Coherence and Cohesion in English Discourse

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The pragmatics of coherence: Cooperativeness and 
politeness
Viewing coherence as a pragmatically-determined quality, many narrative 
analysts turn to pragmatics to achieve a fuller account of coherence. In the study 
of literary coherence the most influential are the linguistic and philosophical 
traditions in pragmatics associated with the work of Paul Grice (1975, 1989); 
another tradition brings about a broader and more sociological approach to 
pragmatic concepts. More recent attempts define pragmatics as the cognitive, 
social and cultural study of language and communication (cf. Mey 1998, 
Verschueren, Östman and Blommaert 1995).
Grice (1975) proposes the idea that participants enter conversation with a 
sincere desire and natural predisposition to cooperate, making their contributions 
suitably truthful, informative, relevant and orderly. When a speaker’s contribution 
diverges from these qualities (i.e. violating or flouting of conversational maxims 
occur) conversational implicatures are created. In parity with conversational 
implicatures in literary text (narration), narrative implicatures are identifiable: the 

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reader of a literary work assumes the general cooperativeness of the author (the 
story-teller) and draws inferences where incomplete or indirect conversational 
contributions are made. Gricean traditional pragmatics has undergone complex 
revision by the relevance theorists, obtaining a more explicitly cognitivist 
direction. In their understanding, cohesion and coherence are categories ultimately 
derivable from relevance (Sperber and Wilson 1995: 289). In a coherent literary 
narrative the reader has to be given sufficient overt and covert clues, which will 
enable him/her to see links and understand the text as a totality or, as Toolan 
states, to “see a point and a tellability” (2012: 29). Similarly to conversation 
cooperativeness, coherence is a strong norm of narrative; its absence raises 
similar reactions as uncooperative behaviour, namely confusion, frustration and 
rejection.
When aiming at processing of literary discourse another aspect of analytical 
work in modern pragmatic stylistics has to be emphasised. It is its central interest 
in interpretations and effects of literary text, which inevitably raises questions 
about contexts in which texts are interpreted. As noted by Stockwell (2006) “a 
growing body of work in stylistics marries up detailed analysis at the micro-
linguistic level with a broader view of the communicative context” and thus 
“stylistics necessarily involves the simultaneous practice of linguistic analysis 
and awareness of the interpretative and social dimension” (Stockwell 2006: 755). 
As Stockwell further points out, the numerous different developments that can 
be outlined in modern stylistics “all have in common the basic stylistic tenets of 
being rigorous, systematic, transparent and open to falsifiability… In short, they 
present themselves as aspects of a social science of literature” (Stockwell 2006: 
755).
Regarding coherence as a pragmatically-determined quality of literary 
discourse, we adopt a pragmatic stylistic approach to literary text, which can 
be best characterized as a process of applying pragmatic principles to stylistic 
analyses of texts. A natural assumption is that Gricean or post-Gricean approaches 
can explain how characters understand each other and how we understand 
characters. Of course, we have to consider the layers of discourse and differentiate 
“between work that applies the pragmatic models to examples of communicative 
interaction between fictional participants in literary texts, and work that addresses 
the nature of the interaction between writer and reader” (McMahon 2006: 232). 
This approach is social in that it focuses on the principles of cooperation and 
politeness as employed by individuals, affected by the given 
social contexts in 
which communication and interpretation of messages take place.
Alongside the Cooperative Principle the Politeness Principle, too, shows 
relevance to the study of coherence in 
literary discourse (cf. Miššíková 2012). 
Considering the setting and situation in literary discourse, we have to acknowledge 
the importance of the reader’s ability to recognize shared background knowledge 

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as well as the patterns of knowledge stored and preserved in our memory. On 
the one hand, scripts, scenarios, and schemata allow for a relatively quick and 
allusive style, and they enable readers to process language quickly. On the 
other hand, the reader’s perception and understanding are dependent on the 
amount and nature of his shared background knowledge, which implies a certain 
relevance to the Politeness Principle as well: the narrator should provide as many 
details, pieces of information, as necessary. Providing more information than 
necessary or giving over specification might be considered as non-cooperative 
and impolite (the reader feels underestimated in his capacity to perceive the 
message correctly). Providing judgements on the level of accuracy (truth-
telling) and informativeness (amount of information) can illustrate some of the 
pragmatically-rooted challenges to coherence.