Coherence in Spoken and Written Discourse (review)

This collection of selected papers from the International Workshop on Coherence (Augsburg, Germany, 1997) is organized into three sections providing complementary perspectives on coherence. In the introduction (1–7), Wolfram Bublitz confronts the dismissal of coherence by some linguists. Recognizing that a widely accepted definition of coherence is unavailable, Bublitz presents the definition that emerges in this volume.

Part 1 deals with means of creating cohesion. Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen (11–33) examines prosodic and paralinguistic features establishing coherence in reported speech. Ronald Geluykens (35–53) posits that speakers arrive at topical coherence collaboratively through topic-organizing questions. Shifting the focus to writing, Gunter Lorenz (55–75) uses corpus data from L1 and L2 English writers to investigate cohesive markers as signs of coherence. Jan-Ola Östman (77–100) describes script-activating patterns in newspapers, illustrating a sociocognitive approach to coherence. The following chapter as well concerns patterns in discourse whose description is beyond reach of previous approaches. Eija Ventola (101–23) proposes the concept of ‘semiotic spanning’ to explain the formation of links to text and other modalities during academic conferences. Helga Kotthoff (125–50) shows how speakers achieve humorous keying and maintain coherence during fictionalizations in German conversations.

In Part 2, the negotiation of coherence is considered. Wolfram Bublitz and Uta Lenk (153–74) distinguish between impaired and disturbed coherence. The latter arises, they claim, ‘when the extent to which a text is only partly understood is no longer tolerated by the hearer’ (153). Carla Bazzanella and Rossana Damiano (175–87) examine coherence and misunderstanding in Italian conversations. The authors document mismatches in coherence, factors in initiating repair, and the repair sequence. The next chapter focuses on oral examinations in an Italian university. Anna Ciliberti (189–203) concludes that coherence manifests itself differently according to the examination context and that examinees evading questions may produce seemingly coherent speech. Barbara Seidlhofer and Henry Widdowson (205–19) address the relevance of coherence to language pedagogy. The authors explain coherence as it relates to the distinction they make between text and discourse, then describe an experiment where students derived coherence from a text in response to different writing task prompts. They suggest that students will benefit from a view of text as indeterminate, having shown, interestingly, how text can serve as data on language use or evidence for its interpretation (206). Gerd Fritz’s (221–32) paper asks what hypertext shows us about coherence. He notes how users can change their organizing principles for creating coherence to make sense of paths in hypertext.

Part 3 contains two chapters, by Ted Sanders and Wilbert Spooren (235–50) and Willis J. Edmondson (251–65), concerning methodological issues in analyzing coherence. The first chapter argues for a cognitive account of coherence in which coherence relations realize communicative intentions. Lastly, Edmondson looks at the possibility of incorporating coherence in the validation of discourse analysis as a scientific undertaking. A bibliography provided by Uta Lenk, Sarah Gietl, and Wolfram Bublitz covers both cohesion and coherence.

Overall, this volume succeeds in demystifying coherence and establishing its relationship to the larger theme of this series.