Drawing on Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1986; Blakemore, 1987, 1992) and takinginsights from Sinclair's (1993) model of written text structure, the purpose of this paper is toshow how and which cohesive features play an important role in helping the reader perceiverelevance and coherence when a text is approached in the process of reading. With this aim, acomment article from Guardian Unlimited consisting of 60 coherence units is analyzed by agroup of 25 subjects. The study seeks to capture the coherence pattem perceived by a discoursecommunity rather than by an individual researcher. The results show that in most cases thecohesive resources that contribute to the perception of the discourse relevance and coherence ofthis text at each juncture deal only with discourse meaning derived from whole sentences, largerfragments of text, or occasionally, certain simple clauses linked paratactically, and they do muchmore than effect a tenuous connection between isolated constituents of sentences.

Peer reviewed