ABSTRACT
The concept of coherence has long been introduced; however, its perspective
theories have not been gathered into a collective framework. As one of the first
attempts to explore the coherence features in the context of English funny stories
comprehension of fourth-year mainstream students at Faculty of English Teacher
Education, ULIS, VNU, this paper seeks to explore the difficulties and techniques
made by the students in humorous discourse. The paper begins by reviewing the
current literature on coherence, some foundation linguistic theories and related
studies. The investigation then involved the participation of 30 students who
undertook questionnaires and interviews. The analysis of the collected data
demonstrated some specific perceptions about coherence and coherence role as a
way to understand discourse humor by Vietnamese learners. In addition, it revealed
the weaknesses of students when reading English funny stories. To overcome all
these difficulties, students often (1) try to re-establish the context of the story and
decode it, (2) find out the implicature of the story and the conversation, (3) try to
link their background knowledge with the story content.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT i
LIST OF TABLES, FIGURES, CHARTS, AND ABBREVIATIONS iii
INTRODUCTION 1
DEVELOPMENT 5
CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW AND THEORETICAL BACKGROUND 5
1. 1. Previous studies 5
CHAPTER 2: METHODOLOGY 31
2.1. Selection of subjects 31


2. 2. Data collection instruments 32
2.3. Procedures of data collection 33
CHAPTER 3: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS 35

Tables
Table 1: Speech acts of an utterance
Table 2: Some characteristics of indirect speech act
Table 3: Widdowson’s example of functional coherence
Table 4: Nunan’s example of functional coherence
Table 5: The cooperative principle
Table 6: The features of context according to Hymes
Table 7: Areas of investigation in each part of the questionnaires
Table 8: Areas of investigation in each part of the interviews
Table 9: Substitutes
Table 10: Students’ arrangements
Table 11: Students’ explanations for arrangements.
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18
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19
21
26
32
33
42
42
43
Abbreviations
FELTE: Faculty of English Language Teacher Education
ULIS: University of Languages and International Studies
VNU: Vietnam National University
ISA: Indirect speech act
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Retrieved from />
Having a high personal interest in discourse coherence, the researcher has
decided to conduct a study on “Coherence in English funny stories: A study of
discourse analysis” to provide an in-depth understanding of coherence and the role
of coherence in humorous discourse in the Vietnam educational setting. In short,
the research’s aim is to make it easier for leaners of English including researcher
when reading English funny stories, and then know how to apply it to make daily
life works and activities more happily and more effectively than ever.
2. Research questions
The first aim of the research is to find out some specific features of
coherence. In another words, the study aims to find out what makes a story sounds
funny in term of coherence characteristics. Besides, the researcher’s ambition is to
propose some methods to promote coherence understanding.
From that the study would seek to answer the following questions:
1. Are there some specific perceptions of coherence and the role of coherence
as a way to understand discourse humor by Vietnamese learners?
2. What are the difficulties the students encounter in order to understand
coherence as well as humor features of English funny stories?
3. What techniques have been utilized by the students to overcome those
difficulties in English funny stories?
3. Significance of the study
The research presents a firm collective framework of coherence subject to
which little previous English research has done. It helps us realize the role of
coherence in discourses generally and in funny stories particularly. Along with that,
by gathering and defining expressive features/ characteristics of coherence, the
study can help the readers easily realize whether a certain discourse is coherent or
not. In addition, the readers’ comprehension of funny stories will be improved and
this type of discourse is not ambiguous any more. The researcher, with this study,
hopes to bring a real picture of what is going on in English funny stories
comprehension and to help students improve their reading skill.

Following this chapter are the References and Appendices.
Summary:
In this chapter, the researcher has elaborated about:
- The statement of the research problem and rationale for the study
- Aims and objectives of the study
- Scope of the study
- An overview of the rest of the paper
In short, these points justify the contents and structure of the study. In addition,
they serve as the guidelines for the rest of the paper.

