Linguists use the two notions of cohesion and coherence to refer to the (linguistically encoded or just assumed) connectedness of spoken as well as written discourse or text. Of course, connecting relations also hold among elements of structure within grammatical units such as word, phrase, clause or sentence. But these intra-sentential relations are different in kind because they are determined by phonological and grammatical rules and described, inter alia, as syntactic-semantic relations of valency, dependency, constituency, modification. Cohesion, operating inter-sententially, and coherence are key notions in text and discourse analysis, as well as in pragmatics because they also relate to the complex interrelationship between form, meaning and use of linguistic expressions in specific (social) contexts. Though both cohesion and coherence refer to meaning resting on relations of connectedness (between individual propositions and sets of propositions), which may or may not be linguistically encoded, they are descriptive categories which differ in kind. Cohesion refers to inter-sentential semantic relations which link current items with preceding or following ones by lexical and structural means (cf. below). Cohesion is a kind of textual prosody. Since J. R. Firth, who perceived prosodic effects as phonological colouring, we use prosody to refer to the property of a feature to extend its domain, stretch over and affect not just one but several units. Analogously, textual prosody refers to cohesive colouring involving more than one element in discourse or text. As cohesion is anchored in its forms, we can argue that it is an invariant, user and context independent property of a piece of discourse or text. Coherence, on the other hand, is a cognitive category that depends on the language user’s interpretation and is not an invariant property of discourse or text. Though both cohesion and coherence have found their place as key terms in text and discourse analysis, they still mean different things to different people. Simplifying matters drastically, one could say that form and structure oriented linguists, who regard a text as a kind of long sentence, i.e. as a unit beyond the sentence, focus on cohesion as an essential feature of textuality. Function oriented linguists, on the other hand, who equate text with any linguistic expression of any length which is used to perform a specific function, focus on coherence as the defining feature of textuality. This overview can only touch upon a limited number of methodological and theoretical approaches to the description of cohesion and coherence, on the one hand, and of ways and means of (re-)creating them, on the other. For some time now there have been several common tendencies, among them the tendency to describe a far larger inventory of cohesive means than originally proposed by Halliday and Hasan, the tendency to refrain from accepting only one canonic definition of coherence, and the tendency to observe a basic stock of fundamental theoretical and methodological assumptions.