Coherence in text, coherence in mind

Abstract

This paper suggests that text coherence is a multi-factored affair that, ultimately, pertains to the mental organization of episodic memory, most likely as a partially-hierarchic mental structure. What text researchers usually describe as coherence is merely an artifact of the cognitive phenomenon. The role of grammatical clues in signalling text coherence is investigated, and it is suggested that the grammar processing channel merely supplements an evolutionarily older channel of lexically-guided (content-based) coherence. Coherence is both local and global, and both properties can be signalled by both processing channels (lexicon and grammar). Finally, the establishement of text coherence is a flexible, negotiable process, and this is true of both conversation and narrative.