System and Text: Making Links
M.A.K. Halliday
Ruqaiya Hasan
It is always refreshing to read
Robert de Beaugrande: not just because he writes breezily (though that helps)
but because he clears the air of stale and suffocating ideas. The picture he
presents here of twentieth century linguistics, and its twenty-first century
prospects, is one we can largely endorse. The prevailing feature of linguistics
as a discipline has always been its shortage of data; linguists have never been
able to establish the real nature of a linguistic fact to theorize the
relationship between instance and system, between events that can be observed
and the principles that lie behind these events. Granted that this relationship
is considerably more complex with semiotic processes than it is with physical
ones (Halliday 1996), it still seems as if linguistics has all this time been at
about that point in its development where physics was in the sixteenth century,
before technology made it possible to carry out systematic experiments. The
arcane theoretical constructions that we have been familiar with in linguistics
the separation of language and speech, the determinate conception of
grammaticality, the idealised sentences, all de Beaugrande’s ‘pseudos’ and
‘semis’ can be seen as attempts to make up for this lack of empirical
foundation, by inventing data in the way that physical scientists had sometimes
had to do before they were able, or else allowed, to observe.
What has transformed the scene,
or at least is now transforming it, is the corpus: an expanding repository of
authentic linguistic data, spoken as well as written, which is accessible for
systematic observation and research. As is so often the case, it was a
particular advance in technology that made this transformation possible: in this
case, the development of the computer. It is about twenty years now since
computers evolved to the stage where they became available as tools for serious
linguistic research; in that time the corpus has emerged as the primary resource
for extending our knowledge of lexicogrammar and semantics, especially in
conjunction with complementary achievements in natural language processing. We
now at last have data to balance, and constrain, the proliferation of theories
that de Beaugrande alludes to.
Where we have
to demur, however, is in coupling together Saussure and Chomsky in the way that
de Beaugrande seems to be doing (cf. paragraphs 3, 10, 13, 23). Saussure’s
reason for excluding a science of parole is that such an enterprise would
be unfeasible because parole is in a constant state of flux, whereas
Chomsky excludes performance because he sees it as defective and therefore of no
possible interest. Where Saussure is multivocal and always leaves room for doubt
(Thibault 1997 passim, Hasan 1999), Chomsky is self-assured: he deals in
univocal certainties. There is no place in Chomsky’s scheme of things for the
dialectic of langue and parole that Saussure allows for in considering language
evolution and change. Thus while Chomsky would not see the absence of a body of
authentic data as imposing any kind of limitation on the scope and power of
linguistics, Saussure by contrast would almost certainly have recognized the
vast potential that would be opened up once linguists had the ability to observe
their object of study, captured as it is in motion by the scale of the corpus,
something that practitioners in the natural sciences had long taken for granted.
De Beaugrande gives a lively
account of the early Chomskyan agenda and its baleful relegation of a language
to a set of (by definition ‘grammatical’) sentences; and he traces the
emergence of a ‘text linguistics’ as an alternative mode of understanding.
The conception of a ‘text linguistics’ is itself a hangover from that time,
when the dogma of sentence syntax was breaking down; text was coming on to the
agenda but it proved impossible to theorize text taking sentence syntax as the
point of departure, whether by treating a text as a string of sentences, or by
writing a special text syntax. De Beaugrande deplores this segregation of text
from language; yet he seems at times to accept it: he retains the term ‘text
linguistics’ as in his title, and also the terminological contrast of
‘text’ with ‘language’ (e.g. in 21). If you oppose language to
text in this way, it suggests that text is somehow a distinct phenomenon from
language; we would prefer to contrast text with system, treating language
as a unitary phenomenon encompassing both.
What is most problematic,
perhaps, is de Beaugrande’s implied equation of text with language
in use. This is problematic on three counts. One is the question whether all
language in use is going to qualify as text; consider as an extreme example the
language use of certain categories of aphasics. Secondly, and more seriously, de
Beaugrande seems to leave out of consideration the properties which make a text
a text. For some time now it has been generally agreed that a text is
characterised by texture and structure, whatever the terms by which these
properties may be referred to. Such concepts no doubt need to be further refined
and elaborated; but it seems desirable not to abandon the notion that there are
certain characteristics that are criterial to recognizing any given instance of
language in use as a text.
It might be that de Beaugrande
is talking about ‘text’ in the general sense of any instance of spoken or
written language, rather than about 1a text’ as a linguistic unit. But he does
refer to ‘a text’, suggesting that it is a unit which links language to
speech ( 23); and that it functions in this way because, while it is an
‘actual’ system, it retains some of the ‘virtuality’ that is
characteristic of language. We may interpret this in our terms as saying that a
text is an environment within which an instantial system may emerge and grow; we
would agree, noting however that this can only happen because of the systemic
property of language itself. This is why instantiantion in the form of text
brings about change in language a point which appears as a sub-motif in de
Beaugrande’s own paper. But this property of texts makes it all the more
important to clarify the nature of textness in relation to the corpus.
Certainly, a corpus is (or can
be) a repository of texts. But this does not mean that every chunk of discourse
we extract from a corpus ipso facto constitutes a text, or (and this is
our third point) that attending to particular features of corpus-derived
instances is the same thing as text analysis. Analysing a text is not the same
thing as analysing instances of language in use. We need a richer, more
constrained view of what constitutes a text especially if we want to relate
texts (as linguistic entities) to other semiotic modalities, as de Beaugrande is
keen to do. We are now technologically in a good position to explore some of
these modalities, and to show how the various modalities co-operate in creating
structures of meaning. This type of semiological enquiry can enrich our idea of
performance and throw light on how language is a resource for other modes of
semiosis while it itself is also resourced by them. This is yet another respect
in which the computer makes possible a qualitative transformation in our
understanding of linguistic processes.
In celebrating the computer, though, we should not forget its precursor:
the thing that first opened our eyes (and ears) to the realities of language,
namely the tape recorder. It was the tape recorder that began the transformation,
because it opened up the world of spoken language, especially informal,
spontaneous, conversational speech. This had two quite separate consequences.
One was to reveal what writing left out, the rich variety of meaning potential
that is built up by intonation and rhythm. We could now observe these resources
at work, and investigate how they functioned, in integration with the rest of
the grammar, to create meaning in text, particularly the information flow and
the negotiation of interpersonal space. The other effect of the tape recorder
was to reveal the intricacy and highly structured nature of the spoken language.
Back in 1964 Halliday, McIntosh & Strevens (1964: 284) pointed up the
‘false notion’ that speech is ‘less grammatical’ than writing; the myth
that spoken language was ‘nothing more than an untidy procession of
featureless fragments, incapable of analysis’ could no longer be
seriously upheld. But the tape recorder showed up more than that: it showed the
enormous semogenic potential of informal speech that here were the semantic
frontiers of language, where new meanings were constantly being created and
semantic systems extended and enriched. In other words, it showed us the order
of speech, its choreographic complexity as each moment becomes the point of
departure for a further discursive move. It might be helpful to present an
example of what we mean by this characterisation. Consider the following
conversation which took place at an exhibition of paintings (Svartvik &
Quirk 1980: 215-8):
A: Yes; that’s
very good. ... I wouldn’t be able to have that one for some reason you see:
this checker board effect I recoil badly from this. I find I hadn’t looked at
it, and I think it’s probably because it probably reminds me you know of
nursing Walter through his throat, when you play checker boards or something. I
think it’s it reminds me of the ludo board that we had, and I just recoiled
straight away and thought [mm] not not that one, and I didnt look inside;
but that’s very fine, [mm mm] isn’t it? very fine, yes.
B: It’s very
interesting to try and analyse why one likes abstract paintings, cause I like
those checks; just the very fact that they’re not all at right angles means
that my eyes don’t go out of focus chasing the lines [yes] they can actually
follow the lines without sort of getting out of focus.
A: Yes I’ve got it
now: it’s those exact two colours you see, together. He had he had a blue and
orange crane, I remember it very well, and you know one of those things that
wind up, and that’s it.
B: It does remind me
of meccano boxes [yes well] the box that contains meccano, actually.
A: Yes. Well, we had
a bad do you know; we had oh we had six or eight weeks when he had a throat
which was [mhm] well at the beginning it was lethal if anyone else caught it. [yeah]
It was lethal to expectant mothers with small children, and I had to do barrier
nursing; it was pretty horrible, and the whole corridor was full of pails of
disinfectant you know [mm], and you went in, and of course with barrier nursing
I didn’t go in in a mask I couldn’t with a child that small, and I didn’t
care if I caught it, but I mean it was ours emptied outside you see [mm] and you
had to come out and you brought all these things on to a prepared surgical board
[mm mm] and you stripped your gloves off before you touched anything [mm] and
you disinfected oh it was really appalling [mm]. I don’t think the doctor had
expected that I would do barrier nursing you see [mm] I think she said something
about she wished that everybody would take the thing seriously you know, when
they were told, as I did, cause she came in and the whole corridor was lined
[mm] with various forms of washing and so on, but after all I mean you can’t
go down and shop if you know that you’re going to knock out an expectant
mother. It was some violent streptococcus that he’d got and he could have gone
to an isolation hospital but I think she just deemed that he was too small [yes
mm mm] for the experience, and then after we’d had him, you know, had him for
a few days at home this couldn’t be done. [mhm] She made the decision for me
really, which at the time I thought was very impressive, but she didn’t know
me very well: I think she thought I was a career woman who would be only too
glad and would say ‘oh well he’s got to go into a hospital , you know’, so
she made the decision for me and then said ‘it’s too late now to put him
into an isolation hospital; I would have had to do that a few days ago’ which,
I thought, I didn’t want her to do!
B: Do nurses tend to
be aggressive, or does one just think that nurses are aggressive?
A: Well, that was my
doctor [oh], and she didn’t at that time understand me very well. I think she
does now.
