Traitement des contraintes linguistiques et cognitives dans la construction de la cohérence textuelle

Abstract

This article begins with an overview of the studies related to the coherence phenomenon, as it is constructed by the readers. It demonstrates how the studies of comprehension clarify the functioning of text production, especially when it comes to the mental representation of the text, coherence relations, linguistic markers and inference processes. Subsequently, this article focuses on the writers and investigates how they process linguistic and cognitive constraints during their text production. It relies on the writing samples produced by students who were asked to write a continuation for a text and develops the questioning around two types of constraints: those related to a text produced so far, and those associated with memory limits of the writer. Within this perspective, text production is studied by considering textual and cognitive conditions of writing both as constraints and heuristics of production. More precisely, it is investigated how a young writer articulates certain enunciative, thematic and structural constraints imposed by the priming text. Based on these empiric analyses, the last part of the article shows how memory influences the management of the writing constraints.