The key to the concept of coherence (“everything fitting together well”) is not something that exists in words or structures, but something that exists in people. It is people who “make sense” of what they read and hear. They try to arrive at an interpretation that is in line with their experience of the way the world is. Indeed, our ability to make sense of what we read is probably only a small part of that general ability we have to make sense of what we perceive or experience in the world. You may have found when you were reading the last example (of oddly constructed text) that you kept trying to make the text fit some situation or experience that would accommodate all the details (involving a red car, a woman and a letter). If you work at it long enough, you may indeed find a way to incorporate all those disparate elements into a single coherent interpretation. In doing so, you would necessarily be involved in a process of filling in a lot of gaps that exist in the text. You would have to create meaningful connections that are not actually expressed by the words and sentences. This process is not restricted to trying to understand “odd” texts. In one way or another, it seems to be involved in our interpretation of all discourse.
Posted on: Mon, 15 Sep 2014 09:03:19 +0000