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online, to interpret ongoing talk in actu (without the possibility to look ahead or the time to recall what was said before in any detail) depend on a certain degree of redundancy. Redundancy helps relieve their memory and gives them time to understand. In everyday face-to-face discourse, at least, securing comprehension as a principle ranks higher than avoiding redundancy. Occasionally, speakers may come up with too many cohesive cues which add up to a degree of redundancy that is no longer tolerable and can irritate or even annoy the hearer. Such cases of ‘cohesive overkill’ are triggered by the speaker’s misjudgement of the hearer’s interpretive competence and range of knowledge.

While there is no direct correlation between (lack of) cohesion and (lack of) coherence, to claim that cohesion is not a sufficient condition for coherence is much more arguable especially if we accept that the speaker’s/writer’s primary motive for using cohesive means is to help secure coherence. And indeed, the examples which are given to prove that cohesion alone does not generate coherence, are not very convincing:

(5)The heads of the city’s uniformed services polished their contingency plans for a strike. Queen Wilhelmina finalized her own plans for the evening. In a nearby

Danish town, two fishmongers exchanged blows. Anders, by far the stronger, had a cousin in prison. Many criminals are in prison. (Samet & Schank 1984: 63)

The authors claim that (5) is cohesive but not coherent because the utterances “exhibit […] connections but ‘make no sense at all’” (Samet & Schank 1984: 63). However,­ as we saw when we looked at Edmondson’s reading of the non-cohesive sequence of utterances in example (2), judgements of coherence, or, for that matter, incoherence are not invariantly triggered by the text at hand for any hearer or reader alike. If the text in (5) was authentic, i.e. an instance of naturally occurring data such as a narrative, its hearers or readers would easily succeed in reaching a plausible interpretation of coherence by resorting to the larger context, to the situation at hand, to the overall communicative goal, to their encyclopedic knowledge and to other sources of supporting data. But even as a piece of constructed, context and situation free text, (5) allows for a coherent reading. To ask people whether or not an isolated sequence of utterances ‘has coherence’ is tantamount to asking whether or not they have enough imagination to come up with a context in which the sequence is indeed coherent. To reach coherence, they will then quite naturally rely on the cohesive means given in the text. Hence, cohesion is normally a sufficient condition for coherence because it serves as a powerful and suggestive guideline for the hearer’s/ reader’s interpretation.

4.  Focus on meaning: Connectivity

It has been argued that text which is not cohesive can, nonetheless, be coherent ­provided the propositions underlying its utterances are semantically related to each other. In

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this view, coherence is a semantic notion resting on (a net of) semantic relations­ . The variety­ of semantic or connectivity relations that have been described in the literature so far can be categorized into a few core classes. Among them we find causality, reference, coordination (parallel, contrastive), elaboration (example, generalization, paraphrase), overlap and contiguity (temporal, spatial, aspectual, referential) (cf. Samet & Schank 1984) as well as so-called scripts, schemata or frames which refer to socially defined activities and events and help “participants apply their knowledge of the world to the interpretation of what goes on in an encounter” (Gumperz 1982: 154). Viewing coherence as a semantic notion usually leads to the assumption that it is a feature of, or rather in the text. It is ‘there’, ‘in’ the text for people to ‘find’ it. Returning to example (2) with its interpretation in (3), we can now argue that its coherence rests on the semantic relations of causality and coordination, which do not only link the propositions of the two utterances but also two additional though latent, i.e. not realized propositions; here is a possible paraphrase: We will have guests for lunch – because – we want to celebrate – because – it is Calderón’s birthday today – and because – Calderón was a great Spanish writer. The connectivity of (2) is only partly reflected on the surface level of cohesion by the linear ordering of the two utterances. To make a clear distinction between connectivity and cohesion (with coherence resting on either or on both of these), is justified on theoretical grounds. In practical discourse analysis, however, the two concepts are not always easy to keep apart.

