Notes towards a Theory of Text Coherence
Rachel Giora · Poetics Today · 1985
It is widely acknowledged in the field of text linguistics that for a text or a text segment (e.g., a paragraph) to be pragmatically wellformed, it must meet the requirement of cohesion. Of the many recent studies concerned with connectedness as a textual phenomenom that has a linguistic manifestation such as: Bellert (1970), Vuchinich (1977), Daneg (1974), Enkvist (1978), Gutwinski (1976), Halliday and Hasan (1976) Reinhart (1980) is the most comprehensive. Reinhart argues that for a text to be coherent it must meet the requirements of consistency, cohesion and relevance. For Reinhart, cohesion is viewed in terms of linear relations between pairs of sentences that are either referentially linked [...] or linked by a semantic connector (1980:168). She further specifies that for a referential link to count as a cohesive device, the linked referent in the second sentence of the pair must be part of the topic or scene-setting expression of the sentence. She adds, however, that a text fails to be referentially linked it can still be cohesive if its sentences are connected by semantic sentence connectors (p. 176). My controversy with the various theories of coherence regards the function of cohesion in the construction of a well-formed text. I will