Constructing Textual Coherence through Pronominal Systems: A Contrastive Study of Albanian, German, and English

Abstract

This article develops a contrastive analysis of how Albanian, German, and English construct textual coherence through their pronominal and morphosyntactic systems. The study places Arbër Çeliku’s (2009, pp. 19–24) distinction between Coherence A (explicit coherence) and Coherence B (implicit coherence) at the center of its theoretical framework, demonstrating that the three languages differ fundamentally in how they encode referentiality, continuity, and discourse progression. Albanian, as a pro-drop language with a highly developed clitic system, realizes coherence largely through implicit and inferential mechanisms, whereas German and English rely primarily on overt pronominal expressions and expletive subject pronouns. Through a tri-lingual mini-corpus (6000 words) and synthetic media-inspired examples based on contemporary Albanian news discourse (2023–2025), the study shows that Albanian systematically omits subjects, encodes referents through morphology and clitics, and avoids expletive subjects in existential and impersonal constructions. German and English, conversely, maintain explicit subject positions and rely heavily on overt pronouns for coherence. These findings argue for a coherence typology in which Albanian exemplifies a prototypical Coherence B system, and German and English codify Coherence A. The article concludes that a modern theory of coherence must account for languages in which implicit mechanisms, not surface markers, carry the essential burden of textual cohesion.