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Renkema (1993), Nunan (1993), Maingueneau (1991), and Cook (1989). Important journals specifically devoted to TDL were started at around this time, and they have continued to be influential in the field: Discourse and Society, Discourse Processes, Discourse Studies and Text and Talk. New journals that have been started during the last fifteen years have focussed on specific perspectives on TDL.
3. Important fields of study
This section presents a few important and foundational fields of research within TDL. Some of these fields have received attention all along, e.g. ‘information structure’ and ‘cohesion’. Others, like ‘coherence’ and ‘grounding’, have grown in importance as research has continued to go deeper into the realms of meaning and function. Issues having to do with ‘discourse types and genres’, again, have always been in the background, but only gradually received systematic attention in linguistics.
3.1 Information structure
One starting point for introducing TDL concepts into linguistics was the need to explain variations in word order, the use of the active and the passive and other seemingly synonymous syntactic constructions. One way to approach such variation is to ask why a text is a ‘better’ text if it contains a sentence with word order A rather than word order B. In other words, what factors – in the surrounding co-text of the sentence – ‘trigger’ the use of a particular word order?
Most sentences occur in a larger co-text which influences their form and, conversely, the syntactic form of sentences contributes to their ‘textual fit’ (cf. Enkvist 1981). Syntactic devices which allow the text producer to regulate the flow of given and new information include passivization, clefting, extraposition and dislocations.
An early interest in this kind of structuring of information (especially in the Prague School; in the U.S.A. by such prominent linguists as Dwight Bolinger, e.g. 1952, and gradually also in generative grammars) brought textual aspects into sentence grammar. Unfortunately, however, the terminology is particularly confusing here. Europeans usually spoke of ‘themes’ and ‘rhemes’, while, on the other side of the Atlantic, ‘topics’ and ‘comments’ were referred to when dividing a clause or sentence into two informationstructural parts. Another set of terms include, on the one hand, ‘given’, ‘old’ or ‘known’ information, and, on the other hand, ‘new’ or ‘unknown’ information. These may, but need not, coincide with the notions of theme and rheme. Jan Firbas of the Prague School suggested (e.g. Firbas 1959) that information structure should not be talked about as a binary opposition, but as a scale of communicative dynamism. Detailed patterns of ‘theme progression’ were developed by František Daneš (e.g. 1974).
One way of distinguishing between the terms was to view ‘theme’ and ‘rheme’ positionally (cf. Halliday 1967, 1985), ‘topic’ in terms of ‘aboutness’, i.e. what a proposition
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is about (cf. van Dijk 1977, 1980), and given and new information cognitively, in terms of the stage of activation assumed by the text producer (cf. Chafe 1976, 1994; Prince 1981; on accessibility, activiation and topicality, see also Lambrecht 1994).
It has been proposed that the basic principle of information structure is that themes, topics, and given information precede rhemes, comments, and new information. (Cf. Section 4 on iconicity.) Since this sequence is seen as the default order by text receivers, it becomes necessary for the text producer to either choose verbs that allow her/him to use the prototypical word order of her/his language, or to signal deviation from the basic pattern, for instance through the use of a cleft sentence, or marked focus in speech. In spoken discourse, given information is frequently recoverable from the situation, which may allow the speaker to either start with, or even neglect, all other except the most crucial information (a typical case would be sports commentaries given under time pressure, cf. Enkvist 1989). Starting with crucial information first in an utterance is also an effective way of getting an interlocutor’s attention.
Research in this field has taken two complementary directions. First, there have been attempts at finding a close correspondence between the cognitive and the linguistic structures (an early suggestion is Chafe 1980). Secondly, inherent givenness values have been ascribed to different kinds of linguistic elements, e.g. setting up a givenness hierarchy among NPs (cf. e.g. Givón 1984–1990; Ariel 1990).
3.2 Cohesion
Many aspects of what is dealt with in the previous section take us into the area of cohesion . Hence another early interest in TDL concerns the question of how sentences – and in later studies, propositions – are explicitly linked together in a text by different kinds of overt ties. Such cohesion devices include repetition of items, coreference, synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, comparison, indexical relationships,
ellipsis and substitution, conjunction, and structural iconicity.
Problems of cohesion and textuality were tackled in France by Michel Charolles, in Germany by János Petöfi, in Austria by Wolfgang Dressler, in Finland by Nils Erik Enkvist, and in Japan by Yoshihiko Ikegami. An influential work in the area of surface cohesion is the sentence-based model of Halliday & Hasan (1976), in which cohesion devices are grouped into five different categories: reference (endophoric and exophoric), substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical cohesion. Hoey (1991) is an early, detailed study of lexical cohesion.
Elements in a text which have the same referent or application form a ‘cohesive chain’ (Halliday & Hasan 1976), which ties together parts in the text, and thus the text itself into a whole. Such cohesive chains were also viewed in a processual light, as signals that a particular text/discourse strategy has been chosen by the text producer
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to structure the text in view of her/his communicative goal(s). Thus, chains also facilitate the text receiver’s task of discourse processing since they help to segment the text (see Enkvist 1987; Givón 1983; Virtanen 1992a). The most common discourse strategies involve temporal, locative, and/or participant/topic-oriented continuity.
