Languages & Linguistics
Coherence Between Sentences
Coherence between sentences refers to the logical and smooth flow of ideas from one sentence to the next within a written or spoken text. It involves using cohesive devices such as transitional words, pronouns, and conjunctions to connect ideas and maintain the overall coherence and unity of the discourse. Effective coherence enhances the clarity and understanding of the communication.
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10 Key excerpts on "Coherence Between Sentences"
eBook - PDF- Kirsten Malmkjaer(Author)
- 2005(Publication Date)
- Edinburgh University Press(Publisher)
7.2.iii Coherence We noted above that it is often possible for readers and listeners to understand the logical relationships that hold between text parts even when these are not signalled by junctive expressions. In inferring such unsignalled relationships, readers rely on their background knowledge of the world as well as of discourse conventions to establish what is generally known as coherence. Interest in the notion of coherence grew in the early 1980s, when British linguistics began to take what may be called a cognitive turn away from what had until then been a primary interest in texts as physical entities more or less straightforwardly available for empirical analysis aimed at laying bare their structure, towards a primary interest in how mental representations arise and develop in the comprehending mind as a result of processing which involves interactive exploitation of the information derived from text and information already available to the com-prehending mind. Some linguists with these cognitively oriented interests pointed to a number of shortcomings of Halliday’s and Hasan’s view of texture. For example, Brown and Yule (1983) consider that the notion of cohesion developed by Halliday and Hasan is neither necessary nor sufficient to explain texture. They provide the following examples (Brown and Yule 1983: 196): A: There’s the doorbell. B: I’m in the bath Just to test the water, I made one telephone call yesterday to a leading British publisher with offices in New York. There was immediate interest in Clear Speech . (Letter from a literary agent) Both of these texts lack cohesive devices between the sentences that constitute them; yet they make sense as texts. In contrast, the following example (from Brown and Yule 1983: 197, drawing on Enkvist 1978: 110) is full of what might be thought to function as cohesive devices; yet it does not make sense as a text: I bought a Ford. A car in which President Wilson rode down the Champs Elysées was black.
eBook - ePubTextual Relations in the Qur'an
Relevance, Coherence and Structure
- Salwa M. El-Awa(Author)
- 2006(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Coherence relations in the Qur’ān are very ambiguous and have been in question by interpreters from various backgrounds for quite a long time in the history of Qur’anic studies. However, they are not what determines the meaning, nor do they make parts of the discourse related. Cohesive ties do connect parts of the text grammatically, but grammatical connectives have a very limited role in forming the meaning conveyed. In fact it is relevance relations that contribute to one’s choice of the interpretation one assigns to relations between utterances. In the following outline of some notions that are central to the two approaches, I will show why this is so.Coherence relationsFor Halliday and Hassan, whose book Cohesion in English is a landmark in the field, ‘The concept of cohesion counts for the essential semantic relations whereby any passage of speech or writing is enabled to function as a text’.2That is, for them, the physical expression of the relation between linguistic items is what the analyst is looking for in order to establish textuality as well as the meaning of the text. They take the existence of cohesive ties as a criterion for distinguishing text from non-text. However, the notion of coherence in their work is quite vague and uncertain, and most of their book is devoted to classifying different types of cohesive ties and explaining how they connect segments of discourse together. According to them, categories of cohesion relations are: references to elements inside and outside the text; ellipsis; substitution; conjunction and lexical cohesion (including repetitions). All these categories focus on the existence of linguistic items such as pronouns, substitutes, conjunctions and connectives. It is claimed that without the existence of some of these elements in the text the intended meaning can never be recovered. This account of cohesion succeeds in describing syntactically the role played by cohesive ties in forming the unity of text as a large grammatical unit consisting of physically or grammatically ‘connected sentences’.
