Local Pragmatic Coherence in Mahfouz s The False Dawn

It is said that the efforts to make the words uttered meaningful within the situational andcultural context of the exchange are efforts to establish pragmatic coherence. Coherence is notfound in speakers utterances, it is created in the minds of speakers and hearers by the inferencesthey make grounded on the words they hear. Broadly speaking, pragmatic coherence are of twotypes: local and global. The former refers to the interrelatedness between adjacent discoursewhile the latter is concerned with the interrelatedness of larger span of discourse.The present study makes the former type its concerns. Precisely, it investigates its aspects inone of Mahfouz s (a well-known Egyptian novelist) famous collection of short stories ، الفجر الكاذبThe False Dawn. It attempts to answer the following: (1) how is local pragmatic coherence utilized in the series in question, and (2) what are the various categories of speech act andepistemic relations used within the fictional discourse.