The concept of Coherence can be identified first of all with the existence of certain local relations between the individual propositions that constitute a discourse. However, the nature of these relationships does not have a univocal definition either. For example, the local interpretation of coherence in dialogues has been linked to the fact that speakers’ contributions to the conversations are organized in adjacent pairs of speech acts that reveal the existence of pragmatic relations between the discourse units derived from their elocutionary content. The notion of “adjacent pair” was originally proposed by ethnomethodologists to account for the empirical observation that certain speakers’ interventions appear to be contingent on immediately preceding interventions and can be largely predicted from them.
The Coherence of Speeches
However, some other authors have suggested the convenience of reformulating the proposal of ethnomethodologists and to replace the concept of adjacent pair with the somewhat broader concept of communicative exchange:
- A: Are you going to the party tomorrow? (PREG).
- B: Where is it? (PREG).
- A: In Cercedilla (RES).
- B: I don’t know if my brother will let me have the car (RES).
communicative exchanges, unlike adjacent pairs, prototypically consist of two movements: one initiation and one response. The beginnings are always prospective and allow predictions to be made about the types of possible responses; the “responses”: are always retrospective, in the sense that they make predictions derived from a previous starting movement, although occasionally they may also imply a beginning.
- A: Where is the typewriter? (Start).
- B: Isn’t it in the closet? Response /Homefl.
- A: No (Answer).
According to Edmondson (1981), response movements constitute mechanisms of coherence in conversations as long as they satisfy the perlocutionary conditions of the beginnings. In this sense, it could be interpreted that the speakers’ contributions to conversations are governed, to a large extent, by a kind of “principle of searching for perlocutionary satisfaction.
According to Hobbs, the planning and carrying out a coherent speechTherefore, it would involve the speaker making a decision about the type of specific relationship that he is going to use to connect some statements with others and will be governed by what we could call a principle of searching for linear propositional coherence.
Conditional/temporary type:
- Of Causes/reasons.
- Components of the action.
- Permission.
- Succession in time.
- Simultaneous occurrence.
Functional type:
- Specification.
- Generalization.
- Explanation.
- Contrast.
- Example.
- Parallelism.
- Correction.
- Preparation.
- Assessment.
Basic relations of linear coherence between propositions, according to Hobbs (1979, 1983).
Global Coherence
The typologies of cohesion indices of sequences of speech acts or propositional relations in discourse can be considered as representative examples of interpretations focused on the local coherence of discourses. However, these relationships do not completely guarantee, by themselves, either their textuality or their interpretability.
Hence, it is necessary to appeal to even more abstract principles and categories that allow us to account for both the global coherence of discourses and the capacity of speakers to generate them. A recurring interpretation in analyzes of global coherence revolves around the notion of general topic or theme of the speech. From a referential approach, topics are interpreted as relatively abstract semantic units that are inferred from the fact that different discourse statements share similar referents, that is, they say something or determine that something is said about the same objects, entities or activities.
In contrast, and from a propositional perspective, topics are interpreted as also general and abstract propositions that contain the center or centers of interest of the speaker or the common denominator that allows describing a situation or a sequence of events as a whole. In the sense in which Van Dijk interprets them, the topics or macropropositions of the discourses would be units equivalent to the summaries of the semantic macrostructure of the texts (equivalent, in a certain sense, to the title).
Thus, the production of a coherent speech would be interpreted as a process that requires the speaker to carry out the following operations:
- the definition of a global speech act (the definition of the pragmatic content of the speech);
- the elaboration of the macroproposition that defines the general semantic contents of the global speech act, and which are established from what the speaker knows, wants, remembers and interprets as relevant in a context.
- the construction, from this macroproposition, of a hierarchy of more specific topics that will eventually constitute the input for the planning of smaller units such as paragraphs or individual sentences.
Rachel Reichman (1978) has also proposed an interpretation of the global coherence of texts based on the notion of topic that is applicable to the analysis of dialogic discourses. He interpreted that topics can be seen as abstract semantic units that develop through a series of context spaces, each of which groups those emissions or shifts of speech that deal with the same object or event. The structural organization of coherent discourses, as well as their realization by speakers, could therefore be characterized, for this author, by defining the types of logical relationships that link some context spaces with others, in order to develop a general topic.
