coherence

[Bill Mann]

Dear listers:

I must respond to James Cornish about Sparky.  I wrote about a two-sentence text
which seemed to not divide well into three parts.  It was a natural text, as the
web site made clear.  It was an advertisment in the September 1999 issue.

James found a 5 sentence section of commentary nearby and wrote about that.
What he said was interesting, but we should notice that he did not divide that
text.  The text (printed over a photograph of a bottle of vegetable juice) was:

REMEMBER ALL THOSE VEGETABLES YOU SLIPPED UNDER THE TABLE?

MAYBE THAT'S WHY SPARKY LIVED SO LONG.

James analyzed my comments about what sorts of things had to be imagined to make
the text coherent.  (To know why, we would need a good theory of James, I
suppose.)

That's the text.  I still feel that the requirement of beginning, middle and end
(along with some principles of division) are much narrower and more genre
dependent than coherence.

==========================

I have been assuming that the list subscribers generally have access to the
internet, so that we can discuss items from the website and elsewhere. Are there
folks who are on this list who do not have web access?  If so, please send me a
personal message at bill_mann at sil.org.  If there are enough folks in that
situation we can adjust how we discuss web content.

Best wishes to all.

Bill Mann