Chapter 7

Coherence in interpretation of discourse

1. What is speech act theory and how can it be useful in discourse analysis?
2. How does background knowledge work in the discourse interpretation?
3. What is difference between top-down and bottom up processing and how are both of
them significant in discourse analysis?

We certainly rely on the syntactic structure and lexical items used in a linguistic message
to arrive at an interpretation, but it is a mistake to think that we operate only with this
literal input to our understanding.
EX: Epistemics Seminar: Thursday 3rd June, 2.00 p.m. Steve Harlow (Department of
Linguistics, University of York). `Welsh and Generalised Phrase Structure Grammar'
We readily fill in any connections which are required. This is the point in connection
with the assumption of coherence which people bring to the interpretation of linguistic
messages.
On what does the reader base his interpretation of the writer's intended meaning? In
addition to the assumption of coherence, the principles of analogy, local interpretation
and general features of context, there are the regularities of discourse structure, and the
regular features of information structure organisation. These are aspects of discourse
which the reader can use in his interpretation of a particular discourse fragment. Yet, the
reader also has more knowledge than knowledge of discourse. This is a form of
conventional socio-cultural knowledge.

7.2 Computing communicative function

Labov (197o) argues that there are 'rules of interpretation which relate what is said to
what is done' and it is on the basis of such social, but not linguistic, rules that we interpret
some conversational sequences as coherent and others as non-coherent.
A text then is defined by de Beaugrande and Dressler as ―a communicative occurrence
which meets seven standards of textuality.‖(1981) They also make a distinction between
cohesion and coherence. In their opinion, cohesion ―concerns the ways in which the
components of the surface text, i.e. the actual words we hear or see, are mutually
connected within a sequence.‖ (1981) Surface components depend upon each other
according to grammatical forms and conventions; therefore they view cohesion as
grammatical dependency. Coherence, on the other hand, ―concerns the ways in which
the components of the textual world, i.e. the configuration of concepts and relations
which underline the surface text, are mutually accessible and relevant.‖ (1981)
Brown and Yule (1983) emphasis the importance of participants‘ backward knowledge in
the interpretation of discourse coherence stored in memory, taking such forms as frame,
schemata, script, scenario and plan. If the interpretation of a discourse is in consistency
with the mentally stored knowledge or backward scenes and can be interpreted as an
interrelated unity, the discourse is thus coherent. However, they don‘t define the scope of
coherence strictly and not take it as a theoretic concept, but a general concept.
From the above brief review on previous approaches towards discourse coherence, two
facts are revealed: first, discourse coherence is such a complicated concept that it is
related to almost every aspect of discourse communication. Secondly, there is no all-
embracing rule governing coherence analysis. Every scholar presents his or her insight
into one aspect of discourse coherence and views it from different angles. Based on the
above illustration, the author will present a comparative view to discourse coherence.

7.3 Speech acts

Speech act theory originates in Austin's (1962: How To Do Good Things with Words)
observation that while sentences can often be used to report states of affairs, the utterance
of some sentences, in specified circumstances, be treated as the performance of an act:
 I bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow.  I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth.
Such utterances Austin described as 'performatives' and the specified circumstances
required for their success he outlined as a set of 'felicity conditions'. Performatives can be
explicit performatives and implicit performatives.
1. A locutionary act, the performance of an utterance: the actual utterance and its
ostensible meaning, comprising phonetic, phatic and rhetic acts corresponding to the
verbal, syntactic and semantic aspects of any meaningful utterance;
2. An illocutionary act: the pragmatic 'illocutionary force' of the utterance, thus its
intended significance as a socially valid verbal action (see below);
3. and in certain cases a further perlocutionary act: its actual effect, such as persuading,
convincing, scaring, enlightening, inspiring, or otherwise getting someone to do or realize
something, whether intended or not (Austin 1962)
By extension, it became possible to suggest that in uttering any sentence, a speaker could
be seen to have performed some act, or, to be precise, an illocutionary act.
Conventionally associated with each illocutionary act is the force of the utterance which
can be expressed as a performative such as 'promise' or 'warn'. Austin also pointed out
that, in uttering a sentence, a speaker also performs a perlocutionary act which can be
described in terms of the effect which the illocutionary act, on the particular occasion of
use, has on the hearer. Searle (1975) also introduces a distinction between direct and
indirect speech acts which depends on recognition of the intended perlocutionary effect
of an utterance on a particular occasion. Indirect speech acts are 'cases in which one
illocutionary act is performed indirectly by way of performing another' (1975: 60).
7.4 Using knowledge of the world
This general knowledge about the world underpins our interpretation not only of
discourse, but of virtually every aspect of our experience. As de Beaugrande (1980: 30)
notes, “the question of how people know what is going on in a text is a special case of the
question of how people know what is going on in the world at all”.