It is interesting to speculate
whether there is any other technical advance in the offing, which would
complement the tape recorder and the computer in giving access to the processes
of language. Is it likely that magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), or some other
form of brain scanning, will develop to the point where, in observing the
neuronal activities associated with speech, we can not simply note that such
activity is taking place, in various different regions of the brain, but measure
it and match it up with particular instances of speech? Sydney Lamb (1999) has
consistently represented linguistic processes in connectionist networks that
could be interpreted in analogous terms.
But let us come back to de
Beaugrande’s concern with the effect of the computerized corpus. The scale of
the data available in a corpus like the Bank of English makes two kinds of
enquiry possible: one quantitative and the other qualitative. On the one hand,
we can conduct quantitative studies of grammatical systems, like polarity and
tense, which bring out (a) general frequencies for the language as a whole (i.e.
putting all varieties together), and (b) frequencies for particular functional
varieties, or registers. We can then test hypotheses about single systems (e.g.
that positive will be more frequent than negative, by about one order of
magnitude), about register variation as the resetting of systemic probabilities,
and about the probability profile of grammatical systems as a whole. (see
Halliday & James 1993; Halliday 1993).
On the other hand, we can use
the corpus data to explore and establish what de Beaugrande here refers to as
the missing links : lexicogrammatical patterns, involving colligation and
collocation, which lie somewhere in between the systemic patterns recognized by
grammarians of the language and the instantial patterns emerging from a single
text. de Beaugrande provides illustrative examples of these; see especially his
section F, ‘intertextual actualizations of theory and practice’.
In what sense does de Beaugrande
want us to understand ‘missing links’? They are links between two modes
of systemic order, the virtual systemic order of the language, and the
actual systemic order of the text. We would interpret the virtual and the actual
as the two poles of the instantiation cline, which we refer to as system
and instance; but we would see them as being different perspectives,
different standpoints of the observer, not as phenomena of two different kinds.
Of course, all linguistic patterns, even the most general systems of the grammar,
are manifested in text, and have to be examined in their ‘actual’ mode of
being; but whereas some are very readily systemicized (networked, in the terms
of a systemic grammar), others such as these ‘missing links’ are more
intractable, and as such they are subject to diminishing returns. So, in
investigating how the words theory and practice, and their various
derivations, function in construing specific domains of experience, de
Beaugrande naturally locates himself at the instance end, generalizing from
particular texts that share certain features in common. It would not be
impossible to approach these phenomena from the system end, and eventually we
shall have to do just that; but at the present moment in history to do so would
consume a massive amount of theoretical (and practical) energy which we cannot
expect to afford. On the other hand, the collocation of theory with practice
clearly is a systemic feature of the language; we could readily determine, for
example, what proportion of the occurrences of theory were within some
defined collocational range of instances of practice, and we could
establish the colligation of these terms, together and separately, with
particular process types in the transitivity systems.
Francis and Hunston (2000) also
locate such colligational patterns in some middle ground between language and
text, or in our terms between the system and the instance. Francis and Hunston
show that, while their patterns are clearly revealed by the corpus data, such
patterns are simply not brought into conscious awareness either by
introsepection or by the inspection of occasional samples. They then make the
stronger assertion that such patterns cannot be accommodated within any general
theoretical grammar. We would reject this assertion; neither the fact that they
have only been retrieved from corpus analysis nor the fact that they are, or
involve, regularities of a lexical kind, is sufficient reason for excluding them
from the reach of a grammatical theory. Note in this connection de Beaugrande’s
reference to Hasan’s work in ‘lexis as most delicate grammar’ (Hasan 1985;
1987) where Hasan sets out, and illustrates, the location of lexis within a
unified lexicogrammar.
De Beaugrande does not suggest
that his ‘missing links’ cannot be incorporated within a general linguistic
theory. His ‘intertext’ (cf our macrotext; also text type as a
set of semantically related texts seen from the instance end) is a theoretical
construct; its regularities could not be captured in terms of ‘rules’ for
the ‘grammaticalness’ or ‘well-formedness’ of ‘sentences’, but they
can be understood in terms of the ‘tuning of [...] probabilities’ among the
texts that go to make it up (cf Halliday’s 1991 account of register variation
as a resetting of probabilities). Then moving to a higher level of abstraction
whence to theorize the relationship between text (or intertext) and language, he
proposes to define a language as ‘a general theory of human knowledge and
experience evolving in a dialectical relation to texts as a set of practices for
working out the theory’. De Beaugrande makes it clear that these
considerations are compatible with, and ultimately take off from, the
theoretical ideas of Peter Hartmann and his colleagues.
We also find them compatible,
and agree that a language is a general theory of human knowledge or rather, that
it includes such a theory (the ideational base; cf Halliday & Matthiessen
1999); but we would want to add that it is also an enactment of human social
processes, and that these two metafunctions cannot exist independently.
Any text must be the product of the interaction between these two, mediated by
the texturing of the whole into coherent discourse. But two questions seem to
arise, in relation to de Beaugrande’s recommendations, and both have to do in
some sense with the overall dimensionality of language.
One is the question of the distance
from one end to the other of the instantiation cline. We have always been struck
by the impoverished conception of natural language that is implicit in
sentence-based theories; Halliday once gave a paper entitled How big is a
language? (summarized in Halliday 1996), in which he wondered why this
question was so seldom asked, and suggested that it was because when linguists
moved from words to sentences they gave up thinking about language in
paradigmatic terms. He gave as one example the English verb (verbal group
in terms of systemic grammar), where even a network that was far from fully
extended in delicacy specified a set of over 70,000 selection expressions. This
output required only a partially ordered set of less than thirty grammatical
systems; when clause types are networked to any significant degree of delicacy
the number soon runs into the hundreds of millions. Unless one is aware of how
big a language is, in paradigmatic terms, the amount of variety that is found in
a corpus of texts will always seem mysterious and even threatening; it is
tempting to give up at that point and invent a notion of ‘text’ that exists
on a different plane of reality from ‘language’. A language is not a set
of texts; but nor is it a phenomenon of a different order from text. We could
call it a theory of text, in the sense in which a climate is a theory of
weather; but if so it is a commonsense theory, and (as de Beaugrande has often
pointed out) linguists have had a hard time coming up with a metatheory that can
explain the relationship between a language, as a virtual entity (the text
potential), and the observable corpus of text (whether a remnant corpus
inscriptionum or an apparently bottomless Bank of English) in which this
potential is actualized.
In passing: let us certainly let
the texts represent themselves it is a way of showing that we trust them (recalling
Sinclair's injunction (1992) to 'trust the text'). Of course, once any
linguistic event becomes a text for the linguist, it thereby becomes a
re-presentation: it is a record of a performance, even if we are attending to it
in spoken form on tape, and if it is in writing it has undergone further
re-presentation a writing system is a commonsense distillation of what aspects
of a text can be left out when it is preserved. Moreover as de Beaugrande points
out what we call text is in fact a spectrum of possible readings. J.R. Martin
prefers to take the reading rather than the text as the endpoint of the
instantiation cline.
The other aspect of the
dimensionality of a language is its thickness: its stratal pattern of
organisation. What we are calling ‘the text’ is a stratified entity, its
strata being linked by a relationship, called metaredundancy by Lemke
(1993), which also links the text to its ecosocial environment, or context of
situation. What we observe as being actualized is text in context, or
‘reading in context’ if that is to be preferred. Hasan (1995, 1999) shows
what is involved in representing context as part of a thicker, dimensional
concept of text itself. We assume that de Beaugrande would be in sympathy with
this enterprise he has written about it himself in various places elsewhere; but
it is perhaps important to make the theoretical status of context explicit,
because if we want, as he suggests, to ‘invest our own status as participants,
in analysing or interpreting data’ (in whatever guise, including Firth’s
dictum ‘the text means what you (sc. the linguist) say it means’), we cannot
do this without taking as primary data the unitary phenomenon of text-in-context.
Putting these two dimensions
together, instantiation and stratification, we arrive at an interpretation
whereby a text, in its context of situation, is an instance of the linguistic
system, in its context of culture. If we are to theorize the interpretation of
the social and the semiotic (as is essential if de Beaugrande’s project for
education is to have any hope of succeeding), then in order to ‘bring real
language back into the centre’ we will need to be surveying very large
corpora of actualized texts’ (.97) in relation to their social
contexts: not only the instantial (situational) contexts of the texts themselves
but also the context of the corpus as a social activity its relation to the
differential distribution of textual practices across society and to the way the
reading of a text is inalienably linked to the social positioning of the reader.
De Beaugrande is outstanding for his insistence on the social accountability of
the linguist. What we are emphasizing here is the importance of embodying this
commitment into the theorizing of language itself: assuming a ‘text
linguistics’ at, and beyond, the millennium, the new freedom that comes with
access to large quantities of authentic data will become a truly democratic
force only to the extent that the data are matched by a
socially accountable theory of semiotic systems and processes.
References
Francis, Gillian and Hunston,
Susan.2000. Pattern Grammar: A
corpus-driven apporach to the lexical grammar of English.
Halliday, M.A. K. 1991. Towards
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Linguistics: Approaches and Uses.
Halliday, M.A.K. 1993. Quantitative
studies and probabilities in grammar. In Michael Hoey (Ed.) Data,
Description, Discourse: Papers on the English Language in honour of John McH
Sinclair.
Halliday, M.A.K. 1996. On grammar and
grammatics. In Ruqaiya Hasan,
Halliday, M.A.K., McIntosh, Angus
& Strevens, Peter. 1964. The
Linguistic Sciences and Language Teaching.
Halliday, M.A.K, & James, Z L.
Halliday, M.A.K, & Matthiessen,
Christian. 1999. Construing Experience through Meaning: A Language Based Approach to
Cognition.
Hasan, Ruqaiya. 1985. Lending and
borrowing: From grammar to lexis. In John E Clark (Ed.) The Cultivated Australian.
Hasan, Ruqaiya. 1987. The grammarians
dream: lexis as most delicate grammar. In Robin P Fawcett & M A K Halliday (Eds.)
New
Developments in Systemic Linguistics, Vol 1: Theory and Description.
