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TASK 2
Questions to units 1 and 2
1. ‘Now we’re going to see Picasso in London’: “Inference” from cohesion or from coherence? Explain.
The inference come from coherence because the cohesion is adequate but only taking into account cohesion you may think that you are going to see Picasso (the person) and not his paintings. Therefore, you get the inference through coherence, because you already know that Picasso is dead, and you are also helped (to get it) by the context.
2. Try to point out differences and similarities in the various views on discourse given by Enkvist, Stubbs, Brown and Yule, Tannen and Fairclough.
On the one hand, Enkvist coincided with Fairclough as far as they thought that discourse was a social exercise and they also remind us that a discourse can be written or spoken. However, for Fairclough, and also for Brown and Yule, discourse needs language in use and this necessity does not occur for Enkvist.
On the other hand, Scrubbs and Tannen believe that discourse wasn’t only based on sentences and clauses.
3. In which way(s) is the definition of text (unit of discourse) ‘substantially’ different from the other two units, clause and phoneme? (See Unit 2)
The difference resides in a simple matter of hierarchy, where clauses are in a higher position than
phonemes as long as we can say that clauses are formed by phonemes. The same happens with texts and clauses; texts are higher relying on the fact that a group of clauses is part of what forms a text.
4. How can you explain that each of these utterances may be texts? They both can be a text because they both can give a message as in the examples bellow:
- Do not feed - it makes sense as a text in the context of being in an aquarium where you cannot feed the animals.
- Danger - it can be a text in the context of being in front of an electric machine that can give you an electric shock if you touch it. 5. Read the following excerpt taken from an article about discourse and text, and explain in your own words: a) the role of writers (or speakers) and readers (or hearers) in relation to discourse and
b) the difference between text and discourse, as it is presented here.
We may go even further and assert that the meaning of a text does not come into being until it is actively employed in a context of use. This process of activation of a text by relating it to a context of use is what we call discourse. To put it differently, this contextualization of a text is actually the reader’s (and in the case of spoken text, the hearer’s) reconstruction of the writer’s (or speaker’s) intended message, that is, his or her communicative act or discourse. In these terms, the text is the observable product of the writer’s or speaker’s discourse, which in turn must be seen as the process that has created it. Clearly, the observability of a text is a matter of degree: for example, it may be in some written form, or in the form of a sound recording, or it may be unrecorded speech. But in whatever form it comes, a reader (or hearer) will search the text for cues or signals that may help to reconstruct the discourse. However, just because he or she is engaged in
a process of reconstruction, it is always possible that the reader (or hearer) infers a different
