V

   

Textual Efficiency

 

1. MOTIVES FOR EFFICIENCY

 

  1.1 I have argued throughout that the utilization of texts in communication entails constant management of blocks of knowledge, only some of which are relevant at a given moment. The sheer volume of this knowledge usually precludes making even a majority of it explicit in an individual statement. It follows that a language should provide numerous options for compacting surface expression without damaging the connectivity of underlying knowledge. In effect, these sets of options point the participants in communication toward that portion of active knowledge which is to be currently expanded or modified. The options are clearly an important contribution to the EFFICIENCY of textuality: processing the largest amounts with the smallest expenditure of resources. In terms of CYBERNETICS, the use of formats for restatement responds to the CURRENT CONTROLS on communication (cf. I.3.4.7), regulating the flow of knowledge up to the surface.

1.2 The notion of “cohesion” has been used by some researchers for devices such as pronominalization, substitution, and ellipsis (see especially Halliday 1964; Hasan 1968; Halliday & Hasan 1976). Often, no special consideration is given to the underlying connectivity of text-knowledge and world-knowledge that makes these devices possible and useful (except in the discussion of “lexical cohesion” in Halliday & Hasan 1976: ch. 6). Many factors in linguistic outlooks were responsible for this omission: limitations to sentences, exclusion of world-knowledge, lack of interest in real communication, and a general discomfort regarding semantics. The enduring primacy of syntax in linguistics is revealed by the very terms that were proposed for the devices we are considering:. “hypersyntax” (Palek 1968), “macrosyntax” (Gülich 1970), or “suprasyntax” (Dressler 1970a). Evidently, the notion of ‘syntax” here is not that of syntax proper, but a hybrid of ‘semantics of syntax” and “syntax of semantics” as envisioned by the scheme set forth in I.2.8. Bonnie Webber (1980) remarks on the tendency to treat the cohesive devices as if they served to refer to surface words rather than to the conceptual-relational content underlying words. Jerry Morgan (1978a: 109f.) notices that tendency even in the writings of Halliday and Hasan (1976: 2), ‘who probably know better.” But Morgan may be too severe: surely we may say metaphorically that words “refer” to other words, and mean that words refer to the same referents as other words, provided we do not go on to claim that we are dealing with nothing but words.

1.3 An exception to general trends is the very broad outlook of Roland Harweg (1968a). His notion of ‘substitution’ subsumes not only the usual devices such as pronouns and articles, but a diverse range of conceptual relations like inclusions among classes, superclasses, or metaclasses, part/whole, causality, and proximity. He is one of the few linguists to make free use of world-knowledge in defining textuality. In the main, “substitution’ is any connection between two components of a text or textual world that allows the second to activate a configuration of knowledge shared with the first. Hence, a good portion of his examples would be in line with the spreading activation model of knowledge use (cf. III.3.24).

1.4   I will undertake to outline some of the most important devices of cohesion. My criteria will be their contributions to the processing efficiency. These devices are: 

1.4.1 RECURRENCE is the actual repetition of expressions. The repeated elements may have the same, different, or overlapping reference, and the extent of conceptual content they can be used to activate varies accordingly.

1.4.2 DEFINITENESS is the extent to which the text-world entity for an expression at a given point is assumed to be identifiable and recoverable, as opposed to being introduced just then.

1.4.3 CO-REFERENCE is the application of different surface expressions to the same entity in a textual world.

1.4.4 ANAPHORA is the type of co-reference where a lexical expression has is a PRO-FORM (e.g. pronoun) after it in the surface text.

1.4.5 CATAPHORA is the type of co-reference where a lexical expression has is a pro-form before it in the surface text.

1.4.6 EXOPHORA is the application of a pro-form to an entity not expressed in the text at all, but identifiable in the situational context.

1.4.7 ELLIPSIS is the omission of surface expressions whose conceptual content is nonetheless carried forward and expanded or modified by means of noticeably incomplete expressions.

1.4.8 JUNCTION subsumes the devices for connecting surface sequences together in such a way that the relations between blocks of conceptual text- world knowledge are signaled, such as: addition, alternativity, contrast, and causality. Subtypes of junction are CONJUNCTION, DISJUNCTION, CONTRAJUNCTION, and SUBORDINATION (see II.2.24ff.).

