Coherence and Cohesion in Spoken and Written Discourse

Coherence and Cohesion in Spoken and Written Discourse
Author: Olga Dontcheva-Navratilova
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2020-07-13
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 152755662X

Coherence and Cohesion in Spoken and Written Discourse provides new insights into the various ways coherence works in a wide spread of spoken and written text types and interactional situations, all of which point to the dynamics and subjectivity of its nature. Despite the variety of approaches the authors adopt, they share an understanding of language as a dynamic and heterogeneous system mediating interaction in social and cultural contexts and explain how coherence and cohesion are reflected in different contextually bound aspects of human communication. The chapters of the book comprise essays by linguists working in the fields of pragmatics, discourse analysis and stylistics which explore features contributing to the perception of cohesion and coherence in spoken and written varieties of English, namely impromptu, academic and political discourse within the former variety, and media, academic and fictional discourse within the latter. This volume, which combines theoretical insights with practical analyses of different varieties of spoken and written English discourse, will be of interest to a wide range of researchers, scholars and students of English.

Coherence in Spoken and Written Discourse

Coherence in Spoken and Written Discourse
Author: Wolfram Bublitz
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 315
Release: 1999
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027250774

Until very recently, coherence (unlike cohesion) was widely held to be a 'rather mystical notion'. However, taking account of new trends representing a considerable shift in orientation, this volume aims at helping relieve coherence of its mystifying aura. The general bibliography which concludes the book bears witness to this intriguing development and the rapidly changing scene in coherence research. Preceding this comprehensive up-to-date Bibliography on Coherence are 13 selected papers from the 1997 International Workshop on Coherence at the University of Augsburg, Germany. They share a number of theoretical and methodoligical assumptions and reflect a trend in text and discourse analysis to move away from reducing coherence to a product of (formally represented) cohesion and/or (semantically established) connectivity. Instead, they start from a user- and context-oriented interpretive understanding and rely on authentic data throughout in relating micro-linguistic to macro-linguistic issues. The first group of papers looks at the (re-)creation of coherence in, inter alia, reported speech, casual conversation, argumentative writing, news reports and conference contributions. The second group describes the negotation of coherence in oral examinations, text summaries and other situations that require special efforts on the part of the recipient to overcome misunderstandings and other disturbances. The third group discusses theoretical approaches to the description of coherence.

Discourse Patterns in Spoken and Written Corpora

Discourse Patterns in Spoken and Written Corpora
Author: Karin Aijmer
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2004-01-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9789027253620

This book brings together a number of empirical studies that use corpora to study discourse patterns in speech and writing. It explores new trends in the area of text and discourse characterized by the alliance between text linguistics and areas such as corpus linguistics, genre analysis, literary stylistics and cross-linguistic studies. The contributions to the volume show how established corpora can be used to ask a number of new questions about the interface between speech and writing, the relation between grammar and discourse, academic discourse, cohesive markers, stylistic devices such as metaphor, deixis and non-verbal communication. The corpora used for text-analysis can also be tailor-made for the study of particular genres such as journal article abstracts, lectures, e-mailing list messages, headlines and titles. A recent development is to bring in contrastive data from bilingual corpora to show what is language-specific in the organization of the text.

Collaborating Towards Coherence

Collaborating Towards Coherence
Author: Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 207
Release: 2006-01-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027253897

This book approaches cohesion and coherence from a perspective of interaction and collaboration. After a detailed account of various models of cohesion and coherence, the book suggests that it is fruitful to regard cohesion as contributing to coherence, as a strategy used by communicators to help their fellow communicators create coherence from a text. Throughout the book, the context-sensitive and discourse-specific nature of cohesion is stressed: cohesive relations are created and interpreted in particular texts in particular contexts. By investigating the use of cohesion in four different types of discourse, the study shows that cohesion is not uniform across discourse types. The analysis reveals that written dialogue (computer-mediated discussions) and spoken monologue (prepared speech) make use of similar cohesive strategies as spoken dialogue (conversations): in these contexts the communicators' interaction with their fellow communicators leads to a similar outcome. The book suggests that this is an indication of the communicators' attempt to collaborate towards successful communication.

Coherence in Spontaneous Text

Coherence in Spontaneous Text
Author: Morton Ann Gernsbacher
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 279
Release: 1995-03-23
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027276358

The main theme running through this volume is that coherence is a mental phenomenon rather than a property of the spoken or written text, or of the social situation. Coherence emerges during speech production-and-comprehension, allowing the speech receiver to form roughly the same episodic representation as the speech producer had in mind. In producing and comprehending a text, be it spoken or written, the interlocutors collaborate towards coherence. They negotiate for a common ground of shared topicality, reference and thematic structure – thus toward a similar mental representation of the text. In conversation, the negotiation takes place between the present participants. In writing or oral narrative, the negotiation takes place in the mind of the text producer, between the text producer and his/her mental representation of the mind of the absent or inactive interlocutor. The cognitive mechanisms that underlie face-to-face communication thus continue to shape text production and comprehension in non-interactive contexts.Most of the papers in this volume were originally presented at the Symposium on Coherence in Spontaneous Text, held at the University of Oregon in the spring of 1992.

Referential and Relational Discourse Coherence in Adults and Children

Referential and Relational Discourse Coherence in Adults and Children
Author: Natalia Gagarina
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2020-06-08
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1501509993

This book combines studies on referential as well as relational coherence and includes approaches to written and to spoken language, to production and to comprehension, to language specific and to cross-linguistic issues, to monolingual, bilingual and L2-acquisition. The theoretical issues and empirical findings discussed are of importance not only for theoretical linguistics, but also have a broad potential of practical implication.

Talk and Text

Talk and Text
Author: Angela Downing Rothwell
Publisher: Univ de Castilla La Mancha
Total Pages: 168
Release: 2000
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9788484270867

This book reviews some current theories about the internal organization of written and oral discourse. The articles range from the theoretical to the highly practical, from the cognitive frameworks which make coherence in oral conversation to the structural and linguistic devices which create textuality in written language. Contextual issues such as ideology, topicality and topic management, thematicity and academic discourse are explored via a contemporary and authentic sample of written fragments and oral corpora. This accesible book will be useful to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students and to teachers interested in Language and Linguistics.

Coherence in Spoken and Written Discourse

Coherence in Spoken and Written Discourse
Author: Wolfram Bublitz
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 316
Release: 1999-06-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 902728380X

Until very recently, coherence (unlike cohesion) was widely held to be a ‘rather mystical notion’. However, taking account of new trends representing a considerable shift in orientation, this volume aims at helping relieve coherence of its mystifying aura. The general bibliography which concludes the book bears witness to this intriguing development and the rapidly changing scene in coherence research. Preceding this comprehensive up-to-date Bibliography on Coherence are 13 selected papers from the 1997 International Workshop on Coherence at the University of Augsburg, Germany. They share a number of theoretical and methodoligical assumptions and reflect a trend in text and discourse analysis to move away from reducing coherence to a product of (formally represented) cohesion and/or (semantically established) connectivity. Instead, they start from a user- and context-oriented interpretive understanding and rely on authentic data throughout in relating micro-linguistic to macro-linguistic issues. The first group of papers looks at the (re-)creation of coherence in, inter alia, reported speech, casual conversation, argumentative writing, news reports and conference contributions. The second group describes the negotation of coherence in oral examinations, text summaries and other situations that require special efforts on the part of the recipient to overcome misunderstandings and other disturbances. The third group discusses theoretical approaches to the description of coherence.