Languages & Linguistics
Coherences within Sentences
Coherence within sentences refers to the logical and meaningful connection between different parts of a sentence. This includes the use of appropriate grammar, syntax, and cohesive devices to ensure that the sentence is clear and understandable. Achieving coherence within sentences is essential for effective communication and comprehension in language and linguistics.
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eBook - PDFUnderstanding Development and Proficiency in Writing
Quantitative Corpus Linguistic Approaches
- Philip Durrant, Mark Brenchley, Lee McCallum(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
6 Development in Cohesion 6.1 Introduction The linguistic category of cohesion refers to those relations of meaning between elements of a text which provide a sense of connectedness, and which serve to distinguish a unified text from a random collection of utterances (Halliday & Hasan, 1976; Sanders & Pander Maat, 2006). As relations of meaning, cohesive links transcend grammatical structure and the types of linking relations described in Chapter 3, enabling connections to be established beyond the boundaries of the clause (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014; Martin, 2003). Many researchers (as described in this chapter) have hypothesised that use of cohesion may be related to language development. The hypothesis is a superficially plausible one: effectively signalling how parts of a text are related can reasonably be seen as part of what a writer needs to achieve to compose an effective piece of writing. Indeed, it is common for writing test rubrics to include cohesion as part of what is graded in examinations (e.g. IELTS, 2018b). As we will see, however, there are also serious problems with this hypothesis and the overall message from the literature to date is that a clear relationship between cohesion and written language development has not been identified. However, the reasons why this relationship does not hold up in a consistent way are instructive for our broader understanding of quantitative research of development and so are worth reflecting on. We will return to this point in Section 6.4. Cohesion is often discussed together with the related construct of coherence. Coherence refers to readers’ subjective experience of a text as connected (Tanskanen, 2006). The nature of the relationship between cohesion and coherence has been a subject of extensive debate. While coherence is a mental construct, cohesion is usually taken to refer to linguistic features in a text – overt signals that help readers reconstruct a coherent message (McNamara et al., 2014).
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 - 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)
1 Introduction To begin their landmark volume Cohesion in English , Halliday & Hasan (1976) make the central observation that is the focus of this paper as well: Andrew Kehler, San Diego, CA, USA 13 Cohesion and coherence 451 If a speaker of English hears or reads a passage of the language which is more than one sentence in length, he can normally decide without difficulty whether it forms a unified whole or is just a collection of unrelated sentences. (Halliday & Hasan 1976: 1) The goal of their book is to describe what makes the difference between the two. Their answer – as suggested by their book’s title – is that discourses exhibit cohesion. Cohesion is created by the existence of cohesively related items called ties. These ‘ties’ are pairs of items that participate in various types of depend-ency relations, such as an anaphoric pronoun and its antecedent expression, an instance of ellipsis and the expression that licenses it, pairs of identical content words (giving rise to lexical repetition), connectives (e.g., but , so , then ) and the clauses or sentences they relate, and even the intonational properties of an utter-ance (e.g., anaphoric deaccenting) and the expression that licenses those prop-erties. These examples all involve situations in which the interpretation of an element in the discourse is dependent on that of another. These are precisely the situations in which cohesion is said to occur, giving rise to the defining property of texture that Halliday and Hasan claim distinguishes texts from non-texts. Three years later, however, Hobbs (1979) began his classic paper Coherence and Coreference with a rejection of the cohesion hypothesis: Successive utterances in coherent discourse refer to the same entities. The common expla-nation for this is that the discourse is coherent because successive utterances are “about” the same entities. But this does not seem to stand up. The text (1) John took a train from Paris to Istanbul.
