الفهرس 
What is Coherence?Only 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
The primary aim of the present study is to investigate and analyze the concept of ”Coherence Relations” in a specific significant mode of discourse, which is ”Narrative Discourse”. The ”Short Story” is the narrative genre chosen for the analysis. The data for the analysis consists of eight short stories written by two different short story writers. The first is the Egyptian short story writer ”Yusuf Idris” (1927 1991); the other is the American short story writer ”Ernest Hemingway” (1899 – 1961). First, Idris’s selected short stories are the following:
1) ”Arkhas Layali” (The Cheapest Nights)
2) ”Nazrah” (A Glance)
3) ”Bayt min Lahm” (A House of Flesh)
4) ”Alusfur walsilk” (The Sparrow and the Wire)
Second, Hemingway’s selected short stories are the following:
1) ”A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”
2) ”Cat in the Rain”
3) ”A Day’s Wait”
4) ”The Sea Change”
The study is divided into SIX chapters. They are the following:
• Chapter one: Introduction: it is mainly concerned with elaborating the objectives of the study, the adopted approach, and reviewing the main concepts that will be discussed, namely, Coherence, Coherence Relations, and Narrative Discourse.
• Chapter two: Review of Literature: it reviews a number of previous researches and studies that are concerned with the same points discussed in the present study.
• Chapter three: Theoretical Framework: it sheds light on ”Rhetorical Structure Theory” (RST), which is the adopted theory for the analysis. It reviews the main concepts and principles of the theory.
• Chapter four & Chapter five: the analysis: these two chapters are devoted to the application of (RST) to the short stories of both writers. The analysis is in terms of the coherence relations between the parts of the stories.
• Chapter six: conclusion: it reviews the main findings and results that were concluded after the analysis and application of the theory.
For a set of utterances or sentences to be interpreted fully, they have to cohere. Discourse is not just a group of scattered unrelated sentences. Rather, sentences are related syntactically and semantically. In linguistics, the term ’Coherence’ refers to the set of concepts and relations that underlie the meaning of discourse. The overall inter-relatedness in a text is mainly attributed to coherence. It is the element of discourse that accounts for the continuity in meaning and context (Louwerse & Graesser, 2005: 216); ”the meaning relations which hold between items in a text (Brown & Yule, 1983: 195). Coherence relations are partly responsible for the perceived coherence of a text. They enable language users to assign coherence to a text (Taboada, 2006: 567). The present study makes reference to the paratactic and hypotactic relations that hold between two or more units of discourse. The emphasis is on ’Narrative Discourse’.
Narrative is one of discourse rhetorical modes. It is an account of connected events in such a way that each action (event or incident) should result from the previous ones and should lead to the following actions. This entails that writers of a narrative text should design their texts in accordance with both their own communicative goals and with their idea about their readers’ needs and expectations. Therefore, writers choose the particular forms that help the addressees detect the linking relations in the text and build a coherent mental model of the text content.
Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) is the framework adopted for this study for investigating both the structure of the short story texts and the coherence relations that hold between the parts. According to RST, text structure is hierarchic, built on small patterns called schemas. The schemas describe the functions of the parts, rather than their linguistic characteristics.
One major issue in the present study is how to recognize the relations between the text parts. The relations can be explicitly marked by ’Discourse Markers’ (or cue phrases). However, the relations can be implicit. Therefore, they are inferred. Certain mechanisms are used for identifying the relation: morphological, syntactic, or semantic. Morphologically, the ’tense’ can be an indication for the succession or the temporal order of events. Syntactically, the sentence mood (declarative, imperative, interrogative) can be a clue to inferring the relation. Semantically, the meaning of verbs can indicate the relation holding between the segments (e.g. cause, trigger, and so forth).
The main distinctive features of RST can be summarized in the following points:
1) It provides comprehensive analyses rather than selective commentary. This is shown in its assigning a purpose and status to every part of a text.
2) Each relation is provided with a definition that functions as ’a check list’, i.e. the analyst can check that ”if all the constraints given in the definition of an RST relation hold for the two text spans under consideration, then this RST relation holds between the text spans” (Grote, 2003: 46).
3) The relations are defined in terms of the effect that a particular text segment ha son the reader.
4) The relations place an emphasis on the writer’s intention of choosing such a set of units.
The text segments related by a relation are often of a different status or importance. This is known as the assumption of ’Nuclearity’.