Coherence

[Bill Mann]

I want to reply to James Cornish's message of 16 Dec. 1999 on coherence.


(Please pardon a delay produced by an email problem.)

He writes:

"To my way of viewing things, a text is overtly defined by offering to
the reader or listener a beginning, middle and an end.  The most readily
available form of this, off the top of my head, are narratives.  Labov's
abstract-action-evaluation-resolution-coda type of setup.  In the case
of academic essays in the United States, a reader expects certain parts
of a whole 'presentational / subject matter'-like thing sometimes
defined as a 'text' within a genre.  ... "

I find it hard to see how this could be made to work, in a couple of
ways:

     a) It seems quite specific to a certain cluster of genres.

     b) The notion of coherence seems to me to be quite genre-independent,
and it seems to be one of the important  notions that various genres (and
various texts that resist genre classification) share.  Consider, for
example the text on the RST website (www.sil.org/linguistics/RST , under
Unpublished analyses) entitled Sparky Lived!  It consists of two
sentences.  It is narrative in some views, but not all.  It would be very
difficult to divide these two sentences into a beginning, middle and end,
and it does not seem insightful to do so.  Everyone that I have discussed
this text with finds it coherent.

I think of coherence as a pretheoretical notion, something to be
explained by linguistic theories, and as spanning nearly all taxonomies
of texts.  (I want to qualify "texts" here as really already restricted
to communicative texts.  That is tricky to do, even pretheoretically, but
explaining the independence of text type and finding coherence does not
require doing that.)

Bill Mann