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 - PDFText linguistics for the contrastive study of online customer comments
Text-linguistic patterns in German, Dutch, Spanish and French hotel comments and reviews
- Raul Sánchez Prieto(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Narr Francke Attempto Verlag(Publisher)
De Beaugrande/Dressler (1981: 3) understand cohesion as “the ways in which the components of the surface text, i.e. the actual words we hear or see, are mutually connected within a sentence”. For them cohesion “rests upon grammatical dependencies”. On the other hand, coherence concerns “the ways in which the components of the textual world, i.e. the configuration of concepts and relations which underlie the surface text, are mutually accessible and rel -evant” (De Beaugrande/Dressler 1981: 4). This rather cumbersome formulation of coherence has been understood differently by different authors, and since it has become polysemous in text linguistic research (Esser 2009: 140), the use of the term is troublesome for some authors (among them, for example, Schnotz 1994 and Storrer 2004b: 3), who prefer to merge the concepts of coherence and cohesion or completely refrain from using one or both concepts� The wide reception of Halliday/Hasan’s standard work on cohesion has helped to create even more confusion. These authors, as well as Van Dijk (1977: 126), seem to use both terms as stylistic variants. Nevertheless, they argue that cohesion is at the basis of coherence (Halliday/Hasan 1976: 9), and that would mean that they should be considered different concepts. This ambiguous approach has been severely criticised by other linguists, first and foremost by Carrell (1982: 479ff), and in the 1980s it triggered a major debate about the nature of the two concepts (see Fulcher 1989 for an overview). Although “cohesion” and “coherence” remain disputed terms, we will resort to them because they allow us to contrast not only straightforward grammati-cal and semantic characteristics on the text surface of our multilingual corpus, but also non-overt culture-related relations that link the different textual units of meaning to each other.
eBook - PDF- Gert Rickheit, Christopher Habel, Gert Rickheit, Christopher Habel(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter(Publisher)
Hobbs and Agar do not question the necessity or viability to operate with a single, written-language based definition of discourse coherence. Questions about properties of spoken language that are based upon a norm of coherence designed for a different medium can hardly be fruitful ones and the approach 1 9 8 C. Hellman taken by Hobbs and Agar is in line with the general tendency to treat spoken discourse as a defective variant of written language that has been amply criticised elsewhere (Linell, 1982). Grosz and Sidner state in the passage cited above that 'a discourse is coherent only when its discourse purpose is shared by all the participants'. This quotation suggests that they have a different perspective on coherence, a 'conversational' perspective, which they share with other scholars who work with spoken lan-guage. Coherence is in this connection not so much to 'make sense' out of things or to 'construct a unitary model'. What is meant is rather that all passes in a conversation should contribute to a common goal. 5. Coherence as a concept in discourse theory The following summarises some of the basic assumptions of text linguistics, an assumption that in important respects has been taken over by those who regard coherence as a processing concept: (6) There is a property, 'coherence', that distinguishes texts and non-texts or, in the terms of Reinhart, well-formed and not well-formed texts. This property is somehow guaranteed or created by specific elements in a text. Coherence is built up, created or maintained by such cohesive markers. It is obvious from the way that concepts such as 'in-coherence' and 'pseudo-co-herence' are used, that in spite of assertions to the contrary, 'coherence' as well as its negative complements are modelled upon the concept of cohesion. This fallacy seems to come about by a two-step procedure: Firstly, it is regarded as the normal case for texts to have cohesive markers.
eBook - PDFOn Grammar
Volume 1
- M.A.K. Halliday(Author)
- 2005(Publication Date)
- Continuum(Publisher)
However, not only is it realizing a text feature, but also, given the naturalness of fit that we were able to establish between the grammar and the semantics, it has a similarity, in some transformed way, to the feature which it serves to realize. (B)1. Ideational. Cohesion, as defined by Halliday and Hasan (1976), is the semantic resource through which textual coherence is realized. A text displays cohesion; and this cohesion is achieved by means of a variety of features of the clause, which serve to relate one clause to others that constitute its context. However, while cohesion is a necessary condition of textual coherence, it is not by itself sufficient to guarantee it; and in her subsequent studies Ruqaiya Hasan (1984) has been comparing pairs of texts, of similar nature and origin, where one is judged coherent and the other not, in order to establish what are the differences between them. She has one set of texts which are stories told by children; she has also examined texts from schizophrenic patients, including a pair of texts from one particular patient, one when undergoing treatment and the other when the same patient was judged as having been cured. In each case all the texts display typical chains of identity or similarity, ongoing representations of some participant or some other element of the semantic structure – a process, perhaps, or an attribute, or a complex concept of some kind. Now, in the texts judged to be coherent, these lexicoreferential chains were systematically interrelated: a majority of the occurrences in any one chain were related to occurrences in some other chain. They were systematically related, that is to say, in the ideational structure of the clause; for example as Agent to Process, or Attribute to Carrier, or by their both having the same role with reference to some other element, such as both being carriers of the same attribute.
