| Edited by Jonathan Culpeper, Francis Katamba, Paul Kerswill, Ruth Wodak and Tony McEneryDescription, Variation and Context English Language | Edited by Jonathan Culpeper Francis Katamba Paul Kerswill Ruth Wodak Tony McEnery LANCASTERText Linguistics Paut CHILTON 9.1 What is text? Like phrases, clauses and sentences, texts have what we might call mean- ing, ‘text meaning’. But just as not all combinations of words in a sentence make grammatical sense, so it is with a text and its constituent sentences. Consider: A teacher was awarded some money. Ms Ball's conduct was to blame. I don’t want a new car. Though the individual sentences are grammatical, you have to work quite i hard to give this short text a meaning. The/point is that the words in it do not give much help to the text interpreter. By contrast, in Illustrations Box 9.1 we have a text that makes sense. The task of the linguist is to understand how we | make sense of texts, what itis chat makes the parts of a text ‘hang together’. The etymology of the term gives us some help. The word text is from the | Latin word fexere, meaning weave. We can think of texts as woven together from different strands or threads. Texts, like textiles, come in different shapes | and sizes and have different functions in human life. In general, the parts of | texts have an analogous kind of coherence or cohesion — technical terms, | about which more later. The term text is not to be confused with discourse. When we focus on text we are freezing in time one moment of the ongoing dynamic use of lan. | guage in the speech community, that is, discourse (see Chapter 35, Advances Box 35.2, for further discussion of the term ‘discourse’. In fact, texts cannot usually be understood fully without understanding their context in that dis- course, but it is important to focus on the text itself, in order to understand how the linguistic elements that make up texts interact with discourse and with processes in the human mind in general. Texts, as objects of lingnis- tic inquiry, are in some sense whole in themselves, as ate sentences. They may be either written or spoken, despite the fact that the term is strongly biased towards the written form. An unscripted speech or conversation, for instance, is a text in this sense, even before linguists transcribe it for ana- Iysis. Texts do many jobs in society, although for some people the notion of | literary texts may come especially to mind. It is teue that societies build up aTEXT LINGUISTICS ILLUSTRATION BOX 9.1 The Bully Text Guardian Saturday 5 October 2002 Bullied teacher wins £230,000 damages Rebecca Smithers Education correspondent (1) A bullied teacher has been awarded a £230,000 payout for personal injury and loss of earnings after being forced out of his job by his head. (2) A judge ruled that the sacking from Coedffranc junior school in Skewen, South Wales, was unlawful, and had already awarded Alan Powis, 53, £80,000 in interim payments pending a full settlement scheduled for yesterday. (3) But Mr Powis was given the payment in an out Thursday to end a lengthy legal battle. court settlement on (4) He lost his job after the head, Sheena Ball, questioned his ability and accused, him of incompetence, (5) When he won the support of the parents, Ms Ball Claimed he was undermining her authority and he was sacked for gross miscon- duct. (6) Mr Powis, a father of two, suffered a nervous breakdown but found ‘work as a £2.50-an-hour security guard and a door-to-door salesman to make ends meet, © Judge Gary Hickinbottom, sitting at Swansea's civil courts of justice, sald that the sacking in 1997 was unlawful and that it was Ms Ball's conduct that was to blame. (8) The settlement against Neath and Port Talbot county borough council's education authority was settled by its insurers, (2) Yesterday Mr Powis said he was pleased with the ruling. (10) ‘’m not the least bit interested in having a flash new car. (11) What | did want when I began this claim was the return of my good name, the return of my dignity, and the return of my peace of mind. (12) I'm starting to get that now. © Guardian News and Media Lid 2002 culture of ‘texts’ in this sense, to include sacred texts or great authors; this is an important fact about the sociology of texts that we shall not address here. ‘A text may be long like the Bible or short like a ‘No Smoking’ notice. Finally, from the analytic point of view, we can focus on either the production (speak ing or writing) of texts or the interpretation (understanding or processing) of texts. In the end, however, these two aspects complement one another, to a certain extent, for text producers do not produce text (usually) without mak- ing assumptions about the way hearers or readers normally interpret texts. Bue the qualification ‘to a certain extent’ should be noted carefully, since m1172_* ENGLISH: STRUCTURE different text processors bring their own experiences and tacit knowledge to bear and these may vary in many ways. 9.2. Is there a grammar of texts? When linguists first started to ask what exactly makes a text hang together, they attempted to do so by using the methods of analysis that had been used for sentences (as well as other levels of language. Zallig S. Harris outlined a formal method of text analysis in the 1950s that was less influential in the English-speaking world than in continental Europe, especially France. Harris's approach was rooted in the American structural. ist approach to language and attempted to describe the structure of a text in the same way as he described the phonology, morphology and grammar of a whole language (Harris, 1951). This approach involved defining phonemes and grammatical categories in terms of their distribution. Essentially, Harris tried to apply a similar approach to whole texts which involves the following steps. First, analyse the grammatical structure of each sentence in the text to reveal constituent sentences coded in relative clauses, nominalizations (ie. the use of nouns instead of verbs to refer to actions or events), adjectival phrases, prepositional phrases and so forth. Second, examine the lexical con- tent of subjects, verbs and objects to see if there are any regularities of distri- bution. Thar is to say, ask the question: does the same sort of lexical content in the subject position always occur before the same sort of lexical content in the verb? If the answer is ‘yes’, then Harris says that we have an equivalence class for that text. The set of equivalence classes for a text gives us a kind of grammar for that text: it tells us the sort of combinations that are ‘grammat- ical’ for that text. In general, it seems highly unlikely that we can come up with a rich and