DEVELOPMENT
CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW AND
THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
1. 1. Previous studies
Research concerned with the development of coherence in funny stories is
few in the current literature. Some of the most relevant researches are Topical
coherence in spoken discourse by Wolfram Bublitz (1989) and Coherence in
political speeches: Interpreting ideational, interpersonal and textual meanings in
opening addresses by Olga Dontcheva-Navratilova (2010). Bublitz (1989) claims
that topic of a discourse is the outcome of a process of ascription in which a subject
linked to a complex speech act pattern. In addition, he shows that a text is not
coherent in it but is understood as coherent in an actual context. In Dontcheva-
Navratilova (2010)’s paper, she focuses on a certain type of discourse. She
introduces some aspects of coherence in opening addresses such as 1) Coherence
and persuasion: understanding and believing, 2) Management of discourse topic and
rhetorical structure, 3) Strategic uses of reference, 4) Modality markers and point of
view.
In this paper, the study focuses on the coherence in English funny stories,
which can only be understood if the theory relating to humor features is cleared. In
other words, the readers of funny stories can smile only when they understand the

It is important to bear in mind what humor is before getting into coherence
features of English funny stories.
The origin of the word ―humor comes from the ancient Greek word
“chymos”, which means “juice”. Later on, Latin adopted the word “umor” for
“fluid”
2
, specifically “body fluid” and the word “humorem”
3
which means moisture.

Retrieved from />
See more in Liu, W. (2010). Cohesive Device Analysis in Humor.
#
According to Liu (2010), the explanation is that “when the flow of the four
Hypocratean humors (phlegm, blood, choler and bile) was normal, a person was
said to be ―in good humor”, as explained furthermore on funtrivia.com website:
“The first fluid was blood, which when someone had a surplus, put him in a
'sanguine', or positive/optimistic mood. The second fluid was phlegm and an
excess of this fluid put a person in a 'phlegmatic' mood, meaning the person
was unexcitable and often slow. The third fluid was bile, sometimes referred
to as 'choler', which put a person into an irritated mood. Other terms for this
mood are 'bilious' and 'choleric', both obviously coming from the "liquids"
they were referring to. The last fluid was black bile, which in reality does not
exist. The word 'melancholy' is used to best describe the mood of someone
with too much black bile in their system, and in fact, the term 'melancholia'
itself meant an excess of black bile.”
4
There are some more representative definitions of humor. Audrieth (1998)
defines humor as "the mental faculty of discovering, expressing or appreciating the
ludicrous or absurdly incongruous". He explained that ludicrous is an adjective

coming down the street. His mother gave a nudge to the father.
“Look how our little boy has grown,” she gasped. “He was never interested
in girls before the Army.”
Meanwhile their son watched the girl intently until they were out of sight,
then turned back and announced, “One of them is out of step.”
(Pocheptsov, 1971, p. 17)
The interpretation of the mother mismatches the aim of the son’s action,
which brings humor to readers’ lips.
1.2.2.2. Linguistic humor
“Linguistically based jokes, anecdotes, etc. is ambiguity. Ambiguity is
affected by various linguistic means.” Nguyen (2007) analyzes some groups of
English funny stories basing on word meaning and meaning transference types such
as polysemy, homonymy, synonym, antonym, hyponymy, metaphor, metonymy,
etc. in her paper. There are several English funny stories which employ the means
of language to create humor.
For example:
%
“Teacher - When was Rome built?
Percy – At night
Teacher – Who told you that?
Percy – You did. You said Rome wasn’t built in a day.”
(Pocheptsov, 1971, p. 270)
In this example, teacher only refers to a day as a short time period (length of
time) but the student understands it is the time when the sun is shining.
With the same linguistic approach to humor, Huynh (2010) points out two
linguistic mechanisms to create humor which are Austin’s indirect speech act theory
and implicatures.
For example:
Our son was constantly wandering in and out of the house, leaving the front
or back door wide open. ‘One and for all, will you please close that!’ my

of a text, was to a large extent confined to a static text-based formal
approach, according to which coherence is the product of textual
connectivity and cohesion (For example Bellert 1970, Daneš 1974, Enkvist
1978, Gutwinski 1976, Halliday and Hasan 1976, Reinhart 1980).”
(Olga Dontcheva-Navratilova, 2010, p.11)
Following this approach, the linguists deal primarily with syntactic and
lexical features such as cohesion, discourse markers of text to identify the
coherence of a text. Nowadays, the terms cohesion and coherence are separated
from each other. Cohesion is the surface structure of a text while coherence is the
concepts and relations underlying text. Although a text has cohesion but it may be
incoherent.
Apart from the ideas of linguists listed in Olga Dontcheva-Navratilova’s
study, Reinhart’s (1980) concept of coherence “involves formal, semantic and
pragmatic elements.” Van Dijk (1977), Widdowson (1978) and Reinhart’s (1980)
also focus on semantic and pragmatic features of coherence in discourse. For
example, they analyze the semantic relation, functional relation among the

