Linguistic Approaches to Literature - Assignment 18
James Madison University
[This assignment will be marked only as an acceptable or unacceptable effort.]
You will be using the silly "Chet" story that was handed out at the end of Friday's class for this part of your assignment. (This segmented story is also available at this link. This micro-story is already broken into its smallest segments. Your assignment is to try to first find bottom-level coherence relations between some of these segments, and then see how far you can get by combining the new, bigger segments you have formed together with each other and with other segments not yet built into any coherence relations in order to reveal an overall hierarchical structure for the coherence of this story. (See the figures on pages 107 and 110 of your Hobbs reading for a general idea of the sort of structure you would hypothetically/ideally like to get to as your final analysis of the coherence relations in this story. :) )
For this part of the assignment, print out the simplified version of "Hansel and Gretel" at this website. Then see if you can (a) find big "junks of the story that seem to act as large discourse segment. (ven though there will be plenty of smaller ones with connections inside, you don't need to worry about that.) Mark off what you see as the big discourse segments. Then see if you can see a coherence relation between any pair of them. Write down whatever you find, and/or whatever questions arise as you attempt to do this.
