Means of Establishing Coherence Relations in the English Theological Text

The article is devoted to identifying the key means of establishing coherence relations in the English-language theological text. The topicality of the study is conditioned by the fact that the coherence of the text is one of the central objects of consideration within the framework of text linguistics. Currently, not all the mechanisms for creating coherence in scientific texts on theological subjects have been identified, which also requires certain attention of linguists. The research material includes a corpus of 560 contexts selected by the continuous selection method from monographs and other printed and electronic scientific works of a theological nature in the modern English language. The main research methods are the method of continuous selection, methods of discursive analysis, the method of distributive analysis, as well as methods of quantitative calculation. In the course of the work, the analysis of English-language discursive fragments on theological topics has been carried out in order to establish coherence relations in the text. Within the framework of the work, it has been revealed that among the key ways of creating coherence in an English-language theological text, one can name: pronominal substitution as a kind of indexical coherence, anaphoric or epiphoric repetition, hypo-hypernymic general-private relations between individual lexical units in successive sentences, belonging of thematic lexis to a single lexico-semantic (including terminological) field, the use of synonyms / antonyms, coordinate and subordinate conjunction connections. The fact is emphasized that in most cases, several ways of creating coherence can be used simultaneously in the English-language theological text, in particular, the use of subordinate conjunction connections and lexical repetitions or synonymic nominations.