Cohesion and Coherence

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Briefly explain the distinction between coherence and cohesion. Does cohesion need to be taught to learners of English as a second language? If so, why, when and how? Introduction While a variety of definitions for coherence have been suggested, this paper will use the definition given by Nunan; the extent to which discourse is perceived to ‘hang together’ rather than being a set of unrelated sentences or utterances. (Nunan 1993:116) Bamberg (1983) states coherence was first discussed by Alexander Bain in the nineteenth century. Bain examined paragraph structures stating “the bearing of each sentence upon what precedes shall be explicit and unmistakable.”(Bamberg 1983:418) Two strong discussions emerge in this theory, one introduced by Halliday and Hasan (1976) who defined coherence as texture, created only by the linguistic links in a text known as cohesion. Strong reactions to this theory such as that from Carrell argued that …cohesion is not the cause of coherence, if anything, it’s the effect of coherence. (Carrell. 1982:486). When analysing a piece of text, either written or spoken, one should not only look at the linguistic markers of the text but also the intended meanings of the writer and the interpretation of this meaning by the reader looking further into the communicative function, Sociocultural knowledge and inferences made in the text. (Brown and Yule. 1983) The definition of cohesion that I will use in this paper is from McCarthy; …surface markings of semantic links between clauses and sentences in written discourse, and between clauses and sentence in written discourse, and between utterances and turns in speech. (McCarthy. 1996:34) The most significant analysis of the cohesion theory is by Halliday and Hasan (1976). They identified five types of cohesion: reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and

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