Understanding Text Properties: Cohesion and Coherence in Communication

Text Properties: Definition and Characteristics

A text is a complete communication unit, whether oral or written, that occurs in a particular situation with a specific communicative intention. Its essential properties or characteristics are adequacy, coherence, and cohesion.

Understanding Text Properties: Adequacy and Coherence

A text demonstrates adequacy when it is well-adapted to the issuer's communicative intention and the specific communication situation.

A text is coherent if its various statements meet the following criteria:

• They are interrelated, meaning they refer to the same subject.
• They maintain a logical relationship.
• They do not contradict each other.
• They advance the information, providing new insights.

Linguistic Cohesion: Lexical and Semantic Connections

Cohesion is the linguistic expression of coherence. It can be achieved through lexical, semantic, and grammatical means.

Lexical Cohesion

• Repetition of words.
• Use of derived words (e.g., write, writer, writing).

Semantic Cohesion

Semantic cohesion is achieved through the repetition of meanings, utilizing:

• Synonyms and contextual synonyms (words that function as synonyms within the text).
• General words or generic terms (words of vague meaning that are equivalent to another in context).
• Hypernyms (words whose meaning includes the meaning of others, e.g., fruit for apple) and hyponyms (words whose meaning is implicit in others, e.g., apple for fruit).
• Antonyms (words of opposite meaning).
• Words that belong to the same semantic field (e.g., doctor, nurse, hospital).
• References to associated realities.

Grammatical Cohesion: Mechanisms for Textual Unity

Grammatical cohesion is achieved through various linguistic mechanisms:

The Article

Articles have an anaphoric value, as they refer to a noun that has appeared previously in the text.

Deictic Expressions

Deictic expressions are words that refer to grammatical persons, places, or times relative to the speaker or context. These include personal pronouns, possessive and demonstrative adjectives and pronouns, and some adverbs (e.g., here, there, now).

• They have anaphoric value when pointing to words or sentences that have already appeared in the discourse. (They lack anaphoric value if they refer to extralinguistic reality.)
• They have cataphoric value when they refer to something that will appear later in the text.

Relative Pronouns

Relative pronouns also have an anaphoric value because they point to an element of discourse that has appeared before.

Verb Forms

Verb forms maintain logical and temporal relationships among themselves, significantly contributing to textual cohesion.

Ellipsis

Ellipsis is the omission of elements from the text that are unnecessary given the situation or context.

• In conversation, words or groups of words are very often omitted because their meaning is obvious.
• In written text, words are omitted if they have already appeared or are easily understood from context.

Textual Connectors

Textual connectors are words or groups of words used to mark the semantic relationships between sentences or paragraphs within a text. They guide the receiver's interpretation and structure the information's progression.

• Their position is variable.
• Connectors can be adverbs, conjunctions, or other linguistic units.