convincing theory of texts without including meaning in our analysis Other linguists tried to develop ‘grammars’ for texts. Van Dijk, for example, attempted in his early work (van Dijk, 1972) to set up a text grammar on the basis of meaning rather than wholly on the basis of syntactic form, later mov- ing wholly toward an explanation of text production and text understanding. which took into account not only internal text structure but also what people know about the world in which texts are embed 9.3 Cohesion and Coherence Attempts to write generative grammars for texts constantly came up against detailed questions concerning how the words and constructions in texts link ‘up with one another. In this section and the following ones we turn to the descriptive study of the linguistic elements that link sentences, or create cohe- sion. It turns out, however, that this is not enough, since texts seem to get their ‘hanging-togetherness’ from outside the text as well, in particular fom what text interpreters know about the world in general - this is whar is called coherence. Simplifying somewhat, coherence is a relation between concep- tual structures (things, people, activities, etc.) which may be expressed byTEXTUNGUISTICS + 173 words in the text but which, and more usually, may be present in the mind of the text producer or processor. These two dimensions are not entirely inde- pendent of one another, as will be pointed out. Cohesion devices frequently depend on coherence. Substitution and ellipsis ‘Texts appear to avoid the repetition of the same word, at least in close proxim= ity to one another. We can see this in the use of substitution, that is, “dummy” words like one(3), do, it: ‘These towels are dirty; we need some clean ones, Have you written that essay yet? I've not done it yet but I'll do it tomorrow Is the meeting still going on? Sounds like it The underlined words in the second clause of e: anoun or a verb in the preceding clause. Ellipsis is the leaving out of some element of the grammatical structure of a sentence: fh example are cohesive with John won a clock and Mary won a TV set. The books on the table are from the library but those [books] are mine. Jane went to the lecture but Harry didn‘ igo. In the Bully Text in Illustrations Box 9.1 we find: (7) The sacking was unlawful and it was Ms Ball's conduct that was to blame [for the sacking]. While there is no problem in understanding what is referred to by “was to blame’, itis still true that there is no overt expression that tells us what Ms Ball’s conduct is to be blamed for. We know of course from the co-text. In this example, what are the mechanisms that account for the fact that a reader can fill in the gap? First there is the meaning of the word blame itself, including its ‘semantic frame’: X blames ¥ for Z. The reader knows that the meaning of blame involves a blamer, a blamed person and some situation Caused by the behaviour of the blamed person. So if the sentence docs not specify the ‘for Z’ part of blame, the reader will look for something to fill it in. This is where the second mechanism comes in, the general principle of ellipsis, which says, roughly, that some element can be left out if the sur- rounding text provides the relevent meaning. This meaning may sometimes be within the same sentence or it may be distant, either before or after the sentence in question. In the present text, we can say that the missing part, what Mes Ball was to blame for, can be found in sentence (1) and perhaps other parts of the text.174 # ENGLISH: STRUCTURE 9.4 Reference A general introduction tothe idea of reference and a more detailed discussion of some specifics ean be found in tk following chapter, Section 10.2. Here. | will focus on two areas particulacly pertinenv wot discussion in hand, Third-person pronouns Third-person pronouns are used to refer to entities, situations or events that may be denoted by lexical material in the Context, ot sometimes to entities, ae of ea events that are outside the text. Those thar tink up with co-text are of two types: anaphora (a Greek word meaning roughly ‘carcying back’) and cataphora (roughly meaning ‘carrying forwn ct) An example of anaphora is (i) The Judge said the sacking of Mr Powis was unlawful. Yesterda said be was pleased with the ruling Here, you probably automatically related be back to Mr Powis; this proper cataphorie wily called the antecedent of the anaphoric Pronoun be. As for cataphoric pronouns, we can construct an example such as the following; (0 After be beard the Judge’s ruling, Mr Powis sid be was leased In this case, the first he refers forwards to Mr Powis. A text processor has phipae the linkage on hold until he or she comes carpe a suitable noun Phrase, Reference to entities outside a text is called exophoric. Consider the Map occurence of he inthe last example. The mo likely reading is that Mr Powis isthe antecedent. However, itall depends on context. Suppose that this sentence occurred in a different text ang situation. Maybe the speaker of the sentence is reporting that Mr Powis is telling a story, perhaps in a somekeation: Then the speaker of this sentence cout be Using he to refer to pOinebody not referred to by any noun phrase in ke co-text at all; he could be referring outside the text to some mate Person known to the hearer of this sentence. The interesting question is: how do we know wh a text relate to? Number, Roun system, but things are by no meas th of anaphora. One might suppose that the antecele toy the anaphoric word if always the last noun that was mentioned. This is, however, obviously not the case. Possible, taking these two sentences in antecedent — that itis the judge who is hat interpretation, were primed by having read the co-text, which nde, the main focus of interes, as well perhagsTEXT LINGUISTICS. #175 as your background expectation that judges do not conventionally express self-satisfaction in this fashion. Here are two more examples of how co-text changes antecedent assignment: (iii) The Judge said the sacking of Mr Powis was unlawful. Yesterc said he was pleased (iv) The Judge said the sacking of Mr Powis was unlawful. Yesterday, he said he had changed his mind. The difference in wording is slight but leads to different assignment of ante- cedents for be. In (iii) the first he can refer to the judge, Mr Powis or to someone outside the text and the second he can similarly refer to one of these thrce, at least in principle. In (iv), the preferred reading is probably that he refers to the judge, however. In addition to background knowledge, a further principle may be involved ~ that a second sentence is expected to say some- thing ‘about’ the preceding one. In (iv) itis hard