COHERENCE IN SPONTANEOUS TEXT TYPOLOGICAL STUDIES IN LANGUAGE (TSL) A companion series to the journal "STUDIES IN LANGUAGE" Honorary Editor: Joseph H. Greenberg General Editor: T. Givón Associate General Editor: Michael Noonan Assistant Editors: Spike Gildea, Suzanne Kemmer Editorial Board: Wallace Chafe (Santa Barbara) Ronald Langacker (San Diego) Bernard Comrie (Los Angeles) Charles Li (Santa Barbara) R.M.W. Dixon (Canberra) Andrew Pawley (Canberra) Matthew Dryer (Buffalo) Doris Payne (Oregon) John Haiman (St Paul) Frans Plank (Konstanz) Kenneth Hale (Cambridge, Mass.) Jerrold Sadock (Chicago) Bernd Heine (Köln) Dan Slobin (Berkeley) Paul Hopper (Pittsburgh) Sandra Thompson (Santa Barbara) Andrej Kibrik (Moscow) Volumes in this series will be functionally and typologically oriented, covering specific topics in language by collecting together data from a wide variety of languages and language typologies. The orientation of the volumes will be substantive rather than formal, with the aim of investigating universals of human language via as broadly defined a data base as possible, leaning toward cross-linguistic, diachronic, developmental and live-discourse data. The series is, in spirit as well as in fact, a continuation of the tradition initiated by C. L i{Word Order and Word Order Change, Subject and Topic, Mechanisms for Syntactic Change) and continued by T. Givón {Discourse and Syntax) and P. Hopper (Tense-Aspect: Between Semantics and Pragmatics). Volume 31 Morton Ann Gernsbacher and T. Givón (eds) Coherence in Spontaneous Text COHERENCE IN SPONTANEOUS TEXT Edited by MORTON ANN GERNSBACHER University of Wisconsin-Madison T. GIVÓN University of Oregon JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences — Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Coherence in spontaneous text / edited by M.A. Gernsbacher, T. Givón. p. cm. — (Typological studies in language, ISSN 0167-7373; v. 31) Chiefly papers presented at the Symposium on Coherence in Spontaneous Text, which was held Spring 1992, University of Oregon. 1. Discourse analysis--Congresses. 2. Cohesion (Linguistics)--Congresses. I. Gernsbacher, Morton Ann. II. Givón, —, date. III. Symposium on Coherence in Spontaneous Text (1992 : University of Oregon) IV. Series. P302.2.C64 1995 415-dc20 94-49702 ISBN 90 272 2923 6 (hb.) / 90 272 2924 4 (pb.) (European; alk. paper) CIP ISBN 1-55619-637-7 (hb.) / 1-55619-638-5 (pb.) (U.S.; alk. paper) © Copyright 1995 - John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. • P.O.Box 75577 • 1070 AN Amsterdam • The Netherlands John Benjamins North America • P.O.Box 27519 • Philadelphia, PA 19118 • USA Table of Contents Introduction: Coherence as a mental entity vii Morton Ann Gernsbacher and T. Givón Negotiating coherence in dialogue 1 Anne H. Anderson The negotiation of coherence in face-to-face interaction 41 Some examples from the extreme bounds Jennifer Coates Coherence in text vs. coherence in mind 59 T. Givón The negotiation of coherence within conversation 117 Charles Goodwin How readers construct situation models for stories 139 The role of syntactic cues and causal inferences Walter Kintsch Aspects of coherence in written language: a psychological perspective 161 Anthony J. Sanford and Linda M. Moxey Explanatory coherence in understanding and talking about events 189 Tom Trabasso, Soyoung Suh and Paula Payton Improving coherence in written communication 215 Matthew J. Traxler and Morton Ann Gernsbacher Coherence in collaboration: Some examples from conversation 239 Deanna Wilkes-Gibbs Introduction Coherence as a mental entity What does it mean for a text to be "coherent"? The contributors to this volume have struggled with this fundamental, but perplexing, question. Their answers are provocative, insightful, and surprising in their overall coherence. The theme that binds the collection of papers in this volume is, simply put, that coherence is a mental phenomenon. Coherence is not an inherent property of a written or spoken text. Readers or listeners can indeed judge with high agreement that one text is more coherent than another. But neither the words on the page nor the words in the speech stream of themselves confer coherence. And although a less coherent text impedes comprehension, neither the printed sentences nor the spoken utterances cause those impediments. Coherence is a property of what emerges during speech production and comprehension — the mentally represented text, and in particular the men­ tal processes that partake in constructing that mental representation. A coherently produced text — spoken or written — allows the "receiver" (lis­ tener or reader) to form roughly the same text-representation as the "sen­ der" (writer or speaker) had in mind. To the extent that the sender's mental representation was coherent to begin with, and to the extent that the receiver's mental representation matched that of the sender's, the text is coherent. In producing and