Relationship between Coherence and Cohesion

【摘 要】写作作为最重要的语言技能之一，在第二语言教学中起了重要的作用，因此培养学生的写作能力在英语教学中一直备受关注。

【关键词】连贯；衔接；写作

Writing is considered to be the most difficult language skill because it requires not only a person’s ability to use a language， but also a higher level of language control. Therefore a person needs to write both correctly and coherently， which demands much more time and skills. Cohesion and coherence are two important textual factors in writing and considered to be important characteristics of good writing. So this paper represents the relationship between coherence and cohesion. As for this issue linguists hold entirely different viewpoints.

Many linguists such as Halliday， Hasan and Hoey held that cohesion was an important factor of coherence and a coherent text must be cohesive. Although Halliday and Hasan did not define the term coherence in Cohesion in English， they used the term texture to describe the property of being a text instead. They held that cohesive relation was a semantic relation. A pair of cohesively related items forms a tie， and cohesive ties between sentences stand out more clearly because they are the only source of texture， and all these ties are integrated into a coherent text. They believed that cohesion was a necessary though not a sufficient condition for the creation of text. Then Hasan concluded that a better explanation of the way cohesion contributed to the recognition of coherence lay in part in the fact that cohesive ties formed chains that interacted with each other； this interaction she termed cohesive harmony. Later Halliday and Hasan improved their former points of view and stated that an important contribution to coherence comed from cohesion. Hoey summarized the opinions of Hasan， Winter and Phillips and concluded that cohesion did contribute to coherence， was directly relevant to the interpretation of pairs of sentences， and did produce a form of text organization.

The other group of linguists， who were obviously contradictory to the first group， was from pragmatic point of view on coherence. Those who supported this opinion argued that cohesion was neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for creating textual coherence. They claimed that a text did not need to represent any cohesive ties to achieve coherent， in other words， a text could be cohesive but not coherent， or coherent but not cohesive. Widdowson argued that a discourse could achieve semantic coherence without cohesive ties by exemplification.

A： That’s the telephone.

B： I’m in the bath.

A： O.K.

In the above example， there are not any cohesive ties as Halliday and Hasan mentioned in Cohesion in English， however， it is still coherent semantically. Therefore， Widdowson believed that cohesion should be studied in terms of the development of the proposition of a text. However， the relation between coherence and cohesion embodied in Widdowson’s example given above just refers to a specific speech which is seemingly cohesive under certain circumstances but not in written text. G. Brown and G. Yule indicated that formal cohesion would not guarantee identification as a text nor， to answer our subsidiary question， would it guarantee textual coherence and they quoted Enksivt’s example to illustrate their opinion. The example is given below：

I bought a Ford. The car in which President Wilson rode down the Champs Elysees was black. Black English has been widely discussed. The discussion between the presidents ended last week. 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.

G. Brown and G. Yule pointed out that this paragraph was quite cohesive but not coherent. They also argued that to some extent the source of cohesion might be found outside the text rather than in the words on the page. They also asserted that people did not need formal cohesive markers when they interpreted a discourse and assumed that the discourse was coherent.

Hoey summarized the differences between cohesion and coherence and got the conclusion that cohesion was a property of the text， and that coherence was a facet of the reader’s evaluation of a text. Meanwhile， cohesion played an important role in coherence and it was the basis of achieving coherence. Halliday and Hasan also stated that it must be permitted to use all kinds of cohesive devices in order to make the text coherent. G. Thompson argued that cohesion was an external phenomenon referring to surface relations， which connected words， phrases and expressions with other words， phrases and expressions in the same text， and it was realized through lexical selections or grammatical devices.

Most coherent texts are also cohesive. Thus， without doubt， among many factors which contribute to a good writing， cohesion is a significant one. And consequently cohesion is the basis for coherence. In the meanwhile， cohesion relies on the presupposed coherence of the text and it is regarded as the ways in which words， phrases and expressions within a text can generate a series of relations under the context of situation. These words， phrases and expressions are considered as cohesive devices because they create links within or across sentence boundaries so as to tie related lexical items together. Briefly cohesion is the visible network of a text， which is represented in the surface structure of the text； while coherence is the invisible network of a text， which is manifested in the deep structure of the text.