The Pragmatics of Discourse Coherence

Over the past four decades, discourse coherence has been studied from linguistic, psycholinguistic, computational, and applied perspectives. This volume identifies current issues and under-researched topics in the pragmatics of discourse coherence. Nine studies from various disciplines address the realization and signalling of coherence relations in various genres and languages, their acquisition and use by first- and second-language learners and university students, the relationship between coherence relations and genre-specific discourse structure, and extensions of the coherence paradigm to multimodal discourse and visual art. This collection will be of interest to researchers from linguistics, applied linguistics, psychology, communication, and multimodal semiotics.

Elisabetta Adami, University of Leeds, in Journal of Pragmatics, Vol 103 (2016):
Among the many strengths of the volume are the specific attention devoted to multimodality, traditionally disregarded in linguistic works on coherence, the significant effort in integrating Rhetorical Structure Theory with theories and tools drawn from other approaches, as well as the contributors’ modelling of analytical frames, which lend themselves to be applied to further work. [...] I believe the volume constitutes an extremely useful and rich contribution on discourse coherence.