See more in Givon, T. (1992) Coming to Terms with Cognition: Coherence in Text vs. Coherence in Mind
en Functionalism and Grammar. Amsterdam: John Benjamin.
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sentences and the structure inside a text. While, “Palmer (1983) writes: ‘Coherence
refers to the rhetorical devices, to ways of writing and speaking that bring about
order and unity and emphasis’” (Nguyen, 2000, p.23). Beside, Redeker (2000)
claims that “coherence should be thought of as consisting of three parallel
components: ideational (semantic) structure, rhetorical structure, and sequential (or
segment) structure” (p.1). There are 24 relations
6
which introduced by Mann and
Thompson (1987) which can be noticed easily through essays or monologue such
non-volitional cause/result, volitional cause/result, sequence, evidence, etc.

sense in terms of their normal experience of things. That ‘normal’ experience will
be locally interpreted by each individual and hence will be tied to the familiar and
the expected” (p.84). If the information of the discourse is familiar and the readers
can interpret; the discourse is judged as coherent. He takes his own example in daily
life:
“In the neighborhood where I live, the notice in [Ia.] means that someone is
selling plants, but the notice in [Ib.] does not mean that someone is selling
garages
[I] a. Plant Sale
b. Garage Sale
(…) Indeed, the interpretation of [Ib.], that someone is selling household
items from their garage, is one that requires some familiarity with suburban
life.
This emphasis on familiarity and knowledge as the basis of coherence is
necessary because of evidence that we tend to make instant interpretations of
familiar material and tend not to see possible alternatives.”
(Yule, 1996, pp. 84-85)
From this point of view, characteristics of coherence made by Yule (1996)
coincide with Relevance theory by Sperber and Wilson (1995).
7
There are some
subtypes of relevance such as relevance to context, relevance to individual,
relevance of phenomena and stimuli:
“(10) Relevance:
Extent condition 1: an assumption is relevant in a context to the extent that
its contextual effects in this context are large
Extent condition 2: an assumption is relevant in a context to the extent that
the effort required to process it in this context is small”
(43) Relevance to an individual (comparative)
Extent condition 1: an assumption is relevant to an individual to the extent

Renkema (2004) defines coherence as the connection that is brought about
by something outside the text. In addition, Dontcheva-Navratilova (2012)
emphasises that coherence is not inherent to a text. It means that coherence belongs
to cognition of human-beings. The “interpretative faculty is activated” and we start
to “infer a relationship between the event described: we try to create a coherent
discourse” (Widdowson, 1978, pp. 38-39).
“It follows that “human beings do not require formal textual markers before
they are prepared to interpret a text. They naturally assume coherence, and
interpret the text in the light of that assumption” (Brown and Yule 1983: 66),

in other words they use their common sense and impose coherence on the
text (Tárnyiková 1995: 24) while trying to achieve a coherent interpretation.”
(Olga Dontcheva-Navratilova, 2010, p.12)
To serve the aim of this paper, pro-mind-based approach will be employed
to measure the understanding and sensitivity of the readers to English funny stories.
A discourse is judged as coherent when the readers/ listeners find the presented one
real, believable and relevant.
To sum up, in this paper the researcher would like to introduce one more but
the most neutral definition by Nguyen (2000), “coherence refers to the type of
semantic or rhetorical relationships that underlined text (…). Coherence can obtain
on the basis of relevance, the cooperative principle, the common shared back
ground knowledge between participants in a speech event, and how discourse is
structured, as well.”
1.3.2. Types of coherence
Though linguists do not reach consensus among them about the classification
of coherence types, the research desire to present all the ones listed in previous
studies in this part.
1.3.2.1. Local coherence & Global coherence
Basing on the scale of semantic connection, there are two types of coherence
which are local and global coherence.

