Preliminares para a definição da coerência/coesão

Abstract

The present research aims to propose a preliminary notion of on the concept of cohesion/coherence, considering it a phenomenon constituted of a conjunction of different facts abstracted not only from the textual surface, and therefore cannot be taken as an inherent characteristic of the text semantic content, but as the result of a construction made by the interlocutors, in a situation of interaction created for the actuation of vary factors of cognitive, situational and interactional types. In this research, the concepts of cohesion and coherence are taken as a singular phenomenon, both faces of a coin, coherence/cohesion, capable of propitiate the meaning of a text to the one who rebuilds it. To the theoretical reconsideration of our work, we (re)analyzed how several issues can contribute to the conceptualization of coherence/cohesion, they are: the factors of textuality proposed by Beaugrande and Dressler (1981); the factors of coherence by Koch and Travaglia (2008); the referential processes in the classification of Custúdio Filho (2006) and Cavalcante (2011); the studies about compositional argumentative sequence described by Adam (1992); the “meta-rules” of continuity, progression, non-contradiction and relation proposed by Charolles (1978); besides the discussions on the application of the notion of discursive topic in written productions by Alencar (2009). The results from these studies suggest that all these factors, together, must be taken into consideration at the moment that the coherence/cohesion of a written text is being evaluated. This made that we analyzed 20 (twenty) written productions of a dissertative-argumentative type, from students in the third year of high-school, university applicants. Among other results, we have observed how the referential expressions could provide some generative factors of coherence/cohesion proposed, such as the textual continuity, the textual progression, the non-contradiction, between the internal and external elements of the text, besides the continuity or discontinuity of the discursive topic to be followed along the textual structure.