Scarica Discourse Analysis 2 e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Linguistica Inglese solo su Docsity!
CHAPTER 6: THE NATURE OF REFERENCE IN TEXT
AND IN DISCOURSE
What is “text”?
As we said, text is the verbal record of a communicative act. A text may be prose or verse, dialogue or monologue. It may be anything from a single proverb to a whole play. In other words, the word ‘text’ is exploited in linguistics to refer to any passage, spoken or written, of whatever length, that does construct a unified whole.
Cohesion
Some linguistics concentrated their studies on this aspect of linguistics, and according to them a set of sentences do or do not constitute a text depends on cohesive relationships between the sentences, which create texture. A text has texture and this is what distinguishes it from something that it is not a text. For example:
I have six bananas. Put them into a box.
It is clear that them in the second sentence refers back to the six bananas of the first sentence. This anaphoric function of them gives cohesion to the two sentences, so that we interpret them as a whole; the two sentences together constitute a text. So it is the texture which makes these two sentences a text.
Halliday and Hasan created a taxonomy of types of cohesive relationships. A familiar type of cohesive relationship in texts is indicated by formal markers like and , but , so , then. But this taxonomy of types of explicit markers of conjunctive relations is exemplified in:
- Additive (and, or, in addition)
- Adversative (but, however)
- Casual (so, consequently, for this reason)
- Temporal (then, finally, at last, after that) Other types of cohesive relationships, as we know, can be reference, substitution, ellipsis and lexical relationships. But we
should substitute for “reference” the term co-reference , which is the reference in one expression to the same referent in another expression (e.g. You said you would come). In linguistics, co- reference occurs when two or more expressions in a text refer to the same person or thing; they have the same referent, e.g. Bill said he would come; the proper noun Bill and the pronoun he refer to the same person, namely to Bill. When exploring co-reference, there are numerous distinctions that can be made, e.g. exophora refers to something extra linguistic, i.e. not in the same text, and contrasts with endophora that refers to something in the same text and can be subdivided into cataphora , which is used for referents that refer to following text, and anaphora , which is used for referents that refer to preceding text. Examples:
- Exophora: Look at that / That man says woman need help / we could move that table.
- Endophora:
■ Anaphora: Our neighbors dislike music. For this they are angry. ( They follows the expression to which it refers)
■ Cataphora: If they are angry about the music, the neighbors will call the cops. ( They precedes the expression to which it refers)
As we said before, cohesion may be derived from lexical relationships (e.g. red is a hyponym of colour, daffodil is a hyponym of flower), part-whole (e.g. wheels are part of a vehicle, arm is a part of a man), clausal substitution (e.g. Roberto is proud of Michele. So am I), comparison (e.g. My phone is more illuminated than that lamp), syntactic repetition (e.g. I will come back home. They will come back home.) and so on.
Now we have to say something really important. Look at the sentence:
- A) There’s the doorbell. B) I’m in the bath.
noun, and its pronoun could be it , as in, I dropped the ice-cream because it was dirty.
Ellipsis is the omission of parts of a sentence, while substitution is the replacement of a part of a sentence with a substitute word or phrase in the same grammatical slot. The difference between ellipsis and substitution can be noted in the answers of the following example:
- Is anyone here a linguistics major?
- A) I am (ellipsis, because there is no a linguistics major .)
- B) I am one (substitution, because one substitutes for a linguistics major .)
Discourse reference
In the traditional approach, the term reference is used, together with “sense”, to discuss lexical meaning, because the meaning of a lexical term, for example chicken , is determinated by its sense (that is the component properties of “animate” etc.) and by its reference (that is the set of objects to which the expression can be applied). In discussions of lexical semantics, we should say that a lexical item has sense (component properties of meaning) and denotation (a set of objects to which it can be applied). This distinction is also generally covered by the terms “intension” and “extension”. For this reason, we can say that the term reference can be taken out of the discussion of lexical meaning and reserved for the function in which speakers indicate the entities they are talking about, via the use of a linguistic expression.
Reference and discourse representations
Before talking about referring expressions, we should say something about discourse representation. When the speaker or the writer creates his discourse, it will be based on his individual representation of a particular situation. The reader o the hearer will try to build a representation of the situation communicated by the speaker. But we can say that there can be a mismatch between what is in the speaker’s representation and what is in the hearer’s
representation, because the hearer creates a representation that is only partially similar to the speaker’s one. For example:
- My uncle’s coming home from Canada.
My uncle can have a large number of properties (e.g. called Jack, smokes cigars) in the speaker’s representation, but for the hearer there is only an identity in terms of “the individual referred to as the speaker’s uncle”.
Referring expressions
A referring expression , in linguistics, is any noun phrase, or surrogate for a noun phrase, whose function in discourse is to identify some individual object.
There are some indefinite expressions such as a corrupt Member of Parliament or a cat with black ears that are used to introduce entities into the discourse. For example: A man hit me. But we have to say that one of the circumstances in which indefinite noun phrases are not used as referring expressions is when they appear as the complement of the verb be (e.g. My father was a football player). The other situation in which indefinite noun phrases cannot be treated as referential is when we talk about referential opacity, which occurs after certain verbs, such as look for and want. Some examples can be:
- Domenic is looking for a rubber
- Michele wants a job
The indefinite expressions, a rubber or a job , could be used to mean “ any rubber ” or “ any job ”, and for this they are not used referentially.
The use of proper names as referring expressions is very important, such as Sarah, London, The Eiffel Tower, or The Beatles. We should say that some proper names, such as Elizabeth for example, need an identification of a particular individual in a particular context, because there are a large number of Elizabeths in the world. But some of them can have a unique referent, for example Plato that refers to the Greek philosopher. In the sentence