“VERY GOOD
Professor:
- Our lesson today is “How to tell lie”. Who has read my book on this
matter?
All the students raise their hands. Professor:
- Very good. That means all of us have understood the lesson already.
The book hasn’t been published yet, actually.”
(Nụ cười Việt – Anh, 1999, p. 234)
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Following above methods to recognize the topic of this story, here are some
suggested variants:
- Teacher and student (the main character)
- Very good (the same as the tittle)
- Students and their lie ( theme and main idea)
- Students tell lie to the professor that they had read the book. (subject and
speech act)
In power point slides of Cheng Xiaotang from Beijing Normal University, he
says that “a coherent text must develop around one single global topic; within the
text, sub-topic or local topics may develop and may change from one to another, but
this should not be done at the expense of the loss of the global topic.”
1.3.2.2.2. Functional coherence
Functional coherence refers to the pragmatic aspects of language in use,
which includes indirect speech acts, and implicature of the utterances.
According to Austin (1955), in saying something, we do something and by
saying something, we often perform an act or do something. The action performed
by producing an utterance will consist of three related acts. The first is locutionary
act, which is the basis act of utterance. A locutionary act is the act of saying
something that is meaningful and can be understood.
We produce utterances with a certain communicative purpose and “we form
an utterance with some kind of function in mind” (Yule, 1996, p.48). The next

the hearer to drink some coffee.
Table 1: Speech acts of an utterance
With general functions of speech act, Austin grouped utterances into five
classes including verdictives, exercitives, commisives, behabitives and expositive.
In term of Searle’s system, speech act is also divided into five types that are
directives, commisives, representatives, declaratives and expressives. However, to
serve the main purposes of this paper, it had better access speech act system through
direct and indirect speech acts. According to Yule, there are three basic sentences
(declarative, interrogative and imperative) and three general communicative
functions (statement, question, command/ request.) in English. We have direct
speech act when “there is a direct relationship between a structure and a function”
and if “there is an indirect relationship between a structure and a function; we have
an indirect speech act.” (Yule, 1996, p.54). For example: a declarative used to make
a statement is a direct speech act, but a declarative used to make a request is an
indirect speech act. In his book, Yule (1996) also said, “different structures can be
$
used to accomplish the same basic function (…).” For example, the utterance “It is
cold outside!” (Yule, 1996, p55) is uttered immediately by one person after entering
a room. It can be a simple statement concerning the low temperature in the room,
but it can be a request from a speaker to a hearer to close the window if there is a
wide-open window in that room. The case is sometimes called an indirect speech
act, consisting of two subtypes, i.e. the primary illocutionary act (request to close
the window) and the secondary illocutionary act (simple description of the
temperature).
Here are some characteristics of indirect speech act (ISA) which are
introduced by Finegan and Sworth (2004, p.303):
- ISA violate at least one maxim of the cooperative principle.
- The literal meaning of the locution of an indirect speech act differs from its
intended meaning.
- Hearers and readers identify indirect speech act by noticing that an utterance

B: No, I’m sorry, I can’t answer it because I’m in the bath.
A: Ok. I’ll answer it.
Apply the way to identify functional coherence to English funny story, coherence of
a discourse (funny story) also is established. For example:
Utterance Function
A: Are you wearing gloves?
B: No.
A: What about the spiders?
B: They’re not wearing gloves either.
(Nunan, 1993, p.62)
Request
Refusal
Table 4: Nunan’s example of functional coherence
According to Nunan (1993), B and the readers can perceive that two A’s
utterances is coherent as follows:
“1. What about the spiders? You might get bitten if you don’t wear gloves.
2.What about the spiders, are they wearing gloves?”
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The most preferable interpretation is the first, in which “Are you wearing gloves?”
means the request that A wants B to wear gloves. Besides, the answers of B mean
the refusal to that request.
1.3.2.2.3. Disturbed coherence
Bublitz and Lenk (1999) is the first one laid the foundation of disturbed
coherence theory. In the study made by Dontcheva and Navratilova (2010, p.49):
“‘Disturbed coherence’ is the term introduced by Bublitz and Lenk (1999,
p.155) to refer to a situation in which the mismatch between the
understanding of the discourse derived by the participants in a
communication is no longer tolerated by one or more of them. In most cases
disturbed coherence is related to ambiguous meanings and misunderstanding
(Bazzanella and Damiano 1999, p.176)”.