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CHAPTER 1. TEXT AND DISCOURSE.
1. The scope of text linguistics.
The scope of text linguistics can be dexcribed as the study of language beyond the clause. For Hallyday ‘beyond the clause’ refers to the metaphorical modes of lexical variation stemming from semantic relation of elaboration, extension, enhancement. So, ‘beyond’ is understood as ‘outside the scope of’ or ‘apart from’. Texts have been traditionally situated ‘above the clause’. Halliday avoids the term ‘text’ but he uses the term ‘clause complex’ to refer to texts. Also, cohesion is the distinguishing features of text and is placed ‘around the clause’. Finally, intonation and rhythm are presented ‘beside the clause’. Considering text as a unit ‘beyond’ the sentence is more accurate than a unit ‘above’ the sentence because the relationship between clauses an texts is not one of constituency. A text should be regarded as a unit of meaning or semantic unit. So, texts are realized by, or encoded in, clauses. Modern linguistics attempted the study of ‘language by itself’only to find increasing difficulty leading to a deadlock caused by the exclusion of context.
- Principles of Modern linguistics: o Study one domain of language at a time. o Describe each domain as a system of theoretical units corresponding to the practical units in the data. o Describe each unit by the features that identify it from the rest. o Investigte by transcribing the native speaker’s utterances, segmenting them into units and classifying them. the principles above have failed to produce a system of underlying patterns and rules of any language.
- The textual level: o is based primarily in formal features o tends to remain constant
o is a limited account of language as a whole because it misses the cognitive and behavioural aspects, o is fairly abstract, and o presents stability across situations.
- The discourse level: o focuses on situations, o is concrete, and o is context dependent.
2. Clause grammar, text linguistics and the description of discourse.
The distinction between text and discourse is understood as the difference between the product and the process of communication. Any piece of language can be considered from these two perspectives. Also, text-linguistic is a blurred picture of communication but it is very useful as a bridge between formal and functional paradigms of description and as a way into the complex and diverse analyses of communication. It is appropriate to stablish the goals and limits of textual description. We can make three observations:
- Gramatical observations will focus on the structural organization of clauses and the distribution of lexical ítems.
- Semantic observations aim to explain meaning as a relatively stabe property of forms and they could include communicative forms.
- Functional observations unite forms, actions and setting. The setting appears in indexicals and the possible relations between form and function. It is necessary to select and organize the type of observations so as to make a consistent analytical frame. We can provide at least a partial account of the ability to construct and understand connected discourse of various kinds as a starting point. Construction (based on personal choice) introduces too many and too complex variables for a prediction to be cost-effective. A theory of
For one thing, a could be a representative. Representatives commit the speaker to something being the case ( that the sketch is art). The psychological state expressed is belief and the strength of the representative is great. Example b does not fulfil these conditions so it is a different speech act. Nevertheless both utterances share something derived from their grammatical form: both are statements. A fourth meaning of an utterance is the set of IMPLICATURES that an addressee works out as intended. If we take The vintners insist that the sketch is art as an answer to the question Should the labels be changed?, a negative answer is understood but not derived from the propositional meaning by itself.
- A grammatical account of texts has serious limitations. The first and more important is that no rules of well- or ill- formedness of the type given for sentences are applicable to texts. Still, it is possible to identify textual patterns and structures and the abstraction of these patterns can be called ‘text grammar’ in a broad sense. The nature of the organizing principles in clause grammar and text grammar are different. The more complex a linguistic unit is, the more numerous are its combinatory possibilities. The difference between clausal and textual organizations can be explained using the concept of constitutive and regulative ‘rules’.
- CONSITUTIVE RULES: they establish the existence of an activity.
- REGULATIVE RULES: they organize an already existing activity. A constitutive rule, i.e. a grammatical rule, is established for the pronominalization of the subject. Alternatively, a regulative rule, of pragmatic nature, would assign meaningful values to the reversal or non-reversal of the polarity. A speaker may choose to reverse the polarity or. In a nutshell, if the speaker cannot choose, it is because of a grammatical rule, and if the speaker can choose, there is a pragmatic principle involved.
