прагматика и медиа дискурс / Teun A van Dijk - Text and Context

description. When we speak of incompleteness we will in general mean this type of selective incompleteness. In those cases where facts are necessary conditions, components or consequences of other facts which have been referred to, we will rather speak of implicitness than of incompleteness.

Some examples may illustrate the distinction made aboye:

[30]John carne home at 6 o'clock. He took off his coat and hung it on the hatstand. He said `Hi, love' to his wife and kissed her. He' 9 asked `How was work at the office today?' and he took a beer from the refrigerator before he started washing up the dishes (...)

[31]John carne home at 6 o'clock and had his dinner at 7.

[32]John carne home at 6 o'clock. Walking to the main entrance of the fiat he put his hand in his left coat pocket, searched for the key to the door, found it, took it out, put it into the lock, turned the lock, and pushed the door open; he walked in and closed the door behind him (...)

Discourse [30] is a relatively complete action discourse: all actions of roughly the same level have been referred to. At the same level [31 ] is incomplete because it does not mention John's activities between 6 and 7 o'clock. At another level of description these may of course not be relevant, eg in a police report describing John's activities of that day. On the other hand [32] would be over-complete relative to the level of description of [30]. All or nearly all component actions are described which are normal constituents of the action of 'coming home'. In this respect [30] is level-incomplete or implicit with respect to the information given in [32] whereas [31 ] is selectively incomplete with respect to the information given in [30]. In a rather wide sense of `inference', we may say that [32] can be inferred from [30], in particular from the first sentence of [30], whereas [30] 20 cannot possibly be inferred from [31].

Note that the following version of [32] would be level-incomplete and incoherent, because some details are given and other comparable details, necessary components of the complex action, are not given:

[33](...) He put his hand in his left pocket and searched for the key. He turned the lock. He closed the door (...)

Apparently, there are some forms of incompleteness which are unacceptable. If a discourse clearly aims at a fuil description of component actions/doings, all necessary constituents must be referred to. A discourse like [33] may therefore be called UNDER-COMPLETE. If we inserted [32] into [30], we would have an OVER-COMPLETE discourse, because details are given of one action but not of the other actions: there would be 'too much' information, given the level of description established by the rest of the discourse. Both undercompleteness and over-completeness are conditions of discourse incoherence, 21 whereas incompleteness is natural for the pragmatic reasons given aboye.

The examples given are action discourses. Completeness and incompleteness are relative to type. All examples are incomplete with respect to object

and situation (place) description: we do not know what John (and his wife) look like, nor his fiat, nor the actions (eg replies) of his wife, and so on. The same remarks may be made for further state descriptions. We may mention that the fiat was big, pleasantly furnished, etc, but also give a more or less precise description of each object. Such state descriptions would only make a coherent discourse together with the action description if these states were conditions or consequences of the actions. If not, they would be irrelevant from the point of view of the action discourse (or conversely). From a pragmatic point of view, given the assumption that action discourse ís an essential component of narrative, the detailed description of objects would be inappropriate in the act of narration. Again, these (still rather informal) constraints may be violated under specific conditions, eg for aesthetic purposes in novels (cf over-completeness of state and action descriptions in the nouveau roman).

5.3

Given a relatively complete or (mostly) incomplete discourse at some level of descriptive generality and with respect to some major kind of facts (eg actions), what information is or must be EXPLICIT and what information is or must be IMPLICIT and what are the consequences for the coherence of the discourse?

