Towards a Model of Local Pragmatic Coherence

Abstract

PRAGMATIC COHERENCE can be either local or global. Global PRAGMATIC COHERENCE, which is not the concern of this study, holds the relations of speech acts in a whole conversation, whereas local PRAGMATIC COHERENCE holds the relations between sequential speech acts in that conversation. In this work, the relations and interrelatedness between the utterances of discourse will be investigated in terms of local pragmatic coherence only. This means that the type of relations investigated here will be pragmatic ones. Theoretically