of 
news, the language used, and also the advertising potential, for example. Despite 
such generalisations the readers of a particular newspaper do not represent an 
easily identifiable group with identical views and opinions. It can by no means be 
assumed that 1) all readers will derive the same meaning from the discourse, and 
2) that the meaning derived by the readers is the same as the intended one. Still, the 
same text or discourse may be coherent to individual readers, although possibly 
in a different way because there are a number of factors which participate in the 
process of meaning and discourse interpretation, such as the reader’s background 
and personal experience, his/her social status and identity, views and attitudes, 
and the social context (whether permanent or temporary), etc. Therefore, what