Coherence as an Issue in Philosophy of Language — Reflections upon a Forty Year History of Coherence Analysis

Ever since the publication of Winterowd’s The Grammar of Coherence, coherence analysis has witnessed four types of approaches during a period of forty years.The four approaches, the linguisticformal approach, the pragmaticinferential approach, the functionalgrammatical approach and the mentalcognitive approach, have been chained to a shared presupposition that coherence is a rulegoverned concept in textual linguistics.Based on this conception, a lot of papers and works have been published, but the theorization of coherence analysis remains unaccomplished.The reason is that coherence analysts have failed to avoid a category mistake in epistemology although they have noticed the Enkvist problem.It is held in this paper that coherence is a normative concept in the domain of philosophy of language.Therefore, coherence analysis should be conducted from the perspective of philosophy of language so as to theorize the concept of coherence.