| Chapter 2: | Background |
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read or listen to the text, preferably as a whole but sometimes in parts, in a way comparable to how they envisage it was processed originally. In this study, I will handle the duality of text and mind by including both an analytical, textual analysis of discourse and a holistic, interpretative dimension. The textual analysis will be an off-line investigation of the elements that reside within the discourse, while the interpretive evaluation will be an online (dynamic) evaluation of coherence using native judges. The real value behind this dual approach, of course, is not the independent findings that each brings, but the correlation between the two and the opportunity to triangulate results.
Having outlined the basic notion of coherence, I will now look at some of the attempts in the literature to define it more precisely. There have actually been very few attempts to do this, although one notable exception is Reinhart (1980), whose definition of coherence has been the basis for subsequent studies (Ehrlich, 1988; Giora, 1985a, 1985b, 1997). She has argued that cohesion, or connectedness in her terminology, is one criterion for coherence but that other criteria that deal with the “semantic and pragmatic relations in the text” (Reinhart, 1980, p. 163) also need to hold. For her, a text is coherent if it meets three conditions: connectedness, consistency, and relevance:
The first stipulation for Reinhart deals with the “formal connectedness as manifested by overt linguistic devices signalling relations between sentences” (Ehrlich, 1988). This commonly refers to cohesive devices.