On The Cognitive Conciliation Of Informativity And Coherence

Informativity of text is related to conceptualcoherence. The coherent concepts can be realized asvarious cohesive forms. Those forms can also realizedifferent information status. An appropriate text should satisfy at least two textual standards: a) It should possess proper informativity. b) It should be coherent. From the perspective of textual standards, that is, the textual constraints, a text is not the fragments of an utterance; it should be constrained both by the informativity and the conditions of text coherence. The informativity standard requires that a text should contain proper new information, and the conditions of text coherence also permit no superfluous information. This paper attempts to discuss how the conditions of text coherence operate if the informativity standard is violated. First, it gives a brief comment on the functional grammar. Then it discusses theinformativity, the representation of discourse structure andthe coherence in the interpretation of discourse. Finally, it mainly discusses from a cognitive perspective the contrastive conciliation of informativity and coherence, sketches the coherent conceptual networks, and explores the relations between text coherence and information status.