Coherence and Cohesion in English Discourse

Headline
: 
Man who killed his son in revenge for wife’s affair gets life
Lead
: 
A father who murdered his four-year-old son and stabbed his 
teenage daughter to take revenge on his estranged wife for having an 
affair was jailed for life yesterday.
(Daily Telegraph, March 6, 2008)
As the examples above illustrate, the headline and the lead contribute largely 
to the coherence, as they communicate the main theme and position the event in 
a particular context. They are not only closely interlinked; the headline may even 
be extracted or derived from the lead. The lead, as Bell (1991: 183) states, is “a 
summary of a story”, but it should not be viewed as “a stand-alone abstract”. 
The journalistic lead has a dual function. It must begin to tell the story as well as 
summarizing it. It therefore has to introduce the orientation material which a face 
to face narrator might consign to several separate descriptive sentences – 
who
, 
when
and 
where
. It must provide a springboard for telling the whole story, not 
just a summary (1991: 183).
It follows from the above that the lead focuses the story and in itself is ‘a 
micro-story’, because it practically tells the story in one sentence (ibid.). In this 
regard the lead is even more important than the headline. This is in accordance 
with a typical journalistic practice applied in newspaper discourse known for 
more than a century as ‘the inverted pyramid’ (e.g. Diller 2002) or ‘the top-down 
principle’ (e.g. Ungerer 2002), i.e. the information is ordered according to its 
importance, with the most important information mentioned at the beginning. Due 
to these features a newspaper report is a relatively stabilized, firmly established 
and recognizable discourse type (Fairclough 1995), from the point of view of 
both the journalist and the reader.
In van Dijk’s framework, both the headline and the lead express or at least 
signal ‘a theme’ (which van Dijk also calls ‘a topic’), which is part of ‘the 
semantic macrostructure’ of the discourse. Having previous experience of these 
practices and particular discourse types the reader makes inferences about the 

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main topic and his/her expectations are thus naturally incorporated in the process 
of meaning interpretation.
At this stage the reader is also aided by the typical layout of a newspaper 
report – the lead may be printed in bold (usually in tabloid newspapers, 
cf. Appendix, Figure 1) and thus made a prominent part of a report. But even 
if bold type is not used (cf. Appendix, Figure 2), it is the reader’s expectation 
based on his/her experience of newspaper reports as a particular discourse type 
that the first paragraph conveys the most important information. The two reports 
(Figures 1 and 2) report on a different murder case and are taken from a 
tabloid 
and broadsheet respectively; still, they represent the same discourse type and the 
leads contain the same or very similar types of information, i.e. they answer the 
principal questions of ‘who’ and ‘what’ and also ‘why’ (e.g. a father killed his son 
in revenge for his wife’s affair and was given a life sentence).
This is not to suggest that all newspaper reports necessarily follow this pattern, 
but it is definitely a very strong, traditional and deeply rooted convention in 
newspaper discourse that the lead summarizes and focuses the story. In addition 
it may also put the event in a wider context, for example, identify something as a 
social problem, as can be seen in Example 4:
(4)
The father of Jimmy Mizen yesterday attacked Britain’s culture of “anger, 
selfishness and fear” after seeing a school dropout jailed for murdering 
his son
. (Daily Telegraph, March 28, 2009)
Since the killer had a criminal past and was known to the authorities, the victim’s 
father blames his son’s death also on British society, which in his view has 
abandoned traditional values and failed to fight the problem of juvenile violence, 
which the newspaper has chosen to include in the lead in order to point out a 
serious social problem. A similar strategy is used in the Daily Mirror report on 
the same event (Example 5).
(5)
The dad of murdered teenager Jimmy Mizen demanded an end to “angry 
Britain” yesterday as his son’s killer was jailed for life.
(Daily Mirror, 
March 28, 2009)
As Examples 4 and 5 illustrate this strategy is not limited to a particular type of 
newspaper, i.e. a broadsheet or tabloid.