Discourse Coherence and Segmentation

Abstract

"We argue that structure is recovered to the extent that the reader can build a coherent cognitive model of the eventuality (situation) the discourse describes from the reader's interpretation of the semantic content of the discourse." (111) "The paper builds up a definition of discourse structure, and a method of segmenting discourses. We argue that discourse structure operates upon the content of the discourse, rather than upon the text or presentation, so that the theory structures sets of discourse entities in the semantics of the discourse. Discourse entities are abstract types (events, states, propositions) in the Discourse Representation Structure (Kamp 1981, Kamp and Reyle 1993, Asher 1993), a logical form for the discourse." (111) "We argue that what coheres is a mental model of the situation a discourse describes, and that the way the mental model coheres is explained by naive theories of causal and other structure in the actual world." (113f.) - kurze Zusammenfassung zu Hobbs, Polanyi, SDRT, etc.! - revised version of discourse structure theory