Bill Mann on Intentions and Coherence in Language

This aspect of linguistics is separate here because it is broader than my other interests, including RST and monologue, DMT and dialogue, and the more general focus on communication. It applies to all of those, and much more in the field.

A weakness of linguistics as we know it is that, for very good historical reasons, it gives almost all of its attention to items the size of sentences and smaller, and much less attention to how those items function at a human scale of language use. There is inadequate attention to larger things -- whole texts, whole dialogues, entire arguments in court, how language is used to influence people's health -- the list is unbounded. If we see linguistics as capable, in principle, of beneficial effects on the lives of communicating people, this pattern is hard to defend.

I have therefore been interested in the large scale structures of language use, studying where possible the entireties of natural episodes of language use. RST is about one kind -- monologues. DMT is about a very different kind, two person interactions (dialouges). My ongoing work on communication is also concerned with the larger temporal scales and events.

One approachable way to examine complete records of language use, a success path for me, has been to focus on coherence. [ Here is a text, or perhaps a record of an interpersonal interaction, perhaps with audio and video. It looks coherent to me, and others in my group agree. Why does it seem coherent? Why does this other one not seem coherent? ] Focusing on coherence reveals a great deal, including some aspects that could not be accessed from a bottom-up development starting with sounds or morphemes. Coherence is thus a valuable, advantageous choice of research attention.

All of the work mentioned above has turned out to involve intentions in a central way. Intentions (along with culture, genre and conventions) seem to be the glue and the justification that give natural interactions their form at large scales. So, I have given some separate attention to intentions.

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There are some memos, mostly unpublished, on these two topics.

• Coherence:
  • A memo originally written with a focus on dialogue is really more broadly usable: (Dialogue) Coherence
  • In the Introduction to RST region of the RST website, there is a discussion of how RST bears on the topic of coherence.
• Intentions:

  • Interest in intentions led to a search of the applicable literatures, trying to identify what technical models of intentions have been described. This led to an unexpectedly broad range of sources, too many to list. The task then became one of identifying the characteristics that differentiate one model of intention from another. This memo Models of Intention in Language -- PDF presents a set of attributes that differentiate published models. The memo is also available in DOC form rather than PDF, and it will be a chapter in a forthcoming book: P. Kühnlein, H. Rieser, & H. Zeevat (Eds.), Perspectives on Dialogue in the New Millennium (Vol. 114, P&B NS). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    Beyond that, I recommend Gibbs, R. W. J. (1999). Intentions in the Experience of Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.