Communicative Functions, Text Fitness, Coherence & Cohesion

Communicative Functions and Text Features

Representative Function

The representative function is oriented to conveying information about reality outside the text. It transmits content and objectives related to external facts, as in scientific, technical, and journalistic texts, coupled with the exposition of knowledge. Features include a neutral intonation, declarative sentences and complete sentences, the timeless present or indicative mood, impersonal constructions, simple syntax, and the use of the third person.

Appellative Function

The appellative (or conative) function is centered on the receiver and aims to provoke a reaction from the audience. It is common in advertising, propaganda, and persuasive journalistic texts that encourage the reader or listener to act.

Characteristics:

• Use of the vocative and direct address
• Imperative sentences
• Interrogative forms that prompt response
• Interjections and exclamations
• Courtesies and other affective elements

Expressive Function

The expressive function is focused on the issuer or speaker and emphasizes subjectivity: emotions, attitudes, and personal stance about what is being said. It appears in subjective opinion journalism, literary texts, and informal registers where slang or vulgar language may be present.

Typical features include:

• Irony and sarcasm
• Emotional affixes and descriptive adjectives
• First person perspective and possessive forms
• Interrogative-exclamative constructions
• Vocative expressions and interjections

Phatic Function (Fática)

The phatic (Fática) function is oriented to the channel: it serves to open, maintain, lengthen, disrupt, or check the communication channel. Its goal is to ensure the flow of interaction rather than to convey propositional content.

Features often include forms of courtesy, fillers, and direct address (second person).

Metalinguistic and Poetic Functions

The metalinguistic function centers on the code itself and appears in contexts such as linguistic descriptions, dictionaries, and grammar commentary — whenever language talks about language.

The poetic function focuses on the form of the message. It deliberately deviates from ordinary usage — typical of literary language, advertisements, jokes, and other texts that foreground style and aesthetic effect.

Text Fitness (Adaptation)

Fitness (appropriateness) is the property of how well a text adapts to its context and participants. It depends on the relation between interlocutors (friendship, academic ties, age differences), the channel (oral or written) and resulting linguistic uses, and the communicative intention. The intention to communicate determines whether we aim to inform, to persuade, or to present a subjective or partial stance.

Coherence

Coherence means keeping the same topic and logical progression throughout a text. Incoherence may appear as missing elements, contradictions with the reader's or speaker's knowledge, or the misuse of language that breaks the intended sense.

Cohesion

Cohesion refers to the connections between parts of the text. It is achieved by linking linguistic elements so the text reads as a unified whole.

Common cohesion devices:

• Recurrence — repetition of linguistic elements
• Substitution — replacement with pronouns or more general terms
• Ellipsis — omission of words that are understood from context
• Deixis — references that relate the text to its context (demonstratives, possessives, adverbs such as now, there, yesterday, here)
• Connectors and discourse markers that order ideas and indicate relations (cause, contrast, sequence, etc.)

Together, fitness, coherence and cohesion determine how well a text functions for its purpose and audience, whether informing, persuading, entertaining, or maintaining interaction.