Coherence: The lifeblood of anaphora

Abstract. Coherence, which is an interpretative principle utilised by cooperative speakers/writers and hearers/readers, should not be confused with cohesion. Cohesion markers are not strictly necessary for the achievement of a coherent interpretation of a fragment of text, relative to some context, and overt incohesion does not necessarily point to an incoherent interpretation of the co-text. Anaphor resolution is a crucial part of the process of integration by which hearers/readers guided by the coherence principle integrate their interpretation of the current incoming clause into the current discourse model. A detailed study of the interdependencies holding between discourse model, antecedent-trigger predication, and anaphoric predication, shows that the anaphoric predication, just as much as the particular type of anaphor selected, plays a more fundamental role than the current discourse context in real discourse understanding.