Discourse and the Non-Native English Speaker By Michael Cribb

the text. McCagg (1990, p. 113) stated that “coherence…is an aspect of comprehension that is established in the mind of the reader as a result of a perception of relatedness among a text's propositions and between the text and the knowledge that the reader possesses of the world”. Green and Morgan (1981, p. 175) argued that the perception of coherence of a text has to do with the “degree to which it is possible to form consistent hypotheses about [the speaker's goals, plans, and intentions] from hearing the text”.

The argument as to whether coherence resides in the text or is constructed in the mind of the interlocutors has been debated for some time by several scholars (e.g., Giv_n, 1993). However, I believe that to some extent the argument is a distraction for the linguist and that the two positions are mutually compatible. An analogy of the text versus mind dichotomy can be made by considering executable computer programmes (texts) which reside dormant on hard drives for periods of time before being invoked to carry out the instructions encoded within them. The execution of the programme's code by the microprocessor (the mind) can be likened to the real-time and dynamic processing of a text by interlocutors to produce a discourse. Of course, the microprocessor interprets the programme consistently each time it is invoked, which is not always true of the human mind. However, I will argue that for denotative texts of the type under discussion here, it is reasonable to assume that, in general, different minds on different occasions, or the same mind on different occasions, will produce roughly similar interpretations of a text, given similar backgrounds and contextual circumstances, a point which has been made by Short (1994), among others: “Readers [and listeners] do bring variability of experience to a text, but they also bring considerable commonality in their understanding of the structure of the language in question and the strategies used to interpret language” (p. 171). (For connotative texts, such as literary works and religious texts, this consistency of interpretation may not hold so well.) Thus, within the text artefact, there resides potentially an abstract, subjective quality of coherence which is available for investigation by the analyst through the objective inspection of the code¹. In conducting this inspection, the analyst has to