eBook - PDF- G. Denhiere, J.P. Rossi(Authors)
- 1991(Publication Date)
- North Holland(Publisher)
Interest in linguistics in the 8 0 ' s has focused on identifying the roles and nature of different markers of text continuity or connectedness used for text composition and construction in different languages. We will close with a discussion regarding current issues in the growing body of literature devoted to markers of text cohesion and connexity. 1. COHERENCE IN TEXT GRAMMARS Starting from the Chomskian principle that the native speakers of a given language L are able to produce and understand an infinite number of well-formed discourse sequences in language L, text grammarians proposed (1) that speakers share the ability to distinguish a sequence of grammatically acceptable sentences making up a text from a sequence of grammatically acceptable sentences failing to do so, (2) can recognize structural similarities between superficially different texts, and ( 3 ) can summarize a given text while maintaining a given text structure. The proponents of this model (Harweg, Petofi, Gulich, Ballmer, Rieser, Dressler, Van Dijk), argue that all sequences of grammatically acceptable sentences are not equally acceptable as texts, since if this were the case, it would be unnecessary to define the set of rules governing text construction. According to this model, example 2 is a text but example 1 is not *tgrammatical**, to use Van Dijk's term (1972): 1. Peter is a botanist. The sum of the angles of a 2. Peter is a botanist. He loves nature. triangle is 180'. Examples and counter examples of this nature quickly led researchers to recognize the importance for text coherence of both linguistic markers of continuity (pronominal anaphora, definite descriptions, conjunctions, etc.) and of the knowledge readers bring to the text.
eBook - PDF- Peter Hühn, John Pier, Wolf Schmid, Jörg Schönert, Peter Hühn, John Pier, Wolf Schmid, Jörg Schönert(Authors)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter(Publisher)
Coherence Michael Toolan 1 Definition As a technical term, as distinct from its use in cultural activities to de-note a range of qualities deemed desirable (e.g. clarity, orderliness, reasonableness, logicality, “making sense,” and even persuasiveness), coherence has tended to be regarded as a textlinguistic (TL) notion. From its everyday senses, textlinguistic coherence has inherited some defining criteria, in particular the assumption that it denotes those qual-ities in the structure and design of a text that prompt language users to judge that “everything fits,” that the identified textual parts all contrib-ute to a whole, which is communicationally effective. But there has al-ways been a tension in the linguistic analysis of coherence, rooted in the recognition that TL “rules” for textual coherence (e.g. rules of an-aphora, norms of paragraphing and paragraph structure) are inevitably general and therefore insensitive to the unique contextual pressures of the particular text, on the one hand, while on the other, judgments of coherence are very much based on what addressees assess as relevant and informative in the unique discoursal circumstances of the individu-al text. This tension is often summarized as a distinction between (purely linguistic) cohesion and (contextualized) coherence: the former is neither necessary nor sufficient for the latter, even if it is normally a main contributory feature (de Beaugrande & Dressler 1981; Giora 1985). In broad terms, it is now widely recognized that coherence is ulti-mately a pragmatically-determined quality, requiring close atten-tion to the specific sense made of the text in the cultural context. This might suggest that determining coherence is a simple matter of apply-ing common sense in context; but narratives often go beyond common sense, that transcending being crucial to their importance and tellabili-ty, so that narratological studies of coherence suggest common sense is not a sufficient guide.
- Paul Portner, Claudia Maienborn, Klaus von Heusinger, Paul Portner, Claudia Maienborn, Klaus von Heusinger(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
It is nonetheless natural that there would be an empirical correlation between coherence in discourses and correspondingly high degrees of cohesiveness. Coherent discourses will tend to talk about the same entities, relationships, and events, which will in turn license linguistically reduced forms to refer to them. As Zipf would have it, speakers have motivation to economize on form when there is enough contextual information to allow them to get away with it. In this chapter, we have seen that the properties of coherence establishment processes play a large role in dictating when a speaker can get away with it. I have described the coherence relation view in terms of an analysis that sees the space of possible discourse continuations as characterizable within Hume’s three types of “connections among ideas”. A variety of other approaches are pos-sible and have indeed been put forth. While the details of different analyses will no doubt continue to be debated, it is nonetheless clear that a variety of semantic and inferential constraints govern the production and interpretation of felicitous discourses. As such, it can hardly be surprising that coherence-driven constraints play a role in determining the contexts in which various discourse-sensitive lin-guistic phenomena can be felicitously employed. The author thanks Paul Portner for comments on an earlier draft. 13 Cohesion and coherence 477 7 References Arnold, Jennifer 2001. The effect of thematic roles on pronoun use and frequency of reference continuation. Discourse Processes 21, 137–162. Asher, Nicholas & Alex Lascarides 2003. Logics of Conversation . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baltaxe, Christiane A. M. & Nora D’Angiola 1992. Cohesion in the discourse interaction of autistic, specifically language-impaired, and normal children. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 22, 1–21. Brown, Gillian & George Yule 1983. Discourse Analysis . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Büring, Daniel 2003.
