Discourse, coherence and relevance: A reply

This paper is a response to the arguments of Rachel Giora (1997) that relevance theory, as developed by Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995), cannot account for intuitions of text or discourse coherence. The paper has three main aims: first, to clarify the goals and mechanisms of relevance theory; second, to show how relevance theory can shed some light on intuitions of local and global coherence; and third, to compare the resulting relevance-theoretic account with Giora's coherence-based account.