Coherence in Text vs. Coherence in Mind (PDF)

Coherence is a major field of textlinguistics. It is not only a broad field but also – from a subjective point of view – a very interesting one. By looking for coherence in a text, one searches for its meanings and sequences of ideas and how they relate to each other. This already explains the connection of coherence to the field of textlinguistics. Textlinguistics designates any work in language science devoted to the text as the primary object of inquiry. Textlinguistics is concerned with the analysis of whole texts rather than with the analysis of isolated sentences or clauses. The same is true for coherence: Here, the entire text needs to be looked at, otherwise no connection (no coherence) can be searched for. The importance of coherence in linguistics can be found in the number of books and articles available.
For this paper, I have used additional information from De Beaugrande’s and Dressler’s book Introduction to Text Linguistics and from the book Text, discourse and process (Vol. IV) by Robert De Beaugrande.
The following work is an attempt to explain and present the term “coherence” not as something purely theoretical but rather as what it actually is –an everyday phenomenon in texts. Since coherence is strongly connected to text processing, I have used a sample text in order to show what coherence actually is when occurring in a text. For this purpose, additional information from the internet have been used as well.
This paper has been subdivided into six parts. Following this introduction, I am going to explain the term “coherence”. Next, I will present and explain the three main theses Givón gives in his contribution for the book Coherence in spontaneous text. After this, I am going to focus on coherence and grounding and later present the difference of knowledge-driven versus grammar-cued coherence and local versus global coherence. Later in this paper, the mechanisms of coherence will be explained. Finally, I am going to analyse a fairy tale by the brothers Grimm and show how coherence looks like “in action”. At the end of my paper, some information about the linguists Givón and De Beaugrande and their publications will be added as well.