What is a unit of communication?Theories of discourse meaning depend in part on a specification of the basic units of a dicouse and the relations that can hold among them. Discourse processing requires an ability to determine to which portions of a discourse an individual utterance relates. ...
He points out that "an explanatory theory of coherence requires a set of externally driven principles to motivate and ultimately constrain the relation set". This is the direction x Introduction taken by Sanders and colleagues (Sanders et al. 1992, 1993; Sanders and Noordman 2000; Sanders ...
byrandomlyselectingonesentencefromeachoftheprevious chaptersofthisbook.Doyouhaveadiscourse?Almostcertainly not.Thereasonisthattheseutterances,whenjuxtaposed, willnotexhibitcoherence.Consider,forexample,thedifference betweenpassages(18.71)and(18.72).” (JM:695) ...