Coherence and Cohesion in English Discourse

picture of the phrase in my head it just confuses me because imagining an 
apple in someone’s eye doesn’t have anything to do with liking someone a 
lot and it makes you forget what the person was talking about. 
(HM: 20)
Humorous texts and jokes built on cross-referencing, script oppositions and 
semantic ambiguity as such make him feel uneasy. He confesses that he cannot 
tell jokes because he does not understand them. In Example (8) he reacts to the 
fact that he understands why the joke ‘His face was drawn but the curtains were 
real’ is meant to be funny (he provides an excellent semantic analysis of the 
polysemy and cross-referencing used in a joke) but still he does not find it funny 
because:
(8)
 If I try to say a joke to myself making the word mean the three different 
things at the same time, it is like hearing three different pieces of music 
at the same time which is uncomfortable and confusing and not nice like 
white noise. It is like three people trying to talk to you at the same time 
about different things.
(HM: 10)
To some extent, there is a parallel here with (non-native and native) speakers 
lacking broader cultural background knowledge; their inability to recognise 
specific social situational contexts, regional or local idiosyncrasies causes 
them to misinterpret or even misunderstand humorous discourse, jokes, puns, 
advertisements, TV commercials, etc.
The superimposition of several semantic levels in a text is called pluri- or 
poly-isotopy (
Nöth
 1995: 319). Poly-isotopy requires a certain amount of 
cooperativeness between the narrator and the reader and can be explained also in 

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pragmatic terms (cf. Sections 3 and 4 above). Similarly to spoken conversation, 
in a literary text the author can violate conversational maxims with the aim of 
deceiving the reader. Example (9) represents non-observance of the maxim and 
inferences about a character in a novel (Lily) and how her way of life can be 
understood by the reader:
(9) Listen: Auntie Lily knows the way it really is.
Air is free. What, you know that? Good for you. Okay. Food is free. Ah, 
you didn’t know that one! 
The food’s piled up everywhere – on shelves, in great heaps and stacks on 
the floor, in boxes and bags and bins. You want it, you name it – it’s yours. 
(BM: 193)
The reader infers that Lily deceives us by saying that stealing is normal. An 
implicated meaning is that she pretends to be free and happy. The author thus 
intentionally communicates an implicature that homeless drug addicts create 
their own world view and adopt some weird sense of morality (cf. Miššíková 
2011).
As stated by Goatly (2012: 101), in literary texts “isotopy is a way of eliminating 
ambiguity, and selection restrictions have an important role to play because they 
are one kind of redundant or repeated semantic feature”. The decision of the 
reader as to what feature or meaning level is redundant or repeated mirrors their 
capacity to recognise (more or less sophisticated) socially rooted, culture-based 
contexts. This may explain why seemingly non-coherent ambiguous texts are well 
received by some readers. The following example illustrates the type of literary 
discourse where effective knowledge of specific historical, cultural, political and 
social contexts is crucial for correct understanding. A certain familiarity with the 
British political scene is necessary (implicatures leading to the Tory party, as the 
speaker is ‘conservative’ in his political opinions) and also cues provided by the 
broader context of the novel (for instance, if we know that the speaker is black 
we perceive his use of expressive language differently).
(10) 
 You might ask what’s a Tory like me doing helping the squatters? A proper 
Tory mind, not one of your watered-down, middle-of-the-road ones. If I 
had my way, all the darkies’d get sent back home. Why not? They have 
their culture we have ours. If you knew the number of people I do who’ve 
turned around and found themselves stuck in the middle of the Carib-
bloody-bean and it was Bristol City twenty years ago, so would you. And 
cut down on the social security and all that. 
(BM: 162)

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Moreover, personal experiential complex can ‘guarantee’ that no two 
readers perceive and interpret a literary text identically. Example (11) would be 
understood differently by East Europeans and (native) Americans depending on 
their social characteristics (age, education, social status, travel experience, etc.).
(11) 
 ‘You need the leaders of both sides to keep the cold war going. It’s the 
one constant thing. It’s honest, it’s dependable. Because when the tension 
and rivalry come to an end, that’s when your worst nightmares begin. 
All the power and intimidation of the state will seep out of your personal 
bloodstream. You will no longer be the main – what do I want to say?’ 
(DLD: 170)
We assume that readers in their meaning-making efforts make decisions 
between two or more isotopical schemas in terms of their saliency. They select 
from different aspects of what they know about the subject matter introduced 
in a text and usually opt for the one which is less salient. An exploration of the 
interface between these selection restrictions and co-text is rooted in semantic 
study and componential analysis but the results are effectively applied in the 
analysis of (narrative literary) texts.