“Making cookies”: local and global coherence in picture-elicited narratives

This article attempts to offer a more thorough understanding of the relationship between cohesion and coherence in a text. A picture-elicited narrative was analyzed from the points of view of local coherence and global coherence: the first accounts for the relationship between utterances and sentences structured as sequential continuations, while the latter provides an overall unity and sense of order to a series of utterances. Time pressure was the key element: the narrative was in fact recorded twice, and a first fast telling and a second slow telling were elicited. Firstly, the two versions were investigated with a focus on the use of surface linguistic features, considering the cohesive categories used by the teller, such as reference, conjunctive relations and lexical items, and secondly a further investigation aimed at identifying their schema, i.e. the way in which information about the setting and the plot in the story is delivered.