It is worthwhile to discuss what is meant by ‘grammar’ in Longacre’s approach to language in context. ‘Grammar’ is used as a counterpoint to ‘semantics’. Features such as plot progression in narrative, dialogue relations, ways of combining predicates or role relations are considered in detail. These notions belong to the general notional structure of spoken language and are independent of particular texts Therefore, ‘grammar’ is justified in terms of the ‘formal’ properties such as deixis, anaphora, temporal and spatial expressions, etc…. ‘Formal’ markers identifying stages, peaks, beginnings and endings enable us to identify a grammatical profile and discourse.
- A second grammatical consideration of relevance to the study of discourse is the recognition of strands of information relevance. Discourse profile and strands of information relevance treat structures as wholes so paragraphs, clauses and phrases are required. Cohesion is as important for texts as it is for sentences and rules such as pronominalization, deletion, or stress assignment operate according to the same principles in texts and sentences. Cohesive ties between sentences are more effective because they are the major source of texture. Cohesion is a matter of interpretation, of meaning, and it is displayed through a varying number of linguistic devices. We can establish a distinction between cohesion (linguistic devices) and coherence (meaning). In its simplest form, a formal notion of texts assesses their acceptability in terms of the sequencing of senteces. This sequence is achieves through various cohesive devices, notably anaphora and conjunction, but there is another source of texture based on the distribution of information across sentences. As an alternative to the grammatical approach, discourse has been related to grammar within a discourse-functional approach. This approach has two goals:
- The description of choices in grammar and lexis available to speakers.
DEFINITIONS OF TEXT:
“A piece of naturally occurring spoken, written, or signed discourse identified for purposes of analysis. It is often a language unit with a definable communicative function, such as a conversation, a poster.” (Crystal) “a stretch of language interpreted formally, without context”. (Cook) “unit of commnication seen as a coherent syntactic and semantic structure which can be spoken or written down.” (Fowler) “A text can be defined as an actual use of language, as distinct from a sentence which is an abstract unit of linguistic analysis” (Widdowson) DEFINITIONS OF DISCOURSE: “A continuous stretch of (especially spoken) language larger than the sentence, often constituting a coherent unit, such as a sermon, argument, joke or narrative.” (Crystal) “stretches of language perceived to be meaningful, unified, and purposive.” (Cook) “whole complicated process of linguistic interaction between people uttering and comprehending texts.” (Flowler) “ the term discourse is taken here to refer both to what a text producer meant by a text and what a text means to the receiver.” (Widdowson)
Table 1 summarizes the features of text and discourse: FEATURES TEXT DISCOURSE Degree of abstraction Abstract Concrete Role in communication Product Process Linguistic status Formal Functional Type of meaning Propositional Non-propositional Relationship to context De-contextualised Contextualised Linguistic unit Any Any Mode Written/spoken Written/spoken
4. Norms of textual communication.
A central problem of textual study is the balance between the formal and functional sides of textual interaction. Text-linguistics should combine the productive and receptive aspects of texts as communicative events. It is more valuable to establish a series of standards to explain the circumstances and features that make texts communicative or noncommunicative. These norms are cohesion, coherence, intentionality, acceptability, informativity, situationality and intertextuality. All the relevant aspects of the three basic elements of verbal communication, participants, texts and situation, and their relationships are established by these seven norms. Example 1.- Dressed to kilt Even highlanders follow fashion (1). Geoffrey Tailor Kiltmakers, based in Scotland, now produces “21 st century kilts,” with pockets form modern necessities like mobile phones (2). Designer Howie Nicholsby sees the evolution as a means of tapping into the youth market (3). “The kilt is free and fun.” (4) His pleated skirts come in various materials – from the traditional tartan to PVC (5). And for male buyers too shy to purchase in person, the kilts are also available only (6). Robert the Bruce never had it this easy (7).
are by no means unified. Temporal relationships may also represent complex orders of actions.
