Coherence and Cohesion in English Discourse

particular author attempts to achieve in a scholarly text.
“For any particular text or type of text, there is a set of other texts and a set of 
voices which are potentially relevant, and potentially incorporated into the text” 
(Fairclough 2003: 47). As regards academic written discourse, writers – authors 
of research articles in the case of this chapter – enter a permanent dialogue with 
other scholars in the same field of research. They can let their voices, i.e. opinions, 
attitudes, feelings, be heard either directly, notably through direct quotations, or 
more indirectly, by means of paraphrases or reported speech, which both belong 
among the most explicit techniques representing intertextuality (Bazerman 
2004). In agreement with Fairclough (2003) it is assumed that “when the speech 
or writing or thought of another is reported, two different texts, two different 
voices, are brought into dialogue, and potentially two different perspectives, 
objectives, interests and so forth. … There is always likely to be a tension 
between what is going on in the reporting text, including the work which the 
reporting of the other texts is doing within that text, and what was going on in 
the reported text” (ibid.: 48-49). And this is exactly where discourse markers 
such as conjuncts can play an important role, since by virtue of their specific 
meanings they are able to express semantic relations such as apposition, result, 
contrast, and concession between different parts of the texts, thus functioning 
as markers of intertextuality, i.e. “the explicit and implicit relations that a text 
or utterance has to prior, contemporary or future texts” (Bazerman 2004: 86, 
88), and also reflecting the degree of interactivity and 
dialogicality in otherwise 
rather monological written texts. Authors can enter a dialogue not only with other 
authors referred to in the text but also with their own previous research and/or 
with some generally shared hypotheses and attitudes which may be different 
from the current author’s standpoints.
By means of DMs (including conjuncts), which can be classified as 
‘metatextual elements’ or simply ‘connectors’ (Mauranen 1993), “the writer steps 
in explicitly to make his or her presence felt in the text, to give guidance to the 
readers with respect to how the text is organized, to what functions different parts 
of it have, and what the author’s attitudes to the propositions are” (Mauranen 
1993: 9). Accordingly, conjuncts can be viewed as interactive items, which help 
to indicate the way through the text and interpret pragmatic links between ideas 
(Hyland 2005: 49-52). They establish textual, interactional and interpersonal 
relations in texts, since, as already stated, “texts are inevitably and unavoidably 
dialogical” (Fairclough 2003: 42).

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