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Article published In: Pragmatics
Vol. 24:1 (2014) ► pp.63–81

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Text and contextual information retrieval

A relevance-theoretic approach to cohesion

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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 1 March 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.24.1.03kol
This paper argues for a pragmatically based reconsideration of cohesion-based approaches to information retrieval during comprehension, suggesting that a Relevance-based approach is preferable on both descriptive and explanatory grounds. It outlines a number of descriptive and explanatory problems dating back to Halliday and Hasan’s (1976, 1985; Hasan 1984) early view of cohesion, which seem to call for pragmatic solutions, and argues that interpretively used and echoic utterances raise serious questions as to the text-constitutive potential of cohesion. It goes on to discuss a number of cases that seem to pose problems for purely cohesion-based approaches but are straightforwardly explained by the Relevance-Theoretic account.
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