Coherence and Cohesion in English Discourse

1 Introduction
Political interaction can broadly be seen as reflecting 
the total complex 
of relations between people living in society, although more specifically it is 
understood as social relations related to the making of institutional – typically 
governmental or party – policy. Political discourse, which encompasses all types 
of verbal interaction concerning political issues and/or taking place in a political 
context, reflects the ideologies
1
of participants involved in the process of political 
interaction and exploits the potential of language to construct identities and 
1 In agreement with the understanding of this concept by critical linguists, 
ideology is defined here 
as the way a social group or a society views objects existing in its world, explains how the world 
functions, and assigns values to these objects and processes (Fowler 1986: 11).

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power relations helping political actors to persuade others to accept a particular 
ideological representation of reality (e.g. Wilson 1990, Chilton and Schaffner 
2002, Chilton 2004, van Dijk 1997, 2002, 2006, Wodak 2007a). As previous 
research has clearly shown (e.g. Wodak 1996, 2009, Simon-Vandenbergen 1997, 
Fetzer 2002, Honoban 2008, Dontcheva-Navratilova 2012), the interpretation of 
meaning conveyed in political discourse is heavily dependent on multifaceted 
contextual factors. Consequently, in the process of discourse comprehension, 
interactants establish complex intertextual, interdiscursive, social and (inter-) 
cultural connections which may yield variation in the resulting interpretations. 
Thus research into political discourse is bound to explore not only the linguistic, 
but also the socio-cultural, psychological and ideological factors affecting the 
ways in which political actors convey social meanings and make rhetorical and 
linguistic choices in order to legitimate their ideological views and to guide the 
audience towards a discourse interpretation which suits their communicative 
purposes.
Coherence, viewed here as the subjective perception of meaningfulness and 
purposefulness of discourse, is obviously an essential aspect of political discourse, 
as political actors need to take into consideration to what extent the potential 
discourse interpretation derived by the audience would be in agreement with the 
one intended by them. Moreover, constructing coherence in political discourse 
is closely related to persuasion, i.e. it is associated with making others accept 
the speaker’s point of view. My understanding of the interconnection between 
coherence and persuasion draws on Sperber et al.’s (2010) approach to discourse 
processing, which is related to the concepts of epistemic trust and vigilance. 
Within this approach, the assessment of the trustworthiness of a message is 
carried out on the basis of two types of epistemic vigilance processes, namely 
assessment of the reliability of the speaker and assessment of the reliability of the 
content conveyed. In order to be accepted as a trustworthy source of information, 
a politician needs to represent him/herself as a competent and authoritative 
political actor of impeccable reputation who possesses reliable information 
and is willing to share this information with the audience (cf. Sperber et al.’s 
(2010) competence, attractiveness and benevolence). This is associated with 
the establishment of consistent and continuous interpersonal relations between 
the speaker and the audience and the perception of the ‘existential coherence’ 
of the political actor, i.e. the projection of a coherent image of him/her and of 
the institution he/she represents, which is constantly under construction in the 
negotiating of the relationship between the self and the other(s) (Duranti 2006: 
469). Content reliability is to a large extent dependent on discourse coherence 
in terms of assessment of the consistency of new information with background 
knowledge and previously processed information. The persuasive force of 
political discourse can therefore be enhanced by a well-constructed argumentation 

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based on coherent shifts of topic, consistency of the viewpoint projected in the 
discourse and the use of explicit markers of logical relations helping the listener 
to follow and accept the discourse interpretation intended by the speaker. 
This investigation into coherence in political speeches strives to explore how 
strategies for the construal of discourse coherence are closely interwoven with 
persuasion strategies which political speakers use to achieve their communicative 
goals, and if necessary get past the epistemic vigilance of the audience. The 
working assumption taken as a starting point for this analysis is that while striving 
to persuade the audience to accept their ideologically biased representation 
of reality, political speakers endeavour to enhance their credibility through 
the establishment of a dialogic framework for the negotiation of a coherent 
representation of identities, social roles, value systems and relationships with the 
audience, and by constructing a coherent logical argumentation to support their 
claims and actions. 
The chapter proceeds as follows: firstly, the framework for 
the analysis of discourse coherence is presented to explain the approach adopted 
in the present study; secondly, since coherence strategies are conceived as genre-
dependent (Dontcheva-Navratilova 2012), a brief description of the rhetorical 
structure of political speeches is given; the analysis then relates the persuasive 
strategies used by different political speakers to various linguistics devices 
contributing to the perception of coherence in political discourse.