Revisiting Charolles's Anteceding Prepositional Syntagms in Accounting for Coherence in Discourse

As with literature where literarity appreciation entails a literary text, textuality is a prerequisite for materializing texts. In fact, in order for textuality to be actualized, we need to have "coherence" ensured that has been studied by many scholars including Michel Charolles in discourse analysis. A device for establishing this quality as addressed by Charolles is "prepositional syntagms". Even though he duly emphasized the particular function of these devices within coherence, it seems, however, that the perspective in which he envisions the issue can be open to criticism. The present paper seeks to offer an alternative to a formal-syntactic view suggesting that coherence can be characterized in semantic terms in which the reader assumes a more active role. Drawbacks to the former perspective are adequately highlighted and more comprehensive view is offered to compensate for the inadequacies of the linguist's idea. The question which arises here is the relation between textual structuralization using prepositional syntagms and continuity of meaning: whether prepositional syntagms have causative role, that is to say continuity of meaning is due to their presence, or vice-versa, prepositional syntagms are the effect of this continuity. According to this second hypothesis, continuity of meaning results in coherence which creates a specific structuralization and prepositional syntagms are just some elements of this structure. Therefore, if we can find a coherent text or passage which has discoursal conditions of the texts where Charolles studies prepositional syntagms while these elements are absent there, Charolles's theory faces a counterexample. In this way, the role of these elements in issue of coherence will be modified. Thus we believe that criticizing Charolles's theory is sufficient to prove the novelty of this research. As a result, we propose to deal with the issue considering coherence rather than cohesion. Since not only the functions which Charolles attributes to prepositional syntagms are not limited to them, but also these functions cannot, in themselves, guarantee the coherence of the text, because other features such as readers' topic familiarity should be considered as well. To these aims, at the first stage, the particular function of "prepositional syntagms" which Charolles calls "framing adverbials" is clarified through his theory. Subsequently, the paper focuses on deemphasizing the exclusive dominance of such elements through resorting to contextualized aspects of coherence.