Hasan, Ruqaiya. 1995. The conception
of context in text. In Peter H Fries & Michael Gregory (Eds.) Discourse
in Society: Functional Perspectives.
Hasan, Ruqaiya. 1999a. The
disempowerment game: Bourdieu and language in literacy. Linguistics and Education
10(1): 25-87.
Hasan, Ruqaiya. 1999b. Speaking with
reference to context. In Mohsen Ghadessy (Ed.) Text and Context in Functional
Linguistics.
Lamb, Sydney. 1999. The
Pathways of the Brain: The Neurocognitive Basis of Language.
Lemke, Jay. 1993. Discourse, dynamics
and social change. Language as Cultural
Dynamic, Special Issue of Cultural
Dynamics 6.1-2: 243-275.
Sinclair, John McH. 1992. Trust the
text: the implications are daunting. In Martin Davies & Louise Ravelli (Eds.)
Advances
in Systemic Linguistics.
Svartvik, Jan & Quirk, Randolph (Eds.).
Thibault, Paul J. 1997. Re-reading
Saussure: The Dynamics of Signs in Social Life.
Grammar
versus Text
Wolfgang
U. Dressler
Since texts are among the most complex linguistic signs (or even units)
which are objects of linguistic research, the number of promising approaches to
their investigation is much higher than with less complex signs (e.g. word or
sentence). As a consequence, even Beaugrande's very rich contribution cannot do
justice to the wealth of competing promising approaches to “text”, be it in
the ending or (even more) in the upcoming millennium. In accordance with the
available space, I will focus my response just on one avenue towards studying
the interconnected relations between grammar and text, and between virtual and
actual systems, and in doing so I must refer to some of my previous work for
further information.
I quite agree with Beaugrande’s
vision of text (section 23) as “a unit which actually links language to
speech”, but I disagree with his equation or near-equation of language and
speech with Noam Chomsky's competence vs. performance” or Ferdinand de
Saussure's “langue” vs. “parole”. Already Louis Hjelmslev and Eugenio
Coseriu have argued that this dichotomy must been enlarged to trichotomy which
includes “language as a social institution = linguistic norms” as mediating
between language as a virtual system and actualisation in performance/parole.
Hjelmslev nowhere says so; on the contrary, he vowed that if “social conditions” become the “content of
conventional linguistics”, we will fail to “grasp the totality of language”,
and incur “the danger” of “overlooking’ “language itself’ (1969
[1943]:
That this trichotomy works well for those systems of grammar, also within
my own naturalness approach (cf. Dressler 1999a), I have shown in many places,
e.g., for phonology in Dressler (1984), for morphology in Dressler (ed. 1987).
It works well also for the lexicon, e.g., when differentiating between 1)
potential meanings of a word within (usually open) system, 2) the
institutionalised meanings of this word, as they should be found in a good
dictionary, and 3) the actual meanings in a running text. Clearly, such a
conceptualisation renders the application of the empirically very important
dichotomy between type and token more difficult than practitioners would like,
i.e. much (explicit or implicit) theoretical groundwork is needed for
operationalising the type-token relation. This is most obvious on the text level,
e.g., if we want to compare tokens of the type “love letter” (or “obituary”,
etc.) and count the occurrences of definitional or of proto typical properties
as against accidental properties of such a type. These types, which represent
genres (German “Textsorten”) are clearly
to be assigned to the level of language as institution (norm) Now can we
construct for these genres also correspondences on a level of the virtual system
of language? Of course we can talk about “virtual love letter” (or “obituary”)
and its distinctive Saussurian value in opposition to other genres of the same
language. But clearly such virtual concepts are much vaguer and more fluid than
any phonological, morphological, syntactic, and lexical unit of the virtual
system of the same language. This is the immediate main reason why attempts at
characterizing non-texts and constructing text grammars have been futile (see
Beaugrande 18, 37). Thus too,stars (asterisks, a tool introduced by generative
grammar) are much dimmer in text than in grammar.
As further consequences, there have been modular approaches to grammar,
whereas nobody has ventured to postulate a specific text module. Accordingly,
the complexity of a (virtual) grammatical system can be described in terms of a
Building-Block Model or of a part-whole model of complexity theory, whereas, as
shown by Beaugrande himself, the complexity of text has to be accounted for in
quite different terms. Therefore it has been a scientific progress, even a must
(pace Beaugrande) that grammar, which had been firmly connected with logics and
rhetorics in the classical trivium since medieval times, has been isolated from
text and posited as a separate object of study (cf. Dressler 1999b). This view,
however, entails that grammar cannot be the core of linguistic phenomena with
texts as superficial epiphenomena; rather, text linguistics, discourse analysis
and pragmatics deal with the essential language phenomena, whereas virtual
linguistics systems — of which virtual grammar is the most systematic and
structured part — represent secondary idealization.
These idealizations should
not be seen only as models. Rather they correspond in a way which linguists
interested in the psychological reality of their models must elaborate and
refine, to what speakers construct themselves. Similar to constructivist
frameworks which describe the self-organizing emergence of complexity in
physical, chemical and biological systems, constructivist and emergentist models
of language acquisition must describe how children construct and reconstruct,
step by step, correspondences to the complexity of their target/input language.
This happens first on the levels of phonetics on the one hand, of text and pragmatics on the
other (cf. Dressler 1996). Later on children also construct fragments of grammar
(Dressler ed. 1997). All these constructions are patterns which appertain to the
level of norms — which of course differ from institutionalised adult norms.
But when children become aware of the productivity of grammatical rules, then
they (re)construct a further level of reader mechanisms of a virtual system,
which represent the core of virtual grammar. Properly textual phenomena lack
such a core and thus, what children, adolescents and adults can construct in
this area, is a rather loose system of potentialities. For this system
Beaugrande (30) is correct when concluding that “virtuality is by definition
open and dynamic”.
As a result of these views, I cannot agree with Beaugrande's (17, 31)
characterizations of grammar as frozen (which recalls Leo Spitzer’s famous
identification of grammar with “frozen style”) nor with his rejection (32)
of real synchronic system: of course, performance is always dynamic (even in the
severest syndromes of global aphasia), and the level of language as institution
includes many norms which are elastic and full of social transitions. Beaugrande
is also correct when thinking of the open virtual systems of text. But the
constructions of virtual grammar are much steadier.
This view on the difference
between text and grammar (especially qua virtual systems) engenders differential
predictions for language impairments, e.g. in aphasia (cf. Dressier & Stark
eds. 1988). It correctly predicts impairments of both performance and norms of
both grammar and text, which is to say no difference. Aphasics may even
construct new textual norms during therapy, as Dressler et al. (1990) have shown
for gender-specific discourse. But whereas there is some evidence for the
impairment of entities or properties of virtual grammar, there is none so far
for impairment of virtual text.
Quite predictably, the steadiest part of virtual text systems occurs at
the interface of text and grammar, where rules of e.g. co-reference are
constructed, whose status comes close to, but is not identical with, that, of
syntactic rules of sentence co-reference. Not surprisingly, this subfield of
text linguistics has been called “text syntax” or “transphrastic syntax”
in the s1970s. Text linguistics in the coming millennium would do well to
distinguish this (rather marginal) subfield from the main objects of textual
investigations.
Dressler, Wolfgang U. 1984. Explaining
Natural Phonology. Phonology Yearbook 1. 29-52.
Dressler, Wolfgang U. 1987. Leitmotifs
in Natural Phonology.
Dressler, Wolfgang U.
Dressler, Wolfgang U. 1999a. On a
Semiotic Theory of Preferences in Language. The Peirce Seminar Papers 4,
389-415.
Dressler, Wolfgang U. 1999b. Textlinguistik und die Isolierung der
Grammatik von Pragmatik und Diskurs. In F. Fuerbeth et al. eds. Zur Geschichte und Problematik der Nationalphilologien in Europa. Tübingen:
Niemeyer. 823-832.
Dressler, Wolfgang U. & Jacqueline A. Stark. 1988. eds. Linguistic
Analyses of Aphasic Language.
Dressler, Wolfgang U., Ruth Wodak and Csaba Pleh. 1990. Gender-specific
discourse in aphasia. In Y. Joanette & H. Brownell eds. Discourse Ability
and Brain Damage.
Response to Robert de Beaugrande
Roland Harweg
Ruhr-Universität
The central object of a linguistic
discipline which calls itself text linguistics is the text. It is, therefore, to
be expected that in an article on text linguistics the notion of text should
form the main topic, and in a certain way this expectation, in Beaugrande’s
article, is clearly fulfilled. Nevertheless, I must confess that I have no clear
idea of what Beaugrande means by this notion exactly. What I presume is, however,
that his notion and idea of text is at least in part different from the one I
have.
Basically speaking, one can, it seems
to me, distinguish between two different notions of text -- two notions of text
which in the view of many linguists (and this is what makes the matter rather
complicated) overlap or even coincide. They coincide, however, only from a
certain point of view, namely extensionally, not intensionally. Intensionally,
they can clearly be distinguished, at least by opposing them to their opposite
notions. Thus, the opposite notion of one of the two notions of text is the
notion of language, whereas the opposite notion or, more precisely, the main
opposite notion of the other of the two notions of text (for this one has more
than only one opposite notion) is the notion of sentence. The former of the two
notions of text designates a certain form of manifestation of language in a
wider sense and is as such roughly synonymous with notions like parole
and performance, its opposite notion being language
in the narrower sense, i.e. langue or
competence, respectively. The latter of the two notions of text, on the other
hand, designates a certain level (in my conception the highest) in the hierarchy
of linguistic units, a level within that hierarchy which consists, among others,
of the levels of the morpheme, the word, the sentence, and the text. But
although the two notions of text are, intensionally, well-distinguished, in the
eyes of many linguists they, as was already said, fall together from an
extensional point of view. Thus, for Chomsky and most of his adherents, the
sentence, as is known, is the highest hierarchical level of language which still
belongs to language in the narrower sense, i.e., to competence, and for Saussure
and many of his followers, exceptions set aside, already the word is the highest
linguistic unit which still belongs to language in the narrower sense, i.e. to langue.
