TESOL Quarterly

TESOL QUARTERLY
Vol. 16. No. 4

December 1982
Cohesion Is Not Coherence*

Patricia L. Carrell
The purpose of this paper is to criticize the concept of cohesion as a

measure of the coherence of a text. The paper begins with a brief overview
of Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) cohesion concept as an index of textual
coherence. Next, the paper criticizes the concept of cohesion as a measure
of textual coherence in the light of schema-theoretical views of text pro-
cessing (e.g. reading) as an interactive process between the text and the
reader. This criticism, which is drawn from both theoretical and empirical
work in schema theory, attempts to show that text-analytic procedures such
as Halliday and Hasan’s cohesion concept, which encourage the belief that
coherence is located in the text and can be defined as a configuration of
textual features, and which fail to take the contributions of the text’s reader
into account, are incapable of accounting for textual coherence. The paper
concludes with a caution to second language (EFL/ESL) teachers and re-
searchers not to expect cohesion theory to be the solution to EFL/ESL
reading/writing coherence problems at the level of the text.
The past several years have seen a phenomenal growth in interest in text as
a unit of language beyond the sentence level. AS interest on the part of
theoreticians and first language researchers has evolved from early preoccu-
pation with phonology, then syntax, later semantics, and recently pragmatics
and text, so too has the interest of applied and second language researchers
and practitioners similarly evolved. Thus, in applied linguistics in general,
and in the fields of ESL and second language research in particular, we find
ourselves in an era of considerable interest in text—discourse level structures
and processes.
A number of different approaches have been taken toward the study of
texts and to determining what constitutes a coherent text as opposed to a
sequence of sentences which would not be considered a text. Many re-
searchers have been hard at work trying to understand the fundamental
properties of texts and some theoretical accounts of them have been pro-
posed. Often these accounts are in terms of linguistic theories of discourse,
i.e., textual analysis techniques which parallel sentence analysis techniques.
These approaches are even sometimes called text grammars. Among others
Ms. Carrell is Professor of Linguistics at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, where she
teaches in the M.A. in EFL/ESL program, She is currently visiting Professor of ESL at the
University of Hawaii.
*A version of this paper was presented at the Fourth Los Angeles Second Language Research
Forum (SLRF-4) held at UCLA, April 28-30, 1982.
479
15457249, 1982, 4, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.2307/3586466 by University Of Reading, Wiley Online Library on [02/12/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
480 TESOL Quarterly
to attempt a linguistic type of analysis of connected discourse or text have

been the American structuralist Charles Fries (1952), the first American
transformationalist Zellig Harris (1970), the tagmemicists Kenneth Pike
(1967) and Robert Longacre (1968, 1972), and more recently propositional
analyst Walter Kintsch (1974), macrostructuralist Teun van Dijk (1972, 1977),
and story grammarians Mandler and Johnson (1977), Stein and Glenn (1979),
Thorndyke (1977), ,and Rumelhart (1975). The most influential of the textual
analysis techniques, however, in terms of its current appeal in applied lin-
guistics, has been the approach of Michael Halliday and Rugaiya Hasan
(1976), known as cohesion theory.
The purpose of this paper, and therefore, also its organization, is three-
fold. The first part of the paper reviews Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) co-
hesion concept as an index of textual coherence, The second part reviews
recent criticism of the cohesive view of coherence. This criticism is both
theory-based and the result of empirical research on cohesion. In the main,
this is criticism which has emerged in the light of schema theory, which
views text processing as an interactive process between the text and the
reader. The third and final part of the paper relates this criticism of cohesion
as a measure of coherence to the teaching of reading and writing in a second
language, specifically ESL.
Cohesion Theory
Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) treatment of cohesion as a linguistic property
contributing to coherence is in the tradition of all the previously mentioned
text grammars in that it attempts to treat text primarily as a linguistic phen-
omenon. In other words, Halliday and Hasan treat discourse properties as
linguistic or language-like properties. In proposing the concept of cohesion
as a factor in what is generally called a text’s coherence, they say:
If a speaker of English hears or reads a passage of language which is more than
one sentence in length, he can normally decide without difficulty whether it
forms a unified whole or is just a collection of unrelated sentences. This book is
about what makes the difference between the two.
The word TEXT is used in linguistics to refer to any passage, spoken or
written, of whatever length, that does form a unified whole. We know, as a
general rule, whether any specimen of our own language constitutes a TEXT or
not. . . .
This suggests that there are objective factors involved—there must be certain
features which are characteristic of texts and not found otherwise. . . . We shall
attempt to identify these, in order to establish what are the properties of texts
in English, and what it is that distinguishes a text from a disconnected sequence
of sentences. As always in linguistic description, we shall be discussing things
that the native speaker of the language ‘knows’ already. (1976:1)
However, unlike structural analyses of a text, cohesion theory attempts to
describe the patterns in the fabric or texture of a text. Hence, Halliday and
Hasan prefer the term texture for the kind of text property that is more
commonly referred to as coherence.
Cohesion Is Not Coherence 481
The concept of TEXTURE is entirely appropriate to express the property of

