I．Brainstorming

What do you think of cohesion and coherence?

II. Cohesion and coherence

Cohesive devices are used to connect sentences together in a text.

1. Definition of cohesion and coherence

Coherence is the feeling that the sentences in the text hang together. Or we can say that cohesion is the means to the text coherence and coherence is the end of cohesion.

Cohesion is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for text coherence. What makes the text meaningful is the textual linguistic cohesive devices, but formal cohesion might not always guarantee the identification of a text, nor will it guarantee textual coherence.

2. How to achieve cohesion

Cohesion is achieved either grammatically or lexically. Grammatical cohesion is reference, substitution, and ellipsis, as they involve closed systems: simple options of presence or absence, and systems such as those of person, number, proximity and degree of comparison.

Lexical cohesion is achieved generally by using content words; it involves a kind of choice that is open-ended, the selection of a lexical item that is in some way related to one that appears previously in the text.

Conjunction is on the borderline of the grammatical and the lexical cohesive device; the set of conjunctive elements can probably be interpreted grammatically in terms of systems, but such an interpretation would be fairly complex and some conjunctive expressions involve lexical selection as well. 

III. Grammatical cohesion

The three ways of grammatical cohesion (i.e. reference, substitution, ellipsis) will be elaborated on by one below.

(1) The definition of reference

Reference means that certain items are used to refer to something else for their semantic interpretation. Two types of relationship are recognized: anaphoric relations look backward in the text for their interpretation and cataphoric relations look forward in the text for their interpretations. They form cohesive ties within the text and instruct the hearer/reader to look inside the text to find what is being referred to.

E.g. several people approached. They seemed angry. (anaphoric)

Listen to this: John is getting married. (cataphoric)

(2) Classification of reference

Personal reference is reference by means function in the speech situation through the category of personal pronoun. E.g. John is my bother. He came here yesterday.

Demonstrative reference is reference by means of location, or scale of proximity. E.g. I like the lions, and I like the polar bears. These are my favorites.

Comparative reference is indirect reference by means of identity or similarity. E.g. we are demanding higher living standards.

(3) Substitution

Substitution is simply the replacement of one item by another, which differs from reference in that substitution refers to the relation between linguistic items.

e.g. –Has Barbara left?

   --I think so.

(4) Ellipsis

Ellipsis can be defined as “something left unsaid”, where there is ellipsis, there is presupposition in the structure that something is to be supplied, or “understood”. Ellipsis is a kind of cohesion, as new information can be foregrounded while old information is taken away. There are three types of ellipsis as wee, nominal, verbal and clausal.

Would you like to hear another verse? I know twelve more (verses).

Nominal ellipsis

VI. Lexical cohesion

Lexical cohesion is the semantic relation between lexical items which are classified into two broad categories: reiteration and collocation.

Reiteration refers to meaning repetition, which can be realized by the same word, synonyms, hyponymy or general words.

e.g. There’s a boy climbing that tree.

The lad’s going to fall if he doesn’t take place. (synonym)

Collocation can be explained as the association of lexical items that regularly co-occur, or those that stand in a certain kind of recognizable lexical semantic relation.

e.g. –Why does that boy wriggle all the time?

--Girls don’t do that.

V. Conjunction

Conjunction refers to the relation between sentences (rather than within part of a sentence as is usually called coordination, e.g. a girl and a boy) which follow one another at a time as the text unfolds; they can not be rearranged in different sequence. Conjunction can be roughly classified into four categories: addition, adversative, casual and temporal relations.

Addition is generally realized through structural coordination, adding to what has been said previously. Common conjunctive relations of the additive type are also, or, or…else, neither…nor, moreover and so on.

The adversative relation is “contrary to expectation”. The expectation may be from the content of what is being said, or from the communication process such as but, however and though, rather and nevertheless and so on.

The causal relations can be summarized as result (as a result of this, hence, therefore), reason (for this reason, because, on account of this, etc.) and purpose (for this purpose, to this end, with this intention, etc.)

The temporal relation between the theses of two successive sentences may be simply one of sequence in time: the one is sequent to the other.