The distinction between implicit and explicit information ís not clear-cut. First of all, explicitness of information is to be defined in tercos of propositions, and not in terms of pragmatic concepts like the assertion of propositions. Thus, in a sentence like

[34] Peter sent a letter to his aunt.

the proposition 'Peter has an aunt' is expressed without being explicitly asserted. On the other hand, the proposition 'An aunt ofy is a female human being x, such that x is the sister of one of the parents of y', is neither asserted nor expressed in [34]. Yet, both propositions are ENTAILED by [34], although in a different way: the truth of the first proposition entailed by [34] may be affected by the falsity or inappropriateness of [34], whereas the truth of the second proposition ís not thus dependent on [34]: it holds in general because it is a MEANING POSTULATE of the language. The same holds for the proposition 'If x sends a letter, then x is human', defining 'sending' as a human action. Whether propositions are true or false, they entail meaning postulates: the latter merely determine POSSIBLE PROPOSITIONS. Meaning postulates together with a particular proposition p yield, by modus ponens, the particular implications of p, eg 'Peter is human' in [34]. Implicit information will be restricted to the set of PARTICULAR propositions entailed by each proposition of the discourse.

This notion of implicit information, taken as the sets of (non self-) entailed 22 propositions of a given discourse, may be extended from conceptual information to factual information, even if the boundaries between them are hard to make precise. Inferences, however weak, may be drawn

or optional implicitness of certain propositions. Why would a discourse like

We carne to a deserted house. It had a chimney from which carne white smoke.

be less acceptable than [36]? The most obvious reason is that information which is necessary or probable need not be specifically expressed and asserted if it is implied by an asserted proposition. This is not the case for a discourse like

[38]We carne to a deserted house. The old man told us that the next village was eight miles from there.

from which a proposition like'An old man was sitting on the porch' has been deleted, such that [38] becomes incoherent because the referent of the phrase 'the old man', has not been identified. Nothing in the concept of house or our factual knowledge of (deserted) houses includes the information that an old man is related to it in some way. This means that in any case we would need a subsequent sentence like:

[39](...) The old man sitting on the porch told us (...)

in which this link is established in the complex noun phrase. We now have the following conditions:

[40]a: a proposition q is (may be) IMPLICIT iff q determines the interpretation of a subsequent proposition r and if q is entailed (but not self-entailed) by a proposition p, preceding r;

b: a proposition q is (should be) EXPLICJT iff q determines the interpretation of r and if there is no propositionp such thatp entails q (or if p self-entails q).

What has been formulated here for (conceptual) entailments holds in a similar way for weaker forms of implication, holding in most normal possible worlds. Note that these rules do not say that all explicit propositions in a discourse must determine the interpretation of subsequent propositions: much of the descriptive details may very well be RELATIVELY IRRELEVANT in this sense, eg the fact that the smoke was white in the previous examples.

In many cases there is not only one implicit proposition necessary to establish coherence, but a set or sequence of them, eg in the example we have analysed earlier:

[41 ] (...) [she] stared out of the window. The sun was already hot and the streets looked dusty.

Staring out of the window weakly implies seeing things outside a building, where one of these things may be the sun, and, if it is further known that the building is in a town, other things may be the streets of the town. It appears at the same time that implicit information may be implied by sets of explicit and (other) implicit information. Thus, the rules in [40] should not mention individual propositions but sets of propositions.

6 Topic, comment, focus, and their functions in discourse

6.1

In this and the previous chapters the notions TOPIC OF CONVERSATION and have been used in order to define connectedness of

sentences and coherente of discourse. It has been assumed that such topics are to be defined in terms of propositions, sets of propositions and/or propositions entailed by such sets. At the level of sentence structure another notion of TOPIC has been used in recent linguistics, 23 often in combination with the notions of COMMENT and FOCOS. In that research a sentence may be assigned, besides its usual syntactic and semantic structures, a binary COMMENT STRUCTURE. The definition of such structures is specified both in semantic and pragmatic terms of information and information distribution in sentences and their canonical or transformed syntactic and morphophonological expression. The intuitive idea behind the assignment of such structures in a grammar is that in a sentence we may distinguish between what is being said (asserted, asked, promised ...) and what is being said `about' it, a distinction closely parallel to the classical

distinction in philosophy and logic. Thus in a sentence like:

[42] John is rich.

the part `John' is topic because it denotes the thing about which something is asserted, whereas 'is rich' is the comment or focus of the sentence, denoting the thing (property) said about (predicated of) John. This comment may be much more complex as in sentences like:

[431 John inherited a large estate from his old uncle who lived in Australia.

where John could be assigned the topic function and the rest of the sentence would be assigned the comment function.

