Submitted to a volume on coherence edited by Gerhard Preyer

Abstract
Where does coherence reside? In current treatments of discourse coherence, coherence is understood as a property of a text or discourse, attributable on the basis of relations that hold between its proposition-denoting units. In this paper, we offer an alternative (but compatible) cognitively-based view of coherence, which locates coherence in the agent’s mental representation of the content of the discourse, and in the processes whereby this representation is generated. On this view, coherence reflects the presence of connections between the concepts which are activated in the course of processing. These conceptual inter-relations are not necessarily (or typically) propositional. In the paper, we lay out this notion of concept-level coherence, and illustrate it with an analysis of nominal bridging.