Coherence and textuality

Bibliogr. s. 176-179

Coherence is one of the fundamental qualities that give a text (semantic) unity and functional purpose. As an essential condition for well-formed and meaningful texts coherence has been the focus of linguistic studies since the sixties of the last century. It was initially defined as a grammatical property, then as a semantic phenomenon at the level of relations between single words or whole clauses, as a pragmatic notion (coherence between speech acts) and as a cognitive process or construct guided by the linguistic input and inferred from non-linguistic factors. In the modern text linguistics the term ‘text’ refers to a multimodal unity of diverse semiotic codes (language, visual image, music, sound). In recent years a great number of works have appeared dealing with the ways that the elements of visual mode constitute the text-meaning. Still, there has been hardly any work on the nature of the semantic relationships across and between various modes and their medialities. In this paper the author reviews on the one hand previous studies on textuality and text-coherence (starting from the grammatical approach) and discusses aspects in which the coherence can be analyzed as a multidimensional phenomenon, on the other hand tries to point out some new aspects of coherence which occur with the ‘text’ notion in the multimodal linguistics.