 

1.5 These devices offer a number of contributions to efficiency: (1) the compacting of surface expression; (2) the omission of surface elements; (3) the carrying forward of materials to be expanded, developed, modified, or repudiated; (4) the signaling of knownness, uniqueness, or identity; and (5) a workable balance between repetition and variation in surface structure as required by the considerations of informativity.

1.6 The dependence of these devices on context emerges from this list of advantages. At any particular moment during the production and comprehension of a text, people need cues about what ALTERNATIVES among possible continuations are more or less probable (cf. IV.1.1). At the same time, it is necessary to keep the intended alternatives CURRENT without cluttering up the surface text by lengthy restatement or repudiation.

1.7 The STABILITY PRINCIPLE was proposed in I.4.4 as a major factor of systemic regulation of the kind I envision in the actualization of texts. Such a principle assigns a high priority to strategies for co-ordinating surface expressions that share common or contiguous conceptual content. The ECONOMY PRINCIPLE stipulates that, wherever expedient or doubtful, preference should be given to re-using already activated content, rather than activating new content. It follows that cohesive devices like those enumerated in V.1.4 do not make the text coherent; the prior assumption that the text is coherent makes these devices useful (cf. Morgan 1978a: I 10).

 

2. RECURRENCE

 

2.1 The recurrence of surface expressions with the same conceptual content and reference is especially common in spontaneous speaking, as opposed to formal situations. The eyewitness report of a distraught county supervisor after a flood in Arizona contained these statements (Gainesville Sun, Dec. 20, 1978):

 

(73) There’s water through many homes.  I would say almost all of them have water in them. It’s just completely under water.]1 [1. Throughout this chapter, I use the convention of underlining the elements I wish to address in italics.]

 

The rhetorical accumulated effect of this usage has something of the disastrous, disordered copiousness of the water, an entity normally in short supply in Arizona.

2.2 According to the principles of stability and economy, recurrence would entail sameness of reference. But this could lead to conflicts in texts where there seem to be no alternative expressions for different referents (Gainseville Sun, Dec. 20, 1978):

 

(74.1) Weapons and projectile toys have a built-in threat to eyes and cannot be made child-proof. (74.2) Consumer safety groups have also warned about stuffed animals with loose eyes and poorly sewn-on accessories. Small children can pull them off and swallow them. (74.3) “We find eyes all over the place,” one toy store clerk said.

 

We assume that the clerk was finding toy eyes, not children’s ‘eyes all over the place’ because in the latter case, the press treatment would be much more explicit (lack of knowledge inference, III.3.21). Ambiguity is similarly overcome for this passage of the Ohio Drivers Handbook:

 

(75) A restricted license may be issued to any person otherwise qualified who is subject to episodic impairment of consciousness upon a statement from a licensed physician.

 

None of my Ohio informants interpreted the passage such that the physician is required to have a driver’s license (though some wondered how ‘episodic impairment of consciousness’ differs from the usual state of Ohio drivers).

2.3 Deliberate violations of the stability and economy principles might increase informativity and interest. For example, a poem allegedly written by the 18-year-old conspirator Chidiock Tichborne just before his execution in 1586 contains the line (Simpson [ed.] 1967: 85L):

 

        (76) My glass is full, and now my glass is run.

 

A discrepancy (1.6.9) arises when the second ‘glass’ cannot be taken as a drinking vessel and must be processed as ‘hourglass’ instead, reverting to knowledge about the writer’s personal situation of impending execution.

2.4 Psychologically, recurrences should distribute attention away from their components, except in cases like (76). If the frequency principle of learning (IV.2.2) applies, the recurrent elements should be impressed on memory. Processing should be easy, as the point of connection in the ongoing text-world model should be obvious (cf. Kintsch 1974: 86). Whatever factors may apply, there must be a difference between the TRIVIAL recurrences required by the limited repertories of language options and MOTIVATED recurrences where repetition has some deeper justification (cf. Werth 1976; Beaugrande 1978b, 1979e, 1979g).

2.5 Consider for instance the Biblical proverb:2 [2. These examples are taken from a textbook entitled Rhetoric: From Athens to Auburn, ed. Richard Graves (Auburn: Auburn University Press, 1976), pp. 33, 32, and 19 respectively).

 

 (77) As in water face reflects face,

     So the heart of man reflects man.

