COHESION AND COHERENCE

1. Cohesion and coherence

2. introduction Cohesionand coherence are terms used in discourse analysis and text linguistics to describe the properties of written texts.

3. cohesion Cohesion is defined as "the use of explicit linguistic devices to signal relations between sentences and parts of texts." These cohesive devices are phases or words that help the reader associate previous statements with subsequent ones. There are five general categories of cohesive devices that signal coherence in texts: reference ellipsis substitution lexical cohesion conjunction

4. A text may be cohesive without necessarily being coherent: Cohesion does not spawn coherence. Cohesion is determined by lexically and grammatically overt intersentential relationships, whereas coherence is based on semantic relationships.

5. COHERENCE Coherent texts make sense to the reader. Coherence is a semantic property of discourse formed through the interpretation of each individual sentence relative to the interpretation of other sentences, with "interpretation" implying interaction between the text and the reader. One method for evaluating a text's coherence is topical structure analysis.