The roots of coherence in discourse

This article is concerned with the emergence of logical coherence across children's repetitions of their own narrative discourse. I propose that coherence does not emerge in isolation of language, but that it depends on the use and manipulation, in ongoing speech, of specific linguistic forms, such as the clause-linking devices that form part of the cohesive system, the text-forming component of language. Using observations from a young child's spontaneous speech and from older children's elicited narrations, I propose that a function of repeated language play is to set up subsequent discourse for the use of increasingly compact sequences of clauses. This creates narrative compression, an integration of clauses that is not only structural but semantic as well, and that corresponds to a description of events that is more coherent than what was originally described. I point out parallels to the grammaticalization of discourse across both diachronic and longer-term ontogenetic time, and I place the findings within a developmental and social framework. Copyright (C) 2003 S. Karger AG, Basel.