Texts, in the view of Chomsky and most generativists, belong to performance, and
in the view of Saussure and his followers they belong to parole.
What is the intensional opposite
notion of the notion of text in Beaugrande’s article, is it language in the
narrower sense, i.e. the langue or is
it the sentence? Maybe a wholly unequivocal answer to this question is not
possible, but there is evidence for the assumption that this opposite notion be
language (in the narrower sense), i.e. the langue.
At least, this opposite notion is for him the main, the dominant opposite notion
of the notion of text.
Thus, the first chapter of his
article bears the heading ‘ “Language” and “text” in “modern
linguistics”’, and though its terms “language” and “text” do not
occur in the headings of the following chapters, the headings of the first two,
namely ‘Virtual system and actual system’ and ‘Theory and practice’,
obviously point in the same direction. The first and the second sentence of
these chapters, respectively, are even explicitly clear about this. Thus,
Beaugrande in the first sentence of the former of these two chapters writes:
‘As a provisional strategy, some “text linguists” (myself included) have
for a number of years been proposing to view the relation between a language and
a text as one between a virtual system
and an actual system”; and in the
second sentence of the latter of these two chapters he writes: ‘we could
define a “language” to be a general theory of human knowledge and experience evolving in a
dialectical relation to texts as a set
of practices for working out the theory’.
Of these two characterisations of the
opposition between language and text Beaugrande considers the former as merely
‘provisional’ and the latter as situated on a higher level. Nevertheless, he
also retains the former one. This is shown by his use of ‘virtualistic’
terms like ‘collocability’ and ‘colligability’ on the one hand and
‘actualistic’ terms like ‘collocation’ and ‘colligation’ on the
other, terms he uses in order to describe basic phenomena of language on the one
hand and basic phenomena of texts on the other. His higher evaluation of his
characterisation of the two phenomena by means of the opposition ‘theory vs.
practice’ is based on the mutual dialectical connection which consists between
theory and practice.
The opposition to language (in the
narrower sense) is, it is true, the main opposition in which Beaugrande sees the
phenomenon of the text, but not the only one. He sees the text, as some of his
remarks betray, partly also in opposition to the sentence. However, he sees this
opposition, whenever he speaks about it, connected with another opposition,
namely that between actuality or authenticity on the one hand and inventedness
on the other. Thus, he speaks, whenever he speaks of sentences or more precisely,
of isolated sentences, of invented
sentences, and when he speaks of texts, he speaks of actual
or authe
ntic texts, and the adjectives he uses in this are, in the last
analysis, only other expressions for the opposition between langue and parole, between
virtualness and actualness. For Beaugrande, the opposition between language and text
(in the sense of langue and parole,
respectively) and the opposition between sentence and text are not independent
from one another. True, he admits that, for instance in speech act theory, one
has attempted to stretch and bend the concept of the ‘sentence’ in the
direction of ‘performance’, and that Hjelmslev, for instance, has tried to
integrate the text into the langue; but, he asserts, Hjelmslev at least has not been able to
show how this could be carried out (cf. § 8).
The opposition between sentence and
text, though perhaps in part as a result of his discussion of the history of
modern linguistics, in fact does occur
with Beaugrande, but it does so only inextricably interwoven with the opposition
between language and text and increasingly eclipsed by this opposition. Finally,
it is even wholly abandoned. Consider, in this connection, two passages in
Beaugrande’s article. In the first of these two passages, Beaugrande still
unequivocally proceeds from the conception that the text is a sequence of
sentences (§ 14), a conception which still abides by the opposition between
sentence and text, but he turns this conception the other way round, such that
he prefers to say that the sentence is a segment within the text (§ 15). The
difference is, as far as the mere relationship between sentence and text is
concerned, merely one of perspective, but for Beaugrande this difference of
perspective implies much more. He considers the sentence as a unit of the langue
and that he fears lest, when he proceeds from the sentence to the text, that the
treatment of the text would ascribe the langue-specific
properties of the sentence to the text as well. Inversely, his proposal to
consider the sentence as a segment of the text, i.e. to proceed from the text to
the sentence, could confer the parole-specific
or performance-specific treatment of the text (which he presupposes) to the
sentence. Even there where he believes in a clear-cut hierarchical opposition
between sentence and text is not ready to conceive of this opposition without
the opposition between language and text (in the sense of langue
and parole or competence and
performance) and, what is more, that he subordinates the former to the latter.
The opposition between sentence and
text, which in this passage appears solely as being subordinated to another
opposition, in a following passage (§ 59) appears to be downright abandoned,
and the abandoned opposition itself is, as it were retrospectively, even „watered
down“. It is watered down by the fact that the conception of a text as a
sequence of sentences is supplemented or even replaced by the conception of the
text as a mere set of sentences. True, in principle the notion of ‘set’ might
be in fact neutral as over against -- in Hjelmslevian terms -- paradigmaticity
and syntagmaticity, but as an alternative to the notion of ‘sequence’ it is
merely to be understood paradigmatically. In this conception, however, the
conception of a text as a set of
sentences does not make allowance for the traditional hierarchical opposition
between sentence and text.
But this conception is, just as the
conception that the text is a sequence of sentences, a conception which
Beaugrande wants to be replaced by another one. This other conception is the
conception of the text as a contribution to intertext (§ 59). What, however, is
the or one intertext? So far as I can see, the notion of intertext is not
explicitly defined by Beaugrande. In one place, in § 35, he seems to identify
the notion of intertext with that of conversation, and although he refuses the
conception of an indefinitely long intertext and of its practical correlate,
possibly ‘a conversation in which the “last word” can never be said’ (§
35), he at least exemplifies his concept of finite
intertexts by the phenomenon of conversations -- a conception that reminds me of
Walter A. Koch’s (1971: 260ff.) concept of conversations as, as he has called
them, bi-textemes or n-textemes.
In this conception, the intertext
appears to be a unit which, in the syntagmatic dimension, is superordinate to
the text; for in this interpretation the relationship of the intertext to the
text seems to be similar to that of the text to the sentence. There are, however,
still other contexts in Beaugrande’s article, contexts in which the intertext
is not conceived of as a higher syntagmatic unit, but as a higher paradigmatic
unit, namely as a set of texts -- so, for instance, in § 89, where, in
connection with the notions of intertext and intertextuality, Beaugrande speaks
of ‘large numbers of texts’, but already in § 35 as well, where, in the
immediate context of the identification of intertext and conversation,
Beaugrande speaks of the discourse of history. Just as with the rejected
definition of text as a sequence or set of sentences, so also in the case of the concept of the
intertext: the opposition between syntagmaticity and paradigmaticity seems to
play no role for Beaugrande. Apart from this, the concept of paradigmaticity, at
least implicitly, seems to play the greater role, so above all when Beaugrande,
as in § 59 and § 89, uses this concept in the singular -- a usage which,
especially in connection with the notion of ‘networks’, reminds of the
notion of internet and its globality and which seems to correspond to my notion
of the universe of texts (‘Textkosmos’) (cf. Harweg 1979 [1968]: 143ff.).
For me, in contradistinction, the
opposition between syntagmaticity and paradigmaticity plays a great role. Thus,
I distinguish between the universe of texts (‘Textkosmos’) as the
paradigmatically organised set of all texts and, inside this (unilingual,
plurilingual or omnilingual) universe of texts, the different classes or sorts
of texts on the one hand and the syntagmatically organised macrotexts (‘Grossraumtexte’)
(cf. Harweg 1970). These macrotexts, however, are not identical with Beaugrande’s
‘conversations’ or Koch’s ‘bi-textemes’ and ‘n-textemes’. These
latter texts are, in my conception, still normal texts (‘Kleinraumtexte’),
since in my conception a plurality of speakers does not automatically produce a
unit which transcends the unit of the text. For me, macrotexts are rather
sequences of texts which, though separated from each other by lesser or greater
temporal intervals, are nevertheless linked to each other anaphorically, i.e. in
such a way that subsequent texts within a macrotext presuppose preceding ones in
this macrotext.
In special cases such a macrotext can
also be a dialogue. This, for instance, is the casewhen the dialogue consists of
an exchange of letters (between two persons) in which subsequent letters refer
anaphorically to preceding ones. Another example of macrotexts are successive (consecutive)
newspaper reports on the successive phases of an event developing and lasting
over a certain stretch of time.
The small role which is played by the
Hjelmslevian opposition between syntagmaticity and paradigmaticity on the levels
of text and intertext as well as the implicit preponderance of the paradigmatic
on these levels manifests itself also in Beaugrande’s practical methods. In
attempting to exemplify his method he, in accordance with his theoretical
principles, has ample recourse to concrete and authentical texts -- a procedure
which is to be highly praised and whose absence in Firth and, above all, in
Hjelmslev Beaugrande justly deplores. The texts, Beaugrande (§ 60) says, stem
from ‘the Bank of Englis’ at Birmingham University, the world’s largest
computerised data corpus (...) containing over 329 million words of running text’.
