Coherence (linguistics)

Coherence in linguistics is what makes a textsemantically meaningful. It is especially dealt within text linguistics. Coherence is achieved throughsyntactical features such as the use of deictic, anaphoricand cataphoric elements or a logical tense structure, aswell as presuppositions and implications connected togeneral world knowledge. The purely linguistic elementsthat make a text coherent are subsumed under the termcohesion.However, those text-based features which provide cohe-sion in a text do not necessarily help achieve coherence,that is, they do not always contribute to the meaningful-ness of a text, be it written or spoken. It has been statedthat a text coheres only if the world around is also coher-ent.Robert De Beaugrande and Wolfgang U. Dressler definecoherence as a “continuity of senses” and “the mutual ac-cess and relevance within a configuration of concepts andrelations”.[1] Thereby a textual world is created that doesnot have to comply to the real world. But within this tex-tual world the arguments also have to be connected logi-cally so that the reader/hearer can produce coherence.“Continuity of senses” implies a link between cohe-sion and the theory of Schemata initially proposed byBartlett in 1932[2][3] which creates further implicationsfor the notion of a “text”. Schemata, subsequently distin-guished into Formal and Content Schemata (in the field ofTESOL[4]) are the ways in which the world is organized inour minds. In other words, they are mental frameworksfor the organization of information about the world. Itcan thus be assumed that a text is not always one becausethe existence of coherence is not always a given. On thecontrary, coherence is relevant because of its dependenceupon each individual’s content and formal schemata.

1 See also

• Cohesion (linguistics)

• M.A.K. Halliday

• Systemic functional linguistics

• Coh-Metrix

2 Sources[1] De Beaugrande, Robert /Dressler, Wolfgang: Introduction

to Text Linguistics. New York, 1996. P. 84 – 112

[2] Bartlett, F.C. (1932). Remembering: A study in exper-imental and social psychology. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press

[3] http://www.academia.edu/1851721/Culture_and_mind_in_reconstruction_Bartletts_analogy_between_individual_and_group_processes

[4] Carrell, P.L. and Eisterhold, J.C. (1983) “Schema Theoryand ESL Reading Pedagogy”, in Carrell, P.L., Devine, J.and Eskey, D.E. (eds) (1988) Interactive Approaches toSecond Language Reading. Cambridge: CUP.

• Bußmann, Hadumod: Lexikon der Sprachwis-senschaft. Stuttgart, 1983. S. 537

3 Further reading• ABibliography of Coherence and Cohesion byWol-fram Bublitz at Universität Augsburg

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