7.5 Top-down and bottom-up processing

In one part of the processing, we work out the meanings of the words and structure of a
sentence and build up a composite meaning for the sentence (i.e. bottom-up processing).
At the same time, we are predicting, on the basis of the context plus the composite
meaning of the sentences already processed, what the next sentence is most likely to
mean (i.e. top-down processing). It would be absurd to suggest that when we read the
first line of we do not attempt to build (i.e. from the bottom-up) some composite meaning
for the three-word string on the basis of its structure and the meaning of the lexical items
involved. It is the predictive power of top-down processing that enables the human reader
to encounter, via his bottom-up processing, ungrammatical or mis-spelt elements in the
text and to determine what was the most likely intended message.

Slim is beautiful
Many reasons are there for people to want a slim body.
All become very lighter and lighter but it's very difficult to held a normally weight.

7.6 Representing background knowledge

In representations of this knowledge, conventional aspects of a situation, for instance,
talking about a restaurant, the tables and chairs, can be treated as default elements. These
default elements will be assumed to be present, even when not mentioned, unless the
reader / hearer is specifically told otherwise. Thus, knowledge of a restaurant scene is
treated as being stored in memory as a single, easily accessible unit, rather than as a
scattered collection of individual facts which have to be assembled from different parts of
memory each time a restaurant scene is mentioned. Riesbeck (1975), for example, boldly
asserts that 'comprehension is a memory process'. Understanding discourse is, in this
sense, essentially a process of retrieving stored information from memory and relating it
to the encountered discourse. It then became possible to think of knowledge-of-theworld
as organized into separate but interlinked sets of knowledge areas which, taken together,
would add up to the generalized knowledge that humans, in comprehending discourse,
appear to use.

7.6.1 Frames
Minsky's frame-theory. Minsky proposes that our knowledge is stored in memory in the
form of data structures, which he calls 'frames', and which represent stereotyped
situations. They are used in the following way: “When one encounters a new situation
(or makes a substantial change in one's view of the present problem) one selects from
memory a structure called a Frame. This is a remembered framework to be adapted to fit
reality by changing details as necessary. (Minsky, 1975)
Since one kind of knowledge is knowledge of a language, then there are frames for
linguistic 'facts'. For example, Minsky draws an analogy between a frame for a room in a
visual scene and a frame for a noun phrase in a discourse. Both frames have obligatory
elements (wall / nominal or pronominal) and optional elements (decorations on the
walls / a numerical determiner). The basic structure of a frame contains labeled slots
which can be filled with expressions, fillers (which may also be other frames). For
example, in a frame representing a typical HOUSE, there will be slots labeled 'kitchen',
'bathroom', 'address', and so on. Formulated in this way, a frame is characteristically a
fixed representation of knowledge about the world.

7.6.2 Scripts
Scripts are specialized to deal with event sequences (Schank & Abelson, 1977).
Example: “John ate the ice cream with a spoon.” Whereas a frame is generally treated as
an essentially stable set of facts about the world, a script is more programmatic in that it
incorporates 'a standard sequence of events that describes a situation'.
7.6.3 Scenarios
Sanford & Garrod (1981) choose the term scenario to describe the 'extended domain of
reference' which is used in interpreting written texts, 'since one can think of knowledge of
settings and situations as constituting the interpretative scenario behind a text'. Their aim
is to 'establish the validity of the scenario account as a psychological theory'.
Sanford & Garrod emphasise that the success of scenario-based comprehension is
dependent on the text-producer's effectiveness in activating appropriate scenarios. They
point out that 'in order to elicit a scenario, a piece of text must constitute a specific partial
description of an element of the scenario itself' (1981: 129).

