Coherence and Cohesion in English Discourse

2 Analysing discourse coherence
In agreement with the approach adopted in this volume, discourse coherence 
is conceptualized here as a dynamic interpretative notion. It can be regarded 
as an instantiation of the ‘interpretation potential’ (Sarangi 2004) of a text 
activated in the process of a particular interpretative decoding in which the 
interactants create their own discourse from the text by assigning it intentionality 
and recreating its meaning, while projecting their personal opinions, attitudes, 
feelings and emotions onto the interaction (Dontcheva-Navratilova 2012: 19). 
Consequently, the construal of discourse coherence is seen as context-dependent, 
inherently subjective and heavily affected by the interpreter’s own resources for 
interpretation, including “knowledge and expectations about human action in 
and surrounding discourse” (Gough and Talbot 1996: 224). This implies that the 
perception of coherence derived by different interactants involved in the same 
interaction may diverge and indicates that discourse understanding is a matter of 
degree. The scalar nature of coherence may explain instances of misunderstanding 
or misinterpretation in human communication, which occasionally may lead to 
disturbed coherence, incoherence or breaks in communication (Bazzanella and 
Damiano 1999, Bublitz and Lenk 1999). The perception of discourse coherence 

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is also undoubtedly enhanced by cohesive relations holding in a text; however, 
due to the collaborative nature of coherence and the dependence of discourse 
interpretation on the entire situational context, cohesion in itself cannot be 
considered as a necessary or sufficient condition for coherence (Bublitz 1988, 
Tárnyiková 1995, Seidlhofer and Widdowson 1997).
When interpreting discourse, interactants negotiate ideational, interpersonal 
and textual meanings encoded in text (cf. Halliday 1978, 1981). Therefore, 
discourse coherence may be seen as a multifaceted discourse property 
encompassing conceptual connectedness on the ideational plane (propositional 
or topical coherence), evaluative and dialogical consistency on the interpersonal 
plane (interactional or evaluative coherence), and textual relatedness on the 
textual plane of discourse (cohesion). An investigation into discourse coherence 
is then supposed to take into account aspects of coherence on all three planes of 
discourse in order to provide an adequate analysis of this complex phenomenon
2
. 
While not pretending to be exhaustive, the following discussion of features 
contributing to the perception of coherence on the ideational, interpersonal 
and textual planes of discourse intends to outline a model for the analysis of 
discourse coherence, which is summarized in Figure 6-1 below. The majority of 
the parameters comprised in the model are open-set; the possible values of the 
closed-set parameters are provided in brackets.