Linguistics Encyclopedia.pdf

A-Z 625
His work on clause relations can for the most part be divided into two
major strands. On the one hand, he is concerned to place a sentence in the
context of its adjoining sentences and show how its grammar and meaning
can only be fully explained if its larger context is taken into account… On
the other, he is concerned to reveal the clause organisation of a passage as
a whole without focussing on any one sentence in particular within it.
In similar vein, de Beaugrande and Dressier (1981, p. 79) distinguish between shortrange
and long-range stretches of surface text structures, the former set up as closely
knit patterns of grammatical dependencies, the latter constituted by the reutilization of
previous elements or patterns (see also van Dijk, 1977. p. 93).
However, as Hoey (1983, p. 18) points out, Winter’s (1971) definition of the clause
relation as ‘the cognitive process whereby we interpret the meaning of a sentence or
group of sentences in the text in the light of its adjoining sentence or group of sentences’,
has the implication that ‘uninterpreted grammatical cohesion is not a relation’. Most
writers on cohesion (see, for instance, Halliday and Hasan, 1976) stress that it is created
by the reader on the basis of the signalling devices. None the less, in view of the force
with which this is stressed by Winter, and also by Hoey, and in view of their emphasis on
the larger, macrostructural patterns the reader is able to construct, only partly on the basis
of cohesive devices, their work is discussed under coherence below.
De Beaugrande and Dressier (1981, p. 80) include as long-range cohesive devices
(compare Halliday’s lexical-cohesion devices listed above):
Recurrence: the exact repetition of material.
Partial recurrence: different uses of the same basic language items
(word stems).
Parallelism: reuse of structures with different material in them.
Paraphrase: approximate conceptual equivalence among outwardly
different material.
Proforms: brief, empty elements used to keep the content of fuller
elements current and to reuse basic syntactic structures.
Ellipsis: allows the omission of some structural component, provided a
complete version is recoverable from elsewhere in the text.
COHERENCE
Coherence concerns the way in which the things that the text is about, called the textual
world, are mutually accessible and relevant. The textual world is considered to consist of
concepts and relations. A concept is defined as ‘a configuration of knowledge (cognitive
content) which can be recovered or activated with more or less unity and consistency in
the mind’, and relations as the links between the concepts ‘which appear together in a
textual world’ (de Beaugrande and Dressier, 1981, p. 4). Some of the most common
relations can be classified in terms of two major notions, namely causality relations and
time relations.