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ARRANGED BY:

ARIF APRIZAL
INTAN TRINE CHODIJA
PANJI W.
SULASTRI
USWATUN KHOIRIYAH

COHESION AND COHERENCE

I. INTRODUCTION
People communicate each other in their live. They share feeling, and thought from one and
others. Crystal (2005:3) states that communication is much boarder concept, involving
transmission and reception of any kind information between any kinds of life. The definition
concludes that every process of sending and accepting information is communication.

In communication, people also need channels of information. The channels are the five human
senses that are sound, sight, touch, smell, and sight. From the five senses, the use of sound
the auditory-vocal mode is the fundamental human communication channel. In practice, the
example of the mode is speech. The use of sight the visual mode is also familiar in daily
communication. The visual mode which uses facial expression or gesture describes as nonverbal
language. People usually use words and sentence in communication and it is called verbal
language.

Language in communication is meaningful when it is well arranged and relevant with context
surrounding the communication. The arrangement and relevance of language is discourse. In
linguistic, Stubbs (1983: 1) states that discourse is a study of the organization of language above
sentence or above clause, and therefore to study larger linguistic units, such us conversational
exchanges or written texts. It follows that study of discourse is wider than other linguistic studies
that only focus in sentence analysis.

The study of discourse is called discourse analysis. Discourse analysis is about how sentences
combine to form text. It observes whether a text makes sense or not. Text that makes sense
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should have unity with context surrounding it. The context can be other discourses (text),
intention with the writer or speaker, setting, time, place, and other aspects of communicative
context. There are two terms that are very fundamental in discourse analysis which studies the
relation among a text within the other texts. The terms are cohesion and coherence.

II. DISCUSSION

A. Cohesion

Cohesion is the connection that results when the interpretation of a textual element is dependent
on another element in the text. [] Cohesion refers to the connection that exists between
elements in the text Stubbs (1983: 1).

Halliday and Hasan (1976: 6) classify cohesion in English into two broad categories:
grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion.

Grammatical Cohesion
1. Reference
Anaphoric: an item that refers back to something else in the same text. (Gutwinski, 1976, p.66)
For example:
There was an old lady who lived in a shoe.
She had so many children, she didnt know what to do.
Cataphoric: an item refers to something coming along in the text. (Gutwinski, 1976, p.67).
For example:
He was scarcely ten years old when he was first arrested as a vagabond.
He spoke thus to the judge: I am called Jean Francois Letruc
(Francois CoppeThe Substitute (in Coppe, 1891, p.91)
Exophoric: an item refers to a situation outside of language. (Gutwinski, 1976, p. 67)
For example: when a person says this cat, and points to the cat in the fort yard.

2. Substitution: use of pro-forms

a. one(s): She likes red ribbons, but her sister likes green ones.
b. do: A: Did John take the letter?
B: He might have done.
c. so/not: Do you need help? If so, I'll stay; if not, I'll go.
d. same: They went to the cafeteria, and I did the same.

3. Ellipsis: omission of elements which are retrievable from context


If you take the green tie, I'll take the blue _.
a. A: Will anyone be waiting?
B: John will _, I think.
b. A: Have you considered my proposal?
B: No, but I will _.
He said he would consider my proposal as soon as he could _ but he hasn't _.
4. Conjunction: signals relationship between discourse segments (and, but, or, though, then,
because...)
a. She's honest. And she's reliable.
b. I've lived here ten years and I've never heard of him.
c. He stayed in the snow for a hour and caught a cold.
d. They came in and sat down.
Other examples: apposition: or, in other words;
clarification: or rather;

variation: alternatively;
spatio-temporal: there/previously;
causal-conditional: consequently/in that case

Lexical cohesion
Lexical Cohesion: words are semantically related; for example, when they all concern the same
topic. (Turney, 2006). In the words of Paltridge (2006:133), Lexical cohesion refers to
relationships in meaning between lexical items in a text and, in particular, content words and the
relationship between them. Hatch (1992) notes that some lexical ties are long, as they are spread
over larger pieces of discourse, and others are short.
Reiteration: repetition of a lexical item in various forms

repetition: same word(s)

There was a large mushroom growing near her, about the same height as herself; and, when she
had looked under it, it occurred to her that she might as well look and see what was on the top of
it... She stretched herself up on tiptoe, and peeped over the edge of the mushroom...{}

synonym:

Accordingly... I took leave, and turned to the ascent of the peak. The climb is perfectly easy...

superordinate: as summation of hyponyms

There was a fine old rocking-chair that his father used to sit in, a desk where he wrote letters, a
nest of small tables and a dark, imposing bookcase. Now all this furniture was to be sold, and
with it his own past.

general word:

Can you tell me where to stay in Vancouver? I've never been to the place before.