‘being a text.’ A text has texture, and this is what distinguishes it from being
something that is not a text. It derives the texture from the fact that it functions
as a unity with respect to its environment. (1976:2)
Coherence, or texture, according to Halliday and Hasan, is the combin-
ation of semantic configurations of two different kinds: register and co-
hesion. Register refers to the variety of language which is appropriate for the
situation of the speech event, and is not of any particular relevance or
interest here. Cohesion, however, is Halliday and Hasan’s main concern and
central focus. Cohesion refers to the semantic relations in a text which Halli-
day and Hasan claim make the test cohere. Although cohesion concerns
semantic relations, according to Halliday and Hasan, cohesion is not a matter
of content or textual meaning. “Cohesion does not concern what a text
means; it concerns how the text is constructed as a semantic edifice.”
(1976:26)
According to Halliday and Hasan (1976), cohesion is displayed in the ties
that exist within text between a presupposed item and a presupposing item.
For example, in the sentences John makes good meals. Last night he cooked
spaghetti. the pronoun he in the second sentence is the presupposing item.
and John in the first sentence is the presupposed item. Halliday and Hasan
claim that text derives texture, i.e., coherence, from these cohesive ties.
Halliday and Hasan suggest that: “The concept of ties makes it possible to
analyze a text in terms of its cohesive properties and give a systematic
account of its patterns of texture. ” (1976:4)
Halliday and Hasan present a taxonomy of various types of cohesive ties
or relations in four main groups: (1) reference, including antecedent-anaphor
relations, the definite article the, and demonstrative pronouns; (2) substi-
tution, including such various pronoun-like forms as one, do, so, etc., and
several kinds of ellipsis, (3) conjunction, involving words like and, but, yet,
etc., and (4) lexical cohesion, which has to do with repeated occurrences of
the same or related lexical items.
That Halliday and Hasan view these cohesion relations, as well as texture
in general, as linguistic relations can be seen at several points in their dis-
cussion:
What we are investigating in this book are the resources that English has for
creating texture. If a passage of English containing more than one sentence is
perceived as a text, there will be certain linguistic features present in that
passage which can be identified as contributing to its total unity and giving it
texture. (1976:2)
Thus, they are claiming that coherence, or as they call it, texture, is created
by the linguistic resources of the language, that if a text has texture that will
be due to certain linguistic features in the text. “Cohesion is part of the
system of a language,” (1976:5)
Halliday and Hasan’s main point seems to be that mere coherence of
482 TESOL Quarterly
content is insufficient to make a text coherent; rather, that there must be

some additional linguistic property, such as cohesive ties, that contributes to
the coherence of a text.
Criticisms of the Cohesive View of Coherence: From Theoretical Consid-

