The Coherence of Incoherent Discourse

Abstract

Some of the more ill-behaved vagaries of free-flowing conversation may seem to call into question the possibility of formal treatments of coherence in conversation. However, in this paper we show that the notions of planning and local coherence from artificial intelligence work in discourse interpretation make such treatments possible. Four fragments of an ethnographic life history interview are examined; they illustrate a negotiation of topic, an associative slide, discontinuous structure, and the emergence of a new conversational goal. In each case we show that the notions of planning and local coherence make possible an intricate analysis of how local incoherencies can disguise a larger, global coherence or of how global coherence can arise from the piecing together of locally coherent segments. Finally, we give an overview of the production of conversation based on these notions that accommodates these vagaries.