But what are ‘329 million words of running text? Surely they do not constitute
one single running text, but just a
host of running texts. Yet how many? And how many of these running texts are
mere excerpts of authentical texts and how long are these excerpts? And even if
the texts would not be excerpts, Beaugrande would have had to epitomise them at
the latest when coming to use them for his exemplificatory purposes -- mainly
purposes concerning problems of collocation and colligation, of collocability
and colligability in the framework of sentences -- and actually this is what
Beaugrande or more precisely, Mr Bullon’, who provided him with samplings of
‘roughly 200 characters’ (§ 91), has done. As the collocations investigated
by Beaugrande, the syntagms of the type If
I were you, theory and practice,
and theoretical and practical, show,
the author’s interest in syntagmaticity, in this article, seems to be reduced
to syntagms of less-than-sentence length. To be sure, the samples are a little
bit longer, but only a little bit. This seems to reveal that Beaugrande’s
interest in and concern for textlinguistics is not -- or at most to a very small
degree - guided by a concern for the dimension of syntagmaticity, but by quite
another principle, namely that of authenticity. What he has exemplified in this
article, reminds me strongly of what, for a long
time, many grammarians and lexicographers have done, especially (and by
necessity) in the description of languages like Greek and Latin, i.e. of dead
languages. To be
sure, many of the descriptive goals envisaged by Beaugrande may be much
more delicate and, in the long run, also much more comprehensive than theirs,
but they nevertheless still belong to sentence grammar and lexicography. They do
not, at least if we judge them from the kind of examples discussed by Beaugrande
in the article under discussion, refer to problems of coherence or cohesion of
larger parts of texts, not to mention larger texts as wholes. Beaugrande’s
main interest in textlinguistics, to say it once more, seems to be the
relationship between language in the narrower sense of the word, namely langue
or competence, and text in the sense of parole
or performance, and as to the very essence of this relationship he really has to
offer some new and important proposals. At first sight, judging from the
emphasis he lays on the authenticity of texts, one might be led to conclude that,
in a certain way, he would only repeat what former linguists of the twentieth
century used to claim, namely that language is a virtual phenomenon, a
phenomenon of competence, and the text an actual phenomenon, a phenomenon of
performance. However, what Beaugrande really does is to attack or at least to
modify this wide-spread view, pointing -- justly to my mind -- to what he calls
a ‘bizarre implication’ of this view, namely the implication ‘that using a
“language” in “speech” triggers an abrupt catastrophic transition from
stable and integrative order over to unstable and disintegrative disorder’ (§
22). This does not mean that Beaugrande would be ready to give up the
distinction between language and text or langue
and parole altogether. What it
means is rather that he sees language and text nearer to each other. Thus, what
he favours is a ‘text-like view of language, and a language-like view of texts’
(§ 55). Important for textlinguistics seems to me above all his view that texts
are not wholly deprived of systemic or virtual aspects (§ 23) and that texts
are not, as is normally believed and sustained, ‘exclusively created by an
actualisation of lower-level virtualities’ (§ 23). Nevertheless, this is
easier to assert than to prove, and I doubt that Beaugrande, in his article, has
given convincing evidence to this claim. Thus, the samples of sections or
portions of authentic texts he discusses centre, as I have already said, around
phenomena which, to my mind, do not reach the level of text in the sense of
hierarchical order, and as to his claim that „some powerful evidence for the
‘virtuality’“ of texts „would be that a single text can be received and
interpreted (‘actualised’) in more than one way by different participants in
a text-event or even by the same participant at different times“ (§ 24), I
must confess that I cannot find it convincing either. True, this possibility is some kind of ‘virtuality’, but I doubt that it is the same
kind of virtuality which we normally connect with language. Moreover, the impact
of this possibility, at least for normal texts, seems to be smaller than is
often believed. Not by chance, Beaugrande in this connection points to literary
texts (§ 24). But to compare literary texts on that account, as already Wellek
and Warren (1956) have done, to
‘langue’ and only their individual realisations to ‘parole’
seems to me somewhat hasty. This is not to say that I for myself am wholly
against such an interpretation, but I think this assignment needs further
specification. In principle, I must say that I heartily welcome the view that
texts might be assigned both to langue
and to parole, and what concerns literary texts I, too, regard them as
particularly suited for this double assignment. But I do this on the basis of a
slightly different conception of langue
and parole. Parole, in my interpetation, is defined by communicativity, langue
instead by non-communicativity -- a view which implies that language is not
communicative in its totality. Language is communicative only when it is
actualised, and there are even actualisations
of language -- I call them ‘performance langue’
-- which are not communicative, so, for instance, if somebody utters some
sentences only in order to test his husky voice. Now, as to literary or more
precisely, fictional texts: they seem to me to belong to langue
as long as they are viewed as productions of their non-fictive authors, that is,
as real fiction, whereas they seem to me to belong to parole -- and this applies in particular to narrative fictional
texts -, as soon as they are read as productions of their fictive narrators (who,
together with the texts, are created by the non-fictive authors); for only when
looked upon as produced by these fictive narrators and as received by recipients
who are fictive as well or who have ‘fictivised’ themselves they are
communicative; when they are viewed as produced by their non-fictive writers
they are, apart from interpretations on some higher, e.g. symbolical level,
non-communicative. Some fictional texts, namely certain lyrical poems, even seem
to be non-communicative in every regard, for they are, in the original Greek
sense of the word ‘poem’, interpretable only as productions of their poets,
of poets who have no fictive counterpart in the sense of fictive narrators (cf.
Harweg 1992).
Of course, text linguists should not
content themselves with seeing a possible languicity of texts in their mere
non-communicativity -- a non-communicativity which, by the way, is also to be
found in the field of non-fictional texts, especially in letter-writers’
guides and colloquial language guides (for these are communicative only when
they are used for communicative purposes) --, text linguists should also try to
discover langue-specific features of texts that may reclaim the status of
textgrammatical rules or which at least may be interpreted as rule-like to a
certain extent. These could be roughly features of the kind Beaugrande
discovered in investigating and interpreting the samples he has put forth in his
article, except for the fact that these features, though stemming from real
texts, nevertheless fall within the scope of sentences. Rules or rule-like
phenomena which go beyond the sentence are, for instance, intersentential
anaphorical relationships in the widest sense or the still unknown features thar
contribute to the thematical unity of texts and their internal hierarchisation.
Methodologically,
Beaugrande’s greatest concern seems to me his claim that the text linguist
should proceed from authentic material instead of inventing his material.
Although I think this might not be necessary on the level of sentences I regard
his claim as sound and justified on the level of texts; for to invent texts as
objects of linguistic demonstration, and that is: to write texts that have no
communicational aim and value, but sound natural and at the same time satisfy
specific requirements of linguistic demonstration seems to be a job that, in the
long run, might be too difficult to realise. So, for obtaining reliable insights
having recourse to authentical texts might indeed be indispensible. On the other
hand, however, I think that the value and necessity of this method is restricted
to the merely heuristic phase of this analysis procedure and should end with it.
For after this the exploitation of our competence should come into play. Not to
make use of this competence would be a waste of reliable and valuable resources.
Beaugrande, at least in principle, seems to share this opinion. True, he doubts
that ‘the native speakers’ intuition’ might ‘be reliable for telling you
what they would say until there arises
a real-life occasion when they do say
it’ (§ 31) (which, for shorter sentences, I doubt), but with regard to the post-festum-use
of our linguistic intuition he seems to hold the same view as I do; for he
writes: ‘Intuition operates most smoothly after the fact in making sense of
what has already been said’ (§ 31). As to the extent to which we should make
use of our intuition „after the fact“, however, we might differ. Whereas
Beaugrande seems to be willing to make use of our intuition only for making
sense of what has been said, I should like to make use of our intuition also for
deciding whether what has been said is acceptable, i.e. agrees with our
intuition. Beaugrande, not very confident about our intuition, seems to think it
necessary to consult a vast number of authentic texts in order to find out which
among various variants is the more or most probable one, whereas I, more
confident about our intuition, do not think that we need such a vast number of
authentic texts; for my concern in authentic texts is a heuristic, not a
probabilistic one. Instead of comparing a vast number of short samples, I should
find it more interesting and rewarding to analyse fewer examples of greater or
even great length, including macrotexts with temporal intervals between their
parts.
On the whole,
Beaugrande’s conception of text linguistics at the millennium border is a very
bold and far-reaching one and seems to transcend the limits of linguistics
proper (including text linguistics) in various directions. Beaugrande goes so
far as to define a ‘language’ as ‘a general
theory of human knowledge and experience evolving in a dialectical relation to
texts as a set of practices for working
out the theory’ (§ 44). What regards language -- in contradistinction to
texts -- this definition reminds me somehow of Humboldt’s (1830-1835) and
Weisgerber’s (1953-1954) views of a language as a specific view of the world,
a view articulating and organising the world’s original conceptual chaos and
thus ‘transferring the world into the property of the mind’. But unlike
Humboldt and Weisgerber, Beaugrande adds to language the realm of texts and sees,
as he says, language ‘in a dialectical
relation to texts as a set of
practices for working out the theory’ (§ 44) language is considered to be.
In accordance with this view, Beaugrande tends to interpret the textual samples
he analyses not only from a linguistic point of view, but also from the
view-point of various other fields, such as education, sociology, and politics.
The comprehensiveness of his view might have been triggered by the breath-taking
vista opened by the magic date of the beginning of the new millennium already
evoked in the very title of Beaugrande’s article. To my mind, this
comprehensiveness, though surely impressive, is somewhat too vast and runs the
risk of melting the gist of text linguistics in interdisciplinarity.
References
Harweg, R.
(1979 [1968]). Pronomina und
Textkonstitution.
Harweg, R.
(1970). Zur Textologie des Vornamens: Perspektiven einer Grossraumtextologie. Linguistics
61: 12-28.
Harweg, R.
(1992). Communicative and Non-Communicative Language. In: Signs of Humanity / L’homme et ses signes, M. Balat and J.
Deledalle-Rhodes (eds.), vol. 1, 187-194.
Humboldt, W.
(1830-1835). Über die Verschiedenheit des
menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwicklung des M
enschengeschlechts.
Koch, W. A.
(1971). Taxologie des Englischen.
Weisgerber,
L. (1953-1954). Vom Weltbild der deutschen
Sprache. Düsseldorf: Schwann.
Wellek,R. and
Warren, A. (1956). Theory of Literature.
Intertextuality
and the Project of Text Linguistics
Jay
Lemke
In his stimulating contribution on ‘Text Linguistics at the Millennium’,
Robert de Beaugrande (this issue) urges us to seek out the ‘missing links’
between language as a system of possibilities and text as a unique instance of
the social act of speaking or writing. He seeks a rededication of the project of
modern linguistics to understanding the meaning of texts in terms of a language
system used for social ends in social contexts. And he re-establishes our
optimism for such a project in the potential of large, computer-accessible
corpora of text data to inform our investigations of what and how texts mean.
