In Cohesion in English, M.A.

Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan identify five general categories of cohesive

devices that signal coherence in texts:

reference

ellipsis

substitution

lexical cohesion

conjunction

"Cohesion," Connor writes, "is determined by lexically and grammatically overt intersentential
relationships, whereas coherence is based on semantic relationships."

Coherent texts make sense to the reader. In Text and Context: Explorations in the Semantics and
Pragmatics of Discourse, Teun A. van Dijk (p. 93) argues convincingly that coherence is a semantic
property of discourse formed through the interpretation of each individual sentence relative to the
interpretation of other sentences, with "interpretation" implying interaction between the text and the
reader. One method for evaluating a text's coherence is topical structure analysis.