Coherence

Coherence is a feature of an underlying structure of the text. Coherence is not a state but a process of a co-operative achievement, depending on  speaker's and hearer's willingness to negotiate meaning. It is not texts that have coherence but rather people who decode meaning. For an addressee to create coherence involves making reasonable guesses and hypotheses matched against one's knowledge. Coherence therefore also refer to relations between communicative acts.

If more than one interpretation is possible, we speak about ambiguous structures. Some of them may be intentional, some are not. (The police are ordered to stop drinking after midnight. - who is ordered to stop drinking? The police or other people?) For piecing text segments together we sometimes need a bridging assumption (inference). For example in order to interpret the following text as coherent, we use the bridging assumption that bicycles have frames (I bought a bicycle yesterday. The frame is extra large.)

Frames are global patterns of concepts that belong together. They represent a part of our knowledge of the world which by convention and experience form a frame. Thus, when an authors write about a restaurant, they do not need to informs the reader that there were chairs, tables and waitresses.

Schemas are ordered sequences of events and states (usually linked by time proximity or causality). A scenario of the text sample can be the following: description of the situation (My mother and father have been shouting at each other.), specification of the reason  (started because of the bacon down the side of the fridge), consequence (I went up to my room and put my Abba records on.), reaction (My father had the nerve to crash my door open.), reaction to the appeal (I did. When he got downstairs I turned it up again.)

Plans are global patterns of events and states leading up to an intended goal (e.g. in argumentative texts).

Scripts are stereotyped plans specifying roles of participants and their expected actions (customer role in a restaurant-script - asking for the menu, choosing a meal, paying). Unlike plans, scripts have a pre-established routine.

Additional text parameters

Cohesion and coherence indicate how the text elements fit and make sense but a language configuration also must be intended to be and accepted as such.

Acceptability - a stretch of language is acceptable if native speaker intuition suggests it could be part of the language and belongs to natural occurrences.

Intentionality - communicative intentions should be explicit (I promise to tell you later.)

Situationality - all factors that connect the text with a real situation of a speaker, a certain time or at a certain place. The text is situation-determined and can influence its interpretation. If a report on parliament is found on the entertainment page of the newspaper, a satirical intention might be suspected.

Intertextuality - perceived in two ways. 1. As our previous experience with other texts of a similar kind - in a business letter, we are prepared for the standardised structure of such a text (forms of openings, closures, politeness). 2. As the way in which one text echoes or refers to another text = allusion, establishing a relation to a cultural tradition. Intertextuality is a necessary pre-requisite in parodies. In order to understand the parody as a mocking echo, one has to know the original text.

Informativity - applied to the content of the text and its semantic load.

Factors influencing word order

Information flow – the utterance starts with given information believed to be already known to the addressee and then proceed to new information. It is a strategy to keep attention, making it easier for a receiver to understand since the utterance starts with already something familiar. At the beginning mind is not focused so key information is placed at the end of the clause.

Among the sports will be tennis. – starts from the known and ends with the important we need to receive and therefore emphasize at the end of the utterance.

Focus and emphasis - point of focus gains prominence. In spoken language we pay attention to intonation and stress which carry the focus. With postponement we give the most important info at the end of the sentence even though they do not have to normally be ending element to achieve emphasis.

Inside the house Mr Summers found a family of cats shut in the bathroom. = two adverbials and I want to emphasize both, it would be strange to write them together so we divide them, placing one at the beginning and the other at the end -> double focus. / We meet at seven tomorrow – normal WO -> Tomorrow we meet at seven = emphasize at both adverbials.

Contrast – express narrowing down of choice from several candidates to one and is also used to move the focus. (It’s not the bikers it’s the other vehicles that’s on the road. - focus would be normally on the road as the last lexical element but contrast moves it. Of everyone present, only Peter knew the answer.)

Weight - elements in clause are of different size relating to their weight. A noun phrase with long premodifier and postmodifier is heavier than a noun phrase consisting of a single pronoun. (The big black book lying on the desk is mine. - starts with very heavy subject and ends with very light words which is not the best structure) By the principle of end weight placing heavy elements at the end of the clause helps to follow the message easier since the receiver does not have to remember all from the beginning to the end.