7.6.4 Schemata
There exists a socio-culturally determined story-schema, which has a fixed conventional
structure containing a fixed set of elements. Rather, it is people who have schemata
which they use to produce and comprehend simple stories, among many other things.
Schemata are said to be 'higher-level complex (and even conventional or habitual)
knowledge structures' (van Dijk, 1981: 141), which function as 'ideational scaffolding'
(Anderson, 1977) in the organization and interpretation of experience. In the strong view,
schemata are considered to be deterministic, to predispose the experiencer to interpret his
experience in a fixed way. We can think of racial prejudice, for example, as the
manifestation of some fixed way of thinking about newly encountered individuals who
are assigned undesirable attributes and motives on the basis of an existing schema for
members of the race. There may also be deterministic schemata which we use when we
are about to encounter certain types of discourse, as evidenced in the following
conversational fragment. A: There's a party political broadcast coming on — do you
want to watch it? B: No — switch it off — I know what they're going to say already.
Rather than deterministic constraints on how we must interpret discourse, schemata can
be seen as the organized background knowledge which leads us to expect or predict
aspects in our interpretation of discourse.
7.6.5 Mental Models
If the representation of a text is not a representation of its semantics, how should it be
characterized? The hypothesis that is examined in the present paper is that memory for
the content of a passage is based on a mental model of the situation in a real or imaginary
world that the passage describes (Johnson-Laird, 1980; Johnson-Laird & Garnham,
1980). One aspect of such models is that they contain tokens that stand for individuals
and these tokens are tagged with information about the properties of those individuals.
There is much empirical evidence to suggest that mental representations of texts contain
such tokens (Anderson, 1977; Anderson & Bower, 1973, chap. 9; Anderson & Hastie,
1974; Ortony & Anderson, 1977). These experiments show that coreferring singular
terms are very often confused with each other. There are also a number of computer
programs that create representations of texts that contain tokens standing for individuals
(Anderson & Bower, 1973; Rumelhart, Lindsay, & Norman, 1972; Winograd, 1972),
which lends further support to the idea that the representation of individuals is essential to
comprehension.
However, to claim that texts are represented in mental models is not simply to say that
representations contain tokens standing for individuals. Johnson-Laird and Garnham
(1980) have shown that the interpretation of singular terms in a text depends crucially on
an account of which individuals are possible referents of those terms. Thus, for each text,
there is a corresponding mental model containing tokens standing for the individuals that
the text is about. Johnson-Laird and Garnham also outline a theory of how cues in a text
and knowledge of the world are used to decide when to introduce representations of
individuals into a mental model. This work forms the basis of a theory of the way
representations are constructed on-line, as successive parts of a text are read. (See
Johnson-Laird & Gamham for a more detailed account of the role of definite and
indefmite descriptions in this process.)
Consider a text that contains the sentence "By the window was a man with a martini."
The indefinite description "a man" introduces a new referent, and, given that no other
men with martinis or standing by windows are introduced by the text, the sentence allows
the reader to infer that, in the context of the passage, "the man with the martini" and "the
man standing by the window" are coreferential. If either of these expressions occurs later
in the passage, it can be assumed to refer to the individual previously introduced into the
discourse model. Garnham (1981) showed that if, later in the passage, a sentence such as
"The man standing by the window shouted to the host" occurred, subjects were unable to
remember whether they had heard that sentence or "The man with the martini shouted to
the host." Thus people confuse semantically different expressions that are established as
being coreferential in the context of a particular passage.
A mental model contains not only representations of a particular set of individuals, but
also representations of a particular series of events. Just as an individual may be
described in various ways, so mayan event be related in different sentences. Those
sentences may have different semantics. That is to say, the sets of events that they could
be used to describe may be very different. Nevertheless, in context, they may clearly
describe the same event, if that event lies in the intersection of those sets.
If the idea of mental models is correct, then it should be possible to show that text
representations are organized around representations of events, rather than linguistic
expressions describing those events. The experiment to be described in this paper
addresses the question of whether people confuse prepositional phrases that have very
different semantic functions, if the sentences in which those phrases occur probably
describe the same situation in the world. Consider the sentences ''The hostess bought a
mink coat from the furrier" and ''The hostess bought a mink coat in the furrier's." They
would usually be used to describe the same event, but they need not be. It is unusual to
buy a mink coat in the furrier's but not from the furrier, but it is possible. One could be
bought from another customer, for example. Similarly, it is possible to buy a coat from
the furrier, but not at his place of business. The sets of events that the two sentences
could be used to describe have, perhaps, a relatively small intersection, but that
intersection contains most, if not all, of the most probable of those events. If knowledge
about the relative probabilities of events affects the kinds of representations that are set
up when sentences are processed, then the two sentences above should receive fairly
similar representations. However, if representations are affected only by the sets of events
that the sentences might possibly describe (i.e., the semantics of the sentences), then the
representations should be markedly different.
Another pair of sentences that differ from each other in surface form in the same way as
the pair above is "The hostess received a telegram from the furrier" and "The hostess
received a telegram in the furrier's." These two sentences would usually describe different
events, but they could describe the same event. It is possible to be in the furrier's and to
get a telegram from him, but it is unlikely. The intersection of the two sets of events that
the sentences could describe is again fairly small, but in this case the events in the
intersection are improbable ones. If the representations of the sentences are merely
determined by the sets of events they could describe, then the difference between the
members of the second pair should be of the same order as that between the members of
the first pair, and there would be no reason to expect more confusions in memory in one
case than in the other. However, if knowledge of probabilities affects the representations,
then the second two sentences should have relatively distinct encodings that should not
be confused in memory, whereas confusions between the first two sentences would be
expected.

