Coherence and Anaphora

As of Volume 9 (1994/95) John Benjamins Publishing Company is the official publisher of the Belgian Journal of Linguistics, the annual publication of the Linguistic Society of Belgium. Each volume is topical and includes selected papers from the international meetings organised by the LSB.

The objective of this collection of essays is to show the ways in which anaphoric expressions contribute to the coherence, or possibly the incoherence, of discourse. Coherence can be viewed as a general interpretive principle that hearers follow in integrating information from current clauses and utterances in their mental model of discourse. Semantic value and formal (morphological and syntactic) properties restrain the interpretation of anaphora. Research into the activation and accessibility of the knowledge store leads to Gricean maxims and Relevance Theory, which are exemplified here.