Discourse and the Non-Native English Speaker By Michael Cribb

internal to the utterance. Thus, an utterance not only has to be consistent with what has been stated previously, but by itself it has to be consistent. That is, an English utterance has to make sense and be consistent with a logically possible, semantic, world (Stalnaker, 1972) as judged by native speakers of English. This extension is important for non-native discourse since a large proportion of utterances produced by non-native speakers do not make complete sense. I assume that the recovery of content from the utterance is an essential criterion which needs to be applied first before integration into the mental model can take place, since logically speaking it would be unlikely for an utterance that does not make sense to be integrated into the mental model. Once the internal semantic consistency has been established, the search for pragmatic relevance and external semantic consistency can then take place.

To elucidate the need for semantic consistency and pragmatic relevance, consider a well-known example (example 2.4) from Halliday and Hasan (1976) in which I have given five alternative sentences which potentially could constitute a text with line 1.

Line 2a is the only sentence which provides a coherent text; not principally because of the cohesive tie established between them and apples (although this contributes), but crucially because line 2a is semantically consistent and pragmatically relevant with the discourse and our background assumptions of the world. We can understand what the proposition means, it is relevant to the discourse, and it is not inconsistent with anything that we have said before. Thus, we can see how the propositional