ABSTRACT
Rejecting relevance, topicality, cohesive devices, syntactic structure, and comprehension as synonymous with and as necessary and/or sufficient for coherence, this chapter develops coherence as a cognitive judgment on the meaningful state of a text. This judgment of meaningfulness is determined by the relationship between the inferential demands of a text and the knowledge structures (schemata) available to the individual to accommodate those demands. Text therefore can be brought into the domain of coherence by varying knowledge structures.
