Chapter IX
Intertextuality
1. We introduced the term intertextuality in I.21f to subsume the ways in which the production and reception of a given text depend upon the participants’ knowledge of other texts. This knowledge can be applied by a process describable in terms of mediation (the extent to which one feeds one’s current beliefs and goals into the model of the communicative situation, cf. VIII.1): the greater the expanse of time and of processing activities between the use of the current text and the use of previously encountered texts, the greater the mediation. Extensive mediation is illustrated by the development and use of text types, being classes of texts expected to have certain traits for certain purposes. Mediation is much smaller when people quote from or refer to specific well-known texts, e.g., famous speeches or works of literature. Mediation is extremely slight in activities such as replying, refuting, reporting, summarizing, or evaluating other texts, as we find them especially in conversation.
2. The question of text types offers a severe challenge to linguistic typology, i.e. systemization and classification of language samples. In older linguistics, typologies were set up for the sounds and forms of a language (cf. 11. 19). More recently, linguistics has been preoccupied with typologies of sentences. Another approach is the construction of cross-cultural typologies for languages of similar construction (cf. Romportl et al. 1977). All of these typologies are devoted to virtual systems, being the abstract potential of languages; a text typology must deal with actual systems in which selections and decisions have already been made (cf. III.12). The major difficulty in this new domain is that many actualised instances do not manifest complete or exact characteristics of an ideal type. The demands or expectations associated with a text type can be modified or even overridden by the requirements of the context of occurrence (cf. VII.18.7). In a larger perspective, of course, discrepancies between ideal language types and actual occurrences are always immanent. The issues in phonetics, for instance, are not yet resolved by constructing a typology of phonemes. And individual languages have their own versions of the types they share (cf. Skalička 1977).
3. In 1972, a colloquium on text types was held at the University of Bielefeld, Germany (proceedings in Gülich & Raible (eds.) 1972). Attempts to apply or convert traditional linguistic methods failed to meet the special needs of a typology of texts. We might count the proportions of nouns, verbs, etc. or measure the length and complexity of sentences (cf. Mistrík 1973; Grosse 1976) but without really defining the type—we need to know how and why these traits evolve. Statistical linguistic analysis of this kind ignores the functions of texts in communication and the pursuit of human goals. Presumably, those factors must be correlated with the linguistic proportions (Schmidt 1978: 55).
4. Siegfried J. Schmidt (1978: 55) envisions “two basic possibilities” for the study of text types. One can either start out with the traditionally defined types as observable objects and try to reconstruct them via a consistent text theory; or one can begin with a text theory which sets up theoretical types to be compared with empirical samples. For a science of texts as human activities, it is impossible to dispense with the traditional text types that people actually use as heuristics in the procedures of production and reception. If our typology turns out to be fuzzy and diffuse, it is only reflecting the state of affairs in real communication.
5. A typology of texts must be correlated with typologies of discourse actions and situations. Unless the appropriateness of a text type to its setting of occurrence is judged (cf. I.23), the participants cannot even determine the means and extent of upholding the criteria of textuality. For example, the demands for cohesion and coherence are less strict in conversation (cf. VI.2ff.), while they are elaborately upheld in scientific texts (cf. Huddleston 1971). In poetic texts, cohesion can be sporadically reorganized along non-conventional principles (cf. IX.9). If these various types were presented in inappropriate settings, communication would be disturbed or damaged.
6. Some traditionally established text types could be defined along functional lines, i.e.’ according to the contributions of texts to human interactions We would at least be able to identify some dominances, though without obtaining a strict categorization for every conceivable example. Descriptive texts would be those utilized to enrich knowledge spaces whose control centres are objects or situations. Often, there will be a frequency of conceptual relations for attributes, states, instances, and specifications. The surface text should reflect a corresponding density of modifiers. The most commonly applied global pattern would be the frame (cf. V.16; VII.38). Narrative texts, in contrast, would be those utilized to arrange actions and events in a particular sequential order. There will be a frequency of conceptual relations for cause, reason, purpose, enablement, and time proximity (cf. Labov & Waletzky 1967; Beaugrande & Colby 1979; Stein & Glenn 19, 79). The surface text should reflect a corresponding density of subordinations. The most commonly applied global knowledge pattern would be the schema (cf. V.16; IX.25ff.).3 Argumentative texts are those utilized to promote the acceptance or evaluation of certain beliefs or ideas as true vs. false, or positive vs. negative. Conceptual relations such as reason, significance, volition, value, and opposition should be frequent. The surface texts will often show cohesive devices for emphasis and insistence, e.g. recurrence, parallelism, and paraphrase, as we saw in the Declaration of Independence (IV.16f.). The most commonly applied global knowledge pattern will be the plan for inducing belief (cf. V.16; VI.11-16; VII.18.1).4
7. The foregoing proposals deal with typical traits and uses of text types and can at most provide a general heuristic. In many texts, we would find a mixture of the descriptive, narrative, and argumentative functions. For example, the Declaration of Independence contains descriptions of the situation of the American colonies, and brief narrations of British actions; yet the dominant function is undeniably argumentative, i.e. to induce the belief that America was justified in ‘dissolving’ its ‘political bands’. The text producers openly declare their ‘decent respect to the opinions of mankind’ and the ‘rectitude’ of their ‘intentions’. In another category, the automobile repair manual How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive (Muir 1969), though it contains more narration and argumentation than most such manuals, is still predominantly intended to describe the construction and maintenance of the Volkswagen. The assignment of a text to a type clearly depends on the function of the text in communication, not merely on the surface format.
8. Literary texts also contain various constellations of description, narration, and argumentation. We therefore need some other distinguishing criteria. The most comprehensive definition of “literary text” might be: a text whose world stands in a principled relationship of alternativity to the accepted version of the “real world” (cf. VII.18.1).5 This alternativity is intended to motivate insights into the organization of the “real world” not as something objectively given, but as something evolving from social cognition, interaction, and negotiation. Often, literary text-worlds contain discrepancies which sharpen our awareness of discrepancies in the socially accepted model of the “real world” (cf. IV.19; VII.40; X.16). Even literary trends such as realism, naturalism, and documentary art, where care is expended to make the text-world match the “real world”, are motivated by this intention to elicit such insights; the text world is still not “real”, but at most exemplary for an alternative outlook on “reality”. Only to the extent that this intention dominates the intention to report “facts” (cf. IX. 10) should the text considered literary.
