Analysis of two Harold Pinter plays, "The Birthday Party" and "The Dumb Waiter," illustrates the complementarity of cohesion and coherence in discourse analysis. Coherence is defined as the structure of verbal interaction on a higher level than grammar. Cohesion is defined as the resources of a language that generates interconnected series of sentences and an integrated text, with descriptive units at the same level as the grammatical system. Both coherence and cohesion have generally been considered two different approaches to textuality. However, this analysis shows that the underlying coherence of discourse is realized first by different discourse units, which are then tied to the continuous discourse by the devices of cohesion. Both approaches, coherence and cohesion, are needed for a thorough examination of discourse, and their use together makes possible rigorous sociolinguistic analyses of texts of any length. (MSE)