Judy Diamondstone wrote:

> Bob, are you suggesting that "underlying semantic relations" are
> not affected by cohesion, or are you saying that cohesion is not a matter of
> sentence-level choices? -- or both?

No, I am not saying that.  I have found it useful to make a distinction between
coherence (the underlying semantic relations that allow a text to be understood)
and cohesion (the grammatical forms which are used to tie sentences together).
This is not my distinction.  Witte and Faigley make it and it is a distinction made
in Celce-Muricia and Ohlstain (2000), Discourse and Context in Language Teaching
(actually it is about L2 language teaching).   Kolln in the second edition of
Rhetorical Grammar notes that sometimes coherence and cohesion are used
interchangably, but she seems to prefer cohesion referring to the grammatical
devices which tie sentences together.  By definition, the use of cohesive devices
are sentence-level choices which are the result of information flow over sentences.

It is an empirical question whether this distinction has any usefulness or not.  I
think it does.  I draw your attention to a passage in Johanna's last post.  Does
the use of "but," a cohesive tie, make clear to the reader the relationship between
the observation about dangling modifiers to the claim about some robust
correlations between grammatical structure and text purpose?

> One well-known example of a violation of such coherence is
> dangling modifiers, or modifiers placed such that the identity of the
> head is ambiguous. I'm not yet far enough into this field to know
> whether the research is there to nail down other violations. But a
> little work I have done myself and the little I have read in
> functionalist discourse analysis points to some robust correlations
> between grammatical structure and text purpose.

[Let me be clear about something.  Posting something to a  list is not expected to
be polished writing.  I am confident I have written posts to this list with similar
leaps.]

I don't get any connection between those two claims because they don't seem
related.  The presence of "but" would seem to indicate that the next passage would
be speculation about other problems of coherence/cohesion? in student writing.  The
passage goes off somewhere else.  I am not quite sure whether any cohesive tie
would make any connection between these two ideas.

My experience with student writing is that they do not deliberately write
incoherent texts.  The relationships between ideas are clear enough to them that
they assume a reader can see those relationships to.  It is for this reason that
writing pedagogy focuses so much on audience awareness.  Every writing assignment I
give to my students always specifies the intended readers of the paper.  I am very
explicit that these readers are not aware of the assignment.

Judy, do you understand the distinction I was trying to make between cohesion and
coherence?  Cohesive devices will do nothing to improve the coherence of the text
if the ideas can not be related.  Clearly if the ideas are related cohesive devices
are important way to show that.

Bob Yates

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