Local pragmatic coherence in Mahfouz's the false dawn

Abstract EN

It is said that the efforts to make the words uttered meaningful within the situational and cultural context of the exchange are efforts to establish pragmatic coherence.

Coherence is not found in speakers' utterances, it is created in the minds of speakers and hearers by the inferences they make grounded on the words they hear.

Broadly speaking, pragmatic coherence are of two types: local and global.

The former refers to the interrelatedness between adjacent discourse while the latter is concerned with the interrelatedness of larger span of discourse.