Now, although our linguistic intuitions about the topic-comment distinction may be correct, the theoretical reconstruction is by no means straightforward. Confusion about the levels of description and about their appropriate definition is widespread in the literature.

Some of the questions arising are for example the following:

(i)is the topic-comment distinction to be defined in syntactic, semantic or pragmatic terms, ie do these terms denote parts or functions of syntactic structures of sentences, of meaning or reference of propositions, or of contextual structures of speech acts, knowledge and information transmission?

(ji) do all sentences have such a structure, and by what explicit rules and procedures can topic and comment be assigned?

(iii)do sentences have topic-comment structure independent of text structure and/or of their use in communicative contexts? In other

words: can the `lame' sentence have different topic-comment structure in different (con-)texts?

(iv)what are the relationships to notions such as `subject' (grammatical, logical, psychological) and `predícate', presupposition and assertion, etc?

(v)which grammatical, in particular morpho-phonological and syntactic, structures are systematically related to the topic and comment functions?

(vi)what are the relationships to notions like topic of a conversation or of a discourse as used semi-technically aboye?

These questions cannot possibly be answered here in a systematic and explicit way. Some of them relate to characteristic properties of sentence structure which are outside the scope of this book. Our attention, therefore, will be focused upon the role of the topic-comment distinction in the account of discourse coherence.

6.2

However, some preliminary remarks about the theoretical status of topic and comment are necessary. From sentences such as [42] and [43] it seems as if the topic of a sentence coincides with, or is expressed by, the subject of the sentence, which in turn is normally associated with the left-most (or first) noun phrase of the sentence, as also in:

[44]The estate John has inherited from his rich uncle is in Australia.

where the topic is expressed by the complex noun phrase. The comment, thus, would in that case be related to the predicate, or the predicate phrase, of the sentence. This general, informally formulated, rule holds for what could be called the of sentences in English, but not for sentences such as:

[45]Lóndon is a town I like!

[46]No, Péter has stolen the book.

where the first noun phrases have particular stress. For such sentences the grammatical subject or the first noun-phrase does not carry the topic function: the first sentence is not about London but about towns I like, the second not about Peter but about someone who has stolen a book, intuitively speaking, whereas it is asserted that London and Peter are individuals satisfying the particular property or relation, respectively. That is, comments are normally in second (predicate) positíon or in positions with particular stress. In the latter case, the cleft sentence construction (it was ...

who/which ...) may also be used to make comments out of categories with topic function. By particular stress assignment or cleft sentences, nearly any grammatical category can thus be assigned comment function, the rest of the sentence becoming topic:

[47]a: Hárry paid for the book with a ten-dollar bill.

b:Harry páid for the book with a ten-dollar bill.

c:Harry paid for the bóok with a ten-dollar bill.

and so on for the major categories (and in some cases also for prefixes, suffixes, prepositions, articles, demonstratíves, etc).

Without giving a more precise analysis and syntactic description of these examples, it will be assumed that the notions of topic and comment cannot possibly coincide with or be identical to particular syntactic categories, and that they must at least have a semantic status. This semantic status most clearly manifests itself in a further analysis of the 'intuitions' referred to aboye: a topic is some function determining about which item something is being said. Similarly, a topic is often associated with what is 'already known' (to the hearer) in some context of conversation, or what is 'presupposed' (to be identified) by some sentence. The comment, then, associates with what is `unknown' (to the hearer) and asserted. An explication of these tercos would have to be framed in a referential semantics and a pragmatic component.