eBook - PDF- Anne Ife, Janet Cotterill(Authors)
- 2005(Publication Date)
- Continuum(Publisher)
Taking the subjective component of coherence into account, its constitution is, understand-ably, also language-and culture-specific, which is the reason why the notion of coherence is expected to be directly relevant to the study of translation as 136 LANGUAGE ACROSS BOUNDARIES strategic intercultural communication at the textual level par excellence. This implies that in translated texts produced on the basis of coherent source texts the coherence does not come about automatically, but requires certain con-ditions at the textual and at the reception levels to be fulfilled. In order to be able to have a closer look at the establishment of coherence in translated texts, we must first examine the notion of coherence itself and, after that, determine the nature of the relationship between translations and their source texts. The notion of textual coherence During the past decades, the notion of coherence as a fundamental textual category has been dealt with by numerous researchers from a variety of different perspectives. Important research has been carried out especially in the fields of text linguistics and discourse analysis, applied linguistics, pragmatics, psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, neurolinguistics and artificial intelligence studies. 1 However, the quantity of the contributions and the intensity of research activities have often not been proportional to the weight and applicability of the results. The reasons for such a situation are rather numerous, which is hardly surprising in view of the utmost intricacy of questions such as 'How are texts made coherent?' and 'How is sense constituted in the process of text production and text interpretation?' Apart from that, the functioning of texts in concrete communicative situations is probably too complex to be dealt with by means of the analytical instruments available to us at this stage.
eBook - PDF- Gert Rickheit, Christopher Habel, Gert Rickheit, Christopher Habel(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter(Publisher)
As is demonstrated in Dahl (this volume), in a narrative text subsequent sentences commonly refer to event pairs that are i) ordered in time in the same way as the text, ii) contiguous in time, iii) causally related. But exactly which of these relations holds in each specific case is not always clear, and there is more often than not no specific signals of the individual relation. The same goes for other types of texts as well. The thesis that has been pursued in this paper is that the notion of discourse coherence as it is generally understood is inherited from a tradition where texts were treated as autonomous products held together by different cohesive de-vices. Applied to discourse processing, text comprehension then easily is re-garded as a process of utilising different cohesive cues to actively construct a representation of the text. Against this I argue that continuity is normally not marked in discourse and that assumptions of connectivity are a built-in condi-tion, a human processing aptitude. We argue that the role of cohesive cues in discourse comprehension accordingly is a different one, namely to indicate dis-continuities, such as breaks in the on-going flow of events. The Notion of Coherence in Discourse 201 References Andersson, E. 1978 An analysis of textual cohesion in apassage from Maria Gripe's Hugo och Josefin. In J. Östman (Ed.), Report on Text Linguistics: Cohesion and Semantics. Abo: Re-search Institute of the Abo Academy Foundation. Broek, P. van den 1990 Causal inferences and the comprehension of narrative texts. In A. C. Graesser, & G. H. Bower (Eds.), Inferences and Text Comprehension. New York: Academic Press. Brown, G., & Yule, G. 1983 Discourse analysis. Cambridge: University Press. Dahl, Ö., & Hellman, C. 1990 Rhetorical relations in discourse. In O. Dahl, & Κ. Fraurud (Eds.), Papers from the Second Nordic Conference on Comprehension in Man and Machine. Stockholm: Stockholms Universitet. Dahl, Ö., & Hellman, C.