Other examples: Human: people, person, man, woman, child, boy, girl
Non-human animate: creature
Inanimate concrete count: thing, object
Inanimate concrete mass: stuff
Inanimate abstract: business, affair, matter
Action: move
Place: place
Fact: question, idea

There's a boy climbing that elm.


a. The boy's going to fall if he doesn't take care.
b. The lad's going to fall if he doesn't take care.
c. The child's going to fall if he doesn't take care.
d. The idiot's going to fall if he doesnt take car.
e. That elm isn't very safe.
f. That tree isn't very safe.
g. That old thing isn't very safe.
Collocation: association of lexical items that regularly co-occur due to some recognizable
lexico-semantic relation, such as

synonym & superordinate e.g. co-hyponyms: red: green

opposites
o

complementarities: boy: girl; stand up: sit down

antonyms: like: hate; large: small

converses: order: obey; buy: sell

same order series e.g. Monday, Tue., Wed.; north, south

part-whole
o

part-to-whole: brake: car; lid: box

part-to-part: mouth: chin; verse: chorus

In short, Lexical cohesion is created if items which tend to appear in the same lexical
environment (i.e. sharing similar patterns of collocation) occur in adjacent sentences.

B. Coherence
The issue of coherence is closely related to Grices Cooperative Principle and particularly to the
relevance maxim, since it addresses the question about what makes a sequence of utterances
hang together in a genuine conversational text.

It follows that a definition of coherence will necessarily make reference to some recognisable
property of relatedness or association among variable elements. In more concrete terms, it will be
based on the assumption that each utterance is intended to mean something in the direction of
achieving a goal in which the conversational actors mutually believe there is interest.

Robert de Beaugrande and Wolfgang Dressler describe coherence as a continuity of senses and
mutual access and relevance within a configuration of concepts and relations.
Continuity of senses is the foundation of coherence; it also implies a relationship between
cohesion and Bartletts theory of Schemata.
Example of Theory of Schemata:
Schemata of a CatIn this schema there is general information (eyes, teeth, sounds they make, claws) and more
specific (small, fur colour, short/long hair). If you think of a more specific breed, your general
information becomes more specific, for example: blue eyes, long coat of fur, etc. Instead of more
specific, one could also think in the opposite direction (need air to breath, food to eat). This
would be your schemata of a cat, new experiences with cats would add to your knowledge of
them.
Rumelhart has described schemata as "building blocks of cognition" which are used in the
process of interpreting sensory data, in retrieving information from memory, in organising goals
and subgoals, in allocating resources, and in guiding the flow of the processing system.
Rumelhart has also stated that if our schemata are incomplete and do not provide an
understanding of the incoming data from the text we will have problems processing and
understanding the text.

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Continuity of sense has varying control centres (listed below), which are points from which
accessing and processing can be strategically done. (de Braugrande &Dessler, 1972) These
control centers are similar to Bartletts Theory of Schemata.
Following are the primary concepts from de Beaugrande and Dressler (1972). A detailed list of
the secondary concepts can be found here.
a. Objects: conceptual entities with a stable identity and constitution;
b. Situations: configurations of mutually present objects in their current states;
c. Event occurrences: which change a situation or a state within a situation,
d. Actions: events intentionally brought about by an agent.
Following is an example from de Beaugrande & Dressler (1972, p.105 ) concerning coherence
and how it is linguistically portrayed on paper.

Coherence is comprehended in terms of the communicative goals and plans of the conversational
actors, who join interpretative efforts to help each other in realising them. It follows that actors
actively organise the world through the processes of collaboratively and intersubjectively
constructed cognition, for if we were not able to do such framing, we would be lost in a murk
of chaotic experience and probably would not have survived as a species in any case (Bruner
1990: 56, original emphasis). In analysing the phenomenon of coherence in conversation, we can
distinguish between functional organisation and topical organisation of discourse, which will be
briefly described below.

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a. Functional coherence
Functional organisation is concerned with the pragmatic aspects of language in use. McLaughlin
(1984) sees the distinction between propositional or topical structure and pragmatic coherence in
a way that is reminiscent of Austins distinction between what we are saying in an utterance
(locutionary act) and what we are doing by it (illocutionary act), or between the organisation of
ideas and the organisation of action.

To account for the linear or utterance-by-utterance level of functional organisation, McLaughlin


uses Schegloffs (1972) and Schegloff and Sacks (1973) notion of conditional relevance,
according to which any utterance restricts the range of actions that subsequent turns may
perform. Jeffersons (1978) terms for this organisational aspect of discourse are local
occasioning and sequential implicativeness, and Goffman (1971) notes that the demand for
conditional relevance seems to be taken for granted, since any utterance can be virtually
interpretable as an appropriate reply if it occurs at the relevant point.

