Discourse and the Non-Native English Speaker By Michael Cribb

from COHESION: the set of linguistic resources that every language has…for linking one part of a text to another” (Halliday & Hasan, 1989, p. 48). It is a formal aspect of discourse which, although often observed in texts, does not necessarily have to be present in order for coherence to be achieved. Thus, the definition of coherence above refers to the subjective aspects. In this study, the cohesive devices will provide a second objective level of analysis which looks at the linguistic code.

According to Graesser, Millis, and Zwann (1997), coherence can be local or global. Local coherence is achieved if “the reader can connect the incoming statement to information in the previous sentence”; global coherence is realised if the “incoming statement can be connected to a text macrostructure or to information much earlier in the text that no longer resides in [working memory]” (p. 178). The macrostructure is the mental model, or the “global semantic structure” according to Dijk (1985, p. 115), which roughly equates to the abstract title of a text. Tomlin, Forrest, Pu, and Kim (1997) have suggested three levels of ‘granularity’ with regard to the organisation of discourse: global, episodic, and local coherence. The global and local levels roughly map onto Graesser et al.'s (1997) levels. Episodic coherence exists between the global and local levels and refers to the “smaller scale units which contribute to global coherence but which display an internal gist of their own” (Tomlin et al., 1997, p. 66). In this book, I will only refer to global and local coherence, although it should be noted that since most of the discourse being considered consists of single episodic texts, then the distinction between global and episodic coherence holds little relevance here. For the conditions of coherence I have outlined above, internal semantic consistency and pragmatic relevance are generally local considerations, whereas external semantic consistency can either be local or global.

Disturbed Coherence

Bublitz and Lenk (1999) have argued that texts, spoken or written, are only ever ‘partly coherent’ for the listener since the hearer's understanding of the text can never totally match the speaker's, even in native-native