Discourse and the Non-Native English Speaker By Michael Cribb

content is the chief ‘carrier’ of coherence here rather than any cohesive devices. All the other examples create texts which lack coherence: line 2b lacks relevance, and line 2c lacks external semantic consistency. Lines 2d and 2e show how internal semantic consistency can be lost through either grammatically well formed but semantically inconsistent utterances, as in line 2d, or grammatically ill-formed, semantically inconsistent utterances, as in line 2e. Line 2d lacks consistency since as a unit by itself it does not fit in with the world as we know it: ‘apples being before a day in heaven’ is not a concept which we can easily understand. Line 2e also lacks internal semantic consistency but differs from line 2d in that it fails due to grammar. (In non-native discourse, more often than not it is a combination of the two.) I take grammar, therefore, to be one component in realising semantic consistency, but it is not the focal point of this study (and should not be). Grammar has been described as a ‘switchboard’ (Newmeyer, 1991), mapping phonological form onto meaning, but most of the time it remains hidden from view. To make an analogy, we do not need to look under the bonnet to know that a car is not running well. Thus, the first task in an analysis of coherence is to separate out all the utterances that are semantically inconsistent (not running well), and only then decide if we need to refer to the grammar (look under the bonnet). It should be noted also in the discussion here that the only means of establishing that an utterance is semantically consistent and pragmatically relevant is the human mind; there is no rulebook which we can consult for grammatical considerations.

My definition of coherence, adopting Giora's (1985a) stance, does not include cohesion. The reason for this is that I take cohesion to be subordinate to coherence, as she does: “I suggest that we regard cohesion as a derivative notion stemming from a higher principle of coherence” (Giora, 1985a, p. 702). In other words, cohesion emerges as a result of a text being coherent rather than being a cause. Cohesion is neither necessary nor sufficient for coherence; although it is one means of realising coherence, and often quite an important one, as Halliday and Hasan have suggested: “An important contribution to coherence comes