Discourse analysis

Cohesion and coherence in discourse

What counts as a text?

Example A
One day her mother said to her, "Come, Little
Red Riding Hood, take this piece of cake
and bottle of wine and bring them to your
grandmother. She's sick and weak, and this
will strengthen her. Get an early start []
Example B
And this will strengthen her. Take this piece of
cake. One day her mother said to her.
She's sick.
The issue of textness
Both examples A and B - a number of simple sentences;
BUT we can intuitively interpret only example A as a text;
Example B was compiled by randomly picking up lines
from Little Red Riding Hood.
ISSUE- how LARGE CHUNKS OF LANGUAGE come to be
INTERPRETED AS TEXT
Example A can be described in terms of cohesion.
Cohesion is a type of relationship within a text when (the
interpretation of) one element of discourse depends on
another, i.e.
the ways in which the components of the surface text
(the actual words we hear or see) are mutually
connected within a sequence

Cohesion
Cohesion= a textuality standard

distinguishes a text from something, which is
not a text.
Two ways to establish cohesion in a text:
Grammatical cohesion
Lexical cohesion: the cohesive effect,
achieved by the selection of vocabulary
(repetition, synonymy, hyponymy (SUPERODINATE-
SUBORDINATE), metonymy (PART-WHOLE),
antonymy; collocation
Lexical cohesion COMPLEMENTS grammatical
cohesion
Supplemented by REGISTER (circumstances of use)
COHESION+REGISTER define TEXT
Cohesive resources
Halliday and Hasan (1976) the
inventory of cohesive resources was
organized as:
(co-)reference (1d)
Ellipsis (1f)
Substitution (1e)
Conjunction
lexical cohesion
TEXTNESS?
We ended up going for a drink and then a meal in
a Bernies Inn. Returned chez Jane for coffee
and talk. Bed about midnight.
- Cohesive markers?
Haliday and Hasan: it is the underlying semantic
relation ...that actually has the cohesive power
But (H&H): textness = presence of cohesive
markers
Reference
co-reference (Brown & Yule)
forms that direct the hearer to look for their
interpretation
Enable the hearer to pick out the intended
referent
EXOPHORIC RELATIONS- interpretation lies
OUTSIDE THE TEXT, Look at that. (that =
ENDOPHORIC- lie within the text, FORM
COHESIVE TIES:
a) anaphoric- look back in text for interpretation
Look at the sun. Its going down quickly
b) cataphoric-look forward in text for interpretation
Its going down quickly, the sun.
The same types of relationships apply to other forms
(HO ex 1.)

Coreferential chains
Example 2 (HO)
Co-referential chains:
a) Lord Melbourne; Prime Minister -0-He-he-0
b) Victoria-Queen-Victoria-she
c) Rooks- them-they- their

Chains of lexical collocation
a) birdsong- woodlark-nightingale- blackbirds-
rooks
b) Birdsong- singing- cawing- calling

Substitution

H&H- support this SIMPLE VIEW, an expression can
simply be replaced by another in discourse:

Wash and core six cooking apples. Put them in a
fireproof dish.

- what is IMPORTANT are THE RELATIONS THE TEXT
ESTABLISHES BETWEEN THE REFERENTS;

Haliday & Hasan- too simplistic (for discourse
analysts)
Concerned with linguistic resources available to the
speaker/ writer to mark the cohesive relationship

Notion of cohesion- problems

Formal cohesion does not guarantee
identification of a string as as a text
Inadequacy of cohesive ties across
sentences as a basis for textness
Exercise 1

It is easy to make up a text full of cohesive
devices which does not make any sense:
Example
My mom is 58 years old. 58 is an even
number. Number four is unlucky in Chinese

Notion of cohesion- problems
(cont.)
Texts that do not have any cohesive
devices but make perfect sense are
also quite common:
Example 2
A: It does not look like 140 students.
B: Its Friday.
Which theoretical constructs explain
this?

Notion of cohesion- problems
ILLUSION- WE COME TO THE MEANING OF A linguistic
message only on the basis of the words and the ways
they are structured:
Syntactic well-formedness as a criterion?
Compare:
a) ( the first sentence of a novel):
Within five minutes, or 10 minutes, no more than that, three
of the others had called her on the telephone to ask her
if she had heard that something had happened out
there. (Tom Wolfe, the Right Stuff)
b) Self Employed Upholsterer
Free estimates. 332 5862
Coherence
There must be some other factors
besides cohesion devices that make
connected texts meaningful
coherence.
Coherence does not exist in the
language, it exists in people. People
tend to interpret texts in accordance
with their life experience,socio-
cultural and discourse knowledge.


Summary

Cohesion is one part of the study of texture
Texture considers the interaction of cohesion with
other aspects of text organization.
In this respect COHESION is the set of resources for
constructing relations in discourse which transcend
grammatical structure
Texture, in turn, is one aspect of the study of
coherence
Coherence takes the social context of texture into
consideration.

The goal of discourse analysis in this tradition is to
BUILD A MODEL THAT PLACES TEXTS IN THEIR
SOCIAL CONTEXTS AND LOOKS COMPREHENSIVELY
AT THE RESOURCES WHICH BOTH INTEGRATE AND
SITUATE THEM