In the last ten years, numerous studies have been done on cohesion in English. These studies have been inadequate first because they analyze only the cohesion that is marked formally in surface manifestations of language and secondly because they are limited to interclausal, intersentential or paragraph cohesion. These inadequacies severely limit what can be said about cohesion in language. A few studies have gone beyond the structural cohesion of language to explore the generic, social, referential, silential, or medial coherence relations which constrain discourse. These studies have been done on languages other than English. A French linguist, Oswald Ducrot, in developing his general theory of linguistic semantics, has focused much of his research on the silential coherence of French texts, on the habits of thinking which constrain the production of natural language in French. The exploration of utterance linking to the unsaid of texts becomes the source of hypotheses which lead to the theoretical imagining of (1) strategies imposed by the speaker of an utterance on the receiver for the interpretation of the discourse as well as (2) the maneouvers to which the text is contrained. Ducrot's influential work has remained relatively unknown in the United States: only four translations of his work have been done. This dissertation is an act of modern philology (Becker: 1979) in that it contextualizes Ducrot's work in terms of all the coherence relations mentioned above, except the silential, and presents three translations of his work: one major theoretical written work and two seminar transcriptions. Familiarity with Ducrot's extensive theoretical work and detailed text analyses opens the possibility of a greater aesthetic underst and ing of French discourse. The focus on the unsaid relations which account for meaning gives non-native speakers access to native speaker strategies of interpretation.Ph.D.LinguisticsUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/160556/1/8512458.pd
