Coherence in

linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...

is what makes a text

semantically Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and comput ...

meaningful. It is especially dealt with in

text linguistics Text linguistics is a branch of linguistics that deals with texts as communication systems. Its original aims lay in uncovering and describing text grammars. The application of text linguistics has, however, evolved from this approach to a point in ...

. Coherence is achieved through syntactical features such as the use of

deictic In linguistics, deixis (, ) is the use of general words and phrases to refer to a specific time, place, or person in context, e.g., the words ''tomorrow'', ''there'', and ''they''. Words are deictic if their semantic meaning is fixed but their de ...

, anaphoric and cataphoric elements or a logical tense structure, as well as

presupposition In the branch of linguistics known as pragmatics, a presupposition (or PSP) is an implicit assumption about the world or background belief relating to an utterance whose truth is taken for granted in discourse. Examples of presuppositions include ...

s and implications connected to general world knowledge. The purely linguistic elements that make a text coherent are subsumed under the term cohesion. However, those text-based features which provide cohesion in a text do not necessarily help achieve coherence, that is, they do not always contribute to the meaningfulness of a text, be it written or spoken. It has been stated that a text coheres only if the world around is also coherent.

Robert De Beaugrande Robert-Alain de Beaugrande (1946 – June 2008) was an American text linguist and discourse analyst, one of the leading figures of the Continental tradition in the discipline. He was one of the developers of the Vienna School of Textlinguistik ( ...

and

Wolfgang U. Dressler Wolfgang U. Dressler (born 22 December 1939) is a polyglot Austrian professor of linguistics at the University of Vienna. Dressler is a scholar who has contributed to various fields of linguistics, especially phonology, morphology, text linguisti ...

define coherence as a "continuity of senses" and "the mutual access and relevance within a configuration of concepts and relations". Thereby a textual world is created that does not have to comply to the real world. But within this textual world the arguments also have to be connected logically so that the reader/hearer can produce coherence. "Continuity of senses" implies a link between cohesion and the theory of Schemata initially proposed by F. C. Bartlett in 1932 which creates further implications for the notion of a "text". Schemata, subsequently distinguished into Formal and Content Schemata (in the field of TESOLCarrell, P.L. and Eisterhold, J.C. (1983)
Schema Theory and ESL Reading Pedagogy
, in Carrell, P.L., Devine, J. and Eskey, D.E. (eds) (1988) Interactive Approaches to Second Language Reading. Cambridge: CUP.) are the ways in which the world is organized in our minds. In other words, they are mental frameworks for the organization of information about the world. It can thus be assumed that a text is not always one because the existence of coherence is not always a given. On the contrary, coherence is relevant because of its dependence upon each individual's content and formal schemata.

Sources

*Bußmann, Hadumod: ''Lexikon der Sprachwissenschaft''. Stuttgart, 1983. S. 537.

See also

Sources

Further reading