9. Poetic texts would then be that subclass of literary texts in which altemadvity is expanded to re-organize the strategies for mapping plans and content onto the surface text. The cohesion of a poetic text is upheld partly in opposition to the cohesion of other text types and partly in accordance with type-specific conventions (cf. VII.30ff) In Chapter VII, we undertook to show how the flow of expectations being fulfilled or disappointed is controlled by the detailed organization of the surface text. The poetic function is therefore intended to motivate insights into the organization of expression as interactive and negotiable. Not surprisingly, many literary texts not presented as poems avail themselves of the poetic function to underscore the interactive, negotiable nature of discourse about the “real world” (IX. 8).
10. Literary and poetic texts could be seen in opposition to text types expressly intended to increase and distribute knowledge about the currently accepted “real world”. Scientific texts serve this purpose in their attempt to explore, extend, or clarify society’s knowledge store of a special domain of “facts” (in the sense of VII.18.1) by presenting and examining evidence drawn from observation or documentation. Didactic texts do not reach beyond society’s current knowledge store, but only serve to distribute established knowledge to a non-specialized or learning audience of text receivers. This intention requires the presentation of more abundant and explicit background knowledge than is customary in scientific texts.
11. Even this modest beginning for a typology of texts is far from straightforward. The sets of texts and their characteristics remain fuzzy. Constellations of functions in varying degrees of dominance can be highly intricate. A single text can even be shifted to another type via a special means of presentation. For instance, it was for a time fashionable to “find” poems by publishing non-poems in a literary setting (e.g. Porter 1972); the text receivers’ processing reaction should be quite unlike that in the original setting. Like so many other issues, the question of text types goes beyond conventional linguistic methods (IX. 3) and merges with the larger conditions of utilizing texts in human interaction. A text type is a set of heuristics for producing, predicting, and processing textual occurrences, and hence acts as a prominent determiner of efficiency, effectiveness, and appropriateness (in the senses of I.23). But the type can hardly provide absolute borderlines between its members and non-members, any more than the notion of “text” can do (cf. III. 8). The conditions of communicating are simply too diverse to allow such a rigorous categorization.
12. A second issue in intertextuality is text allusion: the ways people use or refer to well-known texts (IX.1). In principle a text producer can draw upon any available prior text; but in practice, well-known texts are more suitable as being more readily accessible to the receiver audience. The expanse of actual time between the production of the original text and that of the follow-up text may vary enormously. Around 1600,6 Christopher Marlowe wrote the plea of a ‘passionate shepherd to his love’, beginning:
[148] Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
The shepherd goes on to offer the lady a fanciful catalogue of flowers and rustic apparel. Soon after, Sir Walter Raleigh penned ‘the nymph’s reply to the shepherd’:
[149] If all the world and love were young,
And truth in every shepherd’s tongue,
These pretty pleasures might me move
To live with thee and be thy love.
and remarking that the shepherd’s offerings would soon ‘fade’, ‘break’, ‘wither’, and be ‘forgotten’. Raleigh’s reply preserves the surface format (rhyme scheme, rhythm, number of stanzas) and many expressions of Marlowe’s original. Obviously, the utilization of the follow-up text demands detailed knowledge of the original and of the conventions that brought forth the latter. Around 1612, John Donne borrowed Marlowe’s general scheme for an elaborate, fanciful proposal of an improbable fisherman, beginning:
[150] Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
Of golden sands and crystal brooks:
With silken lines, and silver hooks.
The fisherman suggests that by undressing and bathing in the river, the young lady will attract ‘each fish, which every channel hath’ and hence make it possible to dispense with fishing tackle. Although the mediation is greater between Marlowe’s text and Donne’s than between Marlowe’s and Raleigh’s, the reliance upon the original is still unmistakable. If Donne’s first two lines had not been a near quote of Marlowe’s, however, that reliance would be less crucial. Much later, around 1935, Cecil Day Lewis wrote an ironic new version in which the speaker is an unskilled labourer, beginning:
[151] Come, live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
of peace and plenty, bed and board,
That chance employment may afford.
I’ll handle dainties on the docks
And thou shalt read of summer frocks:
At evening by the sour canals
We’ll hope to hear some madrigals.
The force of this text is its opposition to the very principles and conventions underlying Marlowe’s original: the view that the lives of shepherds or other working classes are spent in ornate dalliance and merriment, with nature as a purveyor of luxurious toys and trinkets. In [151], the wistful lady can only ‘read’ about the ‘summer frocks’ promised so opulently by Marlowe’s shepherd; and the hope of hearing ‘madrigals’ (an archaic song form) on contemporary ‘canals’ is as bitterly ironic as you could imagine. Compare Marlowe’s idyllic scene
[152] By shallow rivers to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.
Cecil Day Lewis’s poem is far more devastating than Raleigh’s rebuttal or Donne’s sarcasm, because it attacks that whole alternativity relationship upon which the literary status of Marlowe’s text was based; Raleigh and Donne had mocked the shepherd’s proposals, not Marlowe’s mode of selecting and communicating about a topic. In cases like this, the alternativity of a literary or poetic text is reinforced by opposition to previous conventions for that text type. Notice that in the sample just cited, it is the conventional organization of the “real world” of the 1930s economic slump that asserts itself over the literary and poetic alternative of past tradition.7
13. Intertextuality prevails with the least mediation in conversation. We explored some ways in which the organization of conversation arises from intentionality (VI.16ff.) and situationality (VIII.13ff.). Neither of these factors can offer a full account, however; a text must be relevant to other texts in the same discourse and not just to participants’ intentions and to the situational setting. Topics must be selected, developed, and shifted. Texts may be used to monitor other texts or the roles and beliefs implied by those texts (cf. Posner 1972, 1980). Monitoring is particularly likely if a text appears to violate conventions such as the conversational “maxims” cited in VI.9ff.
