The Multifaceted Organization of Discourse

The organization of discourse is multifaceted. Theories that take a single perspective on discourse structure, examining for example only goal satisfaction or textual coherence or ignoring the context in which a text was generated, will fail to identify the full functional significance of the content and organization of text. The task of generating coherent text to meet some communicative intentions requires consideration of a number of constraints on content and organization that manifest in different ways in the end-product. Therefore the task of analyzing a text with respect to its coherence and intended functionality requires factoring distinct influences on the organization of the text itself.