On what is coherence

[zmaalej]

Dear all,

Many thanks for Bill to have brought the question of coherence to
discussion. If it is uncontroversial that coherence relates to "personal
mental experiences, " it is not the case that it is "as an attribute of the
text" only. It is true that in "I have two reasons for saying that.  First,
they try harder," coherence is text-based because it is effected through
overt linguistic coherence markers, of which the second is missing. There
are, however, more subtle, covert coherence markers that are attainable
through reference to features of the extralinguistic  context and to a set
of schemas in our "personal mental experiences." Let me illustrate this
through an example from Mann & Thompson's "Relational Propositions in
Discourse" (1983):

"I love to collect classic automobiles. My favorite car is my 1899 Duryea"
vs. "I love to collect classic automobiles. My favorite car is my 1977
Toyota" (p. 1).

Mann & Thompson comment that "the two texts differ in coherence," and that
"this assumption of coherence, that parts of a text 'go together,' can be
seen as a rough linguistic analogue of the general cognitive ability
described by Gestalt psychology under the name 'closure,' the ability to
impose connectivity on disconnected parts of a visual image" (pp. 1-2). In
the article from which I am quoting, Mann & Thompson  do not explicate
"connectivity" any further. I argue that coherence does not always have to
be linguistically overtly signalled, as is the example Bill Mann gives.
Coherence can be located in communication (as he rightly points out) and
cognition (a pragmatic-cognitive level), where a judgement of pragmatic
relevance (à la Sperber & Wilson) combines with a search for classicness
through schemas (W.C. Mann, "Discourse Structures for Text Generation,"
1984) in our mental models. Judging it by our schema of car classicness, it
is not the case that the Toyota fits in. This is in a way how the text is
deemed incoherent. Conceived as such, coherence claims may account for more
than chunks of texts where we feel "that something is missing."

Waiting for your comments.
Regards

Dr Zouhair Maalej,
Assistant Professor,
Department of English, Chair,
Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences,
Tunis-Manouba, 2010, TUNISIA.
Home Tel/Fax: (+216) 1 362 871
E-mail: zmaalej at gnet.tn
URL: http://simsim.rug.ac.be/ZMaalej