Clause-internal coherence

Everyone laughed. What’s funny about this? If I had said, “Let’s take the short way,” it would have been understood that the shortness used in my description also provided a motivation for taking that route. Since I used the word “muddy” instead, it seemed as if I wanted to run that way because it was muddy, as if I enjoyed sloshing through the mud. Very often different parts of a clause are connected inferentially in this way even though there is no direct syntactic connection between them and even though there is no explicit lexical signal of the relation. Among the relations we find are the kinds of coherence relations we find between successive clauses or larger stretches of discourse. In Hobbs (1985) and other papers, I present an account of discourse structure in which the coherence relations are seen as possible interpretations of the adjacency of segments in the discourse. For example, in