Questions: Discourse Coherence and Rhetorical Relations

Question 1

Read the pair: 'She practiced violin every day for a year. Her audition was a disaster.' What coherence relation does a reader most naturally assign between these sentences?

• A. Elaboration — the second sentence provides more detail about the practice sessions
• B. Concession/contrast — the effort and outcome are in tension with expected results
• C. Narration — the second event simply follows the first in time
• D. Explanation — the audition failure explains why she practiced so much

Answer: (B)

The reader uses world knowledge (practice should lead to success) to detect a violation of expectations between the two sentences. This signals a concession or contrast relation — the expected causal chain (practice → success) is disrupted. No connective like 'but' or 'however' is present; the reader assigns the relation inferentially. Option C is too weak — mere temporal sequence doesn't capture the rhetorical tension. Option D reverses the causal direction.

Question 2

Which of the following best demonstrates that discourse coherence is NOT simply a matter of topical relatedness between sentences?

• A. A paragraph about photosynthesis becomes incoherent if a sentence about digestion is inserted
• B. Two topically related sentences can feel incoherent if no inferrable rhetorical relation links them
• C. A text loses coherence whenever connective words like 'therefore' or 'however' are removed
• D. Coherence requires that all sentences refer to the same discourse referent throughout

Answer: (B)

Coherence requires that readers be able to construct a rhetorical relation between adjacent sentences, not merely that sentences share a topic. Consider: 'She was a brilliant chef. Her father had red hair.' Both sentences could be about the same person (topically related) yet the passage is incoherent because no plausible relation can be assigned. Option A describes topical incoherence, which is a necessary but insufficient condition. Option C is wrong — coherence relations are often conveyed without explicit connectives.

Question 3

The sentence pair 'He ran a marathon. He was exhausted.' conveys a causal relation even though no causal connective appears in the text.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: True

This is a central finding in coherence theory: readers automatically assign coherence relations based on world knowledge and pragmatic inference, without requiring explicit connectives. The reader knows that running a marathon causes exhaustion, and uses this to construct a causal interpretation. This implicit coherence relation is just as real and deterministic as one signaled by 'therefore' or 'as a result.' RST and related frameworks document how such relations structure entire texts, mostly without explicit marking.

Question 4

A text is coherent as long as each of its sentences is grammatically well-formed and addresses the same general topic.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

Grammaticality and topical unity are necessary but not sufficient for coherence. A sequence of grammatically perfect, topically related sentences can still feel incoherent if no rhetorical relation can be inferred between adjacent sentences. For example: 'The concert was on Friday. The piano has 88 keys. Mozart was born in 1756.' All three sentences are grammatically correct and loosely related to music, but no interpretable relation links them. Coherence requires that adjacent segments stand in a recognizable rhetorical relationship.

Question 5

Explain why removing all explicit connective words (like 'because,' 'however,' 'therefore') from a paragraph does not necessarily destroy its coherence.

Model answer: Coherence relations can be conveyed implicitly through world knowledge, pragmatic inference, and contextual cues like tense and aspect. Readers actively construct the most salient relation between adjacent sentences, drawing on knowledge about causation, event sequences, and narrative norms. Connectives are signals that make relations explicit and easier to process, but they are not the source of the relations themselves — the underlying semantic and pragmatic relationships between the propositions are what create coherence.

This is the key theoretical point: connectives are surface-level cues, not the deep structure of coherence. A skilled writer can create a fully coherent text with minimal connectives by arranging propositions so that their relations are inferrable. Conversely, a text that uses many connectives incorrectly (e.g., 'therefore' between two unrelated claims) can be incoherent despite heavy explicit marking. Coherence is a property of the reader's ability to construct a consistent interpretation, not of the text's surface form.