eBook - PDFFunctional and Systemic Linguistics
Approaches and Uses
- Eija Ventola(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Thus, for example, any reference to learners in an ELT journal will be understood to mean in that context English language learners. The only syntactic process that functions to explain the creation and perception of parallelism between sentences is that of syntactic equiva-lence. This can be generally characterized as the replacement of one group of words by another such group on systematic principles. These principles need further investigation but certainly include Harris's (1952) notion of transform(ation)s, or equivalences, and Halliday's (1985) concept of grammatical metaphor. In both cases there is an argument for believing that although the process operates on syntax it is motivated by lexical selection. When combined, the various kinds of coherence process are, I claim, sufficient to account for our ability to find coherence of message between pairs of sentences connected by multiple cohesion. The remainder of this chapter is devoted to an attempt to demonstrate their adequacy. 398 Michael Hoey 7. The operation in combination of the coherence processes Our method of representation will be to show the effect of the processes on successive versions of the paired sentences quoted earlier as Examples 5, 6, and 7. The affected parts are initially underlined. Each sentence is treated separately and then their final versions compared. Naturally enough, we begin by considering the connection between Sentences 1 and 8 in Example (5). In (12) we look at Sentence 1 first. (12) What is the advantage which we may hope to derive from a study of the political writers of the past? Applying the process of lexical expansion, the collection studying writ-ers is understood to mean studying the works of writers in all contexts but biographies and gossip columns.
eBook - PDF- Deborah Tannen, Heidi E. Hamilton, Deborah Schiffrin(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
4 Cohesion, Texture, and Coherence In this chapter I have outlined a modular perspective on text, which places cohe- sion analysis within a broader framework 24 for analyzing discourse. Following Martin (1992a), I described the ways in which cohesion can be recontextualized as discourse semantics (identification, negotiation, conjunction, ideation). Subsequently, the study of texture was briefly reviewed, drawing attention to work on patterns of interaction between discourse semantic, lexico-grammatical, and phonological systems (cohesive harmony, method of development, point, and modal responsibility). Finally, I approached coherence from the perspective of social context, suggesting that texture is motivated by tenor, field, and mode and the way in which genre phases these register variables together into a trajectory of meanings that naturalizes a reading position for readers and listeners. From an SFL perspective (for recent surveys see Halliday and Webster 2009; Hasan, Matthiessen, and Webster 2005, 2007), I expect that in the future our understandings of cohesion, texture, and coherence will be enhanced by further work on cohesion in rela- tion to other modules (both linguistic and social), 25 so that our sense of how the social motivates patterns of cohesion is improved (e.g., Bednarek and Martin 2010; Martin and Wodak 2003). I expect some of these patterns to emerge as recurrent units of discourse structure somewhere between what we currently understand as genre structure and clause structure. Early work on phase (e.g., Gregory 1995) and rhetorical units (Cloran 1995) has been encouraging in this respect; see also Martin and Rose (2008). Heeding Firth (e.g., 1957), however, it may be that a good deal of this kind of structure will turn out to be specific to particular registers and genres, and not something we will choose to generalize across social contexts. NOTES 1 For related European perspectives, see de Beaugrande and Dressler (1981).
No longer available |Learn more- Jane Bottomley, Steven Pryjmachuk, David Waugh(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Critical Publishing(Publisher)
Thus, it is clear that effective communication is something which should be prioritised at all levels of teaching. Cohesion and paragraph structure A text is made up of paragraphs. For a text to be clear and coherent, each paragraph must have a clear focus and structure. Good paragraphs usually have the following structural characteristics: • they deal with a single unified point and do not digress from this; CROSS REFERENCE Developing a coherent argument and expressing criticality CROSS REFERENCE Linking ideas CROSS REFERENCE Appendix 3 , Key phrases in assignments Chapter 2 Coherent texts and arguments 39 39 • they often introduce this point in the first sentence; • they usually move from general to specific information and ideas; • they order and connect ideas in a logical manner. In order for a paragraph to develop clearly, the points or ideas it contains should be linked in meaningful ways. This meaningful linking is known as ‘cohesion’ (Halliday and Hassan, 1976), and it is achieved through organisation, grammar and word choice, aspects of which will be discussed in this section. (Note that the extracts in the following task will be referred to throughout this chapter.) Task Cohesion and paragraph structure Read the paragraphs below. 1) Do you find them easy to read? 2) The paragraphs demonstrate some of the typical features of paragraph development and cohesion in English. Can you identify any aspects of organisation, grammar or word choice which make your life easier as a reader? Extract A: an extract from a typical student essay One important element of communication in teaching is active listening , whereby teachers fully concentrate on and reflect on what pupils say (Allott and Waugh, 2016). According to Smith (2005), active listening is an effective way of signalling empathy, as it conveys to pupils that they have the full attention of the person they are talking to.
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