The link between topic and presupposition in the given examples shows in the fact that, for instance, [47]a presupposes the proposition `Someone paid for the book with a ten-dollar bill', and [47]c presupposes 'Harry paid for something with a ten-dollar bill', where it is asserted that the variables `someone' and `something' are identical with `Harry' and 'the book', respectively. Note also that comments do not simply denote 'unknown' individuals (objects, properties, relations or facts): both Harry and the book are `known' in the given examples: they are identified by the hearer (the speaker uses, characteristically, the definite article in the phrase the book). It is only unknown that Harry and the book have the specific (complex) property referred to.

By examining the semantic functions of normal sentence orderings or of stress distribution, we may often decide which sentence part expresses the topic and which part expresses the comment. This is less easy in the normal form of [47]a—c:

[47]Harry paid for the book with a ten-dollar bill.

It is not at ah l obvious whether this sentence is about Harry, about the book, or even about both, especially since both referents are 'known'. Could a sentence have two topics or should we perhaps speak of one compound topic, eg the ordered pair <'Harry', `the book'> of which it is asserted that the first bought the second with a ten-dollar bill?

A typical test for establishing the topic-comment structure of sentences is to use preceding questions. If [47] is used as an answer to the question

[48]What did Harry do?

we may conclude that `Harry' or 'Harry did something' is the topic of [47]. If the question were:

[491 What happened to the book?

it would be `the book' which would be the topic. Similarly, after a question like:

[50] What did Harry do with the book?

the ordered pair <'Harry', `the book'> would be the topic. What is being established by questions can be established by in general:

[51 ] At last Harry found the book he wanted to give Laura as a present. He paid for it with a ten-dollar bill (...)

Characteristically, noun phrases with topic function may then, or must be, pronominalized. Thus topic can be associated with the logical category of BOUND VARIABLES, ranging over both individuals and properties or relations. Less strictly speaking, it may be said that topic l are those elements of a sentence which are BOUND by previous text orcontext. We should therefore investigate how topic-comment structure is to be determined relative to (con-)- textual structure.

6.3

In order to understand the topic-comment articulation of sentences and their (con-)textual dependence, some remarks are necessary about the COGNITIVE

BASIS OF INFORMATION PROCESSING in communicative conteXts. 24

As will be shown in detail in the next part of this book, sentences (discourses) are uttered within the framework of specific speech acts and speech interaction. Thus, one of the purposes of the act of asserting a proposition is that the hearer be informed about a certain matter. This information increase is an enlargement or other change in his set of knowledge and beliefs, brought about by understanding of the meaning of the perceived utterance. The details of the actions involved here are less important for the moment. The point is that all 'new information' is usually integrated into information already known. Thus, when I say that Peter is ill, it is assumed that my speech participant already `knows' Peter, ie knows that Peter exists, and knows his main properties. In this case, general or specific knowledge about Peter is `enriched' with the proposition `that he is ill (now)', to be attached to the complex `Peter' concept already present in the hearer's knowledge.

Now, the topic of a sentence has the particular cognitive function of selecting a unit of information or concept from knowledge. This may be a more general concept (like love or renting a flat) or an individual concept (Peter, this particular book, etc). In the latter case, the individual referred to may already have been `introduced' into the context of communication either by direct action or perception of certain objects (That chair must be painted red) or by previous sentences of the discourse. In such a way many objects may be introduced into the context, and for each sentence it must be

established which of these objects is (again) 'picked up', ie referred to, in order to make a statement about it.

Cognitively, this 'topicalization' of certain phrases is probably a process whereby knowledge of certain individuals is 'foregrounded', ie taken from long-term memory stores to some working memory, in which the established information may be combined with the incoming new information.

