These swimming pools were closed for several weeks last year. The boys are handsome, and they often go to public swimming pools.

These libraries were visited by boys and girls. In London, there are numerous public libraries. 'Yesterday I met an old friend in London.

Consider, for instance, the following example: On the other hand, even if a text shows a strong degree of cohesion, with its constituents being interlinked by many cohesive ties, it does not need to be coherent. Thus, the reader can still perceive coherence in a sequence of clauses and sentences even if the semantic and syntactic ties connecting them are missing. These views have been challenged vehemently by others, however (see Brinker 2005: 41 Hellmann 1995: 193 Brown & Yule 1993: 227).Īs a rule of thumb, a text can be coherent without being cohesive, and vice versa. Hasan & Halliday (1976: 9) even maintained that cohesion is 'the ONLY source of texture'. In several cases coherence has been regarded as a subject to, or pre-conditioned by, cohesion (Halliday 1994: 339). The question of the functional connection between cohesion and coherence has raised much debate, most of the controversy discussing whether cohesion is a sufficient criterion for textual coherence or not. with respect to the syntactic-semantic relations between sentences (cohesion) and the logic-semantic relations established between propositions making up the thematic structure. Coherence is 'the internal for structuring the clause as a message', including the notions of 'theme' and 'information', and cohesion refers to the external relationship between clauses and clause complexes, which are independent of grammatical structure.īrinker (2005: 21-22) points out that the textual structure can be analysed both on a grammatical and on a thematic level, i.e.

Halliday (1994: 308-309) distinguishes between coherence and cohesion in terms of internal and external relations of a clause. Halliday 1994: 308-309 see also de Beaugrande and Dressler 1992: 3-7). Text linguistics is concerned with the distinction between the terms 'cohesion' and 'coherence' (cf. how its single constituents are connected so that the text becomes meaningful for the addressee rather than being a random sequence of unrelated sentences and clauses. Text analysis focussing on coherence is primarily concerned with the construction and configuration of sense in the text i.e. Due to these relations, the text appears to be logically and semantically consistent for the reader-hearer. Coherence is a term of text linguistics used to refer to sense relations between single units (sentences or propositions) of a text.

Coherence vs cohesion