Textual Cohesion and Coherence: Principles and Mechanisms

Textual Units

A verbal text is a unit because we use words, but it also constitutes a semantic unit because it makes sense, and a communication unit because it appears in a particular communicative situation. A text must adhere to three fundamental principles:

Suitability

The text must correspond to the communicative situation. For example, a student greets a director with "Good morning, sir," not "*Che, como va?*"

Coherence

Organize different parts of the text's meaning. A text is coherent if it has a central idea, is properly organized, and answers the text as a whole. Elements that show no coherent organization of texts include titles and captions. Lastly, the issue should be closed with conclusions.

Cohesion

Establish the relationship between words and sentences that form a text. This relationship is based on linguistic resources such as punctuation, connectors, and pronouns.

Phenomena of Cohesion

Reference

A procedure that replaces a word with a pronoun in another position. This avoids repetition (e.g., replacing a word with 'it', 'I', etc.).

Ellipsis

Through this procedure, we can omit a word that was said in one position and mentally replace it when we read. The tacit subject and nonverbal predicate are the most common forms of ellipsis.

Lexical Cohesion

Another way to achieve semantic relations between words in a text is through the relationship between actions, objects, etc.

Antonymy

Sometimes words are related to each other by naming objects or actions with opposite states within that text.

Generalizing Words

Words that synthesize a wide field of objects, situations, or people usually named in the text. The most common are: thing, facts, theme, person, case, everything.

Substitution (Synonymy)

Another way to avoid the repetition of words is to substitute a different word that refers to the same object, action, or state.

Connectors

Connectors link ideas (propositions and sentences) and are generally placed at the beginning of the second idea. By meaning, we can group them into:

• Conjunctive Connectors: Generally used to collect ideas (e.g., and, or, who).
• Disjunctive Connectors: Raise options (e.g., or, either/or).
• Connectors of Effects: Account for expression opposition, leading to an opposing view than expected (e.g., but, however, nevertheless).
• Connectors of Causes and Consequences: Two conditions are linked to one another when a chance is a cause or a motivation to the other, or because the second is a consequence of the first (e.g., because, therefore, since).
• Temporospatial Connectors: These connectors, located in temporal operations and space, establish order (e.g., before, then, while, previously, etc.).
• Conditional Connectors: Express the need for enforcing a condition to develop another action (e.g., if, whenever).

Lexical Cohesion

It is a fundamental support in the textual and semantic relationships given by lexemes stored within the text. Identifying these relationships helps discover the topics and subtopics of the text.

Global Coherence

Macrostructure

The sequences formed by comments that refer to the same topic are called semantic macrostructures. To reduce the information in a sequence and obtain its macrostructure, we must apply macro-rules.

Suppression

Exclude information that is not relevant to understanding the sequence. Example: Sequence: Step, a strange car had 6 doors, one was on the roof. Macrostructure: A car.

Generalization

Replace a number of concepts defined by other conjunctions. Example: Sequence: Marisa is pulled by the slide, the little train, Nicolas's weapon, Cecilia. Macrostructure: The children played.

Construction

Consists of replacing several actions by one of the world through knowledge. Example: Sequence: Individuals attacked a local art, took home TV, DVDs, microcomponents. Macrostructure: Individuals stole electronics for home use.

Superstructure

The framework that satisfies the parts of the same text, drawing a diagram that is repeated in other texts of the same type. This scheme is called superstructure and analyzes the form of a text. Each frame has its own superstructure: argumentative, conversational, and narrative.