14. A topic of conversation emerges from the density of concepts and relations within the worlds of constituent texts. Therefore, a single text might have only potential topics pending further development (Schank 1977: 424). To decide what is worth saying about any topic, participants presumably consider the informativity of potential contributions. The most suitable aspects of a topic to be developed are those involving problems and variables, i.e. things not yet established because they are subject to difficulties or changes.8 In the form of a Gricean “maxim” we would have: pursue those aspects of the presented topic which you consider problematic or variable. We can illustrate some applications of this maxim to “small talk”, where a participant merely reacts to an event or situation already expressed as a topic (cf. Schank 1977). One often asks a follow-up question whose connection to the previous text-world is a relation among concepts of the kind we presented in V.26. The following exchanges from contemporary dramas9 show the following up of the concept type given in square brackets:
[153] Sammy: When’s he coming to see his chair?
Dave: Who, Selby? [agent-of ]
[154] Phoebe: They want us to go out there, and for Archie to manage the hotel in Ottawa ...
Jean: When did they write this to you? [time-of]
[155] Martin: “She entered heaven the moment she died.” So I asked him, “How do you know that?” [cognition-of]
[156] Jimmy: Going out?
Alison. That’s right.
Jimmy: On a Sunday evening in this town? Where on earth are you going? [location-of]
[157] Helena: She’s going to church.
Jimmy: You’re doing what? Have you gone out of your mind or something? [reason-of]
Variables are requested in [153] and [1541: the reference of a pro-form is naturally variable in cohesion (cf. IV.29) and must be made recoverable if no longer available in active storage; and time is variable in coherence because few events and situations occur at fixed moments. Problems are aired in [155], [156], and [157]. People can hardly be expected to know about arrivals in heaven [155]. In a small town in the Britihs Midlands on a Sunday evening, it is hard to imagine a place anyone could go [156]. A declared atheist like Jimmy Porter can of course not recover a reason why his own brainwashed wife would go to church [157]. Thus, in each case, a problematic aspect of a topic—‘going to heaven’, ‘going out on Sunday evening’, and ‘going to church’ —is seized upon as the material for a follow-up question.
15. Texts often give rise to problems inherent more in the presentation than in the content of the textual world. If participants appear to be violating social conventions or conversational principles, or if their intentions and beliefs seem discrepant or unmotivated, either case brings problems another participant may resort to monitoring. Managing is involved also when the monitoring participant hopes to correct the situation and restore conformity (cf. VIII.1). We shall illustrate, again with samples from modern plays,10 some typical cases of this sort.
16. Text presentation is monitored if social conventions are being disregarded:
[158] Gus: One bottle of milk! Half a pint! Express Dairy!
Ben: You shouldn’t shout like that.
Gus: Why not?
Ben: It isn’t done.
Monitoring is also done if a participant seems to be focusing inadequate attention on the presentation:
[159] Catherine: During vacation, I do think Leonora ought to take a look at reality. Are you listening, Charlie?
Charlie: Yes, Catherine.
Catherine: What was I saying?
Charlie: Leonora ought to take a look at reality.
In [159], the inattentive participant is obliged to provide a recurrence of the other’s text to prove attention. Monitoring will also occur if the motivation for a presentation seems unwarranted in the situation:11
[160] Hans: I’m losing a son; mark: a son.
Lucas: How can you say that?
Hans: How can I say it? I do say it, that’s how.
This monitoring elicits the evasive tactic of treating ‘saying’ as the topic rather than ‘losing a son’. And finally, monitoring can be addressed to the style of the presentation rather than to the content:
[161] Fay: I have had nothing but heartache ever since. I am sorry for my dreadful crime.
Truscott: Very good. Your style is simple and direct. It’s a theme which less skilfully handled could’ve given offence.
17. The state of a participant may become the object of monitoring, based on the evidence of his or her texts:13
[162] Daphne: Get out of my life, Charlie
Leonora: Daphne, I know you’re in difficulties, but I think you’re most unpleasant.
A participant’s state may be monitored as inadequate for the discourse:
[163] Esther: So where’s the ideals gone all of a sudden?
Cissie: Esther, you’re a stall-owner, you don’t understand these things.
Monitoring may include comments on conditions that favour or impede the participants’ communicative abilities:
[164] Hans: You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’ve not had enough wine, that’s your trouble ...
Martin: You’re drinking too much wine
18. The participants’ intentions may be monitored if a contributed text seems to serve no plan or goal:
[165] Hal: If, as you claim, your wife is a woman, you certainly need a larger income.
Truscott: Where is this Jesuitical twittering leading us?
Hal: I’m about to suggest bribery.
If the apparent intention is to be misleading, monitoring can serve to point out a refusal to be misled:
[166] Staupitz: It serves very nicely as protection for you.
Martin: What protection?
Staupitz: You know perfectly well what I mean, Brother Martin, so don’t pretend to be innocent.
A participant may be intentionally ambiguous and thus elicit monitorings from others:
[167] Pauline: Pamela’s a bit special too, isn’t she?
Edith: How do you mean?
Pauline: Well, she’s not a raving beauty exactly but she’s not ugly but you don’t know what to do with her.
In [167], Pauline’s original text is deliberately vague about the topic ‘Pamcia’, partly because there is a real difficulty of classifying her along the scale ‘beautiful-ugly’. Monitoring can be used also to aver or disclaim intentions underlying one’s own previous texts:
[168] Catherine: You said that Leonora was putting on an act.
Charlie: I didn’t mean it.
Catherine: It’s a strange admission for a prospective professor of economics to say that he said what he didn’t mean.
Charlie: I was not on the lecture platform. One is entitled to say what one doesn’t mean in one’s own home.
19. The beliefs and prior knowledge of participants can be monitored if a presented text presupposes as fact something still in dispute:
[169] Martin: Father, why do you hate me being here?
Hans: Eh? What do you mean? I don’t hate you being here. One may explicitly denounce some belief as false:
[170] Fay: I’m innocent till I’m proved guilty. This is a free country. The law is impartial.
Truscott: Who’s been filling your head with that rubbish?
