Compares three theories of coherence relations that differ in formality, broadness of coverage, and linguistic detail. Applies them to the concrete task of text analysis. Organizes the information according to principles of linguistic "stratification,""metafunction," and "paradigmatic/syntagmatic axiality," providing a three-way classification…

Outlines an attempt to use artificial intelligence formalisms as a formal language of description for the complex conversational behavior that occurs in ethnographic interviews. Discusses three kinds of coherence and uses them to analyze the text of an interview. (FL)

Analyzes different strategies used by speakers/writers and hearers/readers to deal with underspecified coherence relations, phrased in terms of Horn's (1984) Q- and R- principle. Presents data from the psycholinguistic literature on the interpretation of underspecified relations and data from language-acquisition research suggesting that both…

Explains rhetorical structure theory's conception of relations and why it has appeal in the domain of text generation. Outlines problems resulting from the widespread adoption of the relational concept. Surveys suggestions about how a standard set of relations could be motivated. Presents a new methodology consisting of gathering and classifying a…

Investigates the relevance of a Gricean model for accounting for coherent discourse in courts of law. Identifies 19 rules of discourse congruent with Grice's Cooperative Principle in transcripts of eight trials. However, finds courts must coerce participants to be cooperative. Concludes that Grice's theory does not account adequately for coherent…

Demonstrates that (1) in a theory of comprehension, global coherence must refer not just to the availability of a macrostructure, but also to its ease of construction; and (2) the topic-comment assignment at the sentence level can be an important influence on the reader's perception of the passage topic. (FL)

Describes three experiments that explored the informational roles of emphasis and word order in active sentences. The results, when considered together, strongly implicate recentness, but not emphasis, as an important means of linking temporally contiguous sentences. (HTH)

Offers an introduction to the theory and implementation of Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), a theory and method for extracting and representing the contextual-usage meaning of words by statistical computations applied to a large corpus of text. Gives an overview of applications and modeling of human knowledge to which LSA has been applied. (SR)

Demonstrates the value of quantitative analysis of discourse options by focusing on two discourse options for the representation of cause and effect. (HTH)

Cohesion analysis has been used to investigate the language of schizophrenics and that associated with other psychiatric syndromes. Cohesion, one means of creating text, cannot account for all aspects of the pretheoretical notion of coherence. As a research tool, cohesion meets the dual criteria of an analysis of language in context and…

Illustrates use of Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) for predicting coherence through reanalyzing two studies that manipulated coherence of texts and assessed readers' comprehension. Finds that LSA predicts effects of text coherence on comprehension. Notes that LSA can be applied as an automated method that produces coherence predictions similar to…

Children's early writing is analyzed in this paper according to different perspectives such as function, grapho-phonemics, syntax, and semantics. Emphasis is given to the semantic perspective of decoding the text and to the study of coherence in text as it is viewed by the reader. Proposition analysis is used to map the coherence of samples of…

Investigates (in two phases) how coherence is cued between turns in conversations. Indicates that (1) turns were consistently paired well beyond chance, suggesting that explicit cues to connections between turns in conversations do exist; and (2) only lexical devices were found significantly more often in coherent than incoherent pairs. (NKA)

A discussion of Hungarian spoken discourse focuses on the role of two pragmatic connectives, "hat" ("well, so (after all)") and "mert" ("because"). Introductory sections discuss the classification of utterance-types as a prerequisite to analyzing discourse and the utterance-type as defined by pragmatic…

A study was conducted to examine writing skill, particularly maintenance of coherence, in an environment where the information load was heavy and students would be expected to have problems organizing it. The students, all proficient in English, were enrolled in a postsecondary biology class. Two of the six students in the study had high objective…