The smallest functional unit is the adjacency pair (Schegloff and Sacks, 1973); other
synonymous terms are the couplet, or minimal dialogue unit (Goffman, 1976). Common
examples of adjacency pairs are question-answer, accuse-deny/confess, request-grant/deny, etc.
Goffman (1976) puts the generative mechanism for adjacency pairs down to the fundamental
need in communication for the provision of feedback. This concept of action-reaction pair is
important in discussing local functional organisation and hierarchical relations of pragmatic
coherence.

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McLaughlin (1984) draws on the considerable amount of literature at hand to speak of


pragmatic macro-structures in conversation, which correspond to the representation of a global
speech act or macro-act. He goes on to show that the pragmatic topic refers to the
perlocutionary effect of the global act, that is, to the speakers goal. He further specifies that
ones understanding of the actions (micro-acts) in the macro-structures and their importance will
vary to the extent to which they are under pragmatic focus. This means that in terms of the role
of the micro-acts in the speakers global plan, some will be main acts, others subordinate acts. It
may happen that some pragmatic macro-structures do not have an explicit main act. In such
cases, the micro-acts that constitute them will cumulatively amount to the value of a global act.

For illustration, we take the following dialogue, a familiar family scene:


1 A: Are you still playing games?
2 B: Whats the time?
3 A: Dads leaving in a moment.
4 B: OK.

We cannot speak about an explicit main act here. The subordinate acts 1A (contingent query), 2B
(contingent query) and 3A (answer), accrue to the global act request, an interpretation confirmed
by the satisfaction of it expressed in 4B.

In other cases, main and subordinate actions are overtly manifest in the utterances, like in this
dialogue, so typical of a teaching staff room:

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1 A: Are you using the photocopier?


2 B: How many copies?
3 A: Just two.
4 B: OK. There you go.

As initial plan is to inquire about a precondition of a request (1A = pre-request subordinate


action); A expects that Bs anticipation of a request will be enough reason to grant it, but B wants
to make sure that the preconditions for granting the request suit him/her (2B = request for
information subordinate action); As amended plan is to reassure B that the preconditions for
granting his request are satisfying (3A = providing information about precondition subordinate
action); B grants As request (4B = grant main action) and the macro-structure reads like this:
macro-proposition = A requests B to allow him/her to use the photocopier; the global speech act
= request-grant; subordinate actions = pre-request and question-answer.

b. Topical coherence
Topical organisation is the level of propositional coherence in the structure of the conversational
flow and goes hand in hand with functional organisation, as conversational topicality, that sense
that conversation is about something, can only be analysed in relation to the sequential structure
and activity types in discourse. According to Linell and Korolija (1997: 168), topics are
characteristic of actors activities of using discourse and contexts to build islands of coherence
and intersubjectivity in and through the interactions, i.e., in the acts of referring, predicating, and
connecting thoughts (idea units) with one another in a discourse with a common floor (an
interaction with a single focus of attention) (original emphasis).

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The same idea that coherence is negotiated and jointly constructed in and through conversational
interaction is formulated by other coherence theorists. For example, Bublitz (1988) defines topics
as a combination of topic subjects, i.e. content, and the topical actions, which introduce,
sustain, change or close them; Schegloff (1990) supports the idea that the fundamental building
blocks in discourse are local sequential dependencies between actions and utterances;
Gernsbacher and Givn (1995) maintain that coherence is not merely a matter of the
conversational text itself, but a property which is gained through an emergent sense of
directionality.

To strengthen this idea, the pragmatists view on topicality is different from that of the text
grammarians in that the former consider not only the content but also the whole chain of related
interactional events and actions, which Linell and Korolija (1997) term episodes. They take
episodes to be discursive events or action sequences, each delimited from prior and subsequent
discourse, and internally bound together by something, e.g. a coherent topical trajectory and/or a
common activity (1997: 167). In terms of minimal size, in their conception, episodes consist of
at least three turns, at least two of which must be substantial turns by different speakers . By
substantial turns they mean turns expanded beyond being a minimal response. Episodes are
structures that are situated above utterances and adjacent turns, but below whole speech
events/activities.

Topicality (and, implicitly, coherence) is an incremental process developed on an utterance-toutterance basis: one idea unit makes another one possible and relevant, and once this new unit

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materializes, opportunities for further continuation, i.e. more idea units, are created .Thus, a
topic emerges in the dialogue dynamics of responses and initiatives, being both the project and
the product of coherence building (Goffman 1983). Bergmann (1990) uses the terms topic
maintenance for the responsive actions and topic progression for the initiatory steps. Topics
can shade or drift into each other or they can be shifted or changed more or less abruptly.