My own studies of
text-in-context over many years (e.g. Lemke 1983, 1985, 1990, 1991,
Perhaps no question in text linguistics is more important, or more vexed,
than how best to conceptualize the relationship between system potential and
textual instance, whether as langue vs. parole, competence vs. performance,-- or
virtuality vs. actuality. Like most of us who seek to understand how texts mean,
I have had to grapple with this issue again and again in the evolution of my own
work (particularly Lemke 1985, 1991,
Likewise, the meaning-making potential of language as a cultural system
in its broadest sense is not exhaustively described either by the purely
paradigmatic systems of Halliday's lexicogrammar, nor by the purely syntagmatic
syntax of the MIT school. Language as systematic resource for the making of
textual meanings retains the key feature of what it makes: an inner dialectic
between choice and sequence. The choices are not the same once the sequence has
progressed to some particular point in the making of a text; the choices made up
to now influence the possible sequences that can follow, and -- do so on
multiple scales. Neither language nor text is ever a truly synchronic phenomenon;
both are dynamic in nature. Whether we imagine the act of writing or speaking as
an on-going production, contingent at each next moment, or the effort of
interpretation; similarly, the meaning of text is, made through time, and never
wholly predictably: the aggregate probabilities for each choice that are the
system are not only re-weighted for each situation and each text, but
dynamically shift during the process of text-production itself. The overall
meaning potential of the language, whether as grammar alone or as the totality
of its semantic resources, is also constantly changing, on many timescales.
I consider myself, when necessary, a semiotic materialist; that is, I
take the basic reality of language to be the sounds and marks by which we invoke
its power to mean, but their semiotic power I take to reside not in the sounds
and marks themselves, but in the particular conventional systems of meaning
relationships among them that are repeatedly construed by the members of some
community. Thus the material reality of language for me is in the texts
themselves as material objects (or material dynamical processes), and their full
semiotic force appears when they are interpreted into unique, wholly definite
meanings, however unstably. What we call grammar or syntax, semantic systems,
language rules, etc. are all the products of our analysis, mere theoretical
conveniences, whose only real existence is in the texts we ourselves produce as
linguists and in which they are embedded. I am perhaps at the philosophical
margins in believing that no such relationship we construe is an absolutely
necessary one; we could imagine and speak of the world, and survive, in
indefinitely many ways. Our being-in-the-world constrains something about how we
talk and behave survivably, but it does not determine any particular meaning
relationship absolutely. I say this because such issues do matter to the classic
top-down vs. bottom-up debate over the text-language relationship. Platonists
and neo-Cartesians grant a causal reality to formal abstractions; I do not, and
neither as I read him does de Beaugrande. All that we say of language is an
abstraction from our experience with particular texts, and is itself just one
more text.
So the problem of the ‘missing links’ then becomes a question of
appropriate units of analysis and useful levels of abstraction as we move from
the unique meaning-interpreted-text-in-context, to features of texts that are
typical or frequently repeated under some conditions, to features that seem
ever-present and only very slowly changing over historical time. Perhaps it is
not surprising that modern scientific linguistics looked first to identify the
most invariant features across all texts, and construed first phonological and
then morphosyntactic patterns. Nor is it really surprising, in the model I would
share with de Beaugrande, Halliday and many others, that these patterns enable
us to make textual meaning, but do not very much constrain the particular
meanings we make, and so they serve to tell us relatively little about what
particular texts mean.
I am an applied linguist; I am more interested in the texts I study, and
what they tell me about the society I live in, than I am in the details of
linguistic abstractions for their own sake. I turn to those details only to help
me understand better the possible meanings of various texts in their social
contexts. When I first studied the spoken texts made by teachers and students in
science classrooms (Lemke 1990), I was struck by their affinities to and
differences from the written-texts of professional science which I had studied
as a physicist. I was also impressed by the very many ways in which what counts
for the scientific community as the same scientific explanation can be presented
in words. The critical meanings in these classrooms were matters of
intertextuality: How could students synthesize from ten partial explanations one
coherent understanding? How can we learn to judge which differences of wording
matter to the scientific content of a text and which do not? My answer to these
puzzles was a ‘missing link', which I called an intertextual thematic
formation (Lemke 1983, 1994). It abstracted from a set of thematically related
texts their common semantic patterns insofar as these mattered to a particular
community for a particular set of social purposes. It recognized the role of
grammar and textual cohesion, but it was far more ‘local', more
register-specific. When I attempted to understand the reverse process, going
from such a common textual pattern to any actual wording that conformed to it, I
immediately saw how much else texts are about besides their topical content
(social relationships, evaluative orientations, rhetorical organization, etc.).
As I investigated these other meaning functions of texts, I began to
appreciate why we make texts at all. Why should we not be content with sentences
of a few clauses? What kinds of meanings can be made with longer texts that
cannot be made with shorter ones? How do the short-scale meanings of texts
‘add up’ to their longer-scale meanings? De Beaugrande notes in his
discussion of the practicalities of corpus-based analyses that in many registers
and genres of text we cannot have much confidence in the specificity of the
meaning of even a short phrase like ‘theory and practice', unless we look
across some minimal scale of co-text. In my own analyses of how texts present an
evaluation of the warrantability, desirability, importance, expectedness, etc.
of a semantic item (word, more often phrase or clause), I found that in many
cases both the polarity and the degree of the evaluation had ‘propagated’
grammatically and rhetorically from a distance of several clauses or even
paragraphs in the text (Lemke 1998). Texts are organized on many formal and
functional scales, and these matter very much to how they make their meanings.
Our intermediate units of analysis, our ‘missing links’ must take them into
account to be useful for our purposes. it is a basic feature of text that it is
semantically heterogeneous; it makes different, if related, meanings at
different points. This is the visible or audible trace of the dynamical
processes of its production and interpretation, processes which generate new and
different next meanings from whatever meanings have already been made up to some
point.
As we abstract ‘upwards’ from a set of texts toward common patterns,
we must be guided by some social purposes of our own community. And we always
are, knowingly or not. There are just too many possible patterns, especially
close to the level of texts themselves; only interest or need enables us to
selectively foreground some rather than others. In both his general arguments
and his textual examples, de Beaugrande insistently reminds us of the politics
of linguistics as an intellectual endeavor. We must indeed subject our own
professional texts to the same scrutiny we direct at others'. The register of
linguistics, the common genres and rhetorical commonplaces of linguistics, the
covert heroic stories into which we write ourselves as protagonists: all of
these have social and political histories that matter. We cannot adopt a
viewpoint of ‘no viewpoint', or pretend to a universality of view when our own
view must necessarily always be only a partial one.
The partiality of our analyses can be investigated not just in the terms
of global politics and alternative human futures, but most simply in terms of
the fact, stressed by de Beaugrande, that each of us. has only grasped a very
limited subset of all the kinds of texts made on this planet in our lifetime.
Indeed, as our societies grow more complex and internally differentiated, each
of us arguably encounters an ever smaller fraction of the texts and the
text-types of even one language. Here indeed there is special value in very
large text corpora, where every sort of text made in the world is proportionally
represented (an ideal not yet achieved of course in any real corpus). But even
if we find such texts on the computer screen before us, what are we to make of
them? We are not members of all these speech communities; we do not have
available to us the intertexts considered by members to be relevant to their
interpretation.
I believe that text linguistics must acknowledge the severe limitations
of the heroic story of One Great Linguist who overcomes many obstacles to find
the salvation of a Universal Truth about language. Those of us who seek to begin
from diverse textual data and find genuinely useful typical patterns across
large sets of texts may need to restrict our work, and our claims, to
well-defined corpora with which we have adequate intertextual competence to work.
If we seek generalizations beyond this limit, then we will need to work in teams
or consortia, to pool our collective knowledge of texts in order to further our
common knowledge of text.
Halliday, M.A.K. (1978). Language as social semiotic.
Lemke, J.L. (1983). Thematic analysis. Semiotic Inquiry 3(2):159-187.
Lemke, J.L. (1985). Ideology, intertextuality, and the notion of register.
In J.D. Benson and W. S. Greaves, Eds., Systemic Perspectives on Discourse.
Lemke, J.L. (1990). Talking Science: Language, Learning, and Values.
Lemke, J.L. (1991). Text production and dynamic text semantics. In E.
Ventola, Ed. Functional and Systemic Linguistics: Approaches and Uses.
Lemke, J.L. (1994). Intertextuality and text semantics. In M. Gregory and
P. Fries, Eds. Discourse in Society: Functional Perspectives.
Lemke, J.L. (1998). Resources for attitudinal meaning: Evaluative
orientations in text semantics. Functions of language 5(l): 33-56, 1998.
Lemke, J.L. (in press). Semantic topography and textual meaning. To
appear in J. de Villiers and R. Stainton, Eds. Communication in Linguistics.
Sin
and grace: naught for noughts?
University
of
Embarking on the noughts (2000-09), Robert and I
are fellow-travellers. I agree the key to progress is reworking langue and
parole as a dialectic of system and process, and finding ways of exploring
process that illuminate metastability (systemic inertia and dynamism - the
problem of social semiotic change). In relation to this project I find it useful
to draw on two key dimensions of systemic functional linguistics (hereafter SFL),
the clines of instantiation and realisation (Halliday & Matthiessen 1999). Instantiation
involves the way we observe metastability - as apparent flux or inertia or
something in between. Halliday’s analogy here is weather and climate; weather
the capricious flux we experience day to day, climate the comforting inertia we
try to use to plan. Critically, weather and climate are the same thing, looked
at in different ways. And we can argue that weather changes climate, in ways
that matter (global warming) and ways that don’t (like when we hear that today’s
temperature is 26°, 2° degrees above average, which in fact changes that
average, and we don’t fuss about the contradiction) -- or that climate
determines weather (since It always rains in Melbourne, and as Sydney-siders
overclaim).
