Abstract
Though some approaches to global coherence have tried to analyse it in terms of coherence relations, by analogy to the usual treatment of local coherence, the resulting problems (outlined in the last chapter) have led some researchers to approach global coherence in terms of a notion of (discourse) topic relevance. In this chapter I want to survey four recent variants of this approach: Klein and von Stutterheim’s (1987) and von Stutterheim’s (1997) quaestio approach, Giora’s (1985a; 1985b; 1988; 1997; 1998) topic-based account of global coherence, and van Kuppevelt’s (1991; 1995a; 1995b; 1996) question-based theory of topic, comment and discourse structure.1 These approaches to the notion of topic have in common that they more or less explicitly suggest an influence of genre on discourse topics.
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