 

The two lines are very similar in surface structure, and each contains an element repeated on either side of the element ‘reflects’. This organization of expression enacts the content of the textual world: images ‘reflected’ in a mirror. Less striking is the use of recurrence for signaling repetitious events, as in Steinbeck’s passage:

 

(78) They work at it and work at it.

 

This use is similar to that of the county supervisor preoccupied with an overabundance of water in (73). Speaker outlook can be signaled with recurrences such as this one from Jeannie Morris:

 

(79) There are no distractions — and I mean no distractions.

 

This time, the surface format iconically nacts the insistence of the speaker on an attitude as unchanging as the expressions themselves. Possible objections are accordingly discouraged (cf. Beaugrande & Dressier 1980).

2.6 Recurrence can be employed with a shift in the syntactic function of an expression (Dressier 1979). The recurring element is adapted to its environments, yet the identity of reference is still obvious. In the American Declaration of Independence, we find these stretches of text:

 

(80.1) to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station [...] (80.2) they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation

 

The shift from adjective for an attribute to noun for an action neatly signals the overall coherence while avoiding the monotony of an exact repetition. Dressier (1979) notes that this recurrence type offers the text producer the potential to create new language items, since one occurrence can provide for the comprehension of the other. Such is the case when Erich Fried entitles a story ‘Turtle-Turning’ and includes this passage (Fried 1975):

 

(81) Everywhere he finds a helpless turtle fallen on its back, he turns it over

 

The title would be highly non-determinate without this recurrence via word- class shifting.

2.7 Recurrences of lengthy expressions or whole passages can be disadvantageous, because they depress informativity unless strong motivation is present. It is strategically sound to vary expression with paraphrases or synonyms. Yet as in the case of ‘water’ (73), there may be only one readily available name for the desired concept. In scientific reports, the use of specially defined terms must be consistent, despite the repetitiousness entailed. Hearers and readers presumably adapt their expectations in response to these factors.

 

3. DEFINITENESS

 

3.1 The issue of definiteness takes on various dimensions, depending upon whether one’s outlook is logical or psychological. If meaning is identified directly with “truth value” (III.I.2), definiteness becomes a property of objects asserted in a logical world. If meaning is viewed as mental processes, then definite entities are those that are “uniquely identifiable” to participants in communication (Clark & Clark 1977: 249f.). Whether the entities are logical or real, both criteria are too strong. Definiteness applies to many entities that need not be identified at all with specific objects. Ortony and Anderson (1977) distinguish the identifiable reference as “extensional representation” and the reference to entities needed only for conceptual content as “intensional representation” (cf. I.2.8.2).

3.2 The utilization of ARTICLES,in English at least, is revealing, as the terms “definite and indefinite article” suggest. Usually, the definite article is claimed to precede the expression of entities already mentioned, and the indefinite that of newly introduced ones (cf. Firbas 1966). But the following fragment of a Thurber story (in Thurber 1948: 34), suggests  that the matter is more intricate: 3 [3. James Thurber, ‘The Princess and the Tin Box’, in The Beast in Me —And Other Animals, published by Harcourt Brace Joyanovich 1948. Reprinted by permission.]

 

(82.1) Once upon a time, there lived a king whose daughter was the prettiest princess in the whole world. (82.2) On the day the princess was eighteen, the king sent a royal ambassador to the courts of the five neighboring kingdoms to announce that he would give his daughter’s hand in marriage to the prince whose gift she liked most. (82.3) The first prince to arrive at the palace […]

 

The classical distinction of new = indefinite vs. previously mentioned = definite applies here only to ‘a king’ (82. 1) and ‘the king’(82.2). The beginnings of texts are, of course, likely places for indefinite articles (Weinrich 1976: 172). Yet the first occurrence of ‘princess’ has the definite article, being a superlative. The usage in ‘the five neighboring kingdoms’ rests on the postulate of continuity in a textual world (I.6.4): a geographical region can be expected to have neighbors. ‘The prince’ in (82.2) is a projected entity not yet having any referent: any prince who meets that description (an “intensional representation’ in the sense of Ortony & R. Anderson 1977); and ‘the first prince’ in (82.3) is a member of the candidate class in which there can be only one for each number in a series. Such varied uses of articles are essential for the connectivity of the story. De Villiers (1974) found that if the definite articles in a story text are replaced by indefinite, readers don’t take the component sentences as parts of a story at all. Loftus and Zanni (1975) found that eyewitness reports could be influenced by inserting definite articles in front of strategic items: the articles impelled the eyewitnesses to accept as factual some items they hadn’t really seen to begin with. Here, the text surface actually created background knowledge while pretending to keep it active.

