Cohesion and coherence
Order and sense-what you need to use in your
essays!
• The techniques and devices used to connect different
parts of a text. They help the sentences of a text hang
together so that the reader is able to ‘track’ the meaning.
• It is possible to invent a sequence of sentences that are
highly cohesive but incoherent.
EG ‘A week has seven days. Every day I feed my cat.
Cats have four legs. The cat is on the mat. Mat has three
letters.
Cohesion
• Reference (anaphoric and cataphoric)
• Deictics (deixis)
• Ellipsis
• Conjunction
• Information flow (clefting, front focus and end focus)
Grammatical Cohesion
• Anaphoric-when a word refers back to something that has
already been mentioned, this is an anaphoric reference.
EG ‘My great-grandfather was an Irishman. He (pron.)
was born in Dublin in 1875.’
• Cataphoric- when a word refers to something that hasn’t
been mentioned yet.
EG ‘He gave the following reasons for his decision’
Reference
• Deixis/deictic expressions- terms which refer to the
personal, temporal or locational characteristics of a
situation, and whose meaning only makes sense in that
context or situation.
EG ‘here’ and ‘there’ and ‘this’ and ‘that’ only make
sense when taken in context.
• Language is used to ‘point’ to the aspects of an event.
Deictics
‘When language is spoken, it occurs in a specific location,
at a specific time, is produced by a specific person and is
(usually) addressed to some specific other person or
persons. Only written language can ever be free of this kind
of anchoring in the extra linguistic situation. A sequence on
a slip of paper can move through space and time, ‘speaker’-
less, and address-less. All natural, spoken language have
devices that link the utterance with its spatio-temporal and
personal context. This link is called ‘deixis’.
Christine Tanz
Deictics
• Ellipsis occurs when elements are omitted from a
sentence. This becomes a cohesive device if an earlier
part of the text enables us to supply the missing elements.
EG ‘Beer cans littered the floor, the television had been
kicked in and graffiti covered the walls. A bit of a
mess.’
‘Where did you see the car. In the street.’
Ellipsis
• These words are also called connectives. They link
together parts of a text and indicate relationship between
them. For example if a sentence begins with ‘But’, what
follows will in some way contrast with, or qualify, what
has gone before.
EG The Prime Minister promised that the economy
would soon recover. But it has not done so.
Conjunctions and adverbials
• Clefting
• Front focus
• End focus
Information flow
• Front focus- bringing information which would normally
appear later to the front position in a sentence, to give it extra
prominence.
EG Always in motion, the future is.
Happiness was what she sought.
When we get home, let’s watch a video.
What effect does this have when we read the sentence below:
On September 2, the 35th anniversary of the beginning of his
police career, Commissioner Keelty will leave his post, with two
years still to run on his contract.
Front Focus
• End Focus-prominence to the final part of the sentence and
can enable suspense to build. Not as much prominence as in
front focus, but more than if the information was embedded in
the middle of a sentence.
EG A very short run I can handle.
I believe he lost respect from his peers following his dissent of
Gillard.
• Think of this as given and new information-audience will
focus on the this new information if this is situated at the end
of the sentence.
End focus
1) Everybody in this room speaks two languages.
Two
languages are spoken by everybody in this room.
2) John gave the books to my brother.
John gave my
brother the books.
3) John smeared paint on the wall.
John smeared the
wall with paint.
Front or end focus?
• Clefting means to cleave or to divide. It divides a single
clause into two clauses, each with it’s own verb.
• It is used as a way to shift the focus of interest, and of
getting our attention by delaying mention of what is of
special interest.
EG ‘Jenny ate the ice-cream’ becomes ‘It was Jenny who
ate the ice-cream.’
How do we change the sentence below?
‘Uncle Vernon had answered the call’
Clefting
• How do we ‘decleave’ these sentences?
‘It is Ann that owns the cottage’
‘My father was born in India’
• How do we cleft these sentences?
‘I enjoyed the last dance.’
‘The traffic is noisiest in London.’
Clefting
• Repetition
• Collocation
• Synonymy
• Antonymy
• Hyponymy
• Substitution
Lexical/semantic cohesion
• This involves the repetition of a single word. This has a
cohesive effect because it forms a link between different
sentences.
• Example- ‘I have no great news to announce. I know it is
news you have all been longing to hear.
• Sometimes the word itself is not repeated. Instead a
synonym is used. Example- ‘He rapidly gathered up the
pieces of the vase and hid them under the sofa. He acted
quickly because he did not want to be caught. The choice
of synonym used might depend on the level of formality.
Repetition and synonyms
• This refers to the tendency for certain words to occur
together. It can be short expressions or longer stretches of
text. Collocation is cohesive because it involves the use
of words that, because of their meaning, are already
linked in the reader’s mind.
EG ‘tropical paradise’, ‘heavy rain’, ‘keep a promise’
• Exercise: How many collocations can you think of for the
word ‘line’ and ‘long’ (these two words have a large
unlimited range of collocations. Some words are
restricted ‘spick’ as in ‘spick and span’)
Collocation
• One word is substituted for another.
EG ‘I’ve got a pencil. Do you have one?’
• Avoids repetition
EG I bet you get married before I get married.
I bet you get married before I do.
Substitution
• Time flies. You can’t though, but yes, it flies too quickly.
Identifying cohesive devices