to see, given our background knowledge, how ‘he said he had changed his mind’ can be saying anything about Mr Powis, but it could conceivably be saying something about the judge, given that we know the judge has expressed an opinion. Indefinite and definite articles Indefinite and definite articles play several roles in English, but one of their functions is to indicate whether something has been referred to before or is, assumed to be known to the text interpreter. For example: ‘Aman in a dark suit sidled up to the bar. Mary watched him warily. After a few seconds, the man said, “Hello, darling.” Here a introduces a new referent, while the mentions a referent already intro- duced. Creative writers do of course play tricks with this tendency for special ffects. Suppose a short story began like this: ‘The street was dark. The curtains were drawn across the windows. Mary walked cautiously along the pavement. Here, there is no prior introduction by way of an indefinite article but the text is still coherent, This can be explained by the general semantic fact that defin- ite articles presuppose existence. In reading the first sentence, the reader sim- ply adds to his or her mental model of the text that a certain street exists in the fictional world of the story. The fact that the is also used with other nouns (curtains, windows, pavement) in this little text is explained in a slightly different way — we expect a street to have pavements, be lined by houses, houses to have windows, windows to have curtains. This again shows that the words in texts do not entirely depend on the co-text but on stored back- ground knowledge,176 ENGLISH: STRUCTURE ‘ADVANCES BOX 9.1 Models and frames In the theory of language known as co. -anitve linguistics, a frame can be (@) a semantic frame, specifying, eg., the complements associated with a particular tructure for a particu: | OF bullying (Minsky, 1975). A related term Is script (Sch: 'ank and Abelson. 1977), background know. s; these are often components: 19s of is not sory text model (van Dijk and Kintsch, 1983) essor: rather, its built up in working me ing. People construct a mental model usttied then the text is coherent. As van Dijk puts it: t people are able to construct a mental model already available to the text proc to represent the global text meani by the text; if they can do this, ‘Understanding a text means that for the text’ (2004: 10). Examples iaame is structured knowledge. For example, legal procedures might include: judge, jury, 00M, et, andl associated sequential scripts sentence, etc We have noted that definite pronouns fre item already introduced in the text or lMlustration Box 9.1 we see the parents b in the text. How do we explain the oc: ‘Occurrence as evidence that a frame the occurs because the school frame S1, and associated elements in the fi be picked out by the definite article o the text world such as possessive pro your conceptual frame for defence, prosecution, jury, court 9. accuse-charge-trial-verdict- quently serve to refer back to an understood to be in the context. In $5 in ut there is no previous mention of parents currence of the here? In fact we can use its has been activated, the school frame, Thus hhas been activated by the word teacher in frame, like parents, pupils, by other words presuy NOUNS (Ct. his head in headmistress can ipposing existence in 9.5 Junctions The term junction (see de Beaugrande and Dressler, 197 set of words that relate propositions to one another in... term includes ‘conjunctions’ in the gr and Hasan (1976) u ) is used to refer toa riety of ways. This rammatical sense of the term, Halliday se the term conjunction rather than junction, Often thee, bara’ fclations are not like relations between propositions in fone logic, but are peculiar to texts in human language. We shall not list all the differ: ent types of junction that have been identified (for mote, see the sources just mentioned), ‘The wordandisinterpretablein many different w ing causation) but one of its jobs is simply aysintexts (e,g.,asexpress- the addition of information: (2) A judge ruled that the sacking from Coed: ful, and had alre: ffranc junior school in Skewen, South Wales, was unlaw! ady awarded Alan Powis, 53,| TEXT LINGUISTICS * 177 £80,000 in interim payments pending a full settlement scheduled for yesterday. Here the text's use of and does not seem to be implying any extra unspoken meaning. Statements about facts can, however, be conjoined also by but in English, with the implication chat there is a relation of incongruity, unexpec edness or contradiction between two statements, for example: (6) Mr Powis, a father of two, suffered a nervous breakdown but found work as a £2.50-an-hour security guard and a door-to-door salesman to make ends meet. Another example is the But between sentences (2) and (3) in our text. In fact but is but one of a set of related words and phrases that could be used: (6?) Mr Powis, a father of two, suffered a nervous breakdown. But/yet/ howeverineverthelessleven sofin spite of this he found work as a £2.50-an- hour security guard and a door-to-door salesman to make ends meet. ‘The important point here is that the two main clauses are about separate events (suffering a nervous breakdown and finding work). I is in the human conceptualization of the world that there is a contrast, and it is this contrast that the text enables readers to construct in their minds. The contrastive (or contrajunctive] expressions impose a contrastive relation but also depend on background knowledge — for example, that if you are suffering from a nervous breakdown, you are nor normally fit enough to work. Once again we see that texts take the form they do not simply because of their internal structure, but, because they interact with our (non-linguistic) knowledge about the world Junctive expressions also relate events within a time frame: (1) A bullied teacher has been awarded a £230,000 payout for personal injury and loss of earnings after being forced out of his job by his head. Between sentences we might have: (U) A bullied teacher was forced out of his job by his head. Afterwards some time later he was awarded a £23,000 payout for personal injury. [As can be seen from this adapted sentence, temporal conjunctions may imply different amounts of time lapse: afterwards seems to imply close temporal proximity to the preceding event. There may be a sequence relationship (then, next, subsequently ..), between a past event and the present time of writing, or reading (since, since then...). Certain junctive words (meanwhile, in the meantime, while, during...) imply a ‘parallel event, that is, an event taking place in the same time interval as a previously