3.3 At least the following entities would seem to be eligible for the status of definiteness:

 

3.3.1 MENTIONED entities as established in a textual world (e.g. ‘the king);

3.3.2 SPECIFIC entities established by constraining description or definition (e.g. ‘the day the princess was eighteen);

3.3.3 EPISODIC entities stored in the shared knowledge of language users personally acquainted with each other (e.g. ‘the movie’ in Clark & Marshall 1978: 57; cf. also Goldman 1975: 347);

3.3.4 UNIQUE entities which every sensorially endowed member of a communicative group is assumed to know about (e.g. ‘the sun’, ‘the earth);

3.3.5 INSTITUTIONALIZED entities that social organization is presumed to require (‘the president’, ‘the fire department’, ‘the police);

3.3.6 DEFAULT entities created on demand for the continuity of a textual world (e.g. ‘the five neighboring kingdoms’ in [82.2]);

3.3.7 PROTOTYPICAL entities that function as the representative of a class (e.g. ‘the man on the street’, ‘the ugly American) (cf. III.3.27);

 3.3.8 SUPERLATIVE entities that occupy the extreme position on some scale of variables (e.g. ‘the prettiest princess in the whole world’);

3.3.9 RELATIONAL ENTITIES accessible via TYPICAL and DETERMINATE links from already definite entities.

 

3.4 The criterion of being “uniquely identifiable” fails to cover these various uses. Often, definite entities have no more identity than is required for the particular context wherein they appear (Rieger 1975: 204). We can talk about ‘the police” ‘the ugly American’, or ‘the prettiest princess in the whole world’ without any commitment to an object, or even to a complete entity: we are addressing a conceptual configuration whose content may be no more than the properties we need at the moment. The ‘police’ are people only in their official capacity, not as private individuals. An ‘ugly American’ need by no means possess a repellent outward appearance. We can easily envision the man on the street’ not being on any street at all, but sleeping in a dumpster. And ‘the prettiest princess’ may be decidable in a children’s tale, but hardly in a reality where beauty is a matter of opinion.

3.5 Definiteness might be explicated as the status of entities in a textual world whose FUNCTION in their respective context is non-controversial. To fix the status, e.g. with proper names or definite descriptions, is to instruct the hearer/ reader that the appropriate conceptual content should be easily suppliable on the basis of already activated knowledge spaces. INDEFINITE entities, on the other hand, require the activation of further knowledge spaces. Hence, de Villier’s (1974) test subjects thought that the version with indefinite articles could not constitute a unified story world. They took the indefinite articles as instructions to activate new spaces rather than use already active ones.

3.6 No one would have trouble with entities like ‘the sun’ and ‘the moon’. These entities are not in fact unique, as the exploration of astronomers attests. But in lack of any wider setting such as a science fiction story, preference is at once given to the usual referents. Since a textual world is not committed to exact correspondence with the accepted real world, conventionally unique entities can be recontextualized into non-unique. In this view, uniqueness begins to converge with default. Consider this excerpt from a news article on prostitution (Gainesville Sun, Oct. 8, 1978):

 

(83) Now that the adult bookstores, formerly the vice squad’s primary target, have been closed down, the agents are able to devote more time to busting hookers.

 

The definiteness of ‘bookstores’, ‘vice squad’, and ‘agents’ rests on their typical or institutionalized status in American social organization. They can be assumed as defaults without any clear notion of where or who they might be in this particular town. If an unfortunate occasion arises, their uniqueness can be established. Yet communication would operate very slowly if we had to establish uniqueness merely in order to talk about these entities.

