Coherence and Cohesion in Spoken and Written Discourse
Editor: Olga Dontcheva-Navratilova and Renata Povolná
Date Of Publication: Oct 2009
Isbn13: 978-1-4438-1308-2
Isbn: 1-4438-1308-7
Coherence and Cohesion in Spoken and Written Discourse provides new insights into the various ways coherence works in a wide spread of spoken and written text types and interactional situations, all of which point to the dynamics and subjectivity of its nature. Despite the variety of approaches the authors adopt, they share an understanding of language as a dynamic and heterogeneous system mediating interaction in social and cultural contexts and explain how coherence and cohesion are reflected in different contextually bound aspects of human communication.

The chapters of the book comprise essays by linguists working in the fields of pragmatics, discourse analysis and stylistics which explore features contributing to the perception of cohesion and coherence in spoken and written varieties of English, namely impromptu, academic and political discourse within the former variety, and media, academic and fictional discourse within the latter.

This volume, which combines theoretical insights with practical analyses of different varieties of spoken and written English discourse, will be of interest to a wide range of researchers, scholars and students of English.

Olga Dontcheva-Navratilova is Assistant Professor of English Linguistics at Masaryk University Brno, Czech Republic. She specialises in discourse analysis, stylistics and pragmatics, focusing on cohesion and coherence strategies in political and academic discourse. She is currently working on her book Analysing Genre: The Text-Colony of UNESCO Resolutions, in which she analyses the distinctive features of the colony text type as represented in the genre of resolutions. She has published many articles on topics related to her research interests, notably in Brno Studies in English, Topics in Linguistics, Current Developments in Foreign Studies in Philology, and Discourse and Interaction, which she co-edits with Renata Povolná. She is involved in the research project Coherence and Cohesion in English Discourse, the aim of which is to conceptualize coherence and cohesion as constitutive components of human communication and to explore features and strategies enhancing the perception of coherence and cohesion in different genres of spoken and written discourse.

Renata Povolná is Associate Professor of English Linguistics at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. Her research interests lie in the areas of discourse analysis, pragmatics and conversation analysis, concentrating mainly on coherence, cohesion and interactional markers in impromptu and academic spoken discourse. She is author of two monographs, namely Spatial and Temporal Adverbials in English Authentic Face-to-Face Conversation (2003), in which she investigates the role of spatial and temporal adverbials in authentic private face-to-face conversation, and Interactive Discourse Markers in Spoken English (forthc.), in which she deals with clausal forms, such as you know, you see, I mean, I think, I’m sure, with the aim of identifying the important pragmatic functions these markers perform in spoken discourse. She has published many articles on topics related to her research interests, notably in Brno Studies in English, Topics in Linguistics, Current Developments in Foreign Studies in Philology, and Discourse and Interaction, which she co-edits with Olga Dontcheva-Navratilova. She is involved in the research project Coherence and Cohesion in English Discourse, the aim of which is to conceptualize coherence and cohesion as constitutive components of human communication and to apply theoretical insights to the analysis of spoken and written discourse.

“The overall concern of the present volume is the way coherence is manifested in spoken and written texts. This is an intriguing question, since the interpretation of coherence has shifted from a semantic to a dynamic property, which depends not only on upcoming information and the contextual development but also on the cooperation between speaker/writer and hearer/reader for its understanding.

The manifold manifestations of coherence demonstrated in these articles provide an excellent insight into the many ways coherence works in a wide spread of spoken and written text types and interactional situations, which all point to the dynamics of its nature. It goes without saying that the volume is of immediate interest to all students and researchers of coherence and cohesion.”

—Professor Fil.Dr. Anna-Brita Stenström, Bergen University, Norway

“This volume offers fresh insights on central and controversial issues in language description by bringing together contributions that explore the relationship between cohesion and coherence from various perspectives and in relation to a range of different text types including impromptu face-to-face conversation, public speaking, fiction, media and academic discourse. This collection therefore is to be welcomed as an empirical contribution to our understanding of these complex features of spoken and written discourse and will provide stimulating ideas for future inquiry.”

—Dr. Gunther Kaltenböck, MA, University of Vienna, Austria

'This is an interesting collection of papers'

''...articles are worth reading and offer a glimpse of the range of approaches towards coherence.''

-Carmen Konzett, Institut fur Romanistik, University of Innsbruck, Austria.

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