One may refuse a request for confirming someone else’s beliefs on the grounds that they conflict with one’s own:
[171] Mcleavy: Is the world mad? Tell me it’s not.
Truscott: I’m not paid to quarrel with accepted facts
Notice the typical tendency to equate one’s own beliefs with “facts” about the “real world” in [171] (cf. VII.18.1). However, one can also refute attributed beliefs without actually committing oneself to any “facts” (cf. VIII.21):
[I 72] Sarah: What do they want to hold two meetings for?
Harry: Well, why shouldn’t they hold two meetings?
Sarah: What, you think they should hold two meetings?
Harry: It’s not what I think.
One’s own avowed lack of belief can be attributed to the inherent non-believability of events or situations:
[173] Mcleavy: Is it likely they’d fit eyes to a sewing machine? Does that convince you?
Truscott: Nothing ever convinces me. I choose the least unlikely explanation and file it in our records.
Similarly, one can point out unbelievability as grounds for not accepting other people’s texts as appropriate contributions to the discourse:
[174] Mcleavy: How does the water board go about making an arrest?
Truscott: You must have realized by now, sir, that I am not from the water board?
20. These excerpts of dialogue illustrate how textuality is upheld in discourse despite problems and disturbances. The content of texts seems not to match the roles, intentions, and beliefs attributed to the participants. Conversational principles such as Grice’s “maxims” may be violated. For example, the maxim of quality (V1.9.3) is endangered if a participant’s text implies unfounded beliefs, as in [169], [170], [171 ], and [174]. The maxim OF relation (V1.9.4) is threatened by a seemingly pointless contribution, as in [1651. The maxim of manner (V1.9.5ff.) must be reasserted to regulate ambiguity, as in [167]. And the various concerns of politeness [158], [162], attention [159], participant state [163], [164], and evasion of a topic [166] or of one’s responsibilities [168], would presumably all affect the principle of co-operation (V1.9. 1).
21. In VIII.4, we noted some similarities between situation monitoring and problem-solving: by making some unexpected object or event a text topic, a participant may integrate it into the usual shared version of the “real world” or at least defend that version against an apparent refutation. This principle might apply equally to the aspects of monitoring discussed here in IX.16-20: the function of monitoring the roles, intentions, and beliefs implied by texts is again to negotiate the basic conditions of communicating and to integrate potential deviations or obstacles. In situation monitoring, the non-expected occurrences arise in the external setting of the discourse. In intertextual monitoring, on the other hand, those occurrences are part of the discourse actions in progress. A text receiver can call the producer to account and request to know the motivation behind the non-expected occurrence at hand; hence, producer and receiver can interact in solving the problem (cf. VII.13 on “motivation search”). Many such problems arise simply because discourse participants can serve their goals better by departing from the conventions of conversation, e.g. from the Gricean “maxims”: they might want to attribute unfounded beliefs to others, or to evade their own responsibilities, and so on. Other problems arise because standards for belief and behaviour need to be negotiated from time to time anyway.
22. Rachael Reichman (1978) argues that the coherence of conversation is not necessarily obvious on the basis of concepts shared among its component texts. She proposes to distinguish between general “issues of concern” (i.e. typical human activities and viewpoints) and the specific events and situations that participants have encountered and want to talk about. Her samples demonstrate transitions between the general and the specific as typical “context space relationships”. An illustrative relation obtains if a general issue is followed by some specific example from the partidpants’own experience; if a discussion of a specific event or situation is followed by citing a general issue that appears to be at stake, we have a generalization relation. There are combinations where an event or a situation illustrates several issues at once a subissue relation; or a single issue is illustrated by several events and situations—a joining relation. Reichman’s relations further illuminate the interaction between participants’ current concerns and topics or the “facts” which are held to be true in the “real world” at large (in the sense of VII.18.1).
23. In view of these considerations, the notion of “text-world model” advanced in Chapter V might well be expanded to that of a discourse-world model (cf. “discourse model” in Bullwinkle 1977; Reichman 1978; Rubin 1978b; Webber 1978). This entity would be the integrated configuration of concepts and relations underlying all the texts in a discourse. However, allowances would have to be made for possible disagreements among the discourse-world models of different participants. The monitoring of situations and texts demonstrated in VIII.14ff and IX.16ff would help to minimize conflicts among these models, notably by addressing assumptions and standards not mentioned explicitly in the text.
24. It can be rightly objected that people’s implicit knowledge is inordinately difficult to observe and study. In most of our examples, such knowledge only emerged when it led to some disturbance or discrepancy; there is obviously a vast amount that goes unnoticed even though it is indispensable for making sense. We opine, however, that properly designed experiments can bring a substantial amount of implicit commonsense knowledge to light. For instance, if people are required to listen to or read a text and then to recall the content, there will be a systematic pattern of additions, omissions, and changes manifested in their reports. The making of reports and summaries of texts one has read represents another important domain of intertextuality and can accordingly serve to conclude our discussion here.
25. The ‘rocket’-text already treated in Chapter V was used in a series of tests with diverse groups of receivers.14 The text runs like this:
[4] [1.1] A great black and yellow V-2 rocket 46 feet long stood in a New Mexico desert. [1.2] Empty it weighed five tons. [1.3] For fuel it carried eight tons of alcohol and liquid oxygen.
[2.1] Everything was ready. [2.2] Scientists and generals withdrew to some distance and crouched behind earth mounds. [2.3] Two red flares rose as a signal to fire the rocket.
[3.1] With a great roar and burst of flame the giant rocket rose slowly and then faster and faster. [3.2] Behind it trailed sixty feet of yellow flame. [3.3] Soon the flame looked like a yellow star. [3.4] In a few seconds, it was too high to be seen, [3.5] but radar tracked it as it sped upward to 3, 000 mph.
[4.1] A few minutes after it was fired, [4.2] the pilot of a watching plane saw it return at a speed of 2,400 mph and plunge into earth forty miles from the starting point.
