Coherence

[Bill Mann]

I want to reply briefly to Holger Schauer concerning some of my earlier
comments.  He notes that I said:


 BM> Coherence has to do with an impression of wholeness.  It is
 BM> expected of texts, but not text fragments.

HS> "Huh? This comes as a surprise to me. ... "

My intention here is to say that there is no definite expectation for a text
fragment.  As he notes, text fragments can be set into new contexts that make
them appear coherent or to lack coherence.

He also quotes:

 BM> Coherent texts without any of the well known cohesive devices can
 BM> be constructed, but they are extremely hard to find.

HS> "I can imagine that for a smaller text, but do you have any
references for a larger such text ?"

No, and I do not expect to find any such natural communicative texts.
 Situations that make people want to communicate also tend to make
them want to use cohesion links to maintain referential continuity,
text organization and other attributes.  So for large texts,
encountering cohesive devices is inevitable.

 BM> RST analysis uses cohesive links as evidence, but RST has little
 BM> or nothing to say about cohesion itself.  It is
 BM> "pre-realizational," whereas cohesion is not.

 HS> "I strongly believe that, despite its great success, its (i.e.
RSTs) greatest weakness is that is says too little about the
relationship between cohesion and coherence: it leaves a lot open to
speculation about the intention of the writer (and based on the
pre-realizational nature of the structure it addresses, it does so
rightfully) and gives thereby not much guidance to a person analysing
texts."

Yes, but that is only one of many things that RST does not explain. My hope is
that RST will establish the phenomena that it addresses so explicitly and
undeniably that people will feel that linguistics must somehow explain them.

Bill Mann