O koheziji i koherenciji teksta
On cohesion and coherence of text

Summary/Abstract: The present paper provides a brief overview of theories focusing on text, with special emphasis on the terms cohesion and coherence. As a display of the communicative nature of language, the notion of text has in linguistic history often eluded grammatical description. Mid–20th century saw a significant change in this respect, with the emergence of Actual Syntax, Systemic Functional Theory and M. A. K Halliday’s Functional Grammar and Text Linguistics. These theories caused significant changes in perspectives towards grammar, whose direction tends to turn from text towards the sentence. The focus shift of grammatical description towards functional linguistic units implied a more intense interest in (linguistic) competence, which is roughly classified into grammatical and pragmatic competence, i.e. to the ability of efficient use of grammatical knowledge. Cohesion – the presence of direct linguistic relations that create text structure, and coherence – the degree of text intelligibility, form an important aspect of efficient language use in all theoretical approaches. This paper, therefore, aims to examine and provide an overview of a fraction of theoretical approaches that have tackled these two complex concepts, particularly given the lack of their systematic description in the studies of Croatian.

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