The discussion so far has been about the surface linguistic features which mark the organization of individual sentences or utterances into larger units of discourse. We have looked chiefly at lexical words although a range of such cohesive functions can also be performed by a large number of grammatical words. Cohesion concerns the ways in which the components of the surface text are mutually connected within a sequence. Coherence, on the other hand, concerns the ways in which the components of the textual world, that is, the configuration of concepts and relations which underlie the surface text, are made mutually accessible and relevant. Coherence is not merely a feature of texts, but
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rather the outcome of cognitive processes among text users; it is a conceptual network which has to be recognized and interpreted by the sender and the reader of a text. Not only has lexis been neglected, until recently, in the study of cohesion, but it has also been neglected in the study of coherence. Sections 4.9 and 4.10 do no more than ask some questions about the relationship between lexis and coherence, although this section does introduce a specific descriptive framework. It returns us first to the question raised by McCarthy (1984b) (Section 4.3): how is it that readers recognize texts as coherent or incoherent, and can do so independently of the presence or absence of specific lexical signals or other surface markers of cohesion? In other words, the importance of interpretation of lexical patterning in discourse is stressed once again.
And we return once again to written discourse. The next section also raises a further question concerning readers’ expectations concerning particular kinds of lexical items relative to type, or genre, of discourse.
Examples are taken mostly from writing by children since a number of
‘applied’ studies have taken such discourse as a starting point for investigation.
Carter (1986) is devoted to the relations between vocabulary, style and coherence in children’s writing, in which the following three sentences from a piece of descriptive prose by an 11-year-old boy are examined in respect of their lack of cohesion:
(1) The giant ant is enormous.
(2) All the children run away and the dogs grumble.
(3) And we stare at t.v. (Passage A)
Here it is not clear whether the we in sentence (3) refers to the children in sentence (2); nor is there any preceding referent for ‘the children’ and
‘the dogs’. There is thus no explicitly signalled relation between the sentences. Devices of simple repetition and the use of grammatical words could be deployed to secure greater cohesion. For example: The giant ant is enormous. Our children run away from it and our dogs grumble.
We are afraid of the ant and stare at t.v.
But the presence of cohesion devices alone cannot ensure the organization of a text. Take the following example (again from a piece of children’s writing discussed in greater detail in Carter, 1986):4
(1) Then we found our way outside from the cloakroom.
(2) Next we went outside into the pleasents and we practest the fire drill makeing sure we were quick to line up in the pleasent.
Lexis and discourse 105 (3) Then we went back through the cloakroom.
(4) Then we had break and Jill dropped the crisps.
(5) We could go into the dining room or go outside and eat our food. (Passage B)
This piece of writing is cohesive in so far as several devices (e.g. we, then, next, etc.) underline a connectedness between the sentences; but it is not consistently coherent. Part of the problem is the lack of variation in the devices used, but even if changes were made or more cohesive items added, it is unlikely that they would contribute significantly to the underlying organization of the text or remedy the general ‘flatness’ of the vocabulary used. When teachers write ‘good word’ and put a tick in the margin it is likely that they are responding not merely to a word in isolation, but signalling their perception that it contributes to the coherence and impact of the text as a whole.
It is important to locate more precisely what in vocabulary might underlie the use of terms such as ‘impact’ or ‘flatness’. It has to be recognized that judgement here may be more variable from one individual to another, but it is certainly an impression among teachers who have been shown the two passages above that Passage A contains unusual but expressive lexical choices not to be found in Passage B.
Examples pointed to are dogs grumble and stare at t.v. Further exploration of ‘expressivity’ is offered below, but we should note here (1) that expressive words alone—however many and varied they might be—do not make for a well-organized coherent text, (2) that relations between words are as important as what is in the word, and (3) that our judgements of effectiveness may also be relative to the genre of writing undertaken. Here, for example, more expressive words might be expected in descriptive writing about a giant ant than in a report on a sequence of actions performed in a day at school.