Reichman emphasizes the distinction between “theme” and “events” two concepts that allow context spaces to be classified based on their content: said content would be general, in the case of themes, and more specific, since it illustrates an event related to a theme, in the case of events. The coherence of the discourses would be given, according to this theory, by the fact that the speakers’ contributions revolve around the same topic, which is carried out through successive spaces of context related to each other.
Some of these relationships (e.g. the generalization relationship, which occurs when a space-context of the event type is followed by one of the theme type, or the illustrative relationship, when the sequence occurs in the opposite direction) bear a certain resemblance to the defined by Hobbs for the relationship between individual propositions. Reichman (1978), based on the analysis of natural conversations, also identified a set of linguistic indicators through which speakers usually mark the transitions from one context space to another (e.g. the expression, by the way, indicates the beginning of a digression; in any case, it indicates the end of the digression and the return to a previous topic or event; then it can indicate the near end of a topic, etc.
Also, in a second moment of their research, Planalp and Tracy (1980) developed a typology of topic change strategies based on the assumption that such transitions are governed by principles similar to those described by Grice (1975) in his “maxim of relevance” and by Clark and Haviland (1977) in their contract of “the new and the given”. From this it was concluded that speakers change the topic of the discourse (without breaking its global coherence) whenever they consider it necessary to adjust to the informational needs of their interlocutors. Specifically, the topic of the speech is changed in the following four cases:
- to introduce a new topic that is interpreted as relevant to the immediately preceding topic of the conversation (what they call “immediate topic change”).
- to introduce a topic that is interpreted as relevant to one of the topics addressed at a moment in the previous conversation (“previous topic change”);
- to introduce a topic that is interpreted as relevant to the information that the interlocutors share and that can be recovered from the physical or social context of the communicative situation (change of environmental topic)
- when they interpret that the new topic can be related and integrated into the previous knowledge schemes of their interlocutors (“unspecified topic change”).
Coherence as Relevance
With the work of Planalp and Tracy (1980), and that of Reichman (1978), it can be said that texts are not coherent to the extent that the statements that compose them can be integrated into a structure of knowledge or prior action. and more global: whether this is defined as a macrostructure (Van Dijk, 1977, 1980), as a mental model of discourse (Johnson-Laird, 1986) or as an act of. global speech (Van Dijk 1980). Speeches and conversations will, therefore, be coherent to the extent that they are interpretable.
A coherent text implies, on the part of the listener, the possibility of relating the propositional content of the discourse statements with a set of propositions (emitted or implicit) and presuppositions that: a) are previously known b) can be recovered from the memory at the exact point at which the conversation requires it, and c) they are relevant for the interpretation of the meaning of the statements.
Symmetrically, on the part of the speaker, coherence will presuppose the ability to establish a mental model with psychological reality also for the listener (a minimum and initial common knowledge) and the elaboration of relevant successive statements (that produce effects on the previous knowledge structure) to this mental model. In both cases, the processing of discourses would seem to be governed by a principle of search for relevance (Sperber and Wilson, 1986 1987) that implies the realization effective inferential operations on the state of prior knowledge of the interlocutor relatively complex.
These operations or inferential mechanisms, according to Riviere (1991), are essentially of a deductive type, presumably identical to those involved in other forms of intelligent activity. The pragmatic interpretation that identifies the coherence of texts with relevance in a given cognitive and communicative context has been explicitly developed by Spelber and Wilson in 1986, in their principle of search for relevance, which takes its name from one of Grice’s maxims. , highlights that human communicative activity is essentially governed by criteria of cognitive economy, which determines that the speaker tries to produce maximum relevance with minimum cognitive effort, and also highlights the close dependence that exists between the processes involved in the production of speeches. and others central cognitive processessuch as the inferential mechanisms that underlie all forms of reasoning or attentional effort.
On the other hand, Sperber and Wilson’s theory highlights the primarily conversational nature and…