Coherence and Cohesion in English Discourse

Introduction
Olga Dontcheva-Navratilova and Renata Povolná
With the growing dominance of English as the “lingua franca” of the modern 
world, there is an increasing interest in the study of English discourse in all its 
possible varieties, such as informal conversation, academic discourse, business 
communication, administrative documents, media discourse and fiction. 
Since regardless of varieties and genres, the need to produce well-organized, 
comprehensible and coherent discourse is a key aspect of socialization into any 
kind of international discourse community, research into coherence and cohesion 
strategies in English discourse has become relevant to all spheres of human 
communication.
Cohesion and coherence as two important linguistic notions are subjects of 
intensive debate in the international linguistic community. Cohesion became 
accepted as a well-established category for text and discourse analysis after the 
publication of Halliday and Hasan’s crucial work 
Cohesion in English
(1976). 
The importance of the relationship between cohesion and coherence is stressed 
by de Beaugrande and Dressler (1981), who consider them to be two of the 
basic standards of textuality. Despite the fact that most researchers agree that 
the interpretative perception of the semantic unity and purposefulness of a text, 
i.e. its coherence, is influenced and signalled by the 
cohesive relations holding 
in the text, i.e. relations between lexical items and grammatical structures which 
overtly connect clauses and/or clause complexes (e.g. Widdowson 1979, de 
Beaugrande and Dressler 1981, Halliday and Hasan 1976, 1989, Hoey 1991, 
2001), there is considerable variation in views on the interdependence of 
cohesion and coherence. While Halliday and Hasan (1989: 94) approach them 
as closely related phenomena and hold the view that “variation in coherence is 
the function of variation in the cohesive harmony of a text”, many linguists tend 
to draw a stricter line of demarcation between these two concepts. For example, 
Widdowson (1978) and Stubbs (1983) define cohesion as the overt 
structural 
link between sentences as formal items and coherence as the link between the 
communicative acts that sentences are used to perform. Similarly, Mey (2001: 
154) maintains that “cohesion establishes 
local
relations between syntactic items 
(reference, concord and the like), whereas coherence has to do with the 
global 
meaning involved in what we want to express through our speech activity”. 
An important aspect of the relationship between cohesion and coherence is 
highlighted by Brown and Yule (1983: 66), who argue that “human beings do not 
require formal textual markers before they are prepared to interpret a text. They 

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naturally assume coherence, and interpret the text in the light of that assumption”; 
in other words they use their common sense and impose coherence on the text 
(Tárnyiková 1995: 24) while trying to achieve coherent interpretation. Hence, in 
agreement with Bublitz (1988: 32), who holds the view that “cohesion is neither 
a necessary nor a sufficient condition for coherence”, a text, either written or 
spoken, can be perceived as coherent without cohesive means, and, moreover, 
a text can comprise cohesive means without being understood as coherent. To 
put this in Seidlhofer and Widdowson’s words (1999: 207), one “might derive a 
coherent discourse from a text with no cohesion in it at all. Equally, of course, 
textual cohesion provides no guarantee of discourse coherence”.
At the end of the twentieth century, it was possible to notice a considerable 
change in the conceptualization of coherence by most linguists, namely a 
shift from a static text-based descriptive approach, regarding coherence as the 
product of textual connectivity and cohesion, to a more dynamic understanding, 
which views coherence as a potentially variable co-operative achievement of 
the speaker/writer and the hearer/reader. Within this approach coherence is 
seen as a context-dependent, hearer/reader-oriented and comprehension-based, 
interpretative notion (Bublitz 1999: 2). It stresses the collaborative nature of 
coherence (Tanskanen 2006: 170) and the dependence of discourse interpretation 
on the entire situational context, i.e. the linguistic co-text, the social and cultural 
environment, communicative principles and conversational maxims, and the 
interpreter’s encyclopaedic knowledge, serving to underscore that the deriving 
of coherence from a discourse is a dynamic process which comes into being 
only in the process of human communication (Tárnyiková 2002: 56). In order 
to help their hearers/readers arrive at a coherent interpretation, speakers/
writers normally use certain overt signals to guide them to a suggested line of 
understanding which comes, in an ideal case, as close as possible to their own 
understanding. Conversely, hearers/readers use these signals as instructions to 
achieve coherence and arrive at an interpretation which is in harmony with the 
speakers’/writers’ communicative goals. However, the signals that the speaker 
can use are different from those that the writer has at his/her disposal, since while 
spoken discourse can be characterized by a permanent negotiation of meaning 
between all participants, in written discourse there is a lack of overt negotiation 
of meaning (Seidlhofer and Widdowson 1999). (For more details on coherence 
in written discourse, cf. Dontcheva-Navratilova 2007, 2009, Povolná 2012; for 
coherence in spoken discourse, cf. Povolná 2009, 2010, Dontcheva-Navratilova 
2011.)
The research presented in this volume is inspired by our work on the five-year 
research project 405/08/0866 
Coherence and Cohesion in English Discourse
, 
which was supported by the Czech Science Foundation. The aim of this project 
was to conceptualize cohesion and coherence as constitutive components of 

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human communication and to apply theoretical insights to an analysis of spoken 
and written language while showing how coherence is manifested in different 
genres of spoken and written English discourse.
In the approach adopted in this volume, the authors share a dynamic 
interpretative approach to cohesion and coherence and assume that there may be 
variation in the coherent 
interpretation of one and the same discourse by different