erations
The cohesion view of textual coherence has been criticized by a number
of researchers from several different perspectives. One source of criticism
comes from people such as Karen Feathers (1981) who argues that cohesion
theory operates on the superficial surface structure of a text in establishing
the cohesive ties. Feathers finds more useful and more revealing an
approach that first analyzes a text into its underlying propositional units and
then looks for cohesive ties between the propositions, rather than the surface
structures.
The criticism this paper is concerned with however, has emerged in the
light of schema-theoretical views of text processing. Schema theory is an
approach to information processing emanating from research in cognitive
science—i,e,, research in cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, linguis-
tics, etc. (Bobrow and Norman 1975). Schema theory maintains that pro-
cessing a text is an interactive process between the text and the prior
background knowledge or memory schemata of the listener or reader. In the
schema-theoretical view of text processing, what is important is not only the
text, its structure and content, but what the reader or listener does with the
text. Unlike the textual analysis approaches—story grammar, text grammar,
propositional analysis, cohesion theory, etc., which operate on text as though
it occurred in a vacuum—schema theory takes the text processors into ac-
count.
Coming from this schema-theoretic orientation, Morgan and Sellner
(1980) provide some of the strongest criticism of Halliday and Hasan’s (1976)
cohesive theory of coherence. Morgan and Sellner’s criticism centers on
Halliday and Hasan’s point that mere coherence of content does not suffice
to make a text coherent, that there must be some additional linguistic prop-
erty (like cohesion) that makes a text coherent. Morgan and Sellner argue, in
effect, that coherence of a text is a matter of content which happens to have
linguistic consequences. In a coherent biography of Churchill, for example,
they say:
one would expect frequent mention of words like Churchill, he, him, his, and
so on. The source of coherence would lie in the content, and the repeated
occurrences of certain words would be the consequence of content coherence,
not something that was a source of coherence. (1980:179)
Morgan and Sellner argue that it is a mistake to construe cohesive ties like
these as cause rather than effect. But, they say, this is exactly the mistake
Halliday and Hasan have made. According to Morgan and Sellner: “. . . co-
hesion, insofar as any sense can be made of Halliday and Hasan’s description
of it, is an epiphenomenon of content coherence.” (1980:179)
To show this, Morgan and Sellner examine one of Halliday and Hasan’s
first and simplest examples. Halliday and Hasan take the following two
sentences and ask us to suppose we find them in a cookbook: Wash and core
six cooking apples. Put them into a fireproof dish. (1976:2) Halliday and
Hasan argue that them in the second sentence refers back to, or is anaphoric
to, the noun phrase six cooking apples in the first sentence. This anaphoric
function of them, they say, gives cohesion to the two sentences, so that we
interpret them as a whole, as a text and not as two separate sentences.
Halliday and Hasan (1976) go on to argue that the texture or coherence of
this text is provided by the cohesive relation that exists between the word
them and the words six cooking apples. In other words, Halliday and Hasan
say that texture or coherence is created by these linguistic items and the
cohesive relation which exists between them.
Morgan and Sellner (1980) point out that them does not refer back to
something that has gone before. Them refers (or more accurately stated, the
writer uses it to refer) to six cooking apples (real-world objects), not to the
linguistic expression six cooking apples. The sentence, they point out is an
instruction to put apples, not words, into a dish. It is not the apples which
have ‘gone before,’ but the act of referring to the apples by using certain
words. (1980: 180) Thus, there are two different ways we might interpret the
cohesive relation Halliday and Hasan have in mind. It could be interpreted
as the relation of reference, between the word them and the apples them is
used to refer to. But this relation, then, is not one between elements in a text;
it’s a relation between something in a text and something outside the text.
Clearly this can’t be a cohesive relation as defined by Halliday and Hasan.
Or, it could be interpreted as the relation of coreference, the relation between
two expressions, in this instance six cooking apples and them, used to refer to
the same thing. But this does not seem to be what Halliday and Hasan have
in mind, and Halliday and Hasan give no reason to believe that this derived
kind of relation plays a direct role in understanding text or determining
properties such as coherence.
Furthermore, Morgan and Sellner argue, Halliday and Hasan are mistaken
in taking the coherence relation in this example as a clear and objective fact.
Halliday and Hasan say that it is clear that them refers to the six cooking
apples. But, ask Morgan and Sellner, how can we know what them refers to?
What leads to the conclusion that them, in fact, is intended to refer to the
apples and not, say, to the author’s children, or the pages of the cookbook, or
anything else for that matter? It is not knowledge of language that leads to
this conclusion. It is our background knowledge of cooking and of the
author’s purpose, as well as our ability to reason, and the assumption that the
recipe is coherent. Without this latter assumption, there would be no way of
knowing what them is intended to refer to. As Morgan and Sellner argue, it is
484 TESOL Quarterly
precisely “because we assume the text is coherent that we infer that them is
intended to refer to the apples. ” (1980:180) Halliday and Hasan have mis-
construed all their examples in exactly the same way, say Morgan and
Sellner, by taking certain aspects of linguistic form as the cause, and not the
effect, of coherence.
This shows up most sharply in Halliday and Hasan’s discussion of lexical
cohesion. This type of cohesion arises, according to Halliday and Hasan,
from repetition of some lexical items or from occurrences of lexical items
that are related in certain ways. Again, it is clear that Halliday and Has an
intend this as a case of a relation of linguistic form: “It is not by virtue of any
referential relation that there is a cohesive force set up between two occur-
rences of a lexical item; rather, the cohesion exists as a direct relation be-
tween the forms themselves. (1976:284). But Halliday and Hasan provide no
reason to believe that this formal notion has any explanatory value as cause,
rather than as effect. And, as Morgan and Sellner point out, the notion
collapses entirely when Halliday and Hasan extend the notion of lexical
cohesion to instances of chains of related lexical items in a text, for example,
chains of words like mountaineering-Yosemite-summit-peaks-climb-ridge.
Obviously, a text containing these lexical items will likely be coherent insofar
as their use is indicative of a common overall topic. Halliday and Hasan’s
position, though, is that there is an independent linguistic notion of cohesion
that cannot be reduced to content. This writer agrees with Morgan and
Sellner’s position that Halliday and Hasan have not shown that their view of
lexical cohesion has any explanatory value, nor that they have shown co-
hesion to be the cause, and not the effect of coherence.
The picnic was ruined. No one remembered to bring a corkscrew. This
mini-text coheres, I maintain, not because there is a necessary linguistic
lexical cohesive tie between picnic and corkscrew but rather because we can
access a familiar schema for interpreting it in which picnics and corkscrews
go together. For anyone who cannot access such a schema the text will fail to
cohere. The illusion of lexical cohesion is created by the text’s coherence.
Criticisms of the Cohesive View of Coherence: From Empirical Studies