This new information, usually called the `COMMENT' or also the `FOCUS' of the sentence, may be in various forms: it may assign a general or particular property to a known and identified individual, or a relation between individuals of which one or more are known (Peter met a girl. He kissed her), or the instantiation by one or more individuals of a known property or relation (Péter hasn't committed the murder), or the assignment of various higher level properties or operators to events or proposítions (The robbery had been planned cleverly. Your appearance was real/y unexpecied, you kno w).

From these assumptions it follows that in principie any phrase of a sentence may express topic function, or even several, discontinuous phrases like subject noun phrase and (in-)direct object noun phrase.

6.4

This is roughly the general theoretical basis for the topic-comment articulation in natural language: it is mainly a result of the constraints of effective information processing. Now, what are the implications for the structure and interpretation of discourse?

The first point to be made here is that, according to the principies adopted, certain sentences beginning a discourse or a section of discourse (eg a paragraph) may not always have a topic, viz in those cases where no individual object or property known to the hearer is selected for `comment', as in:

[52] A man was walking slowly along a beach.

Here, individuals (person, place) and a relation are introduced at the same time. Although, intuitively, we might say that this sentence is `about' a man, according to the canonical topic-comment mapping onto the subjectpredicate structure of the sentence, there is, formally speaking, no topic in [52] but topic introduction. In cognitive terms: the hearer's knowledge `slate' is still clean with respect to a topic of conversation. Note, however, that sentences like [52] are rather unusual, and occur more in literary narrative than in everyday, natural narratives, where we would have something like:

[53]a: This afternoon a strange man carne to my office (...)

Again, we could speak of topic introduction, but there is already established knowledge (time: a specific afternoon, determined by time of context of communication, and place: a particular, known, office), which is formally the topic of [53]a. In other words, [53]a is not primarily about a strange guy, but rather about what happened this afternoon, to me, in my office.

We see that the notion of ABOUTNESS is not very precise, and, at least for sentences, not always decidable. A sentence like [52] may be about a man, his walk or about a beach, or about all of them. More in general, aboutness should be established in (con-)textual terms, perhaps in such a way that a discourse or a passage of the discourse is about something if thís'somethíng' is referred to by most phrases with topic function. In this case, however, we no longer deal with the topic of a sentence but with a TOPIC OF DISCOURSE or a We here find ourselves at a more global level of discourse description, to be discussed in the next chapter. Such a topic may be `a strange man' even if in the individual sentences the topics may be 'his cigarette', 'his trousers', `I', etc, ie those referring phrases of which the referents are associated with the strange man. It will appear, however, that aboutness at this more global level is again ambiguous: a story may be about Romeo, about Juliet, about both, about a specific (forbidden or impossible) love or about certain political structures in the middle ages. Often, however, the 'aboutness' pertains to a given individual object or person, if most properties and relations are assigned to one permanent referent or to those objects/persons introduced in relation to it.

Topics are established not only with respect to explicit previous information but also with respect to implicit information as defined aboye. If we continued [53]a with a sentence like

[53]b: His nose was nearly purple (...)

the phrase his nose would be assigned topic function even if its referent has not been explicitly referred to before. ZS However, the concept 'man' entails the meaning postulates of being a human adult male and of having a nose. The proposition 'a has a nose' is therefore implied by [53]a, referred to definitely (by possessive pronoun) in [53]b, and therefore implicit. In cognitive tercos: the hearer already knows that if there is a man he also has a nose. Topics, thus, may be expressed by any phrase referring to an individual (con-)textually identified by the hearer, but also by all other expressions for individuals or properties belonging to what may be called the EPISTEMIC RANGE of that object. 26

In this semi-formal frarnework, topic function may be related to any object of previous models, also to facts or possíble worlds. This would explain the notorious difficulty of assigning topic-comment structure to such sentences as

[54]It is hot. [55]It was raining.

It would express a topic by referring to some particular time-place or world. 27 Similarly, in sentences like [52] which have no apparent topic part, but in which some particular real, fictitious, or narrated world is taken as the (implicit) topic. In fact, the sentence specifies a number of properties of such a