mentioned event. Since two events cannot occur in the same space, this kind of junctive produces a shift of scene: ‘Meanwhile, back at the ranch... It is important to note that tem- poral junctives interact with the tense system of verbs, which itself pays a crucial role in the cohesion of texts.ENGLISH: STRUCTURE When we summarized Harris's version cern with the reappearance the same grammatical environments. This phen ADVANCES BOX 9.2 Text worlds lunctive words can have a radical effec ‘worlds’ that are related in the overall text(ual) worlds was introduced by de Beaugrar build conceptual ‘models’ that can be diagramm A further advance was Werth's theory of concept also Gavins, 2007). Werth introduced the ides ‘world building elements’. Fauconnier (1985) had idea of mental spaces in cognitive linguistics, In at some distinct ‘worlds’ triggered tives’ can perform world-building f ct on text processing, creating several ‘world’ constructed by the text. The term inde (1972): text interpreters ied a5 networks of concepts. tal space in discourse (1999, of ‘Sub-worlds’ triggered by already developed the related this illustrations Box we look in the Bully Text. What we are calling ‘junc: functions, Example When combined with tense forms if sets up in the text processor's mind a (feria that is conceived as possible, probable or not true a all counterfactual) (Gee also the discussion of presuppositions in Chapter 11) This s similar to: wha modal verbs (may, might, rust, should, etc) do. For example: (@)__If Ms Ball apologizes, Mr Powis will be gontent. (b) I Ms Ball were to apologize, Mr Powis would be content. (© IMs Ball had apologized, Mr Powis would be content. | (@) and (b) there is a future possible world in which Ms Ball mi and the text could continue to add events and situations within that possible ext world. In ©) Ms Ball has definitely not apologized, but the text creates an imagin= any word in which she has done so, and goes on to mention what possible things could have happened in that particular ‘world. Notice that the imaginary worl is stilllinked to, ie. cohesive with, the ‘base world’ of the text as a whole A different type of ‘parallel universe's set up by verbs of saying, believing e%c., which ‘distance’ their complement clauses from the commitments of the writer of speaker. An example in the Bully Text is ight yet apologize (5). Ms Ball claimed he was undermining her authority The statement he was undermining her auth \writerispeaker I is only in Ms Ball's world that he, Mr Powis, undermining her authority. Similarly, in $9 the verb say creates a separate world for Mr Powis, Leas thus require readers to carefully separate different kinds of really and also to ‘tag’ claims about the truth of events and situations, jority is not taken on board by the 9.6 A method for analysing cohesi n and coherence n of text linguistics we noted his con- of the same, similar or related expression in jomenon can be viewed as aTEXT LINGUISTICS +179 crucial aspect of text cohesion. In the Bully Text, it can be seen very clearly if we analyse the text as in Table 9.1. ‘What this table does is analyse the sentences of the text into their clauses and their clauses’ grammatical constituents (subject, verb, complements of the verb, adjunct, and conjunctions}. This includes clauses in which the sub- ject is not overtly expressed, although, for simplicity, some of these are not shown in the table. Grammatical subjects that are not overtly expressed in certain kinds of embedded clauses are in brackets. Main clauses are S1, etc., where § stands for ‘sentence’, because each clause is analysed out into a full sentence form. You read the table across the rows, giving you the original word order; each column you cross tells you what is in each grammatical cat- egory that makes up the sentence. In each column we can see (a) which sorts of expressions hang together and (b) which sorts of lexical relationships obtain between them, In the rows we can see which kinds of grammatical subjects and complements are combined with which kinds of verbs. While adjuncts can also display certain kinds of cohesion, we will not discuss them here — we leave it to you to consider them further. In the Subject column we can identify the actors in the little ‘world’ con- structed by the text. In sentence (1) an indefinite article is used, in the way discussed above, to introduce an individual: a teacher. Looking down the ' Subject column and the Complements column, we can see other items that the text processor relates anaphorically to this individual: Alan Powis, 53 (62.2), Mr Powis ($2.3), he, his, him (S4), he (55), Mr Powis, q father of two ($6), Mr Powis, be ($9). In $10 the pronoun I appears and the text processor has to determine its referent. In this instance itis related not to the producer of the text, but to Mr Powis. This is done by the text's use of the verb say, which introduces a separate ‘world’ (see Advances Box 9.2), and by the typo. graphical convention of quotation marks for direct speech. There is thus a chain of anaphoric reference for this actor. Much of this is in the mind of the text interpreter. In particular, consider: S1_ A bullied teacher has been awarded a £230,000. $2 A judge [..] had already awarded Alan Powis, 53, £80,000 in interim payments. There is no overt indication that the teacher is Mr Powis, but we ‘instinct ively’ know that it is on reading the text. How do we know this? One explan- ation is that there is a kind of repetition at work in $1 and $2 that is not only a mater of the repeated word awarded. The two sentences quoted in the above form have different grammatical structures: S1 is the passive construc- tion, $2 active. What counts here is not the grammatical subjects (a bullied teacher in S1, and a judge in S2}, but the roles that they play. In $2 a bullied teacher is the grammatical subject and plays the recipient role. In $2, he is the grammatical object but still plays the recipient role. The inference that Mr Powis refers to the same person as a teacher is probably based largely on this type of repetition, the repetition of the role played, as well as on lexicalb9sanq umopyeaig snoniau & a1ajyns ——“‘OnK} Jo sauney e “SIMOg JW 9s oMpUODSIUI 55016 10) payoes sem u ess 9s pur ‘Ayouyne soy Bujulwopun sem =u rss zss pawile)> lea sw ss squaied aug jo oddns aug wom ay rss vay, ‘apuateduioou! Jo wiy pasne (wea euaays ‘peay aun) zs Zps pur Auge si pauionsanb 1g PURDYS ‘Peay oMp Lbs bps a9ye gol siy x80} aH +S 4 uu} © pua 01 epsinyy uo ‘uowaj yas uno>-jo-1n0 uP UL quausked otf, Uanib sem simod 4 ‘s ‘eopsoys0k 40} painpayps quaWUA!IS |INj e squawAed wuayut Bupuad ‘Apeauje ut o00'083 “Es ‘Simo uely papieme pe (bpn{e)—zzs ‘sojenn uanos “amays Ul J00u3s 40K zz pue ‘ppymequn sem 24249905 wos BuP}>res au ves bzs eu pains a peau siy ke golsiyjo ano panioy Buraq Lis bis seye sGususee jo 530} pue Aunt jeuosiad 40}, anofed poo‘oez7& jeme uaag sey Is soso jouorysodeid saso1yd jouonysodard ‘ppalgo 122spu) 22/G0 (esnop) wonounluey ———“ganpy azunipy Paup :@)wuawiajduioy a 2so.yd unow pelgns — aouaqwos xa] ing 247 UY uoIsayo> joonownuDs6 pup joowe7 1% 2Iq0LSELLS UayN Aopsoasoy sraunsur si Aq zis pue pow spus ayeu oy pus yo a2vad Aus Jo uinyas aip pu ‘Cyubip uy yo wanyas aig ‘oweu poo6 Au jo uumas aun rep si yeu 409 MOU sey ToLs ut parsazanu ‘Buyin atp unm paseaid ves auweyq or {© vey LNPUED s,e8 SN ezs ven, irymejun, tase uewisajes 1009-01 4300p & pue puen6 Ayun>as Ue-95'ZF B Se YOM ae uebaq quem pip Burney 24g sea] ayn YOU WH, pies panes sem. som sem (Pres) pies punoy o 1 24 smog a ‘Auouyne yneaNpa s9uNO> yBno10q ‘Aauno> yoqieL Hod pue pean ysuyebe juowames ay. (onpuod sy1e9 SW) y (wonoquppir A1e5 apn) 2661 1 Burpes ou “aonsni jo syino> 1p seasuems 1 1e Bums ‘wonoqurtH Aten a6pr (uso 4) zis us LIS bus vous ols ves 6s 85 £08 els cus ves “s 9s182+ ENGLISH: STRUCTURE SS a a ———__§ sep aiot: The chain of references that this contributes to ig structured in ; such a way that generalization is filled in with increasing detail. First, there fame al Categorization as a teacher, then his name, then ha age, then his family status, G Table 9.1 also clearly reveals the other actors: a judge and Ms Ball. We these acy, ® Pater of progrestive specication ofthe social cae of these actors, Gro me pees device in these eases is generally caled reiteration, since isthe word soiaclted words ae repeated. A case of repetition moh Sd ag ayia (S2.1 and $71), anothers peyloushn Sh pa in Fat S3) and another is setilefmentied) in S2, 83 and Sor texts meray that reiteration involves sense relations such as eyaoreay antonymy, Section 1324, hyPOnymY (these are discussed in more detal Chon 10, Section 10.3.3). An example of hyponymy contribute a wn cohesion would be: Ms Ball isin education. She teaches in a primary school, Where education is the superordinate term and Primary school is the hyponym, $y comparing expressions in the Verb column in Table 9.1 we can See an example of antonymic cohesion between $4 and SS, S4 He lost bis job SS He won the support of the parents Table 9.1 also enables us to see which roles the actors play and how they relate to one another. As we have seen, Mr Powis plays the role of recipient (St, S2, $3), to which we might add $4 and Sé: the hake foe and suffer have some sausting semantic specification that makes their grammaiet subject sommes ait, ndetBoer’ or ‘patient’, Mr Powis, then, is east ia che role of seabion® who is in a conceptual sense ‘passive The verb fea ie $6.1 has ambiguous semantics: the grammatical subject may be or agent in the find. the cag (nore Passive recipient or beneficiary. Aside from chee examples, the only other verb we find linked with Mr Powie 2 a), but this verb is also combined with the various expressions referring to che judge are frequency of reference to Mr Powis, and his appears ice ay the subject “dbeaave Constructions leads to the feeling a reader inay have concerning the aboutness ofthe text itis primarily about Mr Powis oad wae happened to him. His relationship to the other actors can be sera be examining the rows Where he is referred to in the Complement column, as pel as the Subject col- gin where he (Mr Powis) occurs as the grammatical subject of passive con- struction but has the semantic role of undergoer, The Complement column includes ditect objects (e.g., Powis is the “object” of accusations in $4.1) and indirect objects (e-g., $2.2, Alan Powis, 53). He thas emerges as undergoer of actions whose agent is Ms Ball, and the beneficiary of assertions made by | | | 1 | ieer Ti ae Tae! Pr eee Tepe URS Lo eee Re a ee a ee era 1 TEXT LINGUISTICS * 183, the judge. As for the role of the judge, and the way in which he is repeatedly referred to, these can be clearly read off from the table, ‘Sometimes this kind of linkage between words is called collocation, usually defined as the co-occurrence of lexical items in the same environment. ‘In the same environment’ can be defined in different ways: two or more items can be close together or relatively far apart, grammatically combined (as noun and verb, for example) or found in different sentences, However, we need to distinguish collocations that occur in the language at large (e.g., pretty has a statistical tendency to collocate with girl or woman not with boy or man) and those that occur in specific texts, such as the Bully Text. Furthermore, we nced to realize that lexical collocation is a reflex of mental organization of i the world ~ thar is, frames. Thus, for example, a judge ruled (Sl) is cohesive with out-of-court ($2), sitting at... civil courts of justice ($7), and ruling (S9). These words create a cohesive effect across sentences. However, cohesion (a lexical and grammatical relationship) cannot easily be distinguished from coherence (a conceptual phenomenon). In other such cases, the reason for the co-occurrence of such terms in the same text is due to their role in the con: ceptual frame for legal proceedings 9.7 Superstructure and sequence ‘Texts not only depend on the weaving together of lexical and grammatical strands, they have a level of organization sometimes called superstructure ! {van Dijk, 1980). This term refers to the fact that texts have recognizable | parts that are organized according to conventional patterns: The Bully Text | has the typical superstructure of a newspaper report, with easily recognizable sections: a headline, a by-line and the named journalist's specialism, then the \ body of the text. Sometimes the body of the text will have a ‘lead’, the first sentence or two printed in bold. What is less obvious is the internal organiza- tion of the report itself Reports are essentially narratives or stories. In reading the text, you will | have had little difficulty in building a mental model of the sequence of events . being reported. However, closer inspection shows that these events are not i reported in the order they occurred chronologically: they are scrambled. It is i therefore important to distinguish between story (the chronological sequence of episodes) and plot (the order in which the text presents ther). The effects of such ‘story scrambling’ are various: they may, for instance, create dra- matic suspense or they may highlight some facts or events. Even when stor- | ies are scrambled, texts retain their cohesion and coherence by means of the | tense system and other markers that indicate the time at which events take place