The difficulty with this argument, however, is that it does not distinguish between example (3) and the following example.
(10) |
Ann is so happy! She is tall. She just got a promotion! |
For a formal account of the intuitive difference between examples (3) and (10), let us first look at another local pragmatics problem--the interpretation of vague predicates, specifically, the vague predicate conveyed by the adjacency of two nouns in a compound nominal, such as ``kitchen light''. The explicit content of the phrase ``kitchen light'' is
(11) |
Suppose we know that a kitchen is a room:
(12) |
(13) |
Just as a vague relation is conveyed by the adjacency of the nouns in a compound nominal, so also is a vague relation conveyed by the adjacency of two segments of discourse. We may call this relation CoRel. Thus, when we are interpreting example (3) and we must prove its explicit content, it is not enough to abductively prove (7). That is not all that is conveyed. We must prove
(14) |
happy'(e1,A), CoRel(e1,e2,e), promotion(e2,A) |
By contrast, in example (10) there is no explanation of the relation conveyed by the adjacency of the successive segments. This is illustrated in Figure , where coreference is established but coherence is not. The fact that there is no pragmatic strengthening of the CoRel relations in this example is the formal correlate of our sense of the incoherence of the text. An analogous compound nominal example is ``kitchen job light'', where the nnrelations between ``kitchen'' and ``job'' and between ``job'' and ``light'' would be unexplained.
In summary, considerations of coreference and other aspects of local pragmatics can sometimes provide all the information that would be provided by a coherence analysis, but they leave the coherence (or incoherence) itself unexplained.