Three separate empirical studies of cohesion have examined the relation-
ship of cohesion to coherence, and all three of them report results consistent
with Morgan and Sellner’s theory-based criticism of Halliday and Hasan.
Tierney and Mosenthal (1981) studied the extent to which Halliday and
Hasan’s cohesion concept correlated with coherence. They did this by corre-
lating the proportional use of cohesive ties by twelfth grade students in
written essays with holistic coherence rankings given by the students’
rhetoric instructors. The essays were elicited under controlled conditions,
with several other variables of interest in the study (e.g. topic and famili-
arity) controlled for. They found that topic accounted for most of the vari-
ation in cohesive categories—in other words, as Morgan and Sellner argued,
topic or content appears to affect the options a writer has for using cohesive
items. In one of the topic conditions (a biography), there was a moderate
negative, not positive, correlation of cohesion and coherence ranking. In
other topic condition (a theme), there was a strong negative correlation.
Tierney and Mosenthal conclude that:
With the analyses that have been done with counts of types of cohesion ties,
little positive has been stated about the causal relation of Halliday and Hasan’s
cohesion concept to textual coherence. What was found is that cohesive ties are
pervasive in text and are patterned across topics. But ties are pervasive almost
by definition since reference, conjunction, and lexical cohesion include a large
proportion of any text. . . . Such pervasiveness severely diminishes the use-
fulness of the cohesion concept as an index of coherence. . . . This study argues
against using cohesion analysis as an index or predictor of a text’s coherence.
There appears to be no causal relationship between proportional measures of
cohesive ties and coherence rankings within a topic. . . . The present study
indicates that a cohesion index is causally unrelated to a text’s coherence.
(1981:24-25).
Freebody and Anderson (1981) have empirically studied the effects of
three different levels of cohesion on readers’ comprehension of written pas-
sages; the study also simultaneously looked at the effects of vocabulary
difficulty. Vocabulary difficulty had a dramatic effect on comprehension,
but the amount of cohesion did not. Freebody and Anderson speculate on
the reason for this nonsignificant effect of cohesion by observing: “There is
previous research, such as that of Hagerup-Neilsen (1977), which indicates
that lack of connective does not seriously damage comprehension because
readers are usually able to make bridging inferences.” (1981:19)
Steffensen (1981) has studied the interactive effects of both cohesive ties
and cultural background knowledge on readers’ processing of short prose
texts. After reading comparable passages from both their native culture and
from a foreign culture, readers were asked to write their recalls of the pas-
sages. In analyzing these recall protocols Steffensen found that causal and
adversative cohesive elements were recalled better by readers from the
passage of their own native culture than from the passage of the foreign
culture. These findings suggest that when there is a mismatch in cultural
background knowledge between the reader and that assumed by the text,
there will be a loss of textual cohesion. Steffensen argues that textual co-
hesion represents only a potential which can be fully realized only when a
reader appropriately identifies the schema underlying a text. In other words,
recognizing that a text is about an example of a class of situations makes
possible the complete processing of the cohesive elements in that text. If a
reader does not have, or fails to access, the appropriate background schema
underlying the text, all the cohesive ties in the world won’t help that text
cohere for that reader.
Implications for Second Language/ESL
The purpose of this paper in reviewing cohesion theory and schema-theo-
486 TESOL Quarterly
retical criticism of it has been to caution those in second language teaching