relative (a) to one another and (b) to the time of writing or speaking. | In the Bully Text we can see how this works by listing the episodes in what | must be their chronological order, alongside the number of the sentence in | i which they are expressed: S4__ Ms Ball questions Mr Powis’s ability $5.1 Mr Powis wins parents’ support184 © ENGLISH: STRUCTURE $5 Ms Ball claims Mr Powis is undermining her authority $5.2 Ms Ball sacks Mr Powis $6 Mr Powis suffers nervous breakdown Mr Powis finds work as guard and salesman Judge says sacking is unlawful and blames Ms Ball Judge awards £80,000 interim payment to Mr Powis out-of-court settlement of £230,000 [Thursday] settlement is settled by insurers full payment scheduled to be paid [yesterday (Friday] $9 Mr Powis says he is pleased. Slearly, the sentences are not in the ‘natural’ order. How does the reader establish the probable real-world order of events? In addition to the back- ground knowledge frames concerning legal procedure employment and caus- tion (losing one’s job causes certain effects), the use of tenses and other temporal indicators help the reader to sequence the episodes. Since this text Occurs in a newspaper, there is an explicit deictic centre (or ‘anchor’) for temporal coordinates (Saturday, 5 October 2002). Hence, the deictic words yesterday and Thursday can be given a precise meaning (deixis is more fully introduced in Chapter 11, Section 11.2). The fixed present-time-of-writing also explains the use of the present perfect in S1, referring to a recent event, In Si, after relates the monetary award to an event before it, the sacking, and strongly implies a causal link (via background knowledge, as well as the informal principle of post hoc ergo propter boc). In S2, the simple past points toa more remote event. There is insufficient information in the text to locate it precisely. If the reader takes the trouble to locate it in the text model he or she is building up in working memory, either in processing $2 or at a later point, then the reader has to rely on his or her own inferencing. In $2 we also have a past perfect tense, whose job is to locate an event before the time of some other past event, known as the reference time. Here, the reader has to decide which is the relevant reference time. “The tense in $3 is the simple past, even though the event is recent, because of the precise time indicator Thursday. In $4, however, the reader must infer that the simple past (lost his job) refers to an episode considerably earlier than ‘Thursday. In $5 and S6 the simple past tense (wor, claimed, was sacked, suf- fered, found) celates to remote events. There ate no words to indicate explicitly which event followed or preceded which; even the temporal subordinating Conjunction when does not do this job. What we have is an iconic sequence in which the sequence of the clauses corresponds to the natural sequence of events ~ 2 sequence which is of course already expected on the basis of non- linguistic knowledge. Sentences $4 to $6 constitute a ‘flashback’. 867 takes us back to a different scene and time scale (or ‘sub-world’ in terms of text world theory}, though here again it is up to the reader to infer the exact time point in his or her model at which the judge said what he said. In $8 the same is true: the reader has to use S3, aided by the lexical repeti | tion and conceptual frames, to locate the event in the text model he or she building, The relevant frame is the world of law, local government, the world | already called up in $2.TEXT LINGUISTICS © 185 59 cepresents yet another scene or text world, triggered by the temporal deictic yesterday, the verb say and the quotation marks. The time is past rela five to the utterance time but ‘now’ ~ hence the present tense ~ for Mr Powis in $10 and S11. We have seen that there is some indeterminacy in the sequencing but on the whole the text enables the reader to construct a model of the sequence of | events, The analysis may seem complicated and unnecessaty but the fascin- sting thing for linguists is that the human brain appears to be able to do all | these complex things rapidly and unconsciously 9.8 To conclude We should not assume that because this chapter has been illustrated by means of a written text that the principles and methods we have outlined do not also apply to the spoken word, Indeed we can, and some linguists do, use the term ‘text’ to refer also to spoken utterances. After all, there have to be principles of cohesion and coherence that hold spoken words together too; dnd principles and practices by means of which hearers make sense out 0! hat chey hear. Whether a ‘text’ is written or spoken, the process of ‘making Sense’ ig not a mechanical affair. Many people assume that using language is simply a matter of putting ideas into words and transmitting them to a hearer or reader, who will then decode them, Perhaps even the early text grammars Suffered from this misapprehension. Things turn out to be not so simple, as this chapter has tried to suggest. Texts are perhaps more like structured sets Of ‘cues’ that ‘prompt’ the hearer to bring all manner of knowledge to bear in the search for intelligible coherence. This chapter has aimed merely to intro- \ duce some of the ways in which linguists are beginning to understand what it means to understand a text. Recommended readings ‘A useful survey is G. Brown and G. Yule, Discourse Analysis, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1983). The more recent cognitive approach is cammarized in a readable introduction by J. Gavins, Text World Theory: ‘An Introduction, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press (2007). A more Getailed approach, on which Gavins draws, is P. Werth (1999).Pragmatics JonatHan Cutrerer aND Gta SCHAUER 11.1 What is Pragmatics? Consider this example: (11.1) [Travelling in a car, pasta field with cows in it] Jonathan: They're lying down....means it’s going to rain. Emily: ‘Well, what if it doesn’t. Natalie: They'd be lying, The word Iying has two senses, either telling untruths or the opposite of standing/sitting. What determines which sense or, indeed, whether both senses should be understood? The word well clearly has nothing to do with being healthy. What is it doing here? The pronoun they would be difficult to understand without the situational context. What is it referring to? And what is it referring to? These, and other aspects of this short dialogue, illustrate the indeterminate nature of language: meanings are not simply matched to language forms on a one-to-one basis. Pragmatics accepts the existence of indeterminacy ~ unlike traditional syntactic and semantics theories — and offers principled ways in which