Cohesion versus coherence

Recently many attempts in the field of linguistics and translation studies have
been made to touch on the terms ‘cohesion’ and ‘coherence’.

According to De Beaugrande and Dressler, any text should include 7 criteria:

cohesion, coherence, intentionality, acceptability, informativity, situationality and
intertextuality.

Cohesion and coherence are defined as “text internal”, which make the passage
hang out together as a text; other criteria are “text external”. As Hatim and
Mason said, “texture” (which is cohesion and coherence) is defined as a property
which ensures that a text hangs together, both linguistically and conceptually.

 Cohesion:

Halliday and Hasan identify 2 major types of cohesion: grammatical cohesion and
lexical cohesion.

Grammatical cohesion is achieved through ‘reference, substitution, ellipsis’ and

‘conjunction’, while lexical cohesion is achieved through ‘reiteration’, repeating
lexical items, synonyms, hyponyms, myronyms or antonyms, and ‘collocation’.

Despite the fact that cohesion and coherence share the function of “binding the
text together by creating a sequence of meaning”, they are different from each
other in certain aspects. Cohesion involves textual relations appearing on the
surface of the text, but coherence is a mental phenomenon and it is in the “mind
of the writer and hearer”. Coherence is not linked directly to the text but is
related to the relation of the text with some external factors, somehow it does
not involve explicit relations but rather implicit ones.

Generally speaking, languages normally conceptualize and record their

experiences of the world differently. So what is acceptable in one language
cannot be taken for granted in another.
 Reference:

The term ‘reference’, involves the use of pronouns, articles or adverbs to refer
back or forward to an item, thus creating an anaphoric cohesive relation within
the text. Halliday and Hasan state that there are two main types of reference:
‘endophoric reference’ (i.e., textual reference) and ‘exophoric reference’ (i.e.,
situational reference).

They also recognize two types of comparative reference: ‘general’ and

‘particular’. General comparison denotes ‘likeliness’ or ‘unlikeliness’ of objects.
This type of comparison can be achieved through the use of words like ‘similar’,
‘same’, ‘different’ and so on. Particular comparison, on the other hand, refers to
that type of comparison in terms of ‘quality’ or ‘quantity’. Thus one can be
‘bigger’ or ‘smaller’, ‘better’ or ‘worse’ and so on than another.

In Arabic, however, the only type of comparison is particular comparative

reference. The comparative form in Arabic typically rhymes with the word ‫ أفعل‬,
followed by the preposition ‫من‬.

Although general comparative referential devices do not exist in Arabic, Arabic

has the resources that can accommodate such a type.

 Substitution:

Substitution is a replacement of one lexical item with another. Halliday and Hasan
classify substitution into three main categories: nominal, verbal and clausal
substitution. In English, every kind is achieved by certain substitutes; while by
reviewing the literature of Arabic linguistics, it can be seen that it is completely
devoid of any reference to substitution in Halliday and Hasan’s sense.

With respect to verbal substitution, it is argued that it involves categories not all
languages have. Arabic, for instance, does not have auxiliary verbs, which can be
used instead of main verbs.
The archaic adverbials such as ‘herein’, ‘hereof’, ‘herewith’, ‘therein’, ‘thereof’,
and ‘thereby’ in translating legislative texts from English into Arabic are used as
cohesive devices. Translating from Arabic into English sometimes encourages
translators to avoid the repetition of the lexical items, thereby resorting to these
legal cohesive devices.