Thus text interacts with system, along a cline of
instantiation, including system (the generalised meaning potential of a language),
register (sub-potentials characterised as registers and genres), text type (generalised
instances -- a set of texts if you will), text (the meanings afforded by an
instance) -- to which we should perhaps add at the end of the cline, following
Robert, reading (the meaning taken from a text according to the subjectivity of
the reader):
system (generalised meaning potential)
register (semantic sub-potential)
text type (generalised actual)
text (affording instance)
reading (subjectified meaning)
Robert’s point is that we can’t understand the
climate unless we study local weather. Amplifying this, I’d suggest that we be
clearer about how we position data and generalisations along this cline, and
work harder at finding ways of modelling inertia and flux right along the cline
- since we need to show both where the system end is leaning and how the reading
end is constrained - in order to understand how the dialectic of instantiation
changes things fast enough to matter and slowly enough to keep us sane.
Realisation, on the other hand, involves the way
we model metastable systems - as abstract or concrete, or something in between.
Linguists, qua linguists, typically get real by taking phonic substance as point
of departure, and treating the rest of language and culture as layers of
abstraction. In SFL, depth of abstraction is treated as metaredundancy - as
patterns of patterns of patterns of... (see Lemke 1995). Within language the
strata focus on the syllable (phonology), clause (lexicogrammar) and text (discourse
semantics); social context is modelled as field (institution), tenor (interaction)
and mode (information flow), and sometimes in addition as genre (the system of
social processes constraining immanent associations of field, mode and tenor
relations; Martin 1992, 1997):
genre (immanent social processes)
register (institution/interaction/information)
discourse semantics (text forming resources)
lexicogrammar (clause forming resources)
phonology syllable forming resources/prosody)
Instantiation and realisation are complementary
dimensions in the model, so we can consider the relation of system to process at
any level of abstraction. Robert didn’t deal in detail with realisation, and
what I want to do here is make some complementary suggestions about exploring
language in use with this dimension in mind.
By way of pointing us forward in our exploration
of system and process, Robert draws on corpus linguistics, particularly its well
automated dealings with collocation and colligation. I have no doubt that the
collocational lexical perspective complements work on grammar as system in
important ways, and that Halliday’s notion of lexis as delicate grammar still
has to be reconciled with this tradition. As for colligation, I expect we need
to move from tagging syntagms to tagging structures (from class sequences like
noun^noun or nominal^verbal to function frames like Actor^Process or Classifier^Thing)
for significant progress to be made. The problem is of course that tagging
functional frames is far harder to automate than tagging syntagms; we just
don’t have the parsers, and hand tagging is so slow. We have a soft-ware
problem here, and we have to face it to make it go away. In the meantime,
semi-automated workbenches will have to serve, as we move beyond classes to
functions and thus bring meaning into the scope of grammatical inquiry, just as
collocation research has brought lexical meaning to bear.
So much for grammar; what about discourse? One
thing that concerned me about Robert’s exemplifications was that they didn’t
take us beyond the clause to deal with discourse semantic dependencies. In a
journal like Text, this should perhaps
be a central concern. Time to get our hands dirty. Consider text 1:
I’m sure collocation and colligation would have a lot
to say about data of this kind, whether working with a span of 80 or 200
characters or more. The lexis and grammar of post-colonial discourse feels
distinctive; and we could begin to systematise our feelings. But there is more
going on. Rhetorical dependencies between sentences and ranking clauses for one
thing, as the argument unfolds:
[i] There
is a sense, then ...
[ii] Accounting thus ...
[iii] For ...
[iv]
[v]
[vi] Confession was crucial because it produced
a divided subject who was then ...
[vii]
[viii] But confession was also important because
...
[ix] In introducing the category of “sin”...
[x] In this way ...
And identity dependencies as participants are tracked:
God’s-God’s-His
Confession-it
confession-it
narratives-their
the Law-its
And these two types of semantic interdependency
interact at both the beginning and end of the text. At it’s beginning,
resolving the identity of the demand for a
total recollection of sins specifies the scope of the linker then,
which on its own simply tells us that what preceded is causally connected to
what follows (taking us back to The
Spanish demand is that nothing be held back in confession; see text [1´]
below).
[The Spanish demand is that nothing be held back
in confession] -
There is a sense, then, in which the
demand for a total recollection of sins
Similarly at the end of the text, resolving the
identity of the accounting the
recounting of the past specifies the scope of this
in the linker in this way.
Exploring further, for example through the taxonomy oriented ideational
dependencies (noting in particular the balance of semiotic and religious
lexis)...
narrative-stories-narratives-accounting-accounting-recounting
demand-asserting-reasserting-speaking
sins-successes-failures-mercy-sin-mercy-sins-mercy-sin-sin-sin-sin-grace
God-God-confessor-Father-penitent-penitent
etc.
we should arrive at a schema naturalised by the text in
which [i-iii] are elaborated by [iv-ix] which are in turn elaborated by [x]; the
function of confession is previewed, expanded upon, then distilled as the
complicitous movement between sin and grace:
[i] There is a sense, then, in which the
demand for a total recollection of sins results in the unlimited extensions of
discourse purporting to extract and convey one’s successes and failures in
accounting for past acts and desires.
[ii] Accounting thus allows confession to
become a self-sustaining machine for the reproduction not only of God’s gifts
of mercy but of “sin” as well.
[iii] For God’s continued patronage --
the signs of His mercy -- requires a narrative of sins to act upon.
[iv] The confessor who sits in lieu of an absent
Father needs the penitent’s stories, without which there can be no possibility
of asserting and reasserting the economy of divine mercy.
[v] Without the lure of sin, the structure of
authority implicit in this economy would never emerge.
[vi] Confession was crucial because it
produced a divided subject who was then made to internalise the Law’s
language.
[vii] The penitent became “the speaking subject
who is also the subject of the statement” (Foucault 1980: 1:61).
[viii]
But confession was also important because it made for the
ceaseless multiplication of narratives of sin through their ever-faulty
accounting.
[ix] In introducing the category of “sin”,
confession converted the past into a discourse that was bound to the Law and its
agents.
[x] In this way the accounting and
recounting of the past generated the complicitous movement between sin and grace.
And this is just one small piece of texture in a longer
phase the third part of Chapter 3 of Rafael’s Contracting Colonialism, a treatise on translation and Christian
conversion in the
3. Conversion and the Demands of Confession 84
The “inadequacies” of Tagalog Conversion 84
Reducing Native Bodies 87
Confession and the Logic of Conversion 91
This longer phase opens with a transition from what
preceded (this internalisation...)
to what ensues (two interrelated
procedures); these ‘procedures’ are scaffolded as they appear by the
linker first, and the phoric
Numerative second - and resolved
through the identity of the process
of accounting and the discourse
of interrogation.
This internalisation of an exterior hierarchy consists
of two interrelated procedures: the
accounting of past events and the reproduction of the discourse of
interrogation contained in the confession manual:
First, the
process of accounting. All confession manuals contain the unconditional
demand that all sins be revealed...
These considerations bring us to the second moment in the interiorisation
of hierarchy prescribed by confession: the reproduction of the discourse of
interrogation...
Many people find post-structuralist discourse hard to
read. And it is one of the most abstract discourses the technology of writing
has enabled writers to evolve. But its rhetoric and the way it is textured
through semantic dependencies of the kinds just reviewed subsumes the more
familiar rhetoric of modernist discourse (Halliday 1998, Wignell 1998). The
challenge for text analysts is to unveil this rhetoric, and explain just how the
post-colonial discourse has superseded it. We didn’t get far down that road
here. Here’s the text again, with some co-text; if knowledge about language
and social context has a role to play in language learning, it should be easier
going this time round.
[1´] This
internalisation of an exterior hierarchy consists of two interrelated procedures:
the accounting of past events and the reproduction of the discourse of
interrogation contained in the confession manuals.
First, the process of accounting. All confession
manuals contain the unconditional demand that all sins be revealed...
The Spanish demand is that nothing be held back
in confession. One is to expend all that memory can hold in a discourse that
will bring together both the self that recalls and that which is recalled. The
present self that confronts the priest in confession is thus expected to have
managed to control his or her past - to reduce it, as it were, to discursive
submission. Whereas the examination of conscience requires the division of the
self into one that knows the Law and seeks out the other self that deviates from
it, a “good confession” insists on the presentation of a self in total
control of its past. It is in this sense that confessional discourse imposes on
the individual penitent what Roland Barthes called a “totalitarian economy”
involving the complete recuperation and submission of the past to the present,
and by extension of the penitent to the priest (Barthes 1976: 39-75).
Yet insofar as the ideal of a perfect accounting
of sins also necessitated their recounting in a narrative, it was condemned to
become a potentially infinite task. Given the limitations of memory, accounting
“engenders its own errors.” And the errors created by faulty accounting
become further sins that have to be added to the original list. The very
possibility of a correct accounting engenders an erroneous accounting, just as
remembering one’s sins would make no sense unless there existed the
possibility of forgetting them. It is thus the guarantee of a faulty accounting
of sins that makes conceivable the imperative for total recall. Barthes puts it
more succinctly: “Accountancy has a mechanical advantage: for being the
language of a language, it is able to support an infinite circularity of errors
and of their accounting” (Barthes 1976: 70).
There is a sense, then, in which the demand for a
total recollection of sins results in the unlimited extensions of discourse
purporting to extract and convey one’s successes and failures in accounting
for past acts and desires. Accounting thus allows confession to become a
self-sustaining machine for the reproduction not only of God’s gifts of mercy
but of “sin” as well. For God’s continued patronage -- the signs of His
mercy -- requires a narrative of sins to act upon. The confessor who sits in
lieu of an absent Father needs the penitent’s stories, without which there can
be no possibility of asserting and reasserting the economy of divine mercy.
