The examples show that interpreting extended  multi-clausal discourses depends on both narrative conventions and world knowledge; (similarly for descriptive, instructional or argumentative text) . In particular, an action sentence followed by a static observation, as in (5.12), typically suggests the kind of action-situation overlap we noted, and successively reported actions or events, as in (5.13), typically suggest temporal sequencing and perhaps a causal connection, especially if one of the two clauses is not a volitional action. These suggestive inferences presumably reflect the narrator's adherence to a Gricean principle of orderliness, though such an observation is little help from a computational perspective. The concrete task is to formulate coherence principles for narrative and other forms of discourses and to elucidate, in a usable form, the particular syntactico-semantic properties at various levels of granularity that contribute to coherence.