With the advance of studies in conversation analysis and ethnomethodology, cohesion in spoken interaction also received considerable attention early on. In particular, studies of the behavior of different kinds of adjacency pairs (such as a ques- tion-answer sequence, a greeting followed by another greeting) proved very fruitful. Another vast field of research deals with the functions and use of special signals to segment the discourse flow and to indicate that a change of topic is taking place. Such ‘discourse markers’ or ‘pragmatic particles’ have been found to be the organizers of discourse par excellence. In English, such typical markers would include anyway, so, and well then. In addition to their discourse-segmenting function, these markers also indicate speaker –hearer relations and attitudes (early studies include Fernandez 1994; Östman 1981; Schourup 1985; Schiffrin 1987).
3.3 Coherence
Not all relations among the various parts of a discourse are explicitly marked with the kinds of cohesive devices talked about in the preceding section. Still, as speakers
of a language and as members of a discourse community and culture, we have built up expectations and background knowledge that we can rely on to understand our interlocutor even if s/he does not state everything overtly and explicitly. Such implicit textuality is usually referred to as ‘coherence’. While surface cohesion may be seen as a characteristic of discourse as a product, coherence is rather connected with interpretability, the text world which the text receiver is building around the text (Enkvist 1989), on the basis of context, background knowledge, and the text producer’s choice of discourse strategy (cf. 3.2).
The distinction between surface cohesion and underlying coherence was early on extensively addressed by Widdowson (1973), Östman (1978), de Beaugrande & Dressler (1981), Charolles (1981), and Petöfi (1989). Enkvist (1978) uses the term ‘pseudocoherent’ for a string of sentences with overt surface cohesion, which is nevertheless not a coherent text. For instance, if in a text about a whistling boy we suddenly find the sentence Whistling is a nine-letter word, we might say that ‘whistling’ in this sentence creates cohesion with previous mentionings of the activity through repetition. But the joint text that these two parts form, might rather be characterized as pseudo-coherent.
In France, the concept of ‘enunciation’ (énonciation) was suggested as ‘a domain of mediation’ by which discourse is produced. The concept is based on Benveniste’s (1966–1974) semiotic approach to language and was further developed by Culioli (1990), and Anscombre & Ducrot (1983), cf. also Ducrot (1984). In a sense, the
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distinction between coherence and cohesion corresponds to their distinction between enunciation (proper) and ‘uttered enunciation’, respectively.
The distinction between cohesion and coherence can of course only be upheld in theory – the concepts are convenient tools for the discourse analyst. Textual elements cannot discretely be categorized as either cohesion or coherence markers. A question-answer sequence might be said to have a cohesive tie due to, say, the particular prosody, word order, or – graphically – the occurrence of a question mark in the first part. But it is clear that it will not be easy to find unambiguous surface indicators for, e.g. an acceptance of an apology. All elements in a sentence or utterance ultimately contribute in some way – overtly or covertly – to the textuality of a discourse, to making it look a coherent whole. Even the pragmatic particles we mentioned in the preceding section, which might seem to be explicit indicators of coherence, are really very implicit markers. Interlocutors hardly ever notice that they use them. Speakers can ‘deny’ that they have used a pragmatic particle in a way that they cannot deny having transmitted the propositional content of their utterance. Admittedly, this is a very monological view of how communication works, and in the last couple of decades more dialogical approaches have been advanced, where Malinowski’s distinction between communication and communion is blurred, and the latter arguably gets to be the main impetus for the former.
There are at least six major approaches that early on addressed the question of how coherence could be explained; these are still relevant today. Some address the issue with the help of micro-level analyses of what happens when two sentences are combined. One early representative of this approach was work done within Sperber & Wilson’s relevance theory (cf. Blakemore 1992).
Another tradition is van Dijk’s (1977, 1980) model of ‘macrostructures’. A macrostructure is based on a summary of the content of a discourse, and it can be recursively reduced to finally yield only one ‘macroproposition’. A very similar approach is in terms of the notion of ‘discourse topic’ (see Ochs-Keenan & Schieffelin 1976; for a broader interpretation, see Brown & Yule 1983). The idea here is that in the same way as sentences have topics/themes as pegs to hang the rest on (cf. 3.1.), so too, discourses have topics, usually expressed in the title or first sentence/utterance of a unit of discourse.
A third approach to coherence is to systematize and further develop the ideas brought forth in the traditions of argumentation and rhetoric. Perhaps the best known approach in this line of thinking is rhetorical structure theory, as put forth by William Mann and Sandra Thompson (cf. Mann et al. 1992). This model further develops insights in Grimes (1975) and is set up to reveal underlying rhetorical relations between units of text, e.g. causal and circumstantial relations, and the discourse functions such relations have.
A fourth set of approaches tackle coherence by focusing on the interactive properties of discourse. Though methodologically very different, speech act theory, the