Without the lure of sin, the structure of authority implicit in this economy
would never emerge. Confession was crucial because it produced a divided subject
who was then made to internalise the Law’s language. The penitent became
“the speaking subject who is also the subject of the statement” (Foucault
1980: 1:61). But confession was also important because it made for the ceaseless
multiplication of narratives of sin through their ever-faulty accounting. In
introducing the category of “sin”, confession converted the past into a
discourse that was bound to the Law and its agents. In this way the accounting
and recounting of the past generated the complicitous movement between sin and
grace. [Rafael 1988: 101-103]
These considerations bring us to the second
moment in the interiorisation of hierarchy prescribed by confession: the
reproduction of the discourse of interrogation... My point here is that we
need discourse semantic tagging, alongside lexicogrammatical analysis, in order
to unpack the rhetorical contingencies whereby texts make meaning -- including
the meanings that make and re-make system. There is more to system than grammar;[Note.
Even where discourse semantics and phonology are given
a place in analysis, promotion of grammar as the semogenic powerhouse of the
system gives me pause (cf. Halliday & Matthiessen 1999) -- discourse
analysts might not agree.] it involves
phonology/graphology and discourse semantics as well. Collocation and
colligation, however richly conceived, will never tell us all we need to know.
However much harder the tagging of discourse semantic dependencies may be to
automate, I think we are in desperate need of more, systematic text analysis
that goes beyond the clause without lapsing into informal explication de texte.
Martin (1992) suggests four major regions of
discourse semantic analysis - identification (participant tracking), conjunction
(logical connections of time, cause etc.), negotiation (speech function and
dialogue structure) and ideation (realisation of taxonomies and activity
sequences). It strikes me that research in SFL and west-coast functionalist
tradition[Note. I take Fox 1987 as the exemplary west-coast
functionalist study, since it brings several discourse semantic regions (CA, RST
and participant identification) to bear on the ‘ grammar’ of text
development; more generally, dialogue with SFL has been impeded by west-coast
aversion to theory building and their concern with discourse as an explanation
for grammar, at the expense of developing grammars as (part of) an explanation
for discourse (cf. Cumming & Ono 1997).] has been converging around these regions for some years and that
productive dialogue is now possible. I’m thinking here for example of Dubois
1980, Mann & Thompson
‘identification’
identity (Dubois 1980)
reference
‘conjunction’
RST (Mann & Thompson 1992)
conjunction
‘negotiation’
CA (Ochs et al. 1996)
exchange
‘ideation’
cognitive linguistics (Langacker)
ideational semantics
No doubt readers can make additional connections
of their own. The critical thing is that discourse analysis include text
analysis, not as a matter of form, but as the semantic foundation for discourse
on discourse -- the meta-readings we’re trained to make.
The cline of abstraction I introduced above
includes the social -- as a pattern of meanings. As such it makes room for a
language-based theory of social context, which enables linguists to participate
in transdisciplinary projects as social semiotic practitioners. I think the time
for productive inter-disciplinary work is over -- by which I mean projects in
which linguists hand over to sociologists, anthropologists, critical theorists
or whatever once they’ve worked through phonology, lexicogrammar and discourse
semantics (or even before!). This doesn’t encourage dialogue, since it means
the linguists aren’t taking responsibility for the social just as the social
theorists aren’t taking responsibility for language (cf. Schegloff 1996). We
need overlapping intrusive expertise to move on,[Note. What WILL happen is that we’ll
continue to be bogged down in common sense chat about social context- - at times
referred to as ethnography (but not informed that I can see by social theory of
any kind), at times reglossed as cognition (but not reconciled that I can see
with Edelman’s neo-Darwinian neuro-biology; cf. Halliday 1995, Halliday &
Matthiessen 1999, Matthiessen 1998 for discussion).] and
this means pushing the cline of realisation right
through as many levels of abstraction as we can.
Martin (1992) interprets field, tenor and mode (named
register) as configurations of ideational, interpersonal and textual meaning
respectively; and interprets genre as co-patterning of register choices
recurrently phased together in unfolding text. Genre in such terms, as a pattern
(of a pattern of) linguistic choices corresponds to Biber’s use of the term
text type (cf. Biber & Finnegan 1995: 7-10). Biber’s reserves the term
genre (later register) for ‘folk’ categorisations of discourse glossed in
terms of social purpose, and packages his corpora for both analysis and
interpretation in relation to such criteria, which he sees as language external.
As dialogue between SFL and this great
In short, I’m agreeing with Robert about
instantiation -- system and process in relation to genesis is what we’re after;
and I’m expanding on Robert in relation to realisation - we need to get beyond
the clause, getting bigger and digging deeper towards a fuller spectrum of
social linguistic analysis.[Note. It’s no use getting deeper without getting bigger,
along the dated syntax, semantics and pragmatics cline, since in this tradition
we never really escape the clause; text analysis gets pushed to the margins, as
performance really, as Robert implies.] Pursuing this, we have to be cautious of two things:
(i) getting
trapped by automation, so that we only do what machines let us (e.g. collocation,
colligation, text types based on words classes and syntagms etc.);
(ii) getting mesmerised by scintillating grammarians
proffering super-grammars, so that we put off discourse analysis because the
super-grammars do so much more than we could ever have reasonably expected them
to.
Believe me when I say that I’m not slighting
Biber, Sinclair, Halliday and Matthiessen here; their work founds our future,
and grammars like Halliday’s, however rich from a grammarians’ point of view,
are barely enough when it comes to serving as one key meta-semiotic ratchet in
the discourse analyst’s tool-kit. But as discourse analysts we have to put
ourselves in position to bargain strongly with both grammarians and soft-ware.
To grammarians we’re saying, “Fine; give us all you got; now, give us more;
and by the way, when you run out of grammar, let us take over.” To programmers
we’re saying, “OK; give us an interactive workbench for rich text analysis;
automate what you can, and we’ll do the rest by hand; and by the way, please
build a program than can learn from our manual analysis and from our manual
editing of your automations how to automate better and automate more!”
If we bargain well, we can move forward
gracefully, wary of sins of omission (however technologically induced). Bargain
badly and it will be naught for noughts. Robert to umpire. Us to choose.
References
Biber, D. & E. Finnegan. 1994. Sociolinguistic
Perspectives on Register.
Coulthard, M. [Ed.] .1992. Advances in Spoken Discourse Analysis.
Christie, F. [Ed.]. 1999. Pedagogy and the Shaping of Consciousness: linguistic and social
processes.
Christie, F. & J. R. Martin. 1997. Genre
and institutions: social processes in the workplace and school.
Cope, W. & M. Kalantzis [Eds.]. 1993.The
Powers of Literacy: a genre approach to teaching literacy.
Cumming, S. & T. Ono. 199.7 Discourse and grammar.
T A van Dijk [Ed.] Discourse as Structure
and Process.
Du Bois, J. W. 1980. Beyond definiteness: the trace of
identity in discourse. W L Chafe [Ed.] The
Pear Stories: cognitive, cultural and linguistic aspects of narrative production.
Fox, B. 1987. Discourse Structure and Anaphora: written
and conversational English.
Halliday, M. A. K. 1995. On language in relation to the
evolution of human consciousness. In S. Allén [Ed.] Of Thoughts and Words: Proceedings of Nobel Symposium 92, “The
relation between language and the mind”,
Halliday, M. A. K. 1998. Things and relations:
regrammaticising experience as technical knowledge. In Martin & Veel
185-235.
Halliday, M. A. K. & R. Hasan. 1976. Cohesion
in English.
Halliday, M. A. K. & C. M. I. M. Matthiessen 1999. Construing
Experience through Meaning: a language-based approach to cognition.
Hasan, R. & G. Williams [Eds.]. 1996. Literacy
in Society.
Hunston, S. & G. Thompson [Eds.]. 1999. Evaluation
in Text: authorial stance and the construction of discourse.
Langacker, R. 1987. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Stanford:
Lemke, J. 1995. Textual Politics: discourse and social dynamics.
Mann, W. C. & S. Thompson [Eds.] 1992. Discourse
Description: diverse analyses of a fund raising text.
Martin, J. R. 1992. English Text: system and structure.
Martin, J. R. & R. Veel 1998. Reading Science: critical and functional perspectives on discourses of
science.
Matthiessen, C.M.I.M. 1995. Lexicogrammatical cartography: English systems.
Matthiessen, C.M.I.M. 1998. Construing processes of
consciousness: from the common sense model to the uncommon sense model of
cognitive science. In Martin & Veel, 327-356.
Ochs, E., E. A. Schegloff & S. A Thompson. [Eds.].
1996. Interaction and Grammar.
Rafael, V. 1988. Contracting
Colonialism: translation and Christian conversion in Tagalog society under early
Spanish rule.
Schegloff, E. A. 1996. Turn organisation: one
intersection of grammar and interaction. In Ochs et al. 52-133.
Wignell, P. 1998. Technicality and abstraction in
social science. In Martin & Veel 297-326.
Last words?
Robert
de Beaugrande
These responses certainly do satisfy the criteria of
range and diversity, which I of course find gratifying but which also doom any
attempt at riposte or rebuttal within the confines of an already lengthy, erm,
intertext. I confess being a trifle disquieted
when ideas or positions I do not hold, and have said why not in print,
albeit perhaps not here, are attributed to me now – a reflex I suppose of
unfamiliarity with the larger
scope of my work. But I am quite content to
rest my case with what I said here and now.
Still, just one example: I have always rejected the
notions of the ‘text’ being a ‘unit above the sentence’ or a ‘sequence
of sentences’ (pace Harweg): the ‘text’ is an event,
(yes, an actualisation!) whereas the ‘sentence’ is at most the default
unit (also actual!) of written language as opposed to the ‘utterance’ of
spoken language. I imply no ‘opposition’ of sentence and text, so I cannot
have ‘abandoned’ it (Harweg again).
Since I had only the responses e-mailed to me, I have
taken the liberty of unifying the references as well as insidious formats
stemming from disagreeable word-processors which padded in assyrian hosts of
unwanted blanks or confounded me with unsearchable phantom menaces wreaking
baleful and hideous side-effects upon prints and paragraphs. More prosaically, I
amended obvious typos and putative lapses in punctuation, but only the more
distended or bewildering Teutonic solecisms.
All in all, I am delighted to finally present this colourful gallery, and to thank my distinguished colleagues for their thought-provoking deliberations.
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