it can be handled. It focuses on language use in context, not language in the abstract. Views about what the field of Pragmatics encompasses and what its main thrust should be are controversial. Two principal camps can be identified, one involving a relatively narrow view and the other a relatively broad views The narrow view: syntax, semantics and pragmatics Many notions in pragmatics can be seen in the work of the American phil- osopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) and his work on pragmatism, or even earlier writers ~ Immanuel Kant or Plato, for example. However, it was another American philosopher, Charles Morris (1901-1979), drawing on Peirce’s work along with that of Rudolph Carnap, who provided a point of departure for the field of pragmatics. In his Foundations of the Theory of Signs (1938: 6-7), Morris argues for the following three-way distinction: * Syntax (or syntactics) = mono relationship (relationships between lin- guistic signs)PRAGMATICS + 203, © Semantics = dyadic relationship (relationships between linguistic signs and the things in the world that they designate) ‘© Pragmatics = triadic relationship (elationships between linguistic si things they designate and their users/interpreters) This has provided linguists with a way of understanding how pragmatics relates to other key areas of linguistics.’ Specifically, it distinguishes pragmat- ics as the area that deals with context, but also makes clear that it has some aspects in common with syntax and semantics. Pragmatics is seen-as another component in a theory of language, adding to the usual phonetics, phon- ology, morphology, grammarisyntax and semantics. Moreover, the objective, in this view, is usually to get pragmatics to ‘rescue’ other more formal areas of linguistic theory. This view of Pragmatics is often identified as the Anglo. American view. The topics typically discussed within it include: reference {also discussed in Chapters 9 and 10), deixis and presupposition, speech acts | and implicature ~ all of which will be treated in this chapter The broad view: pragmatic functions What is often identified as the Continental European view of pragmatic does not exclude the kind of topic areas discussed in the Anglo-American view, but it encompasses much beyond them and has a rather different per- spective. In this view pragmatics is the superordinate field, with disciplines | such as linguistics, sociology and psychology as sub-fields. Thus, the range | ‘of topic areas is potentially huge. Moreover, pragmatics is'not simply abo’ adding a contextual dimension to a theory of language, but a ‘general cogni- | tive, social, and cultural perspective on linguistic phenomena in relation to their usage in forms of behavioue’ (Verschueren, 1999: 7). The first part of this quotation indicates that pragmatics is not simply sited within linguistics, but could equally be within cognitive, social or cultural fields of study. The | middle part of this quotation indicates that pragmatics does not look at lin- guistic phenomena per se, but only at linguistic phenomena in actual usage (the abstract patterns that characterize many areas of linguistic theory are not to be found here). And finally note that the last part of the quotation broadens the object of analysis to behaviour, which is to say, what people do, whether with language or something else, in social contexts. In practice, this view of pragmatics emphasizes a socio-cultural perspective on the function- ing of language. Our section on cross-cultural pragmatics at the end of this chapter, for example, is more typical of this pragmatic view. Also, the topics that appear in Part 5 of this book, English: Communication and Interaction, I could sit easily within this view. Regarding example [11-1] above, this prag matic view would not ignore the indeterminacies noted earlier and how they might be resolved, but considerably more discussion would be devoted to the fact that itis a joke. How does the joke work? Why is it being told here (what are its social functions)? i It is important, however, that one should not overemphasize differences | between the Anglo-American and the Continental European views. A topic such as politeness, as discussed in Chapter 31, has a foothold in both, as it204 + ENGLISH: STRUCTURE both seeks to explain some aspects of linguistic structure and some aspects of i social function. Morcover, one could argue that any comprehensive analysis " of linguistic data should do both, as indeed this chapter attempts to do. | 11.2. On the semantic-pragmatic interface: A glance at deixis i and presuppositions 1 Deiis | Regarding example [11.1], people present during this interaction would have | had less difficulty interpreting the referents of they if they had seen that I was looking at the cows when I said it. Just as my head and eyes pointed towards the cows, certain expressions can point towards aspects of the context. These are deictic expressions. Consider these definitions of deixis: By deixis is meant the location and identification of persons, objects, events, processes and activities being talked about, or referred to, in rela- tion to the spatio-temporal context created and sustained by the act of utterance and the participation in it, typically, of a single speaker and at least one addressee. 4 (Lyons, 1977: 37) Deixis concerns the ways in which languages encode or grammaticalize features of the context of utterance or speech event, and thus also concerns ways in which the interpretation of utterances depends on the analysis of that context of utterance. (Levinson, 1983: $4) The first quotation is in fact from a semantics book, and the second, from a pragmatics book, talks about grammaticalized features. Deictic expressions ate part of systems that contribute to the formal structure of languages. But they are clearly also pragmatic in that they specify a particular relationship with the context which is not encoded, but needs to be inferred. Consider these words written on a post-it note found on the floor of the corridor of my department: ‘Til be back in five minutes.’ One’s understanding of this would be rather limited, because one doesn’t know the context. In fact, I referred to the first author of this chapter, be back referred to his return to his office (on whose door the post-it note had been attached), and ix five minutes referred toa point of time 5 minutes ahead of when he left the note. The reason it was, difficule to understand this note is that itis not anchored to a particular point regarding person (who will be back?), time (5 minutes from when?) and space (back to where?) — it has no clear deictic centre. The default deictic centre of an expression is usually assumed to be the person who produced it, and the time and place in which they produced it. However, there are occasions when we project the deictic centre, as when you tell your friend that you are com: ing over to their house (coming suggests movement towards a deictic centre, thus you have projected the deictic centre from yourself to the person you are addressing).PRAGMATICS 205 ‘There are different kinds of relationship involved in deixis. The big three are; Person: Typically personal pronouns, eg., I, you, we, etc Spatial: Typically demonstratives, and certain adverbs, verbs of motion and prepositions, ©.g., this, that, here, there, come, 0, opposite, away, et. Temporal: ‘Typically adverbs and names for units of time, and, e- nous, then, recently, soon, today, tomorrow, yesterday, next week, etc Other types of deixis include social dein’ tures a social relationship. Icis often ach distinguished by the face that it cap- ed via terms of address (e.8. Jon, Jonathan, Mr Culpeper, Dr Culpeper), but also ~ particularly in languagrs sence chan English - certain pronouns (sec Advances Box 11.1, for an example ADVANCES BOX 11.1 Grammaticalized deictic expressions in the history of English English used to have somewhat different systems of grammaticaized expres inns available for deictic purposes. Regarding personal pronouns, whilst today sve can use mast personal pronouns to distinguish number insofar as the ret erent is singular or plural (@, ! versus we), in Old English there were also the scennants of the ‘dual’ forms of the first- and second-person pronouns. Thus eitimeant we-both, and yt meant you-both, Moreover, there have been radical “Changes in second-person pronouns. Elizabethan English, for example, offered candice betveen two sets of pronominal forms for the second person: the fous ye, you, your, yours and yourself (the you-forms), and the forms thou, thee thy; tine and thyself the thou-forms) In Old English, you simply used the Hrs Br coro plural referent and the second for a singular. But by Middle English times, the variant chosen could have significant social implications. One might Say that these items ha taken ona stionger social deictic roe rather than lus ersonal. The usage ofthese sets is a matter of great controversy. Brown ant Perna (1960) predict that high social status equals use of you-forms to each Sines Tow social status equals use of thou-forms to each other, high-status Indl. Siducls use thou-forms to those of lower status, and low-status individuals use You-orms to those of higher status. These predictions, however, frequently €O yor mateh the facts; meanings have to be inferred from the specifics of context. Rievertheless, one can see a certain similarity in the way you-forms and thous farms were used in earlier periods of English with the way, for example, tu and vous is used in today’s French or duand sie in German. More recently, of course, xcept for in some areas of Yorkshire and Lancashire, thou-forms have become aecefete. The fact that English second-person pronouns have been reduced to Single set of forms based on you, without any encoded meanings regarsing a inber or socal position, marks English out as distinct from many languages, ‘especially European.206 + ENGLISH: STRUCTURE of this) affixes and particles. Note that the examples of deictic expressions given in this section cannot be assumed to be always acting deictically. For example, in the utterance you just can’t get decent service these days, the item ‘you does not point to anybody in particular but refers impersonally to anybody lit could be replaced by the pronoun one) ~ itis not used deictically. Presupposition Presupposition is a notion that inhabits semantics/and pragmatics books in equal measure, It has its roots in logic and philosophy {notably in the work of Gottlob Frege), where it has been much discussed. Ir has something to do with linguistic form, yet it also requires a pragmatic inference to be made; that is, fora full understanding, it requires the target to work out aspects of meaning beyond what is specified by the linguistic form (much as the referring expres sions in example [11.1] require pragmatic inferencing for fall understand- ing). It should not be confused with the everyday usage of this term, where it is taken as near enough synonymous with the term assumption, meaning that something is taken as being true without any explicit evidence (e.g,, by the 1980s many of its presuppositions/assumptions were being questioned) ‘The technical sense of presupposition is more restricted, referring to: ‘certain pragmatic inferences ot assumptions [which] seem at feast to be built into lin- guistic expressions and which can be isolated using specific linguistic tests? (Levinson, 1983: 168). You are reading this chapter. In fact, you cannot sce that the chapter exis Yet the expression this chapter invites you to infer that it does: it is an exist- ential presupposition. Consider another example: We are glad 10 write this chapter. Being truly glad about something presupposes that that something truly happened [ie., that we wrote the chapter is a fact). This is a factive pre- supposition. Note the presupposition is not what is asserted by the sentence (essentially, what is being claimed about the subject of the sentence); it is a background assumption taken for granted. It is largely for this reason that what is presupposed gencrally survives when the sentence is negated. Thus, the sentence We are not glad to write this chapter still contains exactly the same presupposition about the fact that we wrote it (as well as the embedded presupposition that the chapter exists) (the assertion about our not being glad is, of course, untruel). Hence, we have the classic presupposition test of con- stancy under negation. Note in our example that the presupposition is conven- tionally associated with particular linguistic forms ~ a definite noun phrase (this chapter) a particular emotive verb expression (are glad). Such linguistic forms are called presuppositional triggers. Table 11.1 summarizes the types of resupposition and presuppositional trigger that are generally discussed in the literature (see, in particular, Levinson, 1983: 1814, for further references). It should be noted that there is disagreement in the literature about types of pre- supposition and whether particular items are presuppositions at all. Table 11.1 captures conventional ways in which presuppositions are embed- ded in English. Other languages will have their own sets of presuppositional triggers, which will overlap to varying degrees. Peesuppositional triggers do not determine presuppositions, but rather have the potential to trigger an inference