UNIT 3

COHESION AND COHERENCE

 BROWN AND YULE (1983) CH6
• Cohesion → Halliday & Hasan
• Co-reference (reference in H & H) → forms that instead of being interpreted
semantically in their own right, make reference to something else for their
interpretation
- Exophoric
- Endophoric
- Cataphoric
- Anaphoric
• Other forms of cohesion → cohesion may be derived from lexical relationships like
- Hyponymy
- Part-whole
- Collocability
- Substitution
- Comparison
- Syntactic repetition
- Consistency of tense
- Stylistic choice
• Endophora→ instructs the reader/hearer to look inside the text to find what
is being referred to. The reader establishes a referent in his mental
representation of the discourse and relates subsequent references back to
his mental representation, rather than to the original verbal expression in the
text.
• Substitution
• Discourse reference → Lyons replaces the term reference with the term
denotation in consideration of lexical meaning. A lexical item has sense and
denotation.
• Reference and discourse interpretation
• Referring expressions
• Pronouns in discourse
 BROWN AND YULE (1983) CH7
• Coherence in discourse →We assume that people bring coherence to the
interpretation of linguistic messages. Although it may not be the correct
interpretation, what is important is the reader’s (hearer’s) effort to arrive at
the writer’s (speaker’s) INTENDED MEANING. The reader bases his
interpretation of the writer’s intended meaning on :
- The assumptions of coherence
- Principles of analogy and local interpretation
- Some gral features of the context
- The regularities of discourse structure
- The regular features of information structure organisation
- Conventional socio-cultural knowledge
• Fragments→ linguistic messages which are not presented in sentences and
consequestly cannot be discussed in terms of syntactic well-formedness,
but which are readily intepreted.
1. Computing communicative function → sociolinguistics have attemped to
describe how an utterance can count as a social action
- Labov: there are “rules of interpretation” which relate what is said to what
is done, and is on the basis of such social, but not linguistic, rules that we
interpret some conversational sequences as coherent and others as non-
coherent. The recognition of coherence or incoherence is not based on a
relationship b/utterances, but b/ the actions performed by means of those
utterances.
- Speech acts → Austin: the utterance of some sentences must, in
specified circumstances, be treated as the performance of an act →
PERFORMATIVES.
In uttering any sentence,a speaker could be seen to have performed some act
or, to be precise, an illocutionary act.
Illocutionary act: performed by the speaker when uttering any sentence.
Conventionally, the force of each utterance.
Perlocutionary act: the effect which the illocutionary act, on the particular
occasion of use, has on the hearer.
Searle → direct and indirect speech acts which depends on the recognition of
the intended perlocutionary effect of an utterance on a particular
occasion.
- Indirect speech acts → cases in which one illocutionary act is performed
indirectly by way of performing another
2. Using knowledge of the world → The interpretation of discourse is based to a
large extent on a simple principle of analogy with waht we have
experienced in the past. The question remains as to how we organise all
this knowledge and activate only limited amounts when needed.
We can think about our processing of incoming discourse as the combination of
2 activities which work at the same time:
- Bottom-up processing → we work out the meanings of the words and
structure of a sentence and build up a composite meaning for the
sentence. Related to syntax and semantics.
- Top-down processing: we predict, on the basis of the context plus the
composite meaning of the sentences already processed, what the next
sentence is most likely to mean. Related to discourse.
• Representing background knowledge →
- Riesbeck →”Comprehension is a memory process”
- Artificial Intelligence → FRAMES AND SCRIPTS
1. Frames (Minsky’s Frame Theory) → our knowledge is stored in memory
in the form of data structures, which he calls “frames”, and which
represent stereotyped situations
• The basic structure of a frame contains labelled slots which can be filled
with expressions, fillers.
FRAME: fixed representation of knowledge about the world.
2. Scripts→ stereotypic event-sequences. Schank and Abelson
Whereas a frame is generally treated as an essentially stable set of facts about
the world, a scripts is more programmatic in that it incorporates “ a
standard sequence of events that describes a situation”.
3. Scenarios→ Sanford & Garrad: “ the extended domain of reference”
which is used in interpreting written texts, “since one can think of
knowledge of settings and situations as constituting the interpretative
scenario nehind a text”
The ≠ b/ schemata ans scenarios is that scenarios are sitation-specific,
whereas schemata are much more general types of knowledge
representations.
4. Schemata → People have schemata which they use to produce and
comprehend ≠ types of texts. S. Are said to be “higher-level complex
knowledge structures” which function as “ideaional scaffolding” in the
organisation and interpretation of experience.
S. Can be seen as the organised background knowledge (cultural background
and people personal stories) (stored in memory) which leads us to expect
or predict aspects in our interpretation of discourse.
5. Mental Models → representation in the form of an internal model in the
state of affairs characterized by the sentences.
6. Inferences
• Determining inferences to be made → inferences are the products of the
process which the reader (hearer) must go through to get from the literal
meaning of what is written (or said) to what the writer (or speaker) intends
to convey.
• Inferences as missing links
• Inferences as non-automatic connections
• Inferences as filling gaps or discontinuities in interpretation