Coherence and Structure in Text and Discourse

Textual coherence versus discourse structure Coherence is one of the most general and most widely discussed concepts in the study of text and discourse In spite or perhaps because of its central status the concept of coherence has many di erent and often incompatible de nitions and connotations For text linguistics or psycholinguistics with their focus on the representation and processing of information in written texts coherence is predominantly a matter of semantics and domain knowledge while various brands of speech act and dialogue analysis describe coherence in terms of inten tions and interactional structures I will argue in subsection that the focus on and restriction to rather extreme discourse genres such as exposition on the one hand or highly interactive dialogues on the other causes an overemphasis on genre speci c characteristics at the expense of general properties common to all kinds of discourse Theories of discourse coherence then should be built and tested for a su ciently diverse variety of discourse types especially discourse that combines monologue and dialogue features In sections and of this paper I will present a framework for such a theory and two corpus analytical studies that support the notion that coherence should be thought of as con sisting of three parallel components ideational semantic structure rhetorical structure and sequential or segment structure