Coherence

[James Cornish of DISCOURS]

Please forgive my late addition to this discussion--I'm still in the course-
work phrase of an American PhD program...

Since my interests are blatantly empirical--I study the texts of student
writers--I tend to work with a sense of coherence as the intersection
between the reader's ability to decode the language at hand,
presuppositions about the forms of that language--cohesion and the
Halliday/Hasan thinking of intratextuality, and the reader's expectations
about genre and purpose; versus the writer's ability to use appropriate
forms within "genres" (argumentative, narrative, and a large ect.),
linguistic forms which can do the job of making the text a text (Hoey)
and all those pesky little relationships between words, phrases,
utterances, discourse paragraphs, and on and on, that I label features of
coherence--meanings and stylistic usages exibited for a reader's
consideration.

I hope that Rhetorical Structure Theory will be useful to me on the level
of distinguishing between L1 American Academic English usage and L2
learners' use and failure of use of that rather ethereal dialect of English.
But RST does not do well at the level of distinguishing the types of
coherence such as Sanders and Wijk's Procedure for Incremental
Structure Analysis (if I have that right) which looks at the facet of, on the
one hand, coherence features of propositional (for lack of a better label)
speech acts (locution vs. illocution) and other features which I believe to
be complementary to RST in several ways.

I got a bit off- topic there, but...

Anyhow, I hope others will respond to Mann's question.  I am interested
in what all of you think about RST, coherence, and text analysis at this
level.

with best wishes,
James Warren Cornish
Co-coordinator of the Writing Center
English Dept./ Discourse Studies
Texas A&M University -- College Station
M/S 4227
College Station TX 77840