Discourse: Text Cohesion and Coherence

Devices of discourse:

• Deixis - shows the way speakers and writers orientate themselves and others in discourse 
• through the use of deitic expressions
• What:
• Demonstratives - ce/cette, ces ... là, celui-là
• Possessives - sa, son, ses etc
• Who:
• Verbs in 1st/2nd/3rd person
• Pronouns - je, tu, il etc
• When: 
• Time adverbs - maintenant, autrefois etc
• Tense of verbs - j'ai donné, je donnerai, etc
• Where:
• Spatial adverbs - ice, là, là-bas
• Deitic expressions are used to point out or indicate something to the speaker or listener

Coherence and Cohesion:

• Coherence - in order to be considered discourse, a text must be coherent
• i.e. it can't be a random sequence of sentences 
• it must tell its audience what is going on 
• Cohesion - how sentences are linked together  
• A text can be cohesive without being coherent  
• i.e. it can be linked together by a topic without having any logical structure
• In order to create coherence, we used subordinating and coordinating clauses
• Coordinating conjunctions - mais, et, ou, ou bien
• Subordinating conjunctions - parce que, si, tandis que, dont, lequel, où, que, qui
• Coordinating clauses can exist independently, are equally important as each other in a sentence
• Subordinating clauses are dependent on the main clause to make sense and cannot exist independently 

Cohesive Ties: 

• Hold discourse together
• e.g. d'abord, ensuite, en plus, enfin, cependant, au contraire d'autre part 
• give the text a logical structure

Endophora:

• An expression which is used to refer to something which has been or which will be said or written in a text
• it can refer to something mentioned earlier or something that will mentioned later 
• e.g. demonstrative pronouns are often used to avoid noun repetition and ambiguity
• Two types of endophora - anaphora and cataphora
• Anaphora - use of pronoun or demonstrative to refer back to something previous mentioned 
• Cataphora - use of pronoun or demonstrative to refer forward in text to something which will be mentioned

Examples:

Je ne vous présente pas un programme, au sens habituel du mot. Je l'ai fait en 1981 alors que j'étais à la tête du Parti socialiste.

Analysis: 

• Deitic expressions in bold, anaphora underlined, cataphora overlined
• je ne vous présente
• je & vous = demonstratives, verb ending = time indication
• je l'ai fait en 1981
• je = demonstrative, fait, en 1981 = time indication, l' = anaphoric reference