A Text-Based Approach To Cohesion And Coherence

Cohesion and coherence, two important concepts in the study of text/discourse, have been extensively studied from a range of perspectives. Due to varied interpretations of the two constructs and poorly-defined frameworks for the comparison, no general consensus so far has been reached on the relationship between them.This thesis advocates a text-based approach to cohesion and coherence. It starts with the definition of written text rather than discourse as the basis of our study. Text is intended to be a complete and connected sequence of written sentences that conceives unity. The thesis proceeds to establish cohesion and coherence as semantic relations within text and classify several types of cohesive and coherent devices. Cohesion is confined to the specific, micro-local level of organization between and within individual clauses and sentences. Five common cohesive devices are reference, substitution, ellipsis, lexical cohesion and conjunction. Coherence is defined as an indwelling feature of text and a sense of unity more than connectedness. It is achieved through common means of text marker, lexical concurrence, text type and text pattern.Existing versions of the relationship of cohesion and coherence can be classified into four kinds: the determination theory, the relevance theory, the irrelevance theory and the correspondence theory. Among them the first three theories either overdraw or undermine the place of cohesion in coherence and only the fourth is comparatively feasible but inadequate in depth. Therefore, a revised model of the correspondence view is proposed. It compares textual cohesion and textual coherence in terms of etymology and acceptation, research subject, device and function. A conclusion is reached that cohesion and coherence are two interdependent semantic relations that work at different levels within a text and interact with each other to create textuality. Finally the relevance of the study to reading and writing teaching is demonstrated from the angles of general implications and concrete strategies. It is suggested that a comprehensive understanding of underlying semantic relations within text be sought before the application of knowledge of cohesion and coherence.The present study is based on a survey of relevant viewpoints at home and abroad, and is illustrated using corpus linguistic examples mainly from three writings of different text types or patterns. It narrows the extension of cohesion, clarifies the definition of coherence, identifies four major coherent devices, and modifies the relationship between textual cohesion and coherence from an exclusively textual perspective. All the above could be conducive to text comprehension and production.