As we have already discussed, discourse – oral or written - has many different manifestations in many different situations, from a “hello/hi” dialogue to a lecture or from a simple pumpkin bread recipe to an appeal to the Supreme Court.
According to Beaugrande (1981), there are some criteria that have to be fulfilled to qualify either a spoken or written text as discourse. These include: coherence,cohesion, intentionality, acceptability, informativeness, situationality, intertextuality. In this course, we are going to focus on the three highlighted ones. Let’s start then with coherence.
The text supplied by the teacher has elements that link its parts together, but does not allow it to be meaningful. If you ask yourself: “What is the main idea of this text?” or “What message does it convey?”. The answer will be, “None.” Coherent texts do make sense to the reader, but this one makes no sense at all. It is senseless or incoherent. However, we can say that each sentence is notionally linked to the one that precedes it, using both lexical and grammatical means, which makes the text cohesive. Thus, we agree that the text is cohesive (i.e. linked together) but not coherent (i.e. meaningful). What is coherence then?
In very simple terms, we can define COHERENCE as the quality that something has when it makes sense or is pleasing because all of its parts fit together well and logically.
Let’s take a look at an example supplied by Enkvist and quoted by Brown & Yule (1983: 197)
I bought a Ford. A car in which President Wilson rode down the Champs Elysées was black. Black English has been widely discussed. The discussions between the presidents ended last week. A week has seven days. Every day I feed my cat. Cats have four legs. The cat is on the mat. Mat has three letters.
(ENKVIST, 1978:110)
To access the meaning of this text, you certainly tried to use the same techniques you use when reading in your mother tongue. You must have tried to make connections across the first few sentences and firmly believed that the next sentence would provide the element(s) which would allow a coherent interpretation of the whole text. However, you were not successful in your attempt. Why was it then? Despite the Ford-car, black-Black, President Wilson-the presidents, discussed-discussions, week-week, days-days, my cat-cats-The cat, mat-Mat types of connections, which accounts for cohesion (to be discussed in our next lesson), the text fails to deliver any message to the reader. Being so, it’s impossible for any reader, even very much experienced ones, to get any meaning from it for just one reason: it is meaningless or the text is NOT COHERENT.
Read the text below to identify, at least, three (03) incoherent pieces of information.
A BRITISH MAN HAS SHOT HIS OWN FINGER OFF IN AN EFFORT TO GET RID OF A PAINFUL WART.
June 16 2011
01 05 |
DRIVEN mad by a small wart, a thirty-eight lady decided to cut his finger off himself. Sean Murphy had a huge wart and for 5 years had tried several creams but nothing could get rid of it. So he decided to remove it with a hammer after drinking several pints of beer. Sean Murphy said: “The worst thing is that the wart has gone. It was giving me a lot of joys. It was as big as my thumbnail. I’d tried all sorts of things and it was almost becoming imperceptible. I didn’t expect to lose my finger – there was nothing left of it. But I’m happy because I didn’t like my big toe very much.” |
Extracted and adapted from: http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/weird-news/2011/06/16/man-shoots-off-his-own-finger-to-get-rid-of-growth-wart-an-idiot-86908-23205185/
1. The title of the text informs us that a British man, not a woman, shot his own finger off trying to get rid of an unwanted painful wart. In its first paragraph, we find the reflexive pronoun himself (line 02), the character’s name, Sean Murphy (line 02), and the subject pronoun he (line 03), all indicatives that the character is a man, not a woman. However, in lines 01 and 02, we come across the following piece of incoherent information: … "a thirty-eight lady decided to cut his finger off himself". As the whole story revolves around Sean Murphy, the word lady has no reason to be included here making reference to him.
2. According to the text, Sean Murphy spent 5 years trying to get rid of his painful wart (title), which, in fact, he did. After having tried several creams without any success (lines 02 and 03), he chose to shoot his wart off (title). However, his plan backfired and nothing was left of his finger (lines 08 and 09). Thus, we can conclude that, despite the tragedy of losing his finger, the best thing, and not the worst, was to find out that the wart was gone too. Therefore, the sentences “the worst thing is that the wart has gone (line 05)” and “It was giving me a lot of joys (lines 05 and 06)” only contribute to make the text incoherent.
3. The title informs us that a British man shot his own finger off (title). To shoot, in this case, means to remove or destroy the wart by firing a weapon. The verb to shoot requires the use of a firing weapon, a revolver, for example. However, throughout the text, we perceive that this piece of information is replaced by others such as: Sean Murphy cut his finger off (line 01), which requires the use of a knife, for example or Sean Murphy removed the wart with a hammer (line 03), which means that in fact he tried to remove the inconvenient wart by hitting it. Being so, the pieces of information supplied are contradictory, contributing to make the text incoherent.
4. Another point of incoherence is the size of Sean Murphy’s wart. In the beginning of the text, it is described as small (line 01), then as huge (line 02), later as being as big as [Sean’s] thumbnail (line 06), and in the end of it, it is said to be almost imperceptible (lines 07 and 08). If the wart had become almost imperceptible, Sean Murphy wouldn’t have come to the extreme of shooting his own finger off.
5. The text is about a man who, unsatisfied with a big wart he had on one of his fingers (title and lines 01), decided to shoot it off. However, instead of getting rid of the wart only he also lost his finger. Therefore, the sentence “But I’m happy because I didn’t like my big toe very much”. (line 09) has no reason to be included in the text due to the fact that Sean Murphy lost his finger and not his big toe.
Do you still remember the definition of COHERENCE?
With the definition above in mind, read the text A TELEGRAM and say whether it is coherent or not. Explain how you got to this conclusion.
Coherent, though its ideas are not linked together. The text conveys a message that can be understood by a reader:
Maybe it was not so easy to decide if A TELEGRAM is a coherent text or not. Why did it happen? Larson (1987, p. 72) says that:
The determination of coherence is fundamentally na interpretation by [the] reader. It is part of a transaction between text and reader – between the reader’s world and the writer’s language.
What does it mean? It means that if the reader is not, for example, linguistically prepared to interact with the text s/he will not understand it. In this case, knowing the meaning of the word telegram is really important to the understanding of the text. Those who are old enough to have experienced wording a telegram to somebody will remember that it was a synonym of catastrophe, calamity, or tragedy. Hardly ever, somebody would send a telegram with a joyful or happy message. Telegrams should always be written in a very economical way, being so, linking elements were the most sacrificed ones. Perhaps, for these reasons, it was not so simple for you to classify the text A Telegram as coherent. In fact, it is coherent but its ideas are not linked together (not cohesive).
If you read the telegram with attention, you will perceive that you can tell the facts in details though the text is not written in a cohesive way. Let’s try together.
See? All this is understood from the very brief message Susan sent to Mary; the telegram that lacked cohesion and that maybe sounded incoherent to you.
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