Cohesion, Coherence and Discourse

She hid Bob then cooked it, whose sister rose prices, which liked very much itself , however Sheila wanted. The electric appliances, including the Kangaroo and the astronaut, notwithstanding, snow-boarded up the slope sadly, swam in the road glady, flew under the sea madly.

Texts as ‘language events’Self-contained

Well formed

Hang together (cohesion)

Make sense (coherent)

Clear purpose

Recognizable text types

Appropriate context of use

Follow expected pattern (schema)

Cohesion and Coherence ‘impeccably well formed [language] is typical of casual spontaneous speech (including children)’

Halliday 1985:35

• Cohesion – hanging it all together

• Coherence – getting the message across (including pragmatic function)

Cohesion

• Grammatical cohesion

• Syntactic cohesion

• Lexical cohesion

• Semantic cohesion

• Cohesive links

• Cohesive devices

Grammatical cohesion In the following texts identify the different kinds or errors

1. Jane like make fun English upper classes2. No one make any reply. She then yawn again, throw aside her

book, and cast her eyes round the room in quest of some amusement; when hear her brother mention a ball to Miss Bennet, she turn suddenly towards him and say, …

3. The brother of Jane is the teacher of my daughter.4. To obtain informations on the musics used in the programme

please write to our informations service. For advices on how to write musics for TV programmes please get in touch with our advices service.

5. she made not the smallest objection to his joining in the society of the neighbourhood

BUT – texts still understandable even if not grammatically cohesive. (– cfr Grice’s maxims – can be flouted, so can grammar rules. All evidence that we strive to make sense of nay kind

of text (unless it is English people trying to udnerstand foreign tourists!)

• Typical natural language presents a high rate of ungrammatical text, so the study of ungrammaticalities cannot be ignored.

Parsing on Ungrammaticality

K.K. Yong and C. Huyck (UK)

Paper presented at AI and soft computing 2004

Syntactic cohesion

1. Has come yesterday John.

2. The sister of the girlfriend of the teacher of my brother is the teacher of my sister.

3. Not only he was rich, but handsome, too.

Lexical cohesion - 2

• Synonymy (the plan, thr project, the proposal)• Antonymy (good/bad, hot/cold, married/unmarried)• Hyponomy (furniture(superordinate)- table, chair, bed (co-hyponyms))• Paraphrasis ("Wilfing" - or surfing the web without any real

purpose - )• Semantic field (weather – cold, sun, rain, temperature, windy, forecast )

• Collocations (patches of fog, join the army, have a party, sharp increase)• Lexical chunks (If I were you, I don’t know, Best wishes, )

Semantic cohesion

• She came into the room. He braked suddenly and the car swerved violently and crashed into the bus shelter. They were happy to be there together, but sorry the children weren’t there to enjoy the scene. Even though it might have been better to buy the bigger size, in case the children had a growth spurt.

Semantic cohesion - 2

• A series of sentences may be well-formed grammatically, but lack semantic cohesion, and therefore does not meet the basic criteria to be considered a text. Semantic links between successive sentences are fundamental to cohesion and coherence. There must be thematic progression (see Halliday below)

Cohesive devices• Verb tenses• Referring expressions (anaphoric, cataphoric

and exophoric reference) • Rhetorical questions• Repetition (words and structures)• Parallelism (+ the rule of three)• Semantic fields (lexical cohesion)• Substitution (Do you like pizza? Yes, I do. )• Ellipsis (What are you doing? Playing chess )• Conjunctions

Parallelism

And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.

Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.

Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania.

   Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado.

   Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California.

   But not only that:   Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.   Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee.   Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of

Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

Conjuncts

• Conjuncts have a fundamental role in the cohesion of a text and may have various functions

• Listing/Enumerative (indicating that what follows is a list of propositions) To start with, First, Second, Third

• Additive (giving extra information, exemplifying a point, emphasising a point ) Too, also, in addition, for example,

moreover etc • Summative (summing up, or concluding, on the

preceding phrases/sentence(s)) To sum up, to conclude, in a word/ nutshell

• Appositive (rephrasing the preceding sentence) in other

words, what I mean is,

Conjuncts - 2• Resultative/inferential/causal (indicating that the content of the

sentence is a result of the events expressed in the preceding sentence/paragraph and relations of cause and effect/outcome) therefore, thus, as a consequence

– As a consequence of this approach, we have equal numbers of mean and women as head of unit.

• Antithetic/adversative (contrasting the previously mentioned idea) but, though, alternatively, on the other hand, however

• Concessive (indicating that the content of the sentence "exists" despite the content in the preceding sentence) however, while, despite, even though

• It is very cold. I went for my morning walk, however. • Temporal (indicating temporal relation between the contend

of the sentence and the preceding sentence) while, during, ever since, next, later, finally

CoherenceTexts can be perfectly cohesive but incoherent

Are these sentences coherent? If not, why not?1. Which of you people is the fish?

