Genre, Relevance and Global Coherence seeks to explain how discourse types or genre may influence the addressee's inferential processes in identifying the communicator's intention. There are two main areas where such an influence is often felt: the interpretation of tense and aspect markers is often said to differ in various text types, and the communication of implicatures is said to differ in various talk-exchange types. The first type of genre effects is usually approached by global coherence-based accounts whereas the second by proposals based on Gricean pragmatics. This study examines both types of accounts, arguing that the key to a solution lies in the interplay of the cognitive and communicative principles of relevance proposed by Sperber and Wilson. It unravels intricate relations between cognitive mechanisms, communicative principles and expectations of relevance in complex ostensive stimuli such as texts.

'This book has thrown a challenge out to linguistics: can any one theory account  for the many-faceted nature of a text? Each chapter has been treated with significant depth to explain the author's thesis, to produce a book whose  importance extends beyond the specific issues under scrutiny…this book is an excellent contribution to scholarship in terms of  the global coherence of text interpretation using GT and RT and the hypothesis  of the cognitive pragmatic function of genre by Unger opens up many and varied  research areas.'
Philippa Mungra, University of Rome, Italy, writing on LINGUIST List

Acknowledgements
Introduction
PART 1: GLOBAL COHERENCE AND GENRE
Global Coherence and Global Discourse Relations
Topic-based Approaches to Global Coherence
Global Coherence and Grounding In Discourse
PART 2: EXPECTATIONS OF RELEVANCE AND GENRE
Expectations of Relevance
Expectations of Relevance, Implicit Questioning in Discourse, and Genre
Empirical Issues in Global Coherence and Discourse Typology
Genre in Code-based Theories of Communication
Conversational Maxims and Genre
A Re-analysis of Genre and its Implications for Pragmatics
Notes
Bibliography
Index

CHRISTOPH UNGER has been working with SIL International since 1992 on linguistic fieldwork and the training and supervision of translators. His research focuses on pragmatic theory and its implications for natural language semantics and cross-cultural communication, particularly translation.