A Study Of The Causes Of Incoherent Utterances And Their Understanding

This study intends to trace the causes of 'incoherent' utterances at the intersection where linguistic and social factors combine to work, and show that understanding the factors contributes to the understanding of the utterances. It first investigates the causes and then seeks ways to impose interpretation.The study examines closely how the factors cause incoherence, how speakers produce utterances under the influence of these factors and, in particular, how hearers interpret the utterances to understand them (the speakers). In search of the causes, factors such as cohesion, linguistic competence and cultual differences are only briefly discussed to make room for a study of the genuine factors that cause incoherence. Such factors include social appropriateness of language, politeness, use of metaphor, common knowledge and the consideration of least effort. The study takes a particular interest in how least effort works on language production, or how it makes language become incoherent. The study insists that language interpretation put users at the centre of attention and that utterances be studied in situations.Besides social approaches to incoherent utterances, the study adopts the principles of equivalent effect and relevance as tools for interpretation. Thus, one has two ways of interpretation. One is to derive equivalent effect as the interpretation of an utterance; the other to derive utterance interpretation via relevance.The study shows that the extent to which language is coherent interferes with understanding and that, besides the known social factors, human language behaviour is also governed by the Principle of Least Effort, especially when people utter language in emergency situations and that, since these factors cause incoherence, utterance interpretation requires a full understanding of the factors surrounding the utterances. The findings should favor utterance understanding and the construction of pragmatic competence.