Discourse and the Non-Native English Speaker By Michael Cribb

the error gravity studies and the manipulation studies. At the end of the section, I will briefly touch on the notion of fluency.

2.1.1. Coherence

While the notion of coherence has been discussed widely in the literature (Bellert, 1970; Bublitz, 1989, 1994; Dijk, 1997; Ehrlich, 1988; Gernsbacher & Giv_n, 1995; Giora, 1985a, 1985b, 1997; Giv_n, 1993; McCagg, 1990; Reinhart, 1980; Sanders, 1997), it has proven a difficult notion to characterise formally. Dijk (1997, p. 9), among others, has suggested that coherence is how the meaning of the sentences ‘hang together’, while Sinclair, Fox, Bullen, and Manning (1987, p. 265 cited in Lenk, 1998, p. 246) have glossed coherence as “parts that fit together well so that it is clear and easy to understand”. For Sanders and Spooren (1999, p. 235), coherence is “that which makes a discourse more than the sum of the interpretations of the individual utterances”. However, these are somewhat circular definitions since they merely replace the notion of coherence with equally vague concepts.

For some scholars, coherence is seen as being primarily realised through cohesion, “the set of linguistic resources that every language has…for linking one part of a text to another” (Halliday & Hasan, 1989, p. 48). For Halliday and Hasan (1976), this linking is achieved through cohesive ‘ties’, semantic relations between elements in a text which combine to form chains running through a text. Some researchers have suggested that more ties equal more coherence, although Hasan (1984) has suggested that it is the combination of chains and their degree of interaction which is important, as this leads to cohesive harmony. Coherence, then, is a function of cohesive harmony.

The ‘coherence-is-cohesion’ viewpoint has been challenged by a number of scholars (e.g., Beaugrande & Dressler, 1981; Green & Morgan, 1981; McCagg, 1990) who believe that coherence needs to take into account the mental schemata that the hearers bring to the process of interpretation and their background knowledge of the world. For these scholars, coherence does not reside solely in the text, but is a dynamic process in which interlocutors actively construct a meaningful representation of