Coherence in the

interpretation of discourse
Coherence in discourse
 Coherence in discourse

The assumption of coherence will only

produce one particular interpretation in
which the elements of the message are
seen to be connected, with or without
overt linguistic connections between
those elements.
 Coherence in discourse

The extract could be interpreted as an

advertisement by someone looking for
an upholsterer. (a cover for a chair)

Self Employed Upholsterer

Free estimates. 332 5862
 Coherence in discourse
• There are several things in the reader,
however, which lead him to avoid this
interpretation. The most important of these
is the reader’s (or hearer’s) effort to arrive
at the writer’s (or speaker’s) intended
meaning in producing a linguistic
message. The reader has also more
knowledge than knowledge of discourse.
 Coherence in discourse

Epistemics Seminar: Thursday 3d June,

2.00 p.m.
Steve Harlow (department of Linguistics,
University of York).
“Welsh and Generalized Phrase Structure
Grammar”
 Coherence in discourse

The reader of the message knows

• the purpose of the linguistic message
• its function in communicative terms
• that it is an announcement and not a
warning partly because of its form, location
and partly because of the socio-cultural
knowledge
Aspects of interpreting a speaker’s / writer’s
intended meaning in producing discourse
involve

• computing the communicative function

(how to take the message)
• using general socio-cultural knowledge
(facts about the world)
• determining the inferences to be made
Computing communicative function
There are ‘rules of interpretation which
relate what is said to what is done’ and it is
on the basis of such social but not
linguistic rules that we interpret some
conversational sequences as coherent
and others as non-coherent.
Labov (1970)
Computing communicative function
Example of a non-coherent conversational sequence:
a doctor talking to a schizophrenic
patient

A: What’s your name?

B: Well, let’s say you might have thought you
had something from before, but you haven’t got
it any more.
A: I’m going to call you Dean.
Laffal (1965, 85)
Computing communicative function

The recognition of coherence or

incoherence in conversational sequences
is not based on a relationship between
utterances but ‘between the actions
performed with those utterances’.
Labov
Computing communicative function

The example of a coherent piece of

conversational discourse:

A: Can you go to Edinburgh tomorrow?

B: B.E.A. pilots are on strike.
Widdowson (1979, 96)
Computing communicative function
Widdowson claims that B’s reply is to be
taken as a negative answer to the
question. This is one interpretation of the
speaker’s intended meaning, but we could
suggest the others.

Whatever the intended meaning , B’s

utterance counts as a response.
Computing communicative function

Only by recognizing the action performed

by each of the utterances within the
conventional sequences (the following
example) we can accept this sequence as
coherent discourse.
/Widdowson/
Computing communicative function
A: That’s the telephone.
B: I’m in the bath.
A: Ok.

A requests B to perform action.

B states reason why he cannot perform it.
A undertakes to perform action.
 Conversation analysis
Turn-taking identifies the regularities of
conversational structure by describing the ways
in which participants take turns at speaking.

There are easily identifiable regularities in the

ordering of those two-turn units described as
adjacency pairs.

Greeting –Greeting Question –Answer

A: Hello. A: How are you?
B: Hi. B: Fine.
 Conversation analysis
Adjacency pair structure can be disrupted
by an ‘insertion sequence’ which delays
the answer-part to one question-part of a
pair until another answer to a different
question has been provided.
 Speech acts
‘Words' (short utterances) do things; they are in
themselves social acts. In fact they are the only
ways in which certain social acts can be done’.   
/Austin/   
• I name this baby Eric.
or
•      I promise I'll bring the book back tomorrow.
or
•      I bet it'll rain this afternoon.
 Speech acts
These are respectively the very act of
naming, promising and betting, with
consequential effects for everyone
involved (as Levinson puts it, after you've
made an utterance like this, "the world has
changed in substantial ways" ) (p 228).
 Speech acts
The utterance of some sentences, must, in
specified circumstances, be treated as the
performance of an act:

I bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow.

I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth.

Austin (1962)
 Speech acts
Austin described such utterances as
‘performatives’ and the specified circumstances
for their success - as a set of ‘felicity conditions’.
In uttering any sentence a speaker could
perform
• some act or, an illocutionary act

• an perlocutionary act - effect the illocutionary

act has on the hearer.
 Speech acts
Searle (1975) also introduces a distinction
between direct and indirect speech acts which
depends on a recognition of the intended
perlocutionary effect of an utterance on a
particular occasion. Indirect speech acts are
‘cases in which one perlocutionary act is
performed indirectly by performing another’.
Can you speak a little louder? (a question about a
hearer’s ability at one level and a request for action, at
another level)
Using knowledge of the world

“The question of how people know what is

going on in a text is a special case of the
question of how people know what is
going on in the world at all’.

De Beaugrande (1980, 30)

 Top-down and bottom-up
processing

2 activities of discourse processing

bottom-up Top – down

 Top-down and bottom-up
processing
Bottom-up processing works out the
meanings of the words and structure of a
sentence and builds up a composite
meaning for the sentence
Top-down processing is predicting, on
the basis of the context plus the composite
meaning of the sentences already
processed, what is the next sentence
likely to mean.
 Knowledge of the world

The representations of ‘knowledge of

the world’ are mainly used for the type of
predictable information a writer / speaker
can assume his hearer / listener has
available whenever a situation is
described.
 Knowledge of the world
Given one particular situation, such a
restaurant scene, the speaker / writer
should not have to inform his reader /
hearer that there are tables and chairs in
the restaurant, or that one orders and pays
for the food consumed. Knowledge of this
sort about restaurants is generally
assumed.
 Knowledge of the world

‘Comprehension is a memory process’

Riesbeck (1975)
Understanding discourse is essentially a
process of retrieving stored information
from memory and relating it to the
encountered discourse.
 Knowledge of the world

When we read a story involving a visit to

the dentist, we use our knowledge of
dentist-visiting, but not our knowledge of
typing a letter or going to a birthday party.
 Knowledge of the world
Organisation of knowledge in memory is related
to the terms such as frames, scripts,
scenarios, schemata and mental models.
Minsky’s frame-theory says that
knowledge is stored in our memory in
the form of data structures, which he
calls ‘frames’ and which represent stereotyped
situations.
 Knowledge of the world
Example:
A postcard telling you where you should go to
register your vote in a local government election,
your understanding of this information can be
described in terms of a ‘voting-frame’. You do
not have to be informed that there is such a
thing as a polling station and that a clerk will be
there.
 Knowledge of the world

Schemata can be seen as the organized

background knowledge which leads us to
expect or predict aspects in our
interpretation of discourse.
 Knowledge of the world
In fact, Tannen (1979, 138) uses the
description ‘structures of expectation’ to
characterize the influence of schemata on
our thinking. Such expectations influence
what type of discourse we produce.
Different cultural backgrounds can result in
different schemata for description of
witnessed events.
 Knowledge of the world
After watching a film (with no dialogue), a
group of American subjects described in
great detail the actual events of the film
and what filming techniques had been
employed. In contrast, a group of Greek
subjects produced elaborate (give more
details and new information) stories with
additional events and detailed accounts of
the motives and feelings of the characters
in the film.