3.7 The spreading activation model of knowledge use, as frequently cited in this book, is relevant to definiteness. Although it is not decided whether spreading is consciously controlled or not (cf. M. Posner & Snyder 1975), definiteness can be one means for channelling it. The appearance of a definite entity not previously mentioned would then have the effect of singling out a point in knowledge space to which activation is assumed to have spread. DETERMINATE and TYPICAL links clearly provide the soundest basis for that assumption. Consider this news item (Florida Independent Alligator, Oct. 9, 1979):

 

(84) A seat belt saved a UF student when he fell asleep at the wheel of his 1977 Subaru and turned off into the path of a train.

 

The definiteness of ‘wheel’ arises as a determinate ‘part-of’ a ‘Subaru’, and that of ‘path’ as a typical ‘’location-of-motion-of’ a ‘train’.

3.8 Perhaps the following definition merits consideration: definiteness con spread to any text-world entity standing in a determinate or typical linkage (cf. III.3.15) to an entity whose definiteness is already establishedin the textual world. To see how this principle would work, imagine that (85.1) were a text beginning; any of the continuations in (85.2) should then’ be acceptable via the link types (from III.4.7) cited in square brackets:

 

(85.1)     Never before had we seen such a house.

(85.2a) The plot of land was quite deserted. [location-of]

(85.2b) The rectangular outline looked oddly lopsided. [form-of]

(85.2c) The walls were leaning inward. [part-ofi

(85.2d) The plaster was peeling off. [substance-of]

(85.2c) The furniture was awfully rickety. [containment-of]

(85.2f) The edifice seemed doomed to collapse. [motion-of]

 

In all of these continuations, the ‘house’is taken as a topic node and thus as a control center to which new material is preferentially connected (cf. III.4.27). This configuration is shown graphically in Figure 22, with all continuations included.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

However, if the linkage were accidental, definiteness would not be so likely to spread, e.g. (85.2g) being an odd continuation:

 

(85.2g) The canary seemed depressed. [containment-of]

 

The oddness of some of my school children’s ‘parts of a house’ (III.3.26) is due to accidentalness. Definiteness also seems reluctant to spread down longer pathways, so that (85.2h) is an odd continuation if the house’s inhabitant is meant:

 

 (85.2h) The face was terribly ugly. [part-of-agent-of-possession-of?]

 

If a single accidental instance is taken from an otherwise accessible class, we are adding an ‘instance-of’ link. Again, definiteness is not clear in such continuations as:

 

(85.2i) The nail was rusty. [instance-of-part-of]

(85.2j) The brick hurt my elbow. [instance-of-part-of]

 

We can improve upon these continuations by providing some intermediary entities not included in numerous classes:3 [3. There may be a constraint that definiteness cannot spread to an accidental instance of an unordered class unless the class itself is first evoked.]

 

(85.2k) The nail holding the name-plate on the front door was rusty. [location-of-location-of-part-of]

(85.21) The brick protruding furthest from the fireplace hurt my elbow. [part-of-part-of]

 

3.9 Linkages to an event can function like these linkages to an object. If a text begins with (86.1), then the continuations in (86.2a-c) connect up to the whole event:

 

(86.1) The sun was just emerging from behind a cloud.

(86.2a) The day was not yet over. [time-of]

(86.2b) The sudden brightness blinded our eyes. [cause-of]

(86.2c) The improvement in our spirits was remarkable. [reason-of]

 

We could also link back to ‘sun’ as object:

 

(86.2d) The golden color was impressive. [attribute-of]

(86.2c) The orb blazed down on us. [form-of]

 

3. 10 Inclusion in classes, superclasses, and metaclasses (III.3.19f.) renders these matters quite intricate. One entity which usually has no unique or identifiable referent is the PROTOTYPE (cf. P. Hayes 1977; Fahlman 1977; Rosch 1977; Brachman 1978a; Webber 1978). The prototypical member has a determinate “instance-of” link to its class, to the extent that the class has a discoverable identity. In a conversation like the following from The Importance of Being Earnest (Wilde 1940 [original 1899]: 420):

 

(87.1) ALGERNON: In married life, three is company and two is none.

(87.2) JACK: That is the theory that the corrupt French Drama has been propounding for the last fifty years.

(87.3) ALGERNON: Yes, and that the happy English  home has proved in half the time.

 

It matters little if speakers have any particular French drama or English home in mind. The context demands no more than a FUZZY concept which supplies the needed content. 