and research, particularly in ESL, not to expect cohesion theory to be the
ultimate solution to ESL reading/writing problems at the level of the text.
Interest in cohesion theory among second language, ESL teachers and re-
searchers is growing; more and more references are made to it, as well as to
other text analysis techniques, in the literature, particularly in the literature
dealing with teaching ESL composition (Menke 1981, Goodin and Perkins
1982, Carpenter and Hunter 1982). These authors appear encouraged to
believe that cohesion theory, as well as other textual analysis techniques, will
yield the answers to ESL composition problems. However, these authors
appear to be committing the errors pointed out by Morgan and Sellner, that
is, equating coherence with cohesion. Consider the following quote from
Goodin and Perkins: “. . . rhetorical composition is preeminently the arrange-
ment and sequencing of sentences, and the art of coherence, or bonding
those sentences together, forms much of the art of rhetoric.” (1982:57) In
other words, according to Goodin and Perkins, coherence is the bonding
together of sentences. Further these authors appear to view coherence as
something within a text, something that can be revealed by textual analysis
techniques such as cohesion theory. Consider yet another quote from
Goodin and Perkins: . . . we began to investigate coherence in the light of
modern discourse analysis . . . (1982:57). Thus, the view expressed by these
quotes is that coherence is caused by something in the text, something like
the cohesive bonding together of sentences. It’s just a short jump from that
view to the view that if we could only teach cohesion to our ESL students,
they’d write coherent, or at least more coherent, compositions. Menke (1981)
laments that “the cohesive resources of the language are not readily available
to the non-native writer” (1981: from the abstract) and further that “Many
ESL students . . . need instruction in the resources of the English language for
creating cohesion.” (1981:3)
In other words, these authors appear to be making the assumptions
Halliday and Hasan made. They seem to be assuming that the features of a
text which, like cohesion, may be subjected to textual analysis techniques,
determine a text’s coherence, They seem to believe that coherence is located
in the text and can be defined as the result of specific textual features. And
finally, they seem to believe that if we teach cohesion to our ESL students,
their writing will be more coherent. The schema-theoretical criticism of
cohesion theory cited in this paper has, hopefully, shown that these assump-
tions are false. Cohesion is not the cause of coherence; if anything, it’s the
effect of coherence. A coherent text will likely be cohesive, not of necessity,
but as a result of that coherence. Bonding an incoherent text together won’t
make it coherent, only cohesive.
I’m not claiming that there’s nothing worthwhile about cohesion studies,
and, in fact, I believe they need to be done. I’m also not saying that we
shouldn’t teach our ESL students the cohesive ties available in English. What
I am saying is that we shouldn’t deceive ourselves into thinking that these

things will be a panacea, the answer to all our ESL composition and reading
problems. If we really want to learn about textual coherence, we must
supplant or at least supplement textual analysis theories such as cohesion
theory with broader, more powerful theories which take the reader into
account, and which look at both reading and writing as interactive processes
involving the writer and the reader, as well as the text.
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Vol. 16. No. 4

Cohesion Is Not Coherence*

The purpose of this paper is to criticize the concept of cohesion as a

to attempt a linguistic type of analysis of connected discourse or text have

The concept of TEXTURE is entirely appropriate to express the property of

content is insufficient to make a text coherent; rather, that there must be

Criticisms of the Cohesive View of Coherence: From Theoretical Consid-

Criticisms of the Cohesive View of Coherence: From Empirical Studies

retical criticism of it has been to caution those in second language teaching

I am saying is that we shouldn’t deceive ourselves into thinking that these

Stein, N. L., and C. G. Glenn. 1979. An analysis of story comprehension in elementary

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