Our test subjects often began their reports with statements such as: ‘This was the story of a rocket’s flight.’ Accordingly, the reception process would have been guided by attachment to a schema for flight (cf. V.16).15 The schema would contain an ordered progression of the events and states that constitute ‘flight’. The events would include at least: ‘take-off’, ‘ascent’, ‘reaching a peak’, ‘descent’, and ‘landing’; each motion event brings the rocket into a new state of location. Figure 13 (next page) shows the ‘flight’-schema as a network graph with the components just named. However, as our sample [4] shows, the events need not all be made explicit (in the sense of 1.6).
The ‘take-off’ and ‘ascend’ events are both included under ‘rise’ in [4.3.1], and the ‘reaching a peak’ can only be inferred to have happened in the time between ‘sped upward’ [4.3.5] and ‘return’ [4.4.2]. Nonetheless, the schema can be shown to act as an “advance organizer” for the text material (cf. Ausubel 1960). Its application would be another instance of the procedural attachment proposed in III.19 as a powerful mechanism for fitting general strategies to current tasks. Figure 14 (next page) offers a graphic illustration of how the nodes from the text-world model (cf. Fig.11) would be attached to those of the schema (Fig. 13).
26. The effects of the schema were unmistakably documented in our test protocols. The original text opens with a simple description of the scene, in which no events are narrated (cf. IX.6 on description vs. narration). Our test persons recalled the opening already in terms of the ‘take-off’ event that their schema foresaw for the ‘rocket’. They seldom reported the rocket merely ‘standing’ there [4.1.1]; they more often had it ‘on a launch pad’, ‘waiting for blastoff’. Many persons began right away with: ‘A rocket fired up into the air’; ‘It was a missile that fired’; ‘In a New Mexico desert, a rocket was launched’. Evidently, material not deemed essential to the schema was often not noticed, recalled, or considered worth mentioning. Moreover, the original ‘rise’ concept [4.3.1] was usually replaced by ‘take-off’ under a variety of expressions (‘take off’, ‘lift off’, ‘shoot off’, ‘launch’,
etc.) all conveying the initiation of the rocket’s motion. In one group of 72 test persons, the protocols showed 71 uses of motion concepts with initiation. In addition, concepts without initiation were used 21 times (e.g. ‘ascend’, ‘go up’), as if some people felt a need to keep the ‘take-off’ distinct from the ‘ascent’—just what the ‘flight’-schema would predict. The heavier insistence on ‘take-off’ could arise from its more problematic nature’,16 as the event most likely to fail and thus to disenable all the other events in the schema. In contrast, the ‘reaching of a peak’ follows as a matter of course between ‘ascent’ and ‘descent’. Only a handful of test persons recalled this event, which (as noted in IX.25) is not mentioned in the original at all. Many of them might have inferred it but not thought it necessary to report a touchy issue in recall experiments of all sorts.17
27. We can see another effect of the schema in our test person’s inclination to match text boundaries up with schema boundaries. The original text [4] concludes with the ‘land’ event as the rocket ‘plunges’ down in the vicinity of the starting point. The protocols followed this strategy quite closely. In one group of 42 protocols, the rocket’s landing was mentioned in the final sentence by 37 readers. Notice that, in contrast, the original begins with two paragraphs of introductory material rather than with the ‘take-off’ event at the outset of the schema. Here, the tendency of test persons was to rearrange the text such that the ‘take-off’ was mentioned in the opening sentence, and the location, fuels, preparation, etc., further on. We found this rearrangement in 13 of the 42 protocols. Perhaps the receivers had directed their focus of attention toward the schema during the initial phase of comprehension; or perhaps they called upon the schema as a basis for organizing the content of their report; or perhaps the schema figured in both stages.
28. Though the effects of schemas are striking, the position adopted by David Rumelhart (1977b: 268) is probably too strong:
“The process of comprehension is taken to be identical to the process of selecting and verifying conceptual schemata to account for the situation or text to be understood.”
More probably, the selecting and verifying of schemas contributes to comprehension without being identical to it. There is a steady compromise between text-presented knowledge and the stored organizational knowledge patterns and cognitive disposition of the understander. Royer (1977) Proposes to distinguish among three theoretical outlooks on remembering materials such as the content of texts. Trace abstraction entails storing away traces of the original presentation as a sensory experience; recalling requires reviving traces (cf. Gomulicki 1956). Presumably, the understander decides along the way what sort of traces are worth attending to and disregards others (cf. Neisser 1967); otherwise, storage would be chaotic and cluttered. Construction allows for the use of one’s current knowledge patterns for organizing traces (cf. Bransford, Barclay & Franks 1972); construction theory could thus explain how different readers would recall their own versions of content, whereas trace abstraction theory could explain this only in terms of omissions or errors. Reconstruction entails using one’s stored schemas (or frames, plans, etc.) in their current state to reconstruct some presentation encountered in the past; the actual traces would no longer have any separate identity (cf. Spiro 1977). Rumelhart’s view seems to project reconstruction theory into the very act of understanding the content being presented. He should then predict that conflicts between a schema and a presentation for example, the inexact match of the ‘rocket’-text to the ‘flight’-schema (cf. IX.25ff.) should always be resolved in favour of the schema; and that schema-related materials should always be recalled better than others. Our own results suggest that such trends are far less pronounced and certainly not infallible. There is evidently a gradation in which trace abstraction, construction, and reconstruction all participate to some extent. Traces such as the exact colours and speeds of the rocket could not be stored in anyone’s schema, yet they were frequently abstracted, stored, and recalled. Construction was plainly at work when people noticed and remembered the ‘desert’ location, but added ‘sunshine’ and ‘sand’ on their own. Hence, reconstruction cannot be a full account unless we agree to consider any stored or recoverable pattern a “schema” (a trend unfortunately noticeable in some recent discussions) and thus render the term pointless.
29 In III.14, we suggested that a text might be regarded as a cybernetic system in which processing is devoted to a maintenance of continuity. Our criteria of textuality are thus basically all centred around relation and access among elements within a level or on different levels. In this, perspective, the major priority in understanding and recalling text content would be keeping whatever is being noticed, stored, and recovered, in a continuous pattern. Whenever the actual traces of the presentation seem discontinuous, the understander draws freely on prior knowledge (including schemas and frames). Under normal conditions, a text receiver has no clear motivation to create a complete or exact trace of content from a particular text, nor to keep such a trace separated from other knowledge. The motivation is rather to uphold a continuity of sense (V.2).