eBook - ePub- M.A.K. Halliday, Ruqaiya Hasan(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
The principle behind both types is the cohesive effect achieved by the continuity of lexical meaning. This may be combined with a referential relation but does not depend on this for its effect. The cohesion is a function of the relation between the lexical items themselves, which has both a semantic aspect – synonymy, hyponymy, metonymy, etc – and a purely lexical or collocational aspect, the mutual expectancy between words that arises from the one occurring frequently in the environment of the other, or (a better way of looking at it) of the two occurring in a range of environments common to both. The whole of the vocabulary of a language is internally structured and organized along many dimensions, which collectively determine ‘what goes with what’; these tendencies are as much part of the linguistic system as are the principles of grammatical structure, even though they are statable only as tendencies, not as ‘rules’. It is the essentially probabilistic nature of lexical patterning which makes it effective in the creation of texture; because they lie outside the bounds of structure, and are not constrained by structural relationships, the lexical patterns serve to transform a series of unrelated structures into a unified, coherent whole.7.3.5 Conjunction
Conjunction is somewhat different from the other cohesive relations. It is based on the assumption that there are in the linguistic system forms of systematic relationships between sentences. There are a number of possible ways in which the system allows for the parts of a text to be connected to one another in meaning.There are certain elementary logical relations inherent in ordinary language; doubtless these derive ultimately from the categories of human experience, and they figure importantly in the sociolinguistic construction of reality, the process whereby a model of the universe is gradually built up over countless generations in the course of semiotic interaction. (They can be regarded as departures from the idealized norm represented by formal logic; but it is worth remembering that in the history of human thought the concepts of formal logic derive, however indirectly, from the logic of natural language.) These logical relations are embodied in linguistic structure, in the form of coordination, apposition, modification, etc. Analogous to these are certain non-structural, text-forming relations which are what we are calling conjunctive relations. Conjunctive relations are encoded not in the form of grammatical structures but in the looser, more pliable form of linkages between the components of a text.
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).
eBook - PDFCooperating with Written Texts
The Pragmatics and Comprehension of Written Texts
- Dieter Stein(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Convergent evidence for a set of coherence relations 1 Kathleen Dahlgren This paper develops a theory of discourse structure based upon the notion of coherence. We examine the question of the locus of coherence — in the text, in the world, or in the speakerhearer's cognitive model? We argue that coherence relations are elements of naive theories of causal and other structure of the actual world applied to the events and entities mentioned in a discourse, rather than belonging to separate linguistic or rhetorical knowledge. Coherence theory is placed within the theory of cognitive models. An allied question is that of the architecture of gram-mar. Is coherence part of formal linguistics, so that discourse structure is a type of grammar? We reject this hypothesis because we locate coherence inferencing in broader causal reasoning about the world. Co-herence inferences are of the same type as those required for the inter-pretation of observed events as they unfold. Thus we propose an archi-tecture in which syntax, formal semantics and world knowledge are separate modules which interact in parallel tp produce a model of dis-course content. Felicitous discourse enables the construction of a cogni-tive model which coheres. Each event or state is connected by some coherence relation to some other event introduced into the discourse. In this paper a short finite set of coherence relations is proposed and justified on the basis of psychological and linguistic evidence and by philosophical argument. A computational discourse relation assignment algorithm is proposed which incorporates input from syntax, formal semantics and world knowledge in the form of naive semantic lexical representations. Its application is illustrated with an example. Computational and psychological approaches to discourse structure have included top-down approaches which try to predict in advance what the structure will be, as in story grammars and scripts (Schank and Abelson 1977).
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