Gabriella Jenei: Referential Cohesion in Academic Writing • A descriptive and exploratory theory- and corpus-based study of the text-organizing role of reference in written academic discourse
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2. A GENRE-ORIENTED APPROACH TO ANALYSING COHESION IN WRITTEN ACADEMIC DISCOURSE
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2.2. Definition of key concepts
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2.2.2. Cohesion, coherence and continuity

2.2.2. Cohesion, coherence and continuity

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

Cohesion is the linguistic expression of connection by “overt, grammatically describable” dependencies (Enkvist, 1990, 14) and mutual connections of the components of the surface text (de Beaugrande & Dressler, 1981). It is a major ingredient of textuality (Smith & Frawley, 1983). According to Halliday and Hasan (1976) “cohesion is the set of meaning relations that is general to ALL CLASSES of text, that distinguishes text from ‘non-text’ and interrelates the substantive meanings of the text with each other” (ibid., 26). In this sense, cohesion pertains to the “semantic edifice” (ibid., 26) of how a text is structured and not what it means. Hoey (1991) also stresses the inter-sentential aspect of cohesion, defining it as “a property of text whereby certain grammatical or lexical features of the sentences of the text connect them to other sentences in the text” (ibid., 266). Others (e.g., Morgan & Sellner (1980 as cited in Shiro, 1994, 174)) maintain that formal cohesion is a natural result of coherence in a text, rather than its cause.

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Coherence is a textual quality that makes a text interpretable for readers by building up and conforming to a possible and consistent world-picture (Enkvist, 1990). These covert relationships may be present in the text with or without overt linguistic connections between the elements, which may be made overt through the process of interpretation (Blum-Kulka, 1986). Relationships within a text may be established through a variety of linguistic means by the writer, which are decoded by the reader using their communicative competence (linguistic, interactional and discourse competence) and their background knowledge of the world. Coherence concerns the accessibility of texts (de Beaugrande & Dressler, 1981), which depends on the interaction of knowledge presented in the text and knowledge shared by the participants in the discourse context. Therefore, much of the skill of a writer is reflected in their appropriate estimation of the imagined reader’s (or assumed target discourse community members’) background knowledge to employ the best linguistic strategies to suit reader needs in the given context.

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While most researchers agree about the distinction between the two concepts, the relationship between cohesion and coherence is much more controversial. In the era of digital technology, the complexity of the notions of coherence and cohesion has become even more difficult to capture with the rise of multilinear texts. Tyrkkö (2007) uses the term continuity instead of coherence, to better describe the new dimensions of coherence that conventional models cannot account for. In this framework, continuity bridges the gap between the two concepts by incorporating in its meaning the step-by-step nature of the decoding of cohesive chains and the flow of texts, which may smoothly build up a coherent whole or which may be interrupted or blocked by uninterpretable cohesive items.

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

Chapter 3 in this book will return to the discussion of these concepts, with a special emphasis on cohesion, and reference as a cohesive device in particular.
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