Is cohesion coherent enough?

No doubt, this passage has texture, i.e., a composite of certain cohesive relationships within and between the sentences. As Halliday and Hasan point out, “the texture is provided by the cohesive RELATION” (1976: 2, cited in G. Brown & G. Yule, 1983: 191). Obviously, the passage in question comprises a set of sentences that constitute a text because of the following cohesive markers: a car—the car, green—Green, sound—sound, today—Tomorrow, etc. These connections, or cohesive ‘ties’, bind the text together and help us interpret every single sentence as a whole. But is cohesion sufficient to identify any one ‘passage’ as a text? Why is it that we have been unable to exact any coherent (that is, at the above-text level) meaning from reading this passage? Before we set about answering these questions, we must see the ways in which cohesion can be established.

There are certainly various ways to establish cohesion: one of them is co-reference, whereby the cohesive relationship holds either between a lexical expression and an object outside the text, in the world, as in example (a), or between a lexical expression and a pronominal form within the text, as in examples (b) and (c).

1. Look at that! (looking at the moon).
2. I love John. He is my husband. (The pronoun He refers back to John).
3. I hate it, the book. (The pronoun it refers forwards to the book).

We will not provide an in-depth analysis of this cohesive relationship. We shall only note in passing that in example (a), the cohesive relation obtaining is an exophoric one, whereas in the following two examples, it is endophoric. In addition, in (b) we have an example of anaphora, while in (c) we have an example of cataphora.

According to Halliday and Hasan, a passage must exhibit some of these cohesive relationships in order to qualify as a text; otherwise, it is reduced to a mere concatenation of sentences. None the less, they concede that “it is the underlying semantic relation…that actually has the cohesive power” (1976: 229, cited in G. Brown & G. Yule, 1983: 192), rather than an explicit cohesive marker. In short, cohesion is a necessary, albeit not sufficient, condition for ‘textness’. Let us have a closer look at the passage above with a view to corroborating this contention.

Undoubtedly, the reader strives to understand what the ‘text’ is about. The lexical repetition of car in the first two sentences induces him or her to expect that they are connected to each other in some way. He is, more or less, willing to make connections across the first and subsequent sentences in order to make a coherent interpretation of the whole passage. As often as not, people coming across a passage or a set of contiguous sentences have the tendency to treat them as a coherent, meaningful text. “We insist on interpreting any passage as text if there is the remotest possibility of doing so” (Halliday & Hasan, 1976: 23, cited in G. Brown & G. Yule, 1983: 198). This expectation, that any concatenation of sentences exhibiting a degree of cohesion is bound to impart some kind of coherent meaning, is very common and usually exploited in literature. For example, the semblance of cohesion in our passage by virtue of the connections we have already mentioned may be employed by an author in order to, say, achieve a comic or ironic effect, depending on the context of situation. (Suppose that the putative author of our passage scoffs at a drunkard who, despite his disordered speech, claims to be sober enough to play chess!) In this case, interpretation of the ‘text’ lies outside the text, rendering it coherent. At any rate, everything can mean anything in a specific context.

To hark back to our passage, we could contend that formal cohesion, in terms of the typology of cohesive relationships we discussed above (hyponymy, collocability etc.), cannot guarantee identification as a text. The explicit realisation of cohesive markers is necessary, but it is a moot point whether its presence in a text results in coherence. But what happens when there are no cohesive markers whatsoever? To answer this and our first question, “Is cohesion sufficient to identify any one ‘passage’ as a text?”, we should adduce the following example:

A: The phone’s ringing.
B: I’m tired.

In this case, it is evident that there are no explicit cohesive markers to bind these two sentences together. It seems that speaker B has totally disregarded, or even failed to interpret, the communicative import of A’s utterance. Nevertheless, in our everyday lives we always engage in this sort of conversational exchange facing minor, if any, difficulties.