2. Two seventy-nines, one medium sixty-three, three elevens, a mild forty-three, oh and what’s the thirty three?

3. Give bob ball. Give ball. Give Bobby ball. Give.

4. They know what the house thinks.

5. if the visible of sprite 5 then go to the frame

Coherence - 2

• “… language in use, for communication – is called discourse; and the search for what gives discourse coherence is discourse analysis.”

• Cook 1989: 6• “Discourse can be anything from a grunt or single

expletive, through short conversations and scribbled notes right up to Tolstoy’s novel, War and Peace, or a lengthy legal case.

Schemata• Write out different schemata for the

following text types:

• Legal document

• Business letter

• Novel

• Newspaper article

• Joke

• Job interview

• Buying a ticket at the train station

Schemata - 2

• We rely on our knowledge of the world (presuppositions) when interpreting situations. This includes cultural knowledge, linguistic knowledge and social knowledge.

• Different views as to how these suppositions work (Lakoff vs Fullmore and Keenan vs Jackendoff)

• Cultural conditions

Form to Function• “To connect their knowledge with the

language system people se reasoning, and pragmatic theories go some way towards explaining how people reason their way from the form to the function and thus construct coherent discourse from the language they receive” Cook, p42-43

• The interaction between knowledge, reasoning, and language is crucial to understanding discourse

Language functions - Jakobson• Emotive function (from ‘Ugh!’ to ‘Awesome’)

• Directive function ( with the purpose of affecting the behaviour of the addressee)

• Phatic function (to open the discourse and monitor it’s reception)

• Poetic function (including advertising slogans)

• Referential function (conveying information)

• Metalinguistic function (to talk about language)

• Contextual function (to signpost the discourse)

Micro-functions• Each of the above macro-functions can be broken

down into subcategories, e.g. » orders requests for action» requests requests for information

Directive function pleas requests for help• questions requests for sympathy

» prayers requests for forgiveness

» Adapted from Cook, 1989, p 27» This list is not meant to be exhaustive and categories

can be broken down further.

• NB. Discourse can have more than one function

Conversational Principles• Grice’s Maxims – cooperative principle:

• Be true (maxim of quality)

• Be brief (maxim of quantity)

• Be relevant (maxim of relevance)

• Be clear (maxim of manner)• Akmajian et al refer to these as Conversational presumptions and

divide sincerity and truthfulness – the former refering to the speaker’s belief in what he/she is saying.

Politeness Principle

• As social beings our ultimate aim is to interact with other people, i.e. social cohesion. In order to achieve this we obey certain unwritten rules regarding politeness. In other words, whenever possible we avoid being rude (not always – depending on context see below)

Breaking rules

• Cooperative principles are often violeted – or ‘flouted’ in Grice’s terminology. For example with hyperbole, metaphor, irony, sarcasm, double entendre etc. Or in the case of politicians, most maxims are routinely flouted.

• However, the addressee must have sufficient knowledge of the language/context/culture to be able to know when the maxims are being purposely flouted.

Appropriacy

• Discourse should be appropriate to the context

• Depends on power relations

• Social expectations

• Prior knowledge of social conventions required

The Appropriate Way to Greet the PM???

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/5189048.stm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Xq3DobSCKQ

Inappropriate use of language can have repercussions far wider than expected.

Catch phrases live much longer than international declarations in the

public’s mind

• Has 'Yo Blair' been replaced? Bumbling Berlusconi becomes Bush's new BFF*

BFF =

Best Friend Forever in chatroom speak

Daily Mail14.10.08

Analysing Texts and Contexts –Top Down

Someone (Who by) communicates to someone else (Who for), who may or may not respond, about something (What), somewhere (Where), at a certain moment in time (When), using a chosen means (How), for some reason/purpose (Why)

Contexts and Register

• The register of language depends on the context of the text – whatever the medium and the participants

Register and language

• Register can affect all features of language: vocabulary, syntax, phonology, morphology, pragmatics and/or different paralinguistic features such as pitch, volume and intonation in spoken English.

Degrees of formality

• There are not merely two kinds of register (formal and informal), nor are there clear boundaries between x kinds of register, but rather a continuum from highly formal to highly informal (aka vulgar!).

Register, varieties and dialect• Discourse highly complex – context must also take

into account such things as geographical varieties (including dialects), social class, age, and even time (e.g. the language used in an historical novel)

• Once again there are no clear boundaries:– When does a variety become a dialect?- At what age should one stop using the language of ‘youth’?- Are there more formal and less formal varieties of dialects? - idiolects – idiosyncracies

http://www.mediaplayer.telegraph.co.uk/?item=A5DD96A9-6983-49E2-85A6-C693A20B4872

Kinds of Meaning

• There are often two types of meaning:

• Semantic meaning (literal meaning) depending on the words used

• Pragmatic meaning which depends on the context in which the words occur

• Sometimes the two may coincide – often they do not

“There’s a dead bird on the steps.”

