Coherence and Cohesion in English Discourse

5.1 Cognitive stylistics approach
Modern studies in 
cognitive stylistics reveal interesting findings on the 
cognitive processes by which readers respond to particular aspects of (literary) 

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texts. The approach of cognitive stylistics enables the exploration of ways in 
which readers get actively involved in the process of making sense of what 
they read and often critical reading is required to decipher correctly the whole 
complexity of implied meanings (cf. Verdonk 2002). Theoretically founded on a 
belief that readers are active within the process of meaning-making, it works with 
several closely-related notions, notably the notion of 1) psychological distinction 
between bottom-up and top-down processing in relation to text comprehension, 
and the conception of 2) 
schema theory (cf. Jeffries and McIntyre 2010).
Both notions are closely related to the exploration of cohesion and coherence 
in text. Studied in psychology, the mental processes of integration and inference 
have been introduced as related to the recognising of cohesive links and the 
establishing of coherence in texts. The complexity of cohesion and coherence 
bears direct influence on the readers’ understanding of text structures. As first 
noted by van Peer (1989), in the process of analysing the human perception of 
texts and messages encoded in linguistic structures, the psychological notion of 
inference and integration is used to describe the process of completing a text. 
The following table is adapted from one of his classical papers on reading and 
understanding literary texts (van Peer 1989):
TEXT
↓
lacking


text-external reference
⇓
(incomplete)