Coherence

coherence

• A text “makes sense” because there is a continuity of senses among the knowledge activated by the expressions of the text (cf. Hörmann 1976). A “senseless” or “nonsensical” text is one in which text receivers can discover no such continuity, usually because there is a serious mismatch between the configuration of concepts and relations expressed and the receivers prior knowledge of the world. We would define this continuity of senses as the foundation of coherence, being the mutual access and relevance within a configuration of concepts and relations

• The surface text is PARSED onto a configuration of GRAMMATICAL DEPENDENCIES • The surface expressions are taken as cues to ACTIVATE concepts • the concepts are treated as steps in the construction of a

continuity of sense

• Attention would be directed particularly toward the discovery of CONTROL CENTRES , i.e. points from which accessing and processing can be strategically done.

The most likely candidates for control centres can be termed primary concepts: • (a) objects: conceptual entities with a stable identity and constitution; • (b) situations: configurations of mutually present objects in their current states; • (c) events: occurrences which change a situation or a state within a situation; • (d) actions: events intentionally brought about by an’ agent.

The other concepts would be assigned to a typology of secondary concepts (a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (f)

state

: the temporary, rather than characteristic, condition of an entity;

agent

: the force-possessing entity that performs an action and thus changes a situation;

affected entity

: the entity whose situation is changed by an event or action in which it figures as neither agent nor instrument;

relation

: a residual category for incidental, detailed relationships like child ’, ‘boss-employee’, etc.,

attribute

: the characteristic condition of an entity (cf . “state”); ‘father-

location

: spatial position of an entity; (g)

time

: temporal position of a situation (state) or event (cf. I.10); (h)

motion

: change of location; (i) (j)

instrument

: a non-intentional object providing the means for an event;

form

: shape, contour, and the like; (k)

part

: a component or segment of an entity; (l)

substance

: materials from which an entity is composed; (m)

containment

: the location of one entity inside another but not as a part or substance; (n) (o) (p)

cause

: see 1.7;

enablement

: see 1.7;

reason

: See 1.8;

(q) purpose: See 1.9; (r) apperception: operations of sensorially endowed entities during which knowledge is integrated via sensory organs;12 (s) cognition: storing, organizing, and using knowledge by sensorially endowed entity; (t) emotion: an experientially or evaluatively non-neutral state of a sensorially endowed entity; (u) volition: activity of will or desire by a sensorially endowed entity; (v) recognition: successful match between apperception and prior cognition; (w) communication: activity of expressing and transmitting cognitions by a sensorially endowed entity; (x) possession: relationship in which a sensorially endowed entity is believed (or believes itself) to own and control an entity; (y) instance: a member of a class inheriting all non-cancelled traits of the class (cf. V. 17); (z) specification: relationship between a superclass and a subclass, with a statement of the narrower traits of the latter (cf. V. 17); (aa)quantity: a concept of number, extent, scale, or measurement;13 (bb)modality: concept of necessity, probability, possibility, permissibility, obligation, or of their opposites; (cc) significancie: a symbolic meaning assigned to an entity; (dd)value: assignment of the worth of an entity in terms of other entities; (ee)equivalence: equality, sameness, correspondence, and the like; (ff) opposition: the converse of equivalence; (gg)co-reference: relationship where different expressions activate the same text-world entity (or configuration of entities) (cf. IV.21); (hh)recurrence: the relation where the same expression reactivates a concept, but not necessarily with the same reference to an entity, or with the same sense (cf. IV. 12 15).14

• This typology is useful for labeling the links among concepts, e.g. that one concept is the “state of” another, or the “agent of” another, etc

• Attribute, Location, Quantity, Specification, state

Causal relations

• Coherence can be illustrated particularly well by a group of relations subsumed under causality. These relations concern the ways in which one situation or event affects the conditions for some other one. • 1. Jack fell down and broke his crown.

the event of ‘falling down’ is the cause of the event of ‘breaking’, since it created the necessary conditions for the latter. 2. The Queen of Hearts, she made some tarts, All on a summer’s day.

The Knave of Hearts, he stole those tarts, And took them quite away.

• A weaker type of causality. The Queen’s action created the sufficient, but not necessary conditions for the Knave’s action (made it possible, but not obligatory); this relation can be termed enablement .

3. Jack shall have but a penny a day because he can’t work any faster • the low pay is not actually caused or enabled by the slow working, but is nonetheless a reasonable and predictable outcome. The term reason can be used for the relation where an action follows as a rational response to some previous event. 4. Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard to get her poor dog a bone.

• Mother Hubbard’s first action does enable the second, but there is an important difference between samples [2] and [4]l : the agent’s plan is involved in [4], while the Queen did not do her baking for the sake of allowing a theft. The term purpose can be used for an event or situation which is planned to become possible via a previous event or situation.

