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Understanding Text Cohesion and Coherence

The document discusses the concepts of cohesion and coherence in texts, emphasizing the importance of both surface features and deeper meaning for effective communication. It outlines characteristics of acceptable texts and various devices that contribute to cohesion, including lexical, grammatical, and rhetorical elements. Additionally, it highlights the unique features of spoken texts, such as spontaneity and interactivity, and their role in maintaining coherence and relevance in conversation.

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Yavuz Mustaoglu
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7 views2 pages

Understanding Text Cohesion and Coherence

The document discusses the concepts of cohesion and coherence in texts, emphasizing the importance of both surface features and deeper meaning for effective communication. It outlines characteristics of acceptable texts and various devices that contribute to cohesion, including lexical, grammatical, and rhetorical elements. Additionally, it highlights the unique features of spoken texts, such as spontaneity and interactivity, and their role in maintaining coherence and relevance in conversation.

Uploaded by

Yavuz Mustaoglu
Copyright
© All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

Thornbury-Beyond the Sentence

Unlocking texts-we do this by combining what we already know (schemata), top-down and what
we can understand from the elements in the text (bottom-up).
What is a text? Acceptable texts
- Are self-contained
- Are well-formed
- Hang together (cohesive)
- Make sense (coherent)
- Have a clear comm. purpose
- Are recognizable text types
- Are appropriate to their contexts
Cohesion- wholeness of a text. Devices:
Lexical:
- direct repetition, word families, synonyms & antonyms
- Words from the same semantic field, lexical chains
- Substitution
Grammatical:
- Reference: pronouns, articles: anaphoric, cataphoric, exophoric (The cat-of the family)
- Substitution
- Ellipsis of clause elements
- Conjuncts (linkers)
- Comparatives
- Tense
Rhetorical
- Question-answer
- Parallelism
Coherence
Cohesion is a surface feature; it is not enough make a sentence coherent. Cohesion and
coherence work together.
Micro-level coherence: Sentence-level coherence, same topic, cohesive devices
Theme/rheme (topic/comment): The genes carry the information needed to make a plant. The
tendency to put new information in the latter part of a clause is called end-weight.
Nominalization (…., this process is called…) encapsulating previous information or set up
expectations as to what to come. Cleft sentences (Dorothy have Toto a bone) used to place
special emphasis on new information. Textualising is a good way to teach coherence and
cohesion.
Spoken Texts (Utterances): HEAD-TAIL Are characterized by
Spontaneity: Filled pauses (um), repetitions (I I), false starts & backtracking (There’s
something… I want to say that), incomplete utterances (the idea that you sort of …), one-phrase-
at-a-time” smaller runs that enable addition of sentence slots for practicality, all for easy
processing in the speed of speaking.
Interactivity (reciprocity): You are speaking to someone, back-channeling, use of discourse
markers (signposting?)
Inter-personality: Recognition of others’ ideas and feeling and responding to them – back-
channeling
Coherence: making sense
Relevance: Talking about the same topic
Macrostructure: Adjacency pairs (predictable two-way exchanges), IRF (initiate, respond,
follow-up), transactional talk>to exchange info,
Opening and closing: starting and ending a conversation
Story sequences
Speech-in-action
Texts in context: co-text> other parts of the same text

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