Strategies for establishing discourse coherence. The case of Slovene dialectal discourse

Abstract

A discourse is considered coherent only if all its parts are semantically related to each other and if it makes sense. However, coherence cannot be attributed to a discourse in advance because it depends on how the participants understand what they hear/ read. So we can say that it is not the discourse that establishes coherence, but the participants according to their understanding of a discourse. In practise, this means that for the same discourse there are at least two coherences that may or may not match up. Usually they match up to some extent because participants follow the cooperative principle of mutual willingness to establish coherence in discourse. There are several strategies for establishing and maintaining discourse coherence; among them, repetition and inference form an extensive group. In this paper, however, I will focus only on the strategies that are typical of spontaneous spoken discourse. These are the following: questions, completion, contradiction and polyphonic talk. In the second part of the article I will present each of them in the examples of spontaneous dialectal discourse. The texts were recorded in Brda, a region in the far west of Slovenia. The dialect spoken there is called the Brda dialect. It belongs to the Littoral dialect group of the Slovene language.