5.  Semantic connectivity as a condition for coherence

From the fact that coherence is frequently based on semantic connectivity we may conclude that the latter is both a sufficient and a necessary condition for coherence. It has been argued, however, that this is too strong a claim. Basically, the argument is supported by five observations. Firstly, adjacent utterances can be semantically related without being coherent. In (5) there is connectivity (resting on the semantic relations of contiguity, time and coordination) but not coherence. Samet & Schank point out that “our ability to render certain elements of a text understandable by using these [semantic] connections cannot itself make a text coherent to the point of making sense” (1984: 64). Secondly, semantic relations can involve utterances which are not adjacent as, e.g., in enumerations where they are related to a superordinate topic but not to each other. Thirdly, utterances can be semantically related in ways that are not clearly identifiable or which allow for alternative identification. Thus, in authentic discourse or text it may be difficult or even impossible to figure out exactly which semantic relation is involved, as in (6):

(6)John bought a raincoat. He went shopping yesterday on Queen Street

and it rained.

(Morris & Hirst 1991: 25)

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Each of several connectivity relations is a likely candidate for coherence: “The coherence relation here could be elaboration (on the buying), or explanation (of when, how, or why), or cause (he bought the raincoat because it was raining out)” (Morris & Hirst 1991: 25). Fourthly, two adjacent utterances can be semantically related (and thus possibly coherent) for one hearer/reader but not for another, as in (7):

(7)S Well unless you’re not a member, if yer a member of TM people do, ah simply because it’s such a fucking high price to get in there (1.0 sec) its like thirty five dollars

C	it’s like water polo (2.0 sec)
S	Why, is it expensive	(Vuchinich 1977: 246)

This exchange is part of an experiment. In order to test the reaction of his/her interlocutor the organiser C makes a deliberately incoherent contribution, i.e. one that is not semantically related to the preceding utterances. However, as is clear from his/her reaction, S does see a semantic relation (of comparison) between it’s like water polo and the preceding text and understands it as coherent (though not straight away, he/she needs more processing time than usual). Fifthly, two or more utterances can be connected by a semantic relation which, however, cannot be inferred from the linguistic or the non-linguistic context but only from previously acquired knowledge or from experience (as is often the case with allusions).

Of course, not one of these five lines of reasoning precludes connectivity from being at least a major condition for coherence. After all, connectivity rests on semantic relations of the kinds mentioned above rather than on transparence, adjacency or absoluteness.

6.  Coherence: A general view

Coherence is a concept which in its complexity is still not fully understood and a matter of continuing debate. Though it has doubtless found its place as a key term in text and discourse analysis, its usage continues to vary to the extent that to give a comprehensive overview of even the major views advocated goes well beyond the scope of a handbook article. While after the publication of Halliday & Hasan (1976) the notion of cohesion was widely welcomed and accepted as a well-defined and useful category, coherence was often regarded or even occasionally dismissed as a vague, fuzzy and “rather mystical notion” (Sinclair 1991: 102) with little practical value for the text or discourse analyst. This view was held by parts of the linguistic community with, however, some notable exceptions, prominent among them hermeneutic, context­ - and interpretation-based dynamic concepts of coherence (cf. below). Since the late eighties,­ there has been renewed interest in the intriguing

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notion of coherence. The remarkable number of almost five hundred titles listed in a recent bibliography (Bublitz 2010) bears witness to this development and to a rapidly changing scene in coherence research which is moving away from reducing coherence to a mere product of (formally represented) cohesion and/or (semantically established) connectivity.

In her overview, Hellman (1995) distinguishes, inter alia, between approaches which see coherence (a) “as a formal property of texts” (p. 191ff), (b) “as a discourse processing concept” (p. 194f), referring primarily to work by Sanders & Spooren(who, in a 1999 paper, juxtapose the linguists’ view of coherence as a relational concept and the cognitivists’ view of coherence as a realisation of participant intentions manifest in each section of a discourse), (c) “as a result of computing referential, causal or other relations”, i.e. “of a complex problem-solving process in which the reader infers relations among the ideas, events and states that are described in the text” (p. 195), and (d) “as a result of computing”, i.e. recognising “the intention(s) of a discourse producer” (p. 196).

