On the coherence and structure of discourse

Abstract

Chomsky, Reflections on Language, p. 13. Between sentence (1) and sentence (2) there is a temporal relation, indicated by “then”, linking two topics Chomsky intends to discuss. Clause (1a) states the first topic, and clauses (1b) and (1c) elaborate on that by breaking it into two subtopics that will be discussed in sequence. This structure may be represented as in Figure 1. One could of course argue about details of this analysis; in fact, one of my aims in this paper is to develop a way of arguing about the details. Numerous other researchers have pointed out that such relations exist. Robert Longacre has a chapter in Anatomy of Speech Notions (1976) on “combinations of predications”, among which he includes conjunction, contrast, comparison, alternation, temporal overlap and succession, implication,