To summarize, then, we may say that the number and range of
‘grammatical’ words which contribute to the cohesion of a text are of significance in effective writing. But counting cohesive devices will not explain why some pieces of writing can be perceived to be better organized than others. (For further discussion, see Morgan and Sellner, 1980; Hasan, 1980.) Similarly, density and variability of open-class
‘lexical’ words should be encouraged in children’s writing, but a relation of types to token—that is, the number of different words in a text (types) expressed as a relation of the total number of words (tokens)—is not of itself an effective measure of expressivity and cannot of itself either ensure that a text is coherent or account for why one text might be
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marked higher or lower than another for its use of vocabulary. (See Harpin, 1976 for discussion of type-token ratios. For an analysis of the role of open- and closed-class words in the development of reading comprehension see Lam, 1984—though she uses the terms ‘content’ and
‘function’ words respectively.)
Few appropriate analytical models exist which enable vocabulary to be examined for its role in the coherence of a text. Daneš’s work on thematic progression has considerable potential for development and has been successfully applied to the analysis of coherence in writing (see Dillon, 1981; Morgan and Sellner, 1980; Harris and Wilkinson, 1986).
It is, however, focused largely on syntactic relations and does not, as developed so far, allow for particularly rich description of lexical patterning.
A potentially productive model is one outlined by Hasan (1980;
1984). Hasan’s model is based on analysis of semantic relations in a text and does not accept any easy division or formal distinction between grammatical and lexical relations. Hasan proposes a ‘lexical rendering’ of texts which focuses not simply on those lexical items which can be cohesively interpreted, but on those which interrelate and ‘interact’ recurrently across a text. Take the following example cited by Hasan:
(1) Once upon a time there was a little girl (2) and she went out for a walk
(3) and she saw a lovely little teddybear (4) and so she took it home
(5) and she got home she washed it
(6) and when she took it to bed she cuddled it.
(Passage C) Here there is ‘interaction’ between clauses (2) and (5) because she is engaged as a ‘doer’ in a related process of doing in both clauses.
Similarly, the transitive process in (3), she saw a teddybear, which is related to (6), she took it to bed and she cuddled it, embraces the same doer-doing relations across the text. More importantly, the relation between words and the actions denoted is multiple not singular. It is not a case of just a single connection between lexical items. In the following examples (also from Hasan), items can be cohesively interpreted but no deeper textual relation established:
(1) The sailor goes on the ship
(2) and he’s coming home with the dog
Lexis and discourse 107 (3) and the dog wants the boy and the girl
(4) and they don’t know the bear’s in the chair
(5) and the bear’s coming to go to sleep in it. (Passage D) Here there is cohesion between particular items and there is lexical repetition, but there is no deeper semantic relation between the ‘coming’
in (5) and the ‘coming’ in (2) because a different ‘actor’ is involved in each case. The relation is thus singular and no interaction takes place.
Hasan divides the items involved in each of the relations in the following terms:
1 Relevant token: those lexical items in a text which exist in some singular semantic relation to each other.
2 Central token: that subset of relevant tokens which enter into direct and multiple interaction with each other.
3 Peripheral token: the difference between the total number of tokens in a text and the relevant ones. Peripheral tokens would thus not need to be used in any summary or paraphrase of content and in a normally coherent text could be expected to be in a low ratio to the total number of tokens.
Of these ‘tokens’ Hasan argues that it is the number of central tokens, expressed as a proportion of the relevant tokens, which contribute most to the coherence of the text. As she puts it, in simple terms, this enables us to account for our intuition that in Passage C the writer is discours-ing on much the same kind of thdiscours-ing and stays with the topic long enough for some coherent progression/development to take place. This is not the case with Passage D, even though there are a number of grammatical and lexical words which contribute to cohesion. In other words: Passage C is cohesive and coherent; Passage D is cohesive but not particularly coherent. In both cases, lexico-grammatical relations play a notable part in the respective textual organization. The model suggested by Hasan forms the basis of analyses of writing by children which are conducted by Carter (1986) and valuably develop the work of Halliday and Hasan discussed above.