Latent coherence, contextual meanings, and the interpretation of a text

An attempt is made to explicate a microcoherency property, i.e., the property of being an acceptable unit of some textual level. It is assumed that a text (T) is acceptable (= microcoherent) if a question-and-answer type pragmatic complement is available. A formal procedure for structuring a textwise continuous unity (extended text-ET) of the surface T and its pragmatic complement is developed. Every semantic connection in T is to be ‘proved’ by commonsense postulates constituting the pragmatic complement; ET is a set of pragmatic proofs for every implicit semantic connection. ET may be used as a working basis for an explanatory model applicable to the diverse phenomena of text performance, e.g., to the generation of specific word meanings by a context. A contextual meaning of a word arises as a result of interaction between words and word phrases involved in explicit as well as implicit semantic connections. Hence, any contextual meaning may be represented by an appropriate excerption from ET.