1. 1 Cohesion + Coherence Lecture 9 MODULE 2 Meaning and discourse in English

2. 2 Cohesion and coherence A sequence of sentences is a “text” when there is some kind of dependence between the sentences. The task of textual analysis is to identify the features that cause this dependence. These features have been classified in terms of COHESION and COHERENCE

3. 3 Cohesion COHESION refers to linguistic features which link sentences together and are generally easy to identify. Here are some examples ….

4. 4 Conjunctive relations He ate the cornflakes. Then he ate the packet Finally, I would like to thank all of you for coming. No students arrived. So he went home. He bought a hat and some sun cream. But he still got sunburnt.

5. 5 Conjunctive relations What is about to be said is explicitly related to what has been said before, through such notions as … CONTRAST But Yet Although / though Despite On the other hand On the contrary However Anyway well.

6. 6 Conjunctive relations What is about to be said is explicitly related to what has been said before, through such notions as … RESULT So Therefore As a result Consequently As a consequence

7. 7 Conjunctive relations What is about to be said is explicitly related to what has been said before, through such notions as … TIME Then Firstly When After Later Earlier before

8. 8 Anaphoric/cataphoric relations cataphoric relation (looking forward) anaphoric relation (looking backwards) These are features which cannot be interpreted except by reference to some other feature in the text What do you think of this: John’s getting married John’s getting married. What do you think of that?

9. 9 SUBSTITUTION the pronoun “it” replaces “bag” One feature replaces a previous word or expression. Pronouns are a good example of cohesive elements by substitution I’ve lost my bag. Have you seen it?

10. 10 ELLIPSIS A structure is omitted and can only be recovered from the previous discourse. In this example “It went” is omitted from “Out of the window” and we recover it by inference from “where did the cat go?” Where did the cat go? Out of the window.

11. 11 REPETITION Repetition is when an expression, or part of an expression is repeated. This is very common in speech (see lesson on characteristics of speech). The repetition of tense and other syntactic patterns is very important for cohesion..

12. 12 LEXICAL COHESION There is a lexical relationship when one lexical item has a structural relationship with another, for example synonymy, hyponymy, antonymy. Register (vocabulary related to a particular discipline) is also very important for lexical cohesion.

13. 13 COMPARATIVE COHESION In comparative cohesion something is always compared with something else in the discourse. Words of identity (e.g. same as), similarity (e.g. very like), difference (e.g. unlike); distinctness (e.g. totally different) are important for comparative cohesion. Something is always compared with something else in the discourse

14. 14 COHERENCE The textual world (what the text is about) is made up of concepts and relations. Coherence concerns the way in which concepts and relations are mutually accessible and relevant. In other words, a coherent text is one which is easy for us to understand because it is easy for us to make a mental representation of it. Remember that it is possible for a text to be cohesive but not coherent. The Faulkner text is full of cohesive elements but it is not easy to understand.