Coherence in non-technical summaries of European Central Bank financial reports

Positioned within the research fields of text linguistics and genre studies, this article reports an investigation into how and to what extent coherence is achieved in a specific type of summary writing, viz. non-technical summaries (NTS) of financial/economic reports published by the European Central Bank. The investigation is motivated by the observation that the very nature of summary writing may militate against a sufficient degree of coherence being achieved in such texts. While it is incumbent on the writer of any type of document to ensure coherence in his/her product, this endeavour may be hampered by the fact that summaries are typically required to condense large amounts of information into very limited space. Relying on the Cohesive Harmony Analysis framework provided by Systemic-Functional Linguistics, the investigation found that the texts do succeed in employing cohesive devices in such ways and to such an extent that a clear potential for coherence is present. Nevertheless, the texts fail to exploit the potential in a way that makes them properly coherent.