30. It follows from these considerations that one can design experiments to obtain support for any of the three theories we outlined in IX.28. Trace abstraction can be proven with closely-knit texts whose content matches typical world knowledge quite well. At the other extreme, a bizarre story such as Bartlett’s (1932) ‘War of the Ghosts’ will demonstrate the importance of reconstruction (as Bartlett in fact did conclude). Still, the average standard will be a compromise between these extremes, such as was evinced by our ‘rocket’ sample, whose content is largely, but by no means entirely, conventional.
31. The processes of inferencing and spreading activation have been studied as mechanisms which expand, update, develop, or complement the content expressed in a text. (cf. I.11; V.12, 34ff). Inferencing is deployed for specific discontinuities and problems, while spreading activation results simply from making one point active inside a stored knowledge pattern. We can see these processes at work in the ‘rocket’ protocols. The additions seem to access links to the same concept types we outlined in V.26 for representing knowledge in textual worlds. The type of linkage followed most heavily evidently corresponds to the topic material and the frames or schemas that apply. Since a ‘flight’-schema involves frequent changes of location, that concept should and did appear frequently in additions or alterations.
32. Location would also be enriched and developed by mental imagery (cf. Paivio 1971).18 Following along a narrative of events or a description of situations can be accompanied by envisioning scenes (cf. Fillmore 1975, 1977).19 The ‘desert’ of our sample was recalled as ‘sandy plains’, sometimes ‘far out’ in ‘isolation’, and sometimes ‘outside a city’.20 The rocket was sent off ‘under a bright sun’ from a ‘launching pad’. The ‘mounds’ were remembered as ‘mountains’, requiring further changes in order to keep things coherent: ‘a rocket is in front of a mountain in Arizona’; or ‘a rocket is in front of a mountain where the people that control it are’. The ‘flight’-schema was doubtless involved when a test person wrote: ‘the rocket blasted off, up, and away from the launch pad . . . at its peak it reversed and plummeted downward on its journey back to earth’.
33. Time was also employed to link events together in a continuous pattern: the ‘scientists crouched behind mounds as the rocket was launched’; ‘When the time came for the rocket to be launched, two red flares were sent up’; ‘While it was ascending, radar tracked the rocket’; there was ‘a plane flying at the same time the rocket was’. In return, the time expressions of the original (‘soon’, ‘in a few seconds’, and ‘a few minutes after’) were seldom recalled or used. People apparently create their own time relations as needed for organizing a sequence of events in a textual world.
34. As remarked in V.33, apperception inferences were often made to the effect that ‘scientists’ and (less often) ‘generals’ were ‘observing’ or ‘watching’ the rocket. Other apperception links were also added with striking insistence: ‘they watched the take-off and paid attention to the flames until they could not be seen any more and then they looked into a radar detector to find the distance of the rocket’; ‘we can see it by satellite, but it speeds up and we lose track of it’. The early part of the flight was told from the ground perspective, whereas the ‘pilot’ of the observation plane was the point of orientation for the ending. Many protocols claimed that the pilot ‘reported’ what he had seen a—communication inference.
35. There was a variety of other concept types involved in such modifications. Cause was followed up to conclude that the rocket ‘crashed’ or ‘exploded’ upon landing; one person surmised: ‘Going approximately 2, 400 mph, it must have made quite a recess in the earth’s crust’. Purpose was frequently assigned to the ‘flight’ as an ‘experimenter a ‘test’ of a ‘new’ kind of rocket. Agency was attributed to the ‘scientists’ who were asserted to have set off the flares or even fired the rocket themselves. The rocket’s ‘trail’ was given substances: ‘bright yellow smoke’, or ‘exhaust’.
36. The additions and changes we have surveyed all rest upon commonsense knowledge about the organization of situations and events. The question that now seems crucial is: are there systematic strategies which control the interaction of text-presented knowledge and commonsense knowledge, so that predictions could be made and tested for the outcome of recalling a particular presentation? On the one hand, there certainly must be some systematic tendencies, or else communication would be unreliable from one text receiver to the next. On the other hand, there may be sufficient variations and gradations among different strategies and different personal expectations and knowledge stores that predictions could never surpass a rough degree of approximation. For instance, we might say that for the ‘rocket’ text, the inference that the ‘scientists’ were ‘observing’ the rocket would be reported by about 33 per cent of the test persons (the proportions generally obtained so far with over 300 persons); but we would not yet know how many actually made the inference without reporting it, nor whether proportions might rise or sink if any one of numerous factors were altered.21 For the time being, we will have to rate qualitative predictions over quantitative ones.
37. In the last part of this chapter, we shall suggest what appear to be systematic tendencies in the interaction of stored world-knowledge and text-presented knowledge, based on the results of various tests so far.
37.1 Text-presented knowledge is privileged in under-standing and recall if it matches patterns of stored knowledge. Since most rockets are powered by combustion, the recall of ‘flame’ by 48 out of 72 test persons, one of the highest frequencies we obtained for any concept, is not surprising. The prominent mention of ‘desert’ in 36 protocols is reasonable, since testing grounds should be, and usually have been, far from population centres or valuable farmland. The use of ‘radar’, recalled by 256 test receivers, is well-known in all kinds of aviation.
