Adherence relations in literary and non-literary discourse

This article is intended as a new departure in the theory of the constitution and comprehension of discourse. It begins by extending the notions, familiar in the field of text linguistics, of cohesion and coherence, in such a way as to explain the kinds of necessary relations that exist amongst texts to create larger bodies of discourse that are cognitively real, in just the way that texts are cognitively real. The theoretical approach that has been adopted for this purpose is the Cognitive Discourse Analysis approach of Teun van Dijk. It depends upon the constitutive role of propositions. I go on to claim that the potential in this approach for explaining the nature of texts, their relations within broader realms of discourse, and their subjective comprehension extends to some notoriously difficult areas of research, including the nature of the so-called abstract concepts. Furthermore, it seems that the hypotheses advanced here are eminently testable. What I find especially promising in an approach based on a theory of propositions and intertextual relations is that it potentially opens up the way to a foundational theory that is universally applicable to texts of all conceivable types. For example, where literature has been conceived of as existing in opposition to other non-literary genres, and therefore requiring a branch of theory all its own, the attempt here is rather to show that texts of all types are mutually implicated in interesting ways and that identifying a separate cognitive function of ‘literariness’ is not always and everywhere the best way to understand literature. In the later pages of this article I will attempt to show how narrative genres exemplify certain of the discourse processes I have in mind, particularly how narrative (macro) propositions supply meanings that can be nominalised as abstract nouns.