Semantic and pragmatic sources of coherence: On the categorization of coherence relations in context

Abstract

This article discusses a distinction present in many theories of relation categorization: the Source of Coherence, which distinguishes between semantic and pragmatic relations. Existing categorizations of both relations and connectives show a reasonable consensus on prototypical examples. Still, there many ambiguous cases. How can the distinction be clarified? And to what extent does it depend on the context in which relations occur?

A more precise text‐linguistic definition is presented in the form of a paraphrase test, intended to systematically check analysts’ intuitions. A paraphrase experiment shows that language users recognize the difference between clear cases in context. More importantly, the type of context (descriptive, argumentative) appeared not to influence the interpretation of clear cases, whereas subjects’ judgements of ambiguous relations are influenced by the type of context. A corpus study further illustrates the link between text type and relation type: Informative texts are dominated by semantic relations, persuasive and expressive texts are dominated by pragmatic relations.