COHESION AND COHERENCE

INTRODUCTION

 Cohesion and coherence are terms used

in discourse analysis and text linguistics
to describe the properties of written texts.
 COHESION
 Cohesion is defined as "the use of explicit linguistic
devices to signal relations between sentences and
parts of texts." These cohesive devices are phases or
words that help the reader associate previous
statements with subsequent ones.
 There are five general categories of cohesive devices
that signal coherence in texts:

 reference
 ellipsis
 substitution
 lexical cohesion
 conjunction
 A text may be cohesive without
necessarily being coherent: Cohesion
does not spawn coherence.
 Cohesion is determined by lexically and
grammatically overt intersentential
relationships, whereas coherence is
based on semantic relationships.
 COHERENCE
 Coherent texts make sense to the reader.
 Coherence is a semantic property of
discourse formed through the
interpretation of each individual sentence
relative to the interpretation of other
sentences, with "interpretation" implying
interaction between the text and the
reader. One method for evaluating a text's
coherence is topical structure analysis.