comprehending a text, be it spoken or written, the interlocutors collaborate towards coherence, negotiating for the common ground of shared topicality, reference, and thematic structure — thus toward a similar mental representation. During conversation, the negotia­ tion takes place collaboratively between two (or more) active participants. During writing, revision and editing, the negotiation occurs cognitively between the writer's own mental representation and his mental representa­ tion of what he/she assumes the reader knows. Conversation — spontane­ ous face-to-face communication — is thus the primary evolutionary viii M.A. Gernsbacher and T. Givón template that shaped the cognitive mechanisms of text production and com­ prehension. Non-conversational text merely piggybacks on these funda­ mentally interactive mechanisms. This view of coherence emphasizes the speakers' and writers' ongoing effort to achieve coherence with their listen­ ers or readers. The measurable litmus test for success is then the readers' and listeners' coherent comprehension. Coherence thus emerges not in the text, but in the two collaborating minds. Anne Anderson presents a striking demonstration of how participants in conversation negotiate for coherence in a laboratory problem-solving task. Her subjects draw on common landmarks and negotiated utterances to achieve their goals. Anderson also demonstrates the developmental course of negotiation. Her data strongly support the hypothesis that negotiating for coherence during discourse is a skill that must be acquired. Jennifer Coates tackles the questions of the Wittgensteinean extreme bounds of coherence — tautology and contradiction. The first represents maximal coherence to the point of manifest redundancy; the second repre­ sents minimal coherence. Working from conversational texts, Coates shows how speakers negotiate instances of both tautology and contradiction, so that what — from a purely logical perspective — could be either redundant or incoherent acquires communicative coherence during the process of negotiation. T. Givón frames the main theme of the volume, that coherence is funda­ mentally not a property of the text but rather of the mind that produces or interprets the text. Cognitively, coherence is constructed with the aid of both domain-specific (lexical) knowledge and grammatical processing cues. Both processes contribute to the construction of both local and global coherence links. Charles Goodwin demonstrates the flexible, negotiable nature of the coher­ ence that emerges during conversation, where both local and global con­ struction of what is "the topic" contributes to specific coherent interpreta­ tions of the communication. Introduction: Coherence as a mental entity ix Walter Kintsch explores the contrast between knowledge-driven and gram­ mar-driven processes of building coherence, suggesting that the two mechanisms operate in parallel as "strong" vs. "weak" text-comprehension strategies, respectively. Tony Sanford and Linda Moxey argue that coherence must be "in the head." They illustrate this with texts that are stylistically cohesive but com­ municatively incoherent. Their subjects, in comprehension tasks, fail to comprehend the meaning intended by the texts' authors because they overly-activate their associated knowledge. Tom Trabasso, Soyoung Suh and Paula Payton investigate the emergence of global coherence links during comprehension. Their laboratory experi­ ments outline the mental representations that must be activated in readers' mind for successful comprehension. Matthew Traxler and Morton Ann Gernsbacher argue that writers also negotiate for coherence. During writing, negotiation for coherence is con­ siderably more difficult because the writer's or editor's audiences are not available as active collaborators. Instead, the writer must envision — indeed imagine — the mental representation that the written texts would prompt in the reader's mind. To the extent that the writer is successful in guessing the emerging text-representation in the reader's mind, the written text will be judged by readers to be more coherent. Deanna Wilkes-Gibbs presents both arguments for and laboratory demonstration of the way participants in conversation negotiate for coher­ ence. Conversation participants engage in turn taking and question asking to establish common ground and mutual representation. Moreover, listen­ ers' memory representations are greatly affected by their assessment of common meaning as they converse. Most of the papers in this volume were originally presented at the Sym­ posium on Coherence in Spontaneous Text, held at the University of Ore­ gon in the spring of 1992. We are indebted to the Institute of Cognitive and Decision Sciences at the University of Oregon, the Keck Foundation of Los Angeles, and the Shaolin-West Foundation of Durango, Colorado for their financial support; to Vonda Evans for logistic support on site; and to our