7.7 Determining the inferences to be made:

Discourse psychologists have developed and tested models that predict what inferences
are generated on-line during comprehension (Graesser & Bower 1990, Graesser et al
1994, McKoon & Ratcliff 1992). When an adult reads a novel, for example, the following
classes of knowledge based inferences are potentially generated: The goals and plans that
motivate characters‘ actions, character traits, characters‘ knowledge and beliefs, character
emotions, causes of events, the consequences of events and actions, properties of objects,
spatial contexts, spatial relationships among entities, the global theme or point of the text,
the referents of nouns and pronouns, the attitudes of the writer, and the appropriate
emotional reaction of the reader. It is conceivable that readers generate all these
inferences on-line. In essence, the mind would construct a high resolution mental
videotape of the situation model, along with details about the mental states of characters
and the communicative exchange between the writer and reader. However, discourse
psychologists are convinced that only a subset of these inferences are generated on-line.
Why? Because the generation of all these inferences would create a computational
explosion problem, because WM has limited resources, and because reading is
accomplished too quickly for some time-consuming inferences to be generated. Which of
these classes of inferences are constructed on-line? That is the central question.
Suppose an adult read a simple fairy tale that contained two successive actions in the
middle of the text: ―The dragon was dragging off the girl. A hero came and fought the
dragon.‖ There are five classes of inferences that might be encoded when the second
sentence is read:
1. Superordinate goal (motive).The hero wanted to rescue the girl.
2. Subordinate goal or action. The hero threw a spear.
3. Causal antecedent. The girl was frightened.
4. Causal consequence. The hero married the girl.
5. Static property. The dragon has scales.
Experiments can be designed to assess which of these inferences are encoded. For
example, after reading the second sentence, the reader would quickly complete a word-
naming task (or alternatively a lexical decision task) and receive a test word extracted
from one of these inferences (i.e. rescue, throw, fright, marry, and scales). The same
words would also be tested in an unrelated context to obtain a measure of inference
encoding from the wordnaming latencies: [latency (unrelated context)—latency
(inference context)]. The inference encoding score should be above zero to the extent that
the inference is generated on-line. In a properly designed study, the words in these
inference classes would be equilibrated on several variables, such as number of letters,
number of syllables, word frequency, syntactic class, free association norms with words
in the text, and the proportion of readers in a normative group who articulate the
inference in a think aloud task (Graesser et al 1994, Kintsch 1988, Long et al 1992,
Magliano et al 1993, Millis & Graesser 1994).

7.8 Inferences as missing links:

Existing models make quite different predictions about which of the five classes of
inferences are encoded on-line. At one extreme, there is a promiscuous inference
generation position that predicts that all five classes are encoded. This is a strawperson
position, however, for reasons discussed above. At the other extreme, there is a textbase
position that predicts that none of the inferences are encoded (Kintsch & van Dijk 1978).
Local text coherence could be established at the textbase level by virtue of argument
overlap (i.e. dragon appears in both sentences) so there would be no need to construct a
situation model. According to McKoon & Ratcliff‘s (1992) minimalist hypothesis, the
causal antecedents would be the only class of inferences among the five that might be
encoded with any consistency. The other four classes are elaborative inferences that are
encoded only if the reader has a special comprehension goal that is tuned to such levels.
The minimalist hypothesis assumes that the reader generates only those inferences that
are needed to establish local text coherence (i.e. either causal antecedents or none at all)
and that are readily available in memory (i.e. in WM or highly active in LTM).
Is it possible, then, to think of an inference as a process of filling in the missing link(s)
between two utterances? A. I bought a bicycle yesterday. B.The frame is extra large. C.
The bicycle has a frame.
A. I looked into the room. B. The ceiling was very high. C. The room has a ceiling.
A.I got on a bus yesterday. B. The driver was drunk. C. The bus has a driver.