37.2 Text-presented knowledge is privileged if it is attachable to the main entries of an applied global pattern, such as a frame, schema, plan, or script. This tendency is a specialized corollary of the preceding one, but it claims priority for global patterns over local ones; the global patterns would make a more pervasive and constraining contribution to the understanding processes than would the local. We reviewed the effects of the ‘flight’- schema upon the receivers of the ‘rocket’-text in IX.26f. There is a very substantial body of research unequivocally documenting the usefulness of schemas in understanding stories, where a small number of common patterns underlie an enormous variety of actual texts. 22
37.3 Text-presented knowledge is altered to produce a better match with patterns of stored knowledge. The ‘rocket’-sample hardly seems to contain disturbing incongruities. But the ‘earth mounds’ [4.2.2] were noticeably treated as incongruous, perhaps because ‘earth’ suggests dark soil not found in a desert. These ‘mounds’ were recalled as ‘sand hills’, ‘sand dunes’, ‘rocks’, ‘rock formations’, and ‘mountains’—all common in deserts. Persons who recalled ‘barriers’ or even ‘concrete bunkers’ must have been focussing on the purpose of the ‘mounds’ to protect the personnel. Another discrepancy in the original sample was the claim that the rocket’s trail ‘looked like a yellow star’ [4.3.3]. Test persons recalled the flame instead as a ‘glow’, a ‘blur’, or a ‘dot’; to get in the rocket’s motion, others had a ‘star rising in the sky’, or a ‘shooting star’. A striking alteration was performed by someone who must have encountered ‘V-2’ rockets in reports of World War II: he said that ‘the paragraph was about the launching of a captured German V-.2 rocket’.
37.4 Distinct elements of text-presented knowledge become conflated or confused with each other if they are closely associated in stored knowledge. The most widespread instance of this tendency in our data was the conflation and confusion of the ‘red flares’ used as a ‘signal’ with the ‘yellow flame’ emitted by the rocket, e.g.: ‘the rocket went off in a burst of flares’; ‘when the rocket was launched, it looked like a red flare’; ‘it sped upward to great heights, leaving a spectacular trail of yellow and red flames’. This conflating may have been assisted by surface similarities. The words ‘flare’ and ‘flame’ look and sound rather alike, and both are said to ‘rise’ in the original [4.2.3] vs. [4.3.1].
37.5 Text-presented knowledge decays and becomes unrecoverable if it is designated accidental or variable in world knowledge. This tendency was unmistakably prominent in the treatment our test persons accorded the various quantities. Their rockets weighed between 5 and 50,000 tons, and telescoped between 26 and 1,000 feet in length. Speeds wavered between 300 feet per minute (a measly 3.13 mph) and 300,000 miles per hour. The distance between launching and landing ranged from 60 feet to 164 miles. Speeds were converted to altitudes, and weights to numbers of gallons. Some people artfully dodged the whole issue by recalling ‘lots of fuel’, ‘a certain speed’, or ‘very fast’. One person even remembered a quantity with nothing to measure: ‘there was something about 2,400’. The rocket’s colours fared little better, though their prominent placement at the beginning of the text may have supported their retention over many other details an effect known as primacy in learning experiments.23 No one would be likely to know in advance that a V-2 rocket ought to be ‘black’ and ‘yellow’. In one group, half of the test persons recovered no colours. A fourth recovered the correct ones, and the other fourth roamed across the colour spectrum, citing ‘red’, ‘green’, ‘white’, ‘blue’, and ‘silver’. Only ‘silver’ is an inherently probable colour for a metal rocket.
37.6 Additions, modifications, and changes performed via spreading activation or inferencing become indistinguishable from text-presented knowledge. If, as was claimed in IX.29, text receivers normally have no motivation to preserve a separate trace for a single text or text-world, then people should eventually be unable to tell what they heard or read apart from their own contributions. The passage of time seems to intensify this tendency. When we had test persons wait just five minutes before making protocols, the additions and alterations were more pronounced than in a control group that started right after presentation. Harry Kay (1955) found that people would stick to their own versions even when given an opportunity to study the original again; the longer the intervening time, the more his people did so rather than try to improve accuracy. The elapse of time seems to strengthen the confidence people place in their alterations.24
38. These six tendencies have been found for receiver groups of different ages. A set of tests was also run with native German speakers recalling a German translation.25 The same results were obtained, e.g. the inference that ‘scientists’ were ‘observing’, or the insertion of ‘take-off’ as an initial schema event, so that the data cannot be specific to the English language. Of course, the German groups would have somewhat different background knowledge. Unlike the Americans, they seldom conflated ‘New Mexico’ with ‘Arizona’ or ‘Nevada’ (as predicted by IX 3 5.4), but they changed the ‘earth mounds’ to ‘sand hills’ just as often; they were no doubt better acquainted with the notion of ‘desert’ than with the geography of the southwestern United States. Their knowledge of chemistry was better than that of the Americans, who listed ‘nitrogen’ (a non-flammable substance) as a fuel; the ‘liquid hydrogen’ (‘Wasserstoff’) given by mistake in the German translation was either recalled exactly or corrected to ‘liquid oxygen’ (Saurerstoff’).26 The Germans tended to report the presence of ‘generals’ at the launching far more often than the Americans (who concentrated on the ‘scientists’), perhaps because of clearer memories of warfare rocketry. Still, the tendencies themselves were comparable for both nationalities, despite variations in commonsense knowledge stores.
39. The six processing tendencies would not, as far as we can judge so far, be able to make exact predictions for a specific case and receiver. In fact, they could easily interact in complex and unforeseen ways. For example, a given pattern of text-presented knowledge might match a pattern in stored knowledge so well that the privileged status of the good match (IX.37.1) could be offset by utter effacement of a few non-matching (IX 37.3) or variable (IX.37.5) elements; the overall result might be no more accurate recall than a modest match would elicit. Or, a particular person’s experience might lead to a wholly unpredictable treatment of text-world elements, e.g. when the American reader remembered a ‘captured German’ rocket.
40. Furthermore, the fact that a recall protocol is a text in its own right has important implications (cf. Kintsch & van Dijk 1978: 374). A certain degree of variation between the original text and a given protocol can arise simply because the test person is striving to uphold textuality at the moment of making the report. The current demands of cohesion and coherence will call for additions, changes, and omissions of material. In real-life settings, situationality will be influential according to the circumstances under which people must recall things. There may even be a trend toward upholding informativity by embellishing or exaggerating the content over that of the original; certainly some such process appears to operate in the “tall tales” narrated in rural areas.27
41. Such considerations indicate that intertextuality should not be disregarded as a factor in any experimental or empirical research on texts or on the transmission of knowledge via texts. Communication serves a myriad of purposes under all sorts of conditions, but with surprisingly economic means and surprisingly few disturbances and misunderstandings. At one extreme, we must not try to define the function of language elements for all conceivable contexts; at the other extreme, we must not conclude that every context is so unique that no systematic regularities can be distilled. The central task for a science of texts is rather to find the regularities according to which conventional functions are either re-affirmed or adapted in actual usage. The whole notion of textuality may depend upon exploring the influence of intertextuality as a procedural control upon communicative activities at large.
