Languages & Linguistics
Levels of Coherence
Levels of coherence refer to the degree of logical connection and organization within a text or discourse. High levels of coherence indicate that the ideas and information are well-structured and interconnected, leading to a clear and easily understandable communication. This concept is important in understanding how language and linguistic elements contribute to effective communication and comprehension.
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6 Key excerpts on "Levels of Coherence"
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.
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 - PDFThe Tapestry of Reason
An Inquiry into the Nature of Coherence and its Role in Legal Argument
- Amalia Amaya(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Hart Publishing(Publisher)
Thus, texts which lack explicit coherence may be shown to be ‘implicitly coherent’, through the application of special procedures by the interpreter. The analysis of the relationship between coherence and other related notions in discourse theory brings to light two important features of coher-ence: (i) coherence is a gradual notion; 106 and (ii) there is a variety of sources of coherence. On one extreme of the scale, we have those rare texts on which almost no procedure can impose any kind of coherence. The fore-going examples may be taken to illustrate this extreme of the scale. On the other extreme, we have those texts in which the syntax, the semantics, and the pragmatics are in order. In between the extremes, we have those texts which exhibit different degrees of coherence depending on whether there is lack of cohesion (or even evidence of non-cohesion), or whether some semantic or pragmatic condition is violated. In these cases, the coherence of the text will depend on whether the interpreter manages to interpret it in a way that makes sense. From this point of view, as stated above, there are two main objectives for a theory of coherence. First, it should identify the sources of coherence, that is, the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic means on which the degree of coherence of a text depends. And second, it should give an account of the interpretative procedures that restore or establish the coherence of a text. ii. Sources of Coherence As regards the first objective for a theory of discourse coherence—the identification of sources of coherence—in earlier sections we have reviewed a number of different views on what, beyond cohesion, constitutes discourse coherence. Different theorists present their views as if they were 104 ibid, 121. 105 Glanzberg (2002: 364). 106 For a number of papers that address the scalar or gradual nature of coherence, see Bublitz, Lenk and Ventola (1999). Coherence, Context and Rationality 457 in opposition with one another.
- Paul Portner, Claudia Maienborn, Klaus von Heusinger, Paul Portner, Claudia Maienborn, Klaus von Heusinger(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
On this analysis the coherence criterion is less restrictive, requiring only that discourses be characterizable as a connected graph; this constraint, unlike the case for tree-based structures, allows for nodes with multiple parents and for crossing dependencies. Webber et al. (2003) offer a third view, arguing that while multiple parents are permissible, the evidence for crossing dependencies is eliminated when one distinguishes between discourse relation-ships that are structural versus those that are anaphoric, the latter of which are not represented in the discourse structure. A full exploration of the issues is beyond the scope of this chapter; suffice it to say that future work is necessary to resolve these questions and many others regarding theories of discourse structure. To summarize this section, Hume addressed the ways in which ideas in the mind are associated with each other by identifying three: Cause-Effect, Resemblance, and Contiguity. The analysis of discourse coherence here identi-fies coherence relations as instantiations of these categories. It therefore consti-tutes an attempt to satisfy the psychological plausibility criterion on theories of coherence, in which the relations are seen only as convenient labels for certain types of cognitively primitive operations. This analysis is but one of many pos-sible, of course, and many questions remain concerning the proper inventory 460 Andrew Kehler of coherence relations and the way in which they are utilized to describe the coherence of larger discourses. 3 Coherence begets cohesion In Section 1 we examined the properties that define a text by pitting the cohesion view against the coherence view. Whereas we sided with the coherence view, we noted that coherent discourses do tend to be cohesive. The work surveyed in this section and the next will suggest that this is no accident; indeed, coherence begets cohesion.
eBook - PDF- Deborah Tannen, Heidi E. Hamilton, Deborah Schiffrin(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
In D. Tannen, ed., Coherence in Spoken and Written Discourse. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, pp. 3–20. Gutwinski, W. 1976. Cohesion in Literary Texts: A Study of Some Grammatical and Lexical Features of English Discourse. The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter. Halliday, M. A. K. 1964. The linguistic study of literary texts. In H. G. Lunt, ed., Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of Linguists. The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 302–7. (Reprinted in S. Chatman and S. R. Levin. 1967. Essays on the Language of Literature, pp. 217–23.) Halliday, M. A. K. 1973. Explorations in the Functions of Language. London: Edward Arnold. Halliday, M. A. K. 1978. Language as a Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning. London: Edward Arnold. Halliday, M. A. K. 1985. Spoken and Written Language. Geelong, VIC: Deakin University Press. Halliday, M. A. K. 1994. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Edward Arnold. Halliday, M. A. K. 1998. Things and relations: regrammaticising experience as technical knowledge. In J. R. Martin and R. Veel, eds., Reading Science: 78 J. R. Martin Critical and Functional Perspectives on Discourses of Science. London: Routledge, pp. 185–235. Halliday, M. A. K. 2002. Linguistic Studies of Text and Discourse, ed. J. Webster. London: Continuum. Halliday, M. A. K. and R. Hasan. 1976. Cohesion in English. London: Longman. Halliday, M. A. K. and R. Hasan. 1985. Language, Context, and Text: Aspects of Language in a Social-Semiotic Perspective. Geelong, VIC: Deakin University Press. Halliday, M. A. K. and J. R. Martin. 1993. Writing Science: Literacy and Discursive Power. London: Falmer. Halliday, M. A. K. and C. M. I. M. Matthiessen. 1999. Construing Experience through Meaning: A Language Based Approach to Cognition. London: Cassell. Halliday, M. A. K. and J. Webster, eds. 2009. Continuum Companion to Systemic Functional Linguistics. London: Continuum. Hartnett, C. 1986. Static and dynamic cohesion: signals of thinking in writing.
eBook - PDFOn Grammar
Volume 1
- M.A.K. Halliday(Author)
- 2005(Publication Date)
- Continuum(Publisher)
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. In the texts that were judged to be non-coherent, on the other hand, although the proportion of lexicoreferential occurrences entering into cohesive chains was no less than in the coherent texts, only a minority of these occurrences were cross-related in this way; in general, the recurring elements ran along-side each other through the text but without intermingling to any extent. The coherence of the text appears to be the product of this “interchaining”. If a text is coherent there is a movement of related particles through a succession of clauses, so that not only do the individual particles persist from one clause to another, but the structural configurations, though not remaining static, also preserve a recogniz-able continuity. Just as individual elements form a clause not as isolated text semantics and clause grammar 245 entities but as roles in a structural configuration, so chains of elements form a text not as isolated chains but as role-chains in an ongoing configurational movement (Appendix 1, pp. 247–50). 2. Interpersonal. How does one recognize the unique rhetorical flavour of a text? Partly at least from the overall pattern of interpersonal features of the individual clauses. A text has its own character as an intersubjective event, and this tenor of discourse is manifested primarily through the cumulative force of the options taken up in the interper-sonal systems of meaning. In Priestley’s play An Inspector Calls , the underlying theme, or rather one of the underlying themes, is that of social responsibility: we are all members of one body. This confers obligations on all of us, each one towards others.
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