On cohesion and coherence of text

Sa？etak Th e 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 signifi cant 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. Th e focus shift of grammatical description towards functional linguistic units implied a more intense interest in (linguistic) competence, which is roughly classifi ed 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 effi cient 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