ABSTRACT
In Chapter 6 we touched on the cohesive function of pronouns and other types of definite noun phrase in the creation of connected discourse. The precise specification of how connected discourse achieves coherence in being distinguishable from any random set of consecutive utterances is an important goal in pragmatics, but it is difficult to achieve since coherence needs to be understood as an abstract property of connected discourse going far beyond surface cohesiveness. The nature of coherence has been examined from many different perspectives; for example van Dijk (1977) and van Dijk and Kintsch (1983) have developed a complex scheme for text analysis which has been used by Ulatowska and her colleagues (1983 and 1983a) in their work on the narrative and procedural discourse of aphasic speakers. One of the points here is that to be comprehensible narratives require in addition to surface cohesiveness certain structural components such as an outline of the setting, a specfication of the complicating action and the resolution. Joanette and Brownell (1990) describe applications of the Kintsch and van Dijk framework in the development of neuropsychological and psycholinguistic discourse processing models used to investigate the discourse abilities of aphasics. They also provide an overview of other recent approaches to the relationship between discourse ability and brain damage.