7.9 Inferences as non-automatic connections

Graesser et al (1994) has argued that the available research on inference generation
supports a constructionist theory rather than the above three positions (as well as others
that will not be addressed here). The constructionist theory assumes that readers encode
three sets of inferences, namely (a) inferences that address the readers ‘comprehension
goals, (b) inferences that explain why events, actions, and states occur, and (c) inferences
that establish coherence in the situation model at local and global levels. From the
standpoint of the five classes of inferences in the above example, it is the explanation
assumption that offers distinctive predictions. The explanation based inferences include
superordinate goals and causal antecedents, but not subordinate goals/actions, causal
consequences, and static properties. It is the superordinate goals and the causal
antecedents that answer why an action or event occurs (Graesser et al 1991). For
example, when asked ―Why did the hero fight the dragon?‖ a reasonable answer would
include the superordinate goal (in order to rescue the girl) and the causal antecedent
(because the girl was frightened), but not the other three classes (i.e. in order to throw the
spears, in order to marry the girl, because the dragon has scales).
The subordinate goals/ actions and static properties are minor ornaments that merely
embellish the core plot and explanations of the plot. Regarding the causal consequences,
it is too difficult for readers to forecast multiple hypothetical plots with new plans of
characters and long event chains into the future. Most of the forecasts that readers
generate to ―What happens next?‖ questions end up being wrong (Graesser & Clark
1985), so the readers would be uselessly spinning their wheels if they did generate many
causal consequences. According to the constructionist model, the only causal
consequences that are generated on-line are the achieved superordinate goals of character
actions (i.e. the hero in fact did rescue the girl), emotional reactions of characters to
actions and events, and consequences that are highly activated and constrained by prior
context (see Keefe & McDaniel 1993, van den Broek 1990).
Analyses of think aloud protocols in fact confirm that most readers (and good
comprehenders in particular) generate more explanation-based inferences than
predictions and associative elaborations in simple stories (Trabasso & Magliano 1996), in
literary short stories (Zwaan & Brown 1996), and in technical expository texts (Chi et al
1994).
Experiments that have collected word-naming and lexical decision latencies confirm the
constructionist theory‘s predictions that readers generate superordinate goals much more
than subordinate goals/actions (Long et al 1992), and causal antecedents much more than
causal consequences (Magliano et al 1993, Millis & Graesser 1994, Potts et al 1988).

7.10 Inferences as filling in gaps or discontinuities in interpretation

We suspect that each of the above models is correct in certain conditions. The textbase
position and minimalist hypotheses are probably correct when the reader is very quickly
reading the text, when the text lacks global coherence, and when the reader has very little
background knowledge. The constructionist theory is on the mark when the reader is
attempting to comprehend the text for enjoyment or mastery at a more leisurely pace,
when the text has global coherence, and when the reader has some background
knowledge. The promiscuous inference generation model may even be valid when a
literary scholar is savoring a good short story at a very slow cruise. There are many gaps
in our understanding of the generation of knowledgebased inferences. We need to
analyze the precise time course of constructing, maintaining, and modifying particular
classes of inferences (Keefe & McDaniel 1993, Kintsch 1988, Magliano et al 1993).
 Some inferences may slowly emerge as text is received rather than discretely popping in
when a particular statement is comprehended. Very little research has examined global
inferences, such as themes, points, morals, and attitudes of the writer (Long et al 1996,
Seifert et al 1986). Global inferences have tentacles to many elements in the text and span
large stretches of text. These global inferences are more difficult to study than inference
classes that discretely pop in at a particular locus in the text. There also needs to be much
more work on how inference generation is influenced by readers who differ in
comprehension skill, working memory span, and other psychological attributes (Dixon et
al 1993, Haenggi et al 1995, Perfetti et al 1996, Singer & Ritchot 1996, Whitney et al
1991).