Intentionality
While cohesion and coherence organize the textual material, intentionality and acceptability are focused on the users. Intentionality refers to the encoder’s intention that the text achieves a goal within a plan. Plans and goals are patterns of knowledge. Plans are patterns of events leading to an intended goal. The simplest way for the encoder to attain a goal is the successful performance of a speech act by being informative, clear, relevant and truthful. However, 0it is sometimes the case that the encoder’s intentions are made deliberately unclear, as in the answer given by the official in the following real life example: Example 2.- Interviewer: Did the United States Government play any part in the Duvaliers’ departure? Did they, for example, actively encourage him to leave? Official: I would not try to steer you away from that conclusion.
Acceptability
Acceptability represents the set of norms based on the receiver. Ultimately, the receiver is responsible for the relevance of texts in terms of knowledge and communicative goals. The receiver collaborates in the achievement of cohesion since the degree of explicitness of texts always leaves areas of indeterminacy. One can observe these variations in explicitness by comparing a legal document such as Example 3, with a high degree of explicitness, with a literary text of the type quoted in Example 4. (PAGE 29) The passage in Example 3 displays almost no personal pronouns, no ellipsis, and multiple lexical reiteration by repetition and by superordinate items. There are
continuous deictics to connect the text to the situation. On the contrary, the excerpt from Mrs Dalloway shows many cases of reference and ellipsis. There are two frames of reference: the narrative and the present of the consciousness of characters. This produces a special use of deictics that combines a near temporal deictic with a past tense. The deictic no longer relates language to its immediate context of production but is filtered through the narrative frame while maintaining marks of direct speech such as near deictics or the expressive features of conversation. All these characteristics detach the text from its original source and situation. Legal and literary text represent the extremes of dependence and independence from context. Likewise, other types and genres can display a strong or weak dependence from context. More broadly, we can conjecture that language users would hardly accept a textual form that ignored the connections between language and situation.
Informativity
Informativity refers to the predictability of the text material, i.e. the amount of known and new information packed into the text. In order to achieve their communicative goals, texts have to be informative but not at the expense of excessive effort on the part of the receiver. We will deal with the two aspects involved here in separate chapters. A very simple illustration taken from Example 1 is the choice of Determiners and Modifiers in noun phrases with kilt as Head: 21 st century kilts - > the kilt - > his pleated skirts - > the kilts. Since it is the central discourse topic it is also marked with focus. After the first mention, the rest of its occurrences are definite and non-focal.
Situationality
Situationality relates texts to their situation. Textual relevance is understood in terms of appropriateness. The headline Dressed to kilt in Example 1 responds to the particular communicative situation of this text. Its elliptical Head and the pun
respectively. Informativity responds to both communicants, encoders and decoders, in terms of their knowledge. Situationality explains the connection between text and context. Finally, intertextuality relates a text to other previous texts. These seven norms of textual communication which define and establish the communicative process are regulated by three principles: efficiency, effectiveness and appropriateness.
- EFFICIENCY: is a function of the effort made in processing texts.
- EFFECTIVENESS: depends on the text’s contribution to achieve the speaker’s communicative goal.
- APPROPRIATENESS: is related to the balance between the use of a text in a situation and the fulfilment of text norms. It should be highlighted that the above scheme does not assume a code model of communication in which the role of the encoder is mirrored by that of the decoder to reach the enconder’s thought. Addressees try to anticipate the addresser’s actions to increase the efficiency of the reception and this makes it follow the same steps of production. Naturally, the receiver begins with only a vague idea of the producer’s knowledge and goals so she has to keep on formulating and checking hypotheses as to the direction of communication; if all possible directions had to be considered, it would hardly be feasible to decode in time so the hypothesis are regulated by a principle of relevance.
