Coherence and Cohesion in English Discourse

2 Cohesion and its relation to coherence
Coherence is one of the constitutive properties of discourse which comes 
into being in the process of communication in which the interactants derive 
meaning from a text and strive to achieve their specific communicative intentions 
while relying on their background knowledge and the context in order to infer 
missing links and meaning components. Thus coherence may be defined as the 
interpretative perception of semantic unity and purposefulness derived from a 
text, which encompasses conceptual connectedness, evaluative and dialogical 
consistency and textual relatedness. It is textual relatedness that is associated 
with cohesion, a textual property signalled by semantic relations between lexical 
items and grammatical structures which overtly connect clauses and/or clause 
complexes in a text (e.g. Widdowson 1978, de Beaugrande and Dressler 1981, 
Halliday and Hasan 1976, 1989, Hoey 1991, 2001, Tanskanen 2006). 
As views on the interdependence of cohesion and coherence vary, it is 
essential to state that the approach adopted in this investigation regards coherence 
and cohesion as closely related but independent phenomena (cf. e.g. Seidlhofer 

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and Widdowson 1997, Táryiková 2002, Miššíková 2007, Povolná 2012). The 
most important difference between these discourse properties stems from the 
understanding that cohesion is a property of text, while coherence pertains 
to discourse (e.g. Bublitz 1999, Widdowson 2004). Thus coherence is not 
regarded as inherent to a text; it is rather seen as a property of discourse which 
is derived within the process of instantiation of the interpretation potential of 
a text (Dontcheva-Navratilova 2011). Cohesion, on the other hand, is a textual 
property which fosters coherence as cohesive devices guide the reader in text 
processing. It should be mentioned that the interpretation of cohesive relations is 
also context-dependent and affected by the 
background knowledge of the reader; 
therefore the relations established by different readers need not be identical. 
Cohesion stems from the potential of overt linguistic mechanisms (lexical and 
grammatical) to establish internal links between parts of the text as well as between 
the text and its context, thus serving as signals available to, but not necessarily 
utilized by the writer (Brown and Yule 1983: 198), and to guide the reader towards 
an intended discourse interpretation. Since the publication of a seminal work by 
Halliday and Hasan (1976), cohesion has been conceptualized as comprising 
four types of grammatical cohesive ties (conjunctives, reference, substitution and 
ellipsis) and two categories of lexical cohesion (reiteration and collocation); in 
addition, some authors take into consideration the cohesive role of parallelism, 
theme-rheme articulation and given-new information organization, which are 
referred to as structural cohesion. There is, however, variation in the analytical 
models suggested for the analysis of cohesive relations (cf. Halliday and Hasan 
1976, 1989, Martin 1992, Hoey 1991, 2001, Tanskanen 2006). Thus the existing 
taxonomies of conjunctives vary in the number and types of external logical 
relations between experiences of the participants, and internal logical relations 
holding between discourse components (cf. Halliday and Hasan 1976, Martin 
1992, Kehler 2002). As to the categories of reference, substitution and ellipsis, the 
function they perform is basically the same – to refer repeatedly to the same entity, 
action or state in the discourse, thus keeping them available in the active memory 
of the participants in the interaction – and the boundaries between these categories 
are considered to be rather fuzzy (cf. Hoey 1991, Tárnyiková 2002). 
The treatment of reference, a category central to the present research, is also 
not unified. While for Halliday and Hasan (1976) the cohesive force of reference 
is restricted to endophoric relations, which can be decoded by reference to 
other elements in the discourse without recourse to the situation, other linguists 
extend the scope of reference to include exophoric reference, the meaning of 
which is recovered by reference to the situational context or the shared cultural 
knowledge of the interactants for the supplying of the identity of things, people, 
ideas or spatial and temporal settings mentioned in the discourse. Within this 
cognitive conception of reference, deixis and endophora (understood here as 

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reference to shared representation in discourse rather than to previous text) can 
be considered as “complementary discourse referring procedures which the 
user exploits when processing, modifying and assessing the contents of mental 
models of an unfolding discourse within the minds of speaker and addressee” 
(Cornish 2008: 999). Moreover, reference may be seen as a cline including 
two polar types – ‘pure’ deixis and ‘pure’ endophora – and transitional cases of 
what have been termed ‘anadeictic’ (Cornish 2008: 1000) or ‘quasi-anaphoric’ 
(Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 1471) expressions combining anaphoric and 
deictic reference. In agreement with this approach, the present research considers 
exophoric reference indicated by indexical devices such as personal pronouns, 
e.g. 
I, you, we
, demonstratives, e.g. 
this, those
, or adverbials, e.g. 
here
, 
now
, as 
contributing to the continuity of shared mental representations in the minds of 
the interlocutors.
Finally, there is also some variation in the categorization of the lexical 
coherence categories reiteration and collocation. While reiteration is generally 
clearly defined as a 
cohesive link achieved by repetition of the same lexical 
item and by the use of synonyms, paraphrasis, opposites and lexical items with 
more general or more specific meaning, there are so many divergences in the 
understanding of the category of collocation that it has been called “a ragbag 
of lexical relations” (Hoey 1991: 7). Probably the most adequate, and most 
recent, conceptualization of collocation is that suggested by Tanskanen (2006), 
who considers three types of cohesive relation – ordered set, activity-related and 
elaborative collocation. 
Despite differences in their views on the relationship between cohesion and 
coherence and the analytical models applied to the study of cohesive relations, all 
researchers agree that cohesive relations enhance the perception of continuity and 
semantic unity in discourse and thus constitute an important aspect of discourse 
coherence. The analysis of indexical devices carried out in this study strives to 
bring further evidence of this by showing how indexicals with anaphoric and 
deictic interpretation contribute to the construal of discourse coherence.