Notes
1 In addition to the sentence typologies of transformational grammar, sentence typologies have been offered by Admoni and Brinkmann, among others (cf. survey in Helbig 1974).
2 The notion of “function” here is again based on that in systems theory: the contribution of an element to the workings of the entire system (in this case, the system of communication). See note 2 to Chapter VII.
3 Freedle & Hale (1979) found that narrative schemas can be acquired and transferred to the processing of descriptive (“expository”) texts.
4 A major question we have pointed out on occasion (cf. I.16; VII.28, 42; VIII.20) is the extent to which text receivers are persuaded by content they have to supply themselves an important factor in argumentative texts. Yet as we suggested in Chapter VII, all texts could be studied in consideration of what they do not say, but might be expected to say.
5 Literary texts are often called ‘fiction’ to signal their non-agreement with the “real world”. But there are fictional texts which are not literary, e.g. simple lies; and fictionality is not a sufficient condition for literariness. The sufficient condition is the intentional awareness of organizational principles that evolves from the various degrees of non-agreement between the text-world and the “real world” (cf. Iser 1975; Ihwe 1976).
6 The dates used here are those given in The Norton Introduction to Literature ed. J. Paul Hunter (New York: Norton, 1973) pp. 78ff. The dates are those of the first publication, which, according to the editor, do not “differ substantially” from the dates of actual writing (p. xliii).
7 Here again, a text-world discrepancy deliberately points up a discrepancy in the real world (cf. IV.19; IX. 8; X. 16).
8 On preferences for problematic knowledge, cf, IV.23, 29; IX.26. On the treatment of variables in recall, cf. IX. 37. 5.
9 The sources of these excerpts are as follows: [153] is from Wesker (1964: 189); [154] from Osborne (196ib: 67); [155] from Osborne (1961a: 58); and [156] and [157] from Osborne (1960: 51).
10 The sources ofthese excerpts are as follows: [158] from Pinter (1960: 108); [159] from Spark (1963: 1); [160] from Osborne (1961a: 15); [161] from Orton (1967:67); [162] from Spark (1963: 100); [163] from Wesker (1964: 200); [164] from Osborne (1961a: 39); [165] from Orton (1967: 82); [166] from Osborne (1961a: 53); [167] from Osborne (1968: 16); [168] from Spark (1963: 76); [169] from Osborne (1961a: 38); [170] from Orton (1967: 66); [171] from Orton (1967: 70); [172] from Wesker (1964: 17); [ 173] from Orton (1967: 72); and [174] from Orton (1967: 62).
11 We noted the function of motivation search in VII.13; here, a participant is delegating the search task back to the producer of the problematic text (cf. IX.21).
12 If style is, as we asserted (cf. I.7), the outcome of selection and decision processes, then it could well be treated as problematic and variable and hence as a suitable topic of discourse (cf. IX. 14).
13 On the states of participants, cf. note 6 to Chapter VII.
14 On earlier work about this text, cf. note 10 to Chapter V. Thanks are due to all those who participated in running these experiments: Manfred Buge, Roger Drury, Richard Hersh, Walter Kintsch, Genevieve Miller, and Althea Turner; and to the students who acted as test subjects at the Universities of Colorado and Florida, and at the Gymnasium am Wall (Verden an der Aller, West Germany).
15 The text is essentially narrative and thus predominantly, though not exclusively, guided by a schema (cf. IX.6).
16 See note 8 to this chapter.
17 The event would be recoverable via updating (cf. V. 34).
18 A new test for the effects of mental imagery is now being designed by Robert de Beaugrande and Zofia Solczak-Roberts at the University of Florida. The presentation of the ‘rocket’-text is accompanied by pictures whose effects on recall are often striking.
19 Fillmore’s use of the term “scenes” is much broader: “any coherent segment of human beliefs, actions, experiences, or imaginings” (Fillmore, 1975: 143) (cf. IV.40). We prefer the narrow sense: coherent images of situations.
20 We italicise the items changed or added by our test subjects.
21 The passage ‘too high to be seen’ may have been influential here. But how can we test inferences without eliciting them by our questions?
22 Cf. Rumelhart (1975, 1977b); Bower (1976); Anderson (1977); Kintsch (1977b); Mandier & Johnson (1977); Meyer (1977); Rumelhart & Ortony (1977); Thorndyke (1977); Kintsch & van Dijk (1978); Mandler (1978); Stein & Nezworski (1978); Adams & Collins (1979); Beaugrande & Colby (1979); Freedle & Hale (1979); Stein & Glenn (1979); Beaugrande & Miller (1980); Thorndyke & Yekovich (1980). Compare V.16.
23 The evidence for primacy effects on recalling texts is still inconclusive (Meyer 1977: 308ff) (but cf. IV.24). Conversely, recency effects would appear if the final passage of a text were favoured in recall; here again, definite proof is lacking (Meyer 1977: 309).
24 Bransford and Franks (1971) found that receivers were most confident about those altered versions which made explicit the greatest number of implied associations.
25 Thanks are due to Manfred Buge, of the Gymnasium am Wall (Verden an der Aller), for running these tests; and to Dr. Daniele Kammer of the University of Bielefeld for the translation.
26 One subject even commented that the presented text was in error, and pointed out that the V-2 required oxygen rather than hydrogen.
27 The tendency to depict preternaturally large or small objects in literary texts has been discussed in Weinrich (1966). Our own test readers quite often made the rocket much larger and faster in their reports (cf. IX.37.5). When one group was later assigned to write their own stories about a ‘rocket’, there were greater exaggerations, e.g., flying from the earth to Mars in six hours.
Return to main page
of
Introduction
to Text Linguistics