Linell and Korolija (1997) make the point that although topic organisation is a property of
discourse at the episode level, this is not an obligatory correlation. Their argument is that,
generally, topicality, coherence, and episode structure in discourse are activity-specific (1997:
171). For example, an activity type like gathering personal data about a client by a professional
generates little local coherence beyond the question-answer pair but has global coherence
derived from the framing activity type, along with the macro-topical agenda.

Quizzes and psychological tests are made up of topically unrelated questions, yet the activities
are perceived as globally coherent by virtue of the activity-type context that compensates the
lack of any relatedness between question-answer pairs.

Another aspect discussed by Linell and Korolija is topic maintenance as a dynamic process. This
means that within episodes there are smoother or more radical topic transitions, which explains
why the end of some episodes appears to be about a completely different topic from the initial
one. Coherence is not something which exists in the language but something which exists in
people.
Example:

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A: Thats the telephone


B: I am in the both.
C: Ok.
We can interpret the above dialogue with the help of conventional action and by our background
knowledge that someone in the bathroom can not attend the telephone.

C. Relation between Coherence and Cohesion


Halliday and Hassan (1976) refer to cohesion as being a source of coherence. But Carrell (1982)
strongly disagrees with them on that view. She finds cohesion to be nothing more than a result of
coherence. Carrell quotes Morgan and Sellner (1980) who also find Halliday and Hassan to be
mistaking. Morgan and Sellner explain that when Halliday and Hassan are mentioning that a
referent refers back or forth to something in the text, it is not something in the text actually but
something in the context, from which the reader and the hearer understands what the
speaker/writer is talking about. Carrell herself is also supporting the idea by Morgan and Sellner
and believes it to be the content and not the cohesion between the expressions which bring
coherence to the text. In the commonly quoted example by Halliday and Hassan:
Wash and core six cooking apples. Put them into a fireproof dish.
Carrell finds that them in the second sentence does not refer to the apples in the first sentence but
some real world apples. Brown and Yule (1983) present a more convincing argument against
Halliday and Hassan that the apples, in the first sentence, are as they were brought from the
market while those in the second sentenceare washed and cored apples and therefore not the
same as in the first sentence. They argued similarly for the other cohesive devices like
substitution and ellipsis. Brown and Yule (1983) observe that some pieces of discourse, can be

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said to be unconnected due to lack of cohesive devices, but they still form coherent text (for
example; advertisements, brochures etc) because different genres of discourse have different
criteria of coherence.

Where Carrell fully ignores the importance of cohesion in coherence, Brown and Yule at least
agree that different genres of text demand different criteria of coherence. Hatch (1992) sounds
more acceptable, when he says that the knowledge of script, speech events and rhetorical
organisation usually results in a coherent text but sometimes, we need to make use of cohesive
ties and deictic markers to guide the listener/reader through the text.

The formal links (cohesive devices), according to Cook (1989) also, are not enough or necessary
for a text. He means to say that there can be a text without them and there can even be an
incoherent piece with them. He as well as Salkie (1995) holds the understanding of the context as
more important. Davies (2005) clarifies all them is conceptions, coherence does not have to
depend on logical internal links and familiar patterns of organisation- it also has a lot to do with
how we interpret the language we read or hear.

To conclude, the argument let us quote McCarthy (1991) who says, all discourse markers
including cohesive markers are concerned with the text on the surface level. He, like Davies,
marks that the interpretation is the key that the listener/reader uses to understand what the
speaker/writer has tried to say by utilising both above and below the surface available devices.
Therefore, cohesion is not a criterion for coherence yet it is an important element in some genres
of discourse.

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CONCLUSION
There are two terms that are very fundamental in discourse analysis which studies the relation
among a text within the other texts. The terms are cohesion and coherence. Cohesion is the use of
language forms to indicate semantic relations between elements in a discourse. It is grammatical
and lexical relationship within a text or sentence. It can be defined as the links that hold a text
together and give it meaning.

Coherence is grammatical and semantic interconnectedness between sentences that form a text. It
is the semantic structure, not its formal meaning, which create coherence. Coherency is a
condition where sentences in a text hang together. It can occur in relation of sentences that
immediately follow each other. Coherency grammatically arises when a text contains transition
signals or when it possesses consistent pronoun. Semantically, a text is said coherence when
there is unity of meaning among elements of the texts.

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from http://www.apperceptual.com/ml_text_cohesion_apps.html

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