3.11 A class combined with scales of values can yield a SUPERLATIVE as the class member situated at the extreme end of a scale. Because value scales are in the main imprecise, superlatives share the fuzziness of prototypes. The usage of ‘the prince whose gift she liked most’ in (82.2) is straightforward enough, since the princess’s decision will automatically define the referent. But when Leroy Brown was asserted in the American pop song back around 1977 to have been:

 

(88) the baddest [i.e. toughest] man in the whole damn town

 

no one would seriously suppose a precise value determination. Leroy is simply being characterized as an extreme representative of the already extreme class of ‘bad men in south Chicago’. Where competition is so keen, empirical verification would be absurd (and mighty dangerous). In this one textual world, Leroy was the superlative, at least until his sudden demise, ‘like a picture puzzle with some pieces missing’.

3.12 As I mentioned in III.1.3, logicians have traditionally been concerned with at least certain aspects of classes and class inclusions, namely those that fall under the heading of QUANTIFICATION (cf. Stegmüller 1969: 15f.). As I observed at a philosopher’s symposium at the University of Bielefeld in June 1979, logicians generally suppose that definiteness and the use of definite articles depends on the types of quantification described in III.1.3. My own impression was that quantification has been introduced not so much for matters of this kind, but for the special requirements of logic in constructing valid proofs. In the following famous example, we have a universally characterized class of ‘men’ in (89. 1) and the unique member ‘Socrates’ in (89.2):

 

(89.1) All men are mortal.

(89.2) Socrates is a man.

(89.3) Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

 

Although the proof is clearly valid, I do not see why it should depend particularly on definiteness of existence or uniqueness. We might replace ‘men’ and ‘Socrates’ with ‘unicorns’ or ‘the King Louis XIII of France’s pet pageboy’ without making the line of reasoning faulty. The questions of existence and definiteness, I submit, hinge upon context of occurrence. The demands of formal logics for precise quantification far exceed the conditions of many contexts of everyday communication. Whereas logicians have for years debated the status of the donkey in the (according to the redoubtable Texan Robert F. Simmons, who vowed prospectors love their donkeys, utterly false) assertion:

 

(90) Every man who owns a donkey beats it.

 

the language user need merely create a default donkey with whatever further traits (besides being beaten) are required for the textual world. The demands exerted by logical quantification are far too strict for natural language communication. For the text psychologist, the interesting questions are rather how people recognize objects, and under what conditions they are more or less disposed to believe statements. People concern themselves with existence and abstract truth only in special contexts.

3.13 INDEFINITENESS, I suggested in V.3.5, is the property of entities for which no knowledge space is currently active. The beginning of our rocket text:

 

      (35.1.1) A great black and yellow V-2 rocket 46 feet long stood in a New Mexico desert.

 

accordingly instructs the reader to create active nodes for ‘rocket’ and ‘desert’ and to hang the supplied attributes, locations, etc. onto them. However, the text could also have begun with ‘The great black and yellow V-2 rocket […]’ and still have been perfectly coherent. The effect would be the writer’s commitment to make further use of the node beyond that one statement. For example, Through the Looking Glass (Carroll 1960: 175) starts right out with the statement:

 

        (91) One thing was certain, that the white kitten had had nothing to do with it.

 

The reader justly expects to hear at least enough about the white kitten to make the statement believable (and will have a long time to wait!). Such usage is very widespread in texts whose format requires engaging the reader’s interest, because a knowledge deficit is created. In one collection of short essays (G. Levin [ed.] 1977), definite articles for not yet established entities at the beginning of texts is clearly the rule, not the exception (cf. Harweg 1968b):

 

 (92) Each year I watched the field across from the Store turn caterpillar green. (Maya Angelo, p. 13)

(93) The judging formally begins with the Saturday luncheon at the Heart of Wilson Motel. (Frank Deford, p. 115)

(94) The train, its metal wheels squealing as they spin along the silvery tracks, rolls slower now. (Robert Ramirez, p. 127)

(95)     Before you even get the cone, you have to do a lot of planning. (L. Rust Hills, p. 182)

 

3.14 The introduction of entities as definite right at the beginning of the text does not disprove or undermine the status of the definite/indefinite distinction. We do see that, given a regularity of natural language communication, people freely do just the opposite for special effect. It is pointless to argue whether the essays just cited are “well-formed.” In a linguistics of actual texts, a rule such as ‘Use the indefinite article for the first mention, and the definite for later mention” can be no more than I DEFAULT or PREFERENCE (d. 1.3.4.3). Communication takes place gainst a baekdrop of defaults and preferences, but text users will go their own ways when it is expedient to do so (cf. 1.3.4.8).