• Literal/semantic meaning referential function

• Pragmatic function remove it

Infering meaning - 3• The meaning has to be the same for both speakers

(Lakoff – semantic presuppositions, assumptions about context; Fillmore - set of conditions, presupposition that the context is appropriate; Jackendoff – shared presuppositions, presumption that the hearer has the same presuppositions – see Akmajian et al p 346)

• The presupposition must match the context. In the case of the ‘snack’ Calvin has not thought about the context – perhaps soon before dinner and with a mother who cares about diet… Calvin’s presuppositions and those of his mother are not the same.

Infering meaning - 3Dick Cheney walks into the Oval Office and sees The President whooping and hollering.

"What's the matter, Mr. President?" The Vice President inquired.

"Nothing at all, boss. I just done finished a jigsaw puzzle in record time!" The President beamed.

"How long did it take you?"

"Well, the box said '3 to 5 Years' but I did it in a month!"

A Question

• If the same words can mean completely different things in different contexts, how does the addressee know whether to interpret words literally or non-literally?

Answer

• Linguistic knowledge alone is not enough to interpret discourse when Grice’s maxims are being flouted – i.e. when an utterance has non-literal meaning.

• We choose the most likely meaning according to our expectations and world, cultural, and linguistic knowledge

Ambiguity

• We choose the most likely meaning according to our expectations and world, cultural and linguistic knowledge

Context and Register – Halliday

• Halliday (1964) identifies three variables that determine context and as a result register: field (the ‘what’ of the discourse, i.e. the subject matter and the nature of the discourse), tenor (the ‘who’ of the discourse, i.e. the participants and their relationships) and mode (the ‘how’ i.e. the type of communication, e.g. spoken or written).

• This is but one linguist’s terminology – other linguists use other terms.

Context and Register – Hymes (1)

• Hymes (1972) identified other components of a context:- participants (speaker audience)- message form- message content- setting (where/when)- medium of communication (spoken, written etc)- intent of communication (purpose)- effect of communication (outcome)- the key (tone/register)- the genre (text type)- the norms of interaction (expectations)

Context and Register –Hymes (2)To help you remember

S – Setting and Scene

P – Participants

E – Ends

A – Act Sequence

K – Key

I – Instrumentalities

N – Norms

G – Genre

Context and Register – House (based on Crystal and Davey)

• House (1981 & 1997) talked about different ‘dimensions’: 3 dimensions for the ‘language user’ and 5 dimensions for ‘language use’

User Use- geographic origin - medium- social class - participation- time - social role relationship

- social attitude- province

- member of sub-group??- cultural and social relationships

Power relations• Much of the register of an interaction is

dictated by the power relations between the interlocutors. Both participants must, however, have the same understanding of this power relationship if the rights and obligations of the participants are to be respected. If not this can result in either offence or embrassment. This knowledge is often culture-bound. Compare power relationships in Eastern cultures with those in the Western world.

Underlying forces

• The force of what is said can vary depending on how the language is used.

• Austin and Searle’s Speech act theory:

• Locution – the information conveyed

• Illocution – the act performed

• Perlocution – the main aim of the discourse (the upshot)

DiscourseTop down

social relationships shared knowledge discourse type discourse structure

discourse function

schemata (ritual and repertoire)

cohesion grammar and lexis sounds and letters

bottom up(Adapted from Cook, 1989, p80)

Bibliography• Cook, G (1989) Discourse Oxford: Oxford University Press.• Cutting, J. (2002) Pragmatics and Discourse: A resource book for students • Halliday, M.A.K. (1964) ‘Comparison and translation’. In M.A.K. Halliday,

M.McIntosh and P. Strevens, The linguistic sciences and language teaching. London: Longman.

• Halliday, M.A.K. (1985) ‘Dimensions of discourse analysis: grammar’ in T. A. van Dijk (1985) Handbook of Discourse Analysis vol 2 London: academic Press

• House, J. (1981) 1997) A Model for Translation Quality Assessment. Tuebigen: Gunter Narr Verlag

• Hymes, D. (1972) ‘Models of the Interaction and Social Life’ in Gumperz, J. J. and Hymes, D. (1972) Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication New York: Holt, Rhinehart & Winston.

• McCarthy, M. (1991) Discourse analysis for Language Teachers Cambridge: CUP

• Thornbury, S. (2005) Beyond the Sentence: introducing discourse analysis London: Macmillan