Cohesive Harmony Analysis: Measuring the Coherence of a Text

Hasan's (1984) Model of Cohesive Harmony Analysis (CHA) represents one of the first attempts within the SFL framework to devise a relatively objective index for measuring a text's coherence. As a development of the classic "cohesion analysis"(Halliday & Hasan 1976), it probes into the coherence of a text by considering discourse structure as being based in both the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic semantic relations between components of clauses. More than thirty years later, it is still widely used as an effective tool for language teaching and linguistic pathology. This paper will trace its origin, introduce its basic concepts and analytical procedure, describe its applications and consider its possible future development.