Coherence and inferences

• Coherence is clearly not a mere feature of texts, but rather the outcome of cognitive processes. The simple juxtaposition of events and situations in a text will activate operations which recover or create coherence relations. : • • • [5] The King was in the counting house, counting all his money; The Queen was in the parlour, eating bread and honey; The Maid was in the garden, hanging out the clothes; • In the explicit text, there is a set of actions (‘counting’, ‘eating’, ‘hanging out’); the only relations presented are the location, the agent, and the affected entity of each action. Yet simply by virtue of the textual configuration, a text receiver is likely to assume that the action is in each case the purpose of being at that location; that the locations are proximate to each other, probably in or near the royal palace; and even that the actions are proximate in time. One might well go on to assume that the actions are intended to signal the attributes of the agents (e.g. the King being avaricious, the Queen gluttonous, the Maid industrious). The adding of one’s own knowledge to bring a textual world together is called inferencing (cf. V. 32ff.)

Coherence= mutual dependency of concepts below the surface

Wembley loses its auditor weeks before bribery trial

(UK) -- Ernst & Young, the accountancy firm, resigned as auditor to Wembley yesterday, barely a month before the dog track owner and gambling group faces a bribery trial in the United States. The sudden departure of E&Y, the firm’s auditor since 1999, was included in a statement that announced a permanent replacement for chief executive Nigel Potter , who has stepped aside to defend the charges in the US.

The Guardian

, 7/12/2004 (Courtesy of Giuliana Garzone)

> That Nigel Potter is Chief executive of Ernst and Young is not made explicit on the surface of the text, but is inferred on the basis of relations among concepts (the CEO is the one to be held accountable for the company’s

• A text does not make sense by itself, but rather by the interaction of text presented knowledge with people’s stored knowledge of the world (cf. Petöfi 1974; IX.24-40).

• • • • • Such interaction rests on some types of

global

patterns: F RAMES are global patterns that contain commonsense ‘birthday parties’, etc. knowledge about some central concept, e.g. ‘piggy banks’, S CHEMAS are global patterns of events and states in ordered sequences linked by time proximity and causality. Unlike frames, schemas are always arrayed in a progression, so that hypotheses can be set up about what will be done or mentioned next in a textual world. P LANS are global patterns of events and states leading up to an intended GOAL . Plans differ from schemas in that a planner (e.g. a text producer) evaluates all elements in terms of how they advance toward the planner’s goal. S CRIPTS are stabilized plans called up very frequently to specify the roles of participants and their expected actions. Scripts thus differ from plans by having a pre-established routine.

• The importance of these kinds of global patterns has become recognized in text production and reception: • how a topic might be developed (frames), • how an event will progress in a sequence (schemas), • how text users or characters in textual worlds will pursue their goals (plans), • how situations are set up so that certain texts can be presented at the opportune moment (scripts).

• Different pattern types might share the same basic knowledge in a variable perspective (e.g. a frame for ‘structure of a house’ versus a plan for ‘building a house’). • Using global patterns greatly reduces complexity over using local ones, and allows retaining much more material in active storage at one given time.

Coherence

• The berry pickers, youths and maidens, laughed and shouted boisterously shrilly . A boy…leaped from the wagon and attempted to drag after him one of the maidens who screamed and protested • [

laugh

activates the frame of a playful, innocent act vs. threatening, violent act]

•

Can you spot a problem with coherence in this text?

Anche se non molti lo sanno, esso nacque sotto l’egida della più assoluta novità a livello internazionale, perché per la prima volta, in un impianto pubblico di questo tipo, al posto delle sbarre di ferro gli animali erano divisi dagli spettatori per mezzo di fossati, che, adeguatamente studiati e disegnati secondo le regole del giardino di stile inglese, davano l’impressione che gli animali si trovassero in libertà, generando nei visitatori paura ed attrazione, un po’ come accadeva ai primordi del cinema con l’illusione di una locomotiva che sembrava entrare nella sala di proiezione.

Inventore di questo rivoluzionario sistema fu il commerciante di animali amburghese

Carl Hagenbeck

, il quale a dire il vero aveva sviluppato la sua idea più per praticità che per intenti scientifici. Infatti, dovendo mantenere per lunghi periodi gli animali catturati nel freddo clima della Germania settentrionale, e al tempo stesso contenere gli alti costi di gestione, egli, grazie al suo geniale intuito e alla sua grande esperienza, sostituì le sbarre con i fossati e eliminò i riscaldamenti a termosifone acclimatando con successo le specie esotiche con semplici ripari notturni.

(expository) paragraph development

• Methods of paragraph development fall into three loose groups:

– Those that stay strictly within the topic (e.g offering examples / repeating it) – Techniques introducing another theme for comprison or contrast – Tecniques exploring the ramifications of the topic more fully (defining/establisging cause-effect relations)