7.  A hermeneutic, context and interpretation based view of coherence

Much recent work describes coherence as a mental notion which is interactively negotiated within a given socio-cultural setting and less dependent on the language of discourse or text itself (cf. the readers by Gernsbacher & Givón 1995; Bublitz et al. 1999). Such a hermeneutic approach describes coherence as a context dependent, user oriented and comprehension based notion. This view, which dominates work by Fritz (1982), Brown & Yule (1983) and many others, is in accordance with a fairly long interpretive tradition in Europe (represented by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Alfred Schütz, Harold Garfinkel, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Anthony Giddens and others) and the USA. Within a sociological and ethnographic framework, Dell Hymes, John Gumperz and others (cf. the reader edited by Bauman & Sherzer 1974) argue for analysing language within its sociocultural settings. Speakers and hearers alike come to an understanding of the ongoing communicative interaction by linking linguistic and non-linguistic cues with their background knowledge. They thus continually and jointly negotiate meaning by constructing a shared context. From such a contextualizing, interpretive viewpoint, speakers/writers are said to intend, anticipate and (overtly and/or covertly) suggest coherence while hearers/readers ascribe coherence to utterances within their linguistic, situational and socio-cultural context.

Because much recent research into coherence follows a context-, negotiaton-, interpretation-dependent view of coherence, a snapshot account of it seems indicated. According to this view, coherence is not a discourse or text inherent property, i.e. it is

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not given in discourse or text independently of interpretation. Consequently, one cannot say “a text has coherence” in the same way as one can say “a text has a beginning or an end”, or indeed, “a text has cohesion” (the latter being a text inherent property). We can only say “someone understands a text as coherent”. Of course, coherence is based on the language of the text in the same way as it is based on other information provided by the linguistic context, the socio-cultural environment, the valid communicative principles and maxims, the interpreter’s encyclopedic knowledge etc.

Since it is not texts that cohere but rather people who make texts cohere, we can say that for one and the same text there exist a speaker’s/writer’s, a hearer’s/reader’s and an analyst’s coherence, which may or may not match. Typically, different interpretations of the coherence of a text depend on its linguistic complexity, the temporal, local and social setting, the interpreter’s familiarity with genre and content as well as his/ her knowledge of the speaker’s/writer’s background (motives, preferences, interests). Being dependent on interpretation means that speakers/writers can never produce coherence which is binding for hearers/readers. It is the latter who have to arrive at their own understanding of coherence. Normally speakers/writers are set to help create coherence by (more or less subtly) guiding their hearers/readers to a suggested line of understanding. Conversely, hearers/readers use these guiding signals as instructions to align their interpretations with what they take to be the speakers’/writers’ intentions. Hearers/readers assemble and subsequently test a view of coherence which they assume comes closest to that of the speaker/writer. Hence, coherence is rarely static but frequently dynamic, i.e. a process rather than a state. It can be tentative and temporary because it is continually checked against any new information which may make adaption and updating necessary. Of course, eventually, coherence (especially of written texts) can lose some of its provisional and temporary character and acquire a higher degree of permanence.

Coherence is the outcome of the language user’s gestalt creating power. People are driven by a strong desire to identify forms, relations, connections which they can maximize in order to turn fragments into whole gestalts, i.e. to ‘see’ coherence in strings of utterances. Coherence is also a cooperative achievement (in ongoing discourse more than in ‘petrified’ text) because it depends on both the speaker’s/writer’s and the hearer’s/reader’s willingness to negotiate coherence. Mutual understanding not only rests on the participants sharing the same socio-cultural background, the same range of knowledge and communicative assumptions, but also on their ability to figure out unshared experience, i.e. to adjust their own world-view to that of their interlocutors’. Hearers/readers are constantly engaged in trying to re-create coherence as an equivalent of the speaker’s/writer’s coherence, but despite their efforts they can never succeed in coming up with an exact copy. Coherence is only approximate and a matter of degree and best described as a scalar notion. Any interpretation of coherence is restricted and, accordingly, partial to different degrees.