Discourse and the Non-Native English Speaker By Michael Cribb

The second condition refers to the need for each sentence to be consistent or ‘unified’ with previous sentences and possible worlds; that is, they should not contradict what has previously been said nor conflict with common knowledge. The third condition requires that each sentence is contextualised to be relevant to the underlying discourse theme. Ehrlich (1988) has reiterated the need for these three conditions.

Giora (1985a, 1985b) has argued that the first condition, cohesion, is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for coherence, although she has accepted the second and third conditions. She has contended that while texts can be cohesive, they are not necessarily coherent. To illustrate, in example 2.1, the text is connected in a formal way through cohesive ties, but is not coherent since it breaks the conditions of consistency and relevance. The second sentence is not consistent with the previous discourse and our knowledge of the world, since we assume Rona to be a woman, and the relevance of each sentence to the preceding discourse is unclear; there is no unifying discourse theme. Furthermore, the text is not improved through the inclusion of an explicit semantic connector, as in example 2.2. A contra example is given in example 2.3, where each sentence observes the conditions for consistency and relevance, but there are no cohesive devices. This text would be coherent for any native speaker of English with an appropriate background knowledge of British football.