3.15 The treatment of PROTOTYPES illustrates another facet of the definite/ indefinite distinction. Either of the following utterances could be produced in a situation of receiving unqualified advice:

 

   (96a) A layman shouldn’t give advice to an expert.

   (96b) The layman shouldn’t give advice to the expert.

 

If one utters (96a), bearers are instructed to look immediately into the situational context for referents, so that the indefiniteness is removed. One can use (97b) with a less obvious directness, because the tendency is to envision prototypes for the class of laymen and experts. Once more, the question of “well-formedness” would miss the main point.

3.16 Indefiniteness could also be applied unconventionally. If we had the utterance (traditional saying):

 

(96)     A man who never loses his head doesn’t have a had to lose.5 [5. A similar saying in German goes back to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing.]

 

the usage ‘a head’ presents as indefinite something that is a determinate “part-of” ‘man’. The effect is to weaken the determinateness of that link by suggesting that there could be men without heads after all.

3.17 The definiteness of text-world entities, as we can see, is complex. The usual criteria (cf. V.3.1f.) for exploring the issues are too narrow. If people could assign definiteness only to uniquely identifiable objects in the world, or objects whose existence (either singly or as a class) has been explicitly asserted, communication as we now find it would scarcely be feasible. We might make better headway by treating definiteness as something that arises out of the connectivity of stored knowledge being used in a real situation, where efficiency is referring expressions.

 

4. CO-REFERENCE VIA PRO-FORMS

 

4.1 If REFERENCE is the relationship between expressions and the objects, events, and situations in a world those expressions designate (III.1.3). The use of alternative expressions in a text for the same text-world entity could be termed CO-REFERENCE. Although there are many types of co-reference, (e.g. synonyms, paraphrase), I shall explore only co-reference via PRO-FORMS. Pro-forms are derivative in their actuãIized content from their co-referring expressions. As such, pro-forms differ from their co-referring expressions in systematic ways (cf. Padučeva 1970; Dressler 1972a: 26f.):

 

4.1.1 Pro-forms have a wider range of potential application.

4.1.2 Pro-forms are comparatively empty of inherent content.

4.1.3 Pro-forms are usually shorter-a fact which Dressier (1972a: 26f.) sees in agreement with Zipf’s (1 935) “law”. the more frequently a word is used, the shorter it tends to be or become.

4.1.4 Pro-forms obey constraints upon their occurrences, such that comprehension is not rendered unduly problematic.

4.1.5 Pro-forms need a distinctive surface appearance. In English, PRONOUNS are the only word class in the nominal system that maintains different forms for gender (masculine, feminine, neuter) and case (subject vs. object)-nouns distinguish at most possessive, singular, and plural. DEICTICS (pointing words) generally begin with ‘th-’and are the only word class in which initial ‘th- ’is voiced in pronunciation (except the article ‘the’ and the pro-forms ‘they/their/them).

 

     4.2 PRONOUNS are the best known type of pro-forms. In general, they have as co-referent expressions nouns appearing in the text (cf. Postal 1969). Yet some uses of pronouns do not follow this application, for instance, in the popular American imperatives:

 

(98) Stop it!

(99)  Hold it!

(100) Forget it!

(101) Shove it!

 

Inferencing may be required to recover some referents, as in the well-known slogan of the Bell Telephone Company:

 

(102) Calling long distance is the next best thing to being there.

 

where ‘there’ must be co-referent with an inferrable location. Pronouns may apply to entities whose previous introduction did not occur via nouns, as in a recent statement by a U.S. newscaster:

 

(103) The Congressional privilege of giving consent to treaties is one they seem unwilling to sacrifice.

 

where the co-referent must be derived from the adjective ‘Congressional’.

     4.3 If other expressions sharing referents are used together with pronouns, the natural order would seem to be from most specific to least. Lakoff (1968a) foresees an order of. (1) proper name; (2) specific description; (3) a general class name; and (4) pronoun. An invented example might be:

 

(104.1) Napoleon entered the room. (104.2) The famous general made some announcement. (104.3) The man was very excited. (104.4) He spoke at top speed.

