Resumen de The Embodied Basis of Discourse Coherence
This doctoral dissertation investigates the corporeal basis of global and local coherence. As far as global coherence is concerned, the main argument of this thesis is that the search for global coherence is often guided by means of metaphorical mappings, particularly those having to do with the conceptual metaphor DISCOURSE IS A FORM OF MOTION ALONG A PATH INFLUENCED BY FORCE DYNAMICS. In the case of local coherence, the analysis presented focuses only on a subset of interclausal connections: cause-effect and cause-concession relations, when explicitly marked by means of discourse markers. This thesis successfully assesses the hypothesis that Talmy’s force-dynamic model, along with conceptual metaphor, may account for the semantic content and the type of inferences that said subset of connectives generate during language processing. More broadly, this thesis provides evidence to support the premise that not only the general structure of discourse, but also the coherence relations on which it relies, emerge from our embodied interaction with the world.