 

Yet this order is far from obligatory. A text producer might use just the reverse in order to create a knowledge deficit (like the deficit evoked by introducing new entities as definite, cf. V. 3.13). We find that tactic used for suspense in this passage by the marvellous Russian story-teller Nikolai Leskov (1961: 55). The door to the cell of the Archbishop mysteriously opens:

 

(105) Who should walk in but a venerable old man in whom his Grace immediately recognized one of the saints of the church, no other than the Right Reverend Sergius.

 

The order of ‘who-man-saint-Sergius’ is a complete reversal of that foreseen by Lakoff,6 [This example is not meant as a refutation of Lakoff, who was dealing with sequels where each element was in a invented separate sentence. Rather, it illustrates how flexible language regularities are in general (cf. note 10 to Chapter 1).] and the gradual emergence of the mysterious figure’s identity is perfectly matched to the gradual increase of specificity in the co-referring expressions. The usage is both effective and appropriate (cf. 1.4.14).

4.4 The replacement of surface expressions also brings up the problem of class inclusions such as we saw in V.3.10ff. The pro-forms can refer to the same set of entities as their co-referent expressions (examples here from Webber 1978: 45): (106a) Several linguists attended the masquerade. They were dressed up as cyclic transformations. But distinctions can be found between a COLLECTIVE inclusion, as in (106b), and a DISTRIBUTIVE inclusion, as in (106c):

 

(106b) Several linguists attended the masquerade. They all came as parse trees.

(106c) Several linguists attended the Yorktown Strutters’ Ball. They each came dressed as a different transderivational constraint. [Insider joke: The original hit tune was the 'Darktown Strutters’ Ball', but IBM Labs, known at the time for airy, boastful claims about its language programs, are in Yorktown Heights.]

 

This distinction has important effects upon the text-world model, as these examples (from Webber 1978: 44) reveal:

 

(107a) The three men who tried to lift a piano dropped it.

(107b) The three men who tried to lift a piano dropped them.

 

The pronoun ‘it’ creates a textual world with the men lifting one piano together, while ‘them’ leaves us with the three lifting one piano each.

4.5 The efficiency of pro-forms is especially evident when they apply to large stretches of discourse that activate sizeable knowledge spaces:

 

(108) “Give your evidence,” said the King, “and don’t be nervous, or I’ll have you executed on the spot.” This did not encourage the witness at all. (Carroll 1960: 148) 6

 

In (108), ‘this’ stands for the entire content of what the King of Hearts has said, and places the entirety in a ‘reason-of’ relation to the state of the ‘witness’. A pro-form can even stand for a block of content whose limits are left open by remaining unexpressed:

 

     (109) “My father and mother were honest, though poor—”

      ‘Skip all that!” cried the Beliman in haste.

        I skip forty years,” said the Baker in tears

        (The Hunting of the Snark, [Carroll 1973: 63])

 

The depiction of forty years would have constituted a vast expanse of content.

4.6 Pro-forms also serve in the REPUDIATION of some portion of previously expressed content (cf. IV.3.12), as in (Belloc 1940: 177f.):

 

         (110) I shoot the hippopotamus

                   With bullets made of platinum

          Because if I use leaden ones

          His hide is sure to flatten ‘em.

 

The class of ‘bullets’ is divided into the subclass of ‘platinum’ versus ‘leaden’, and the expectation that the latter subclass should be used is repudiated. In the following remark of the White King, ‘one’ designates a currently present member of the class of ‘Pencils” while a still indefinite ‘thinner’ member is envisioned:

 

        (111) My dear, I must get a thinner pencil. I can’t manage this one a bit. (Carroll 1960: 190)

.

Different referents in a textual world can be similar in every respect but one, and the pro-form need only attach that respect to keep them distinct, as in the case of Tweedledee and Tweedledum (Carroll 1960: 229, e.a.):

 

(112) She was just going around to see if the word “TWEEDLE” was written on the back of each collar, when she as startled by a voice coming from the one marked “DUM.”

 

The pro-form ‘one’ is useful also if the entity in question is to be kept indefinite (Carroll 1960: 100):  

 

(113) The March Hare said: “I vote the young lady tells us a story.” “I’m afraid I don’t know one,” said Alice.