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8Structuring texts

Text linguistics

8.0Overview

So far in this book, we have looked at single linguistic expressions such as a word, a morpheme, a sentence, or a speech act. In Chapter 7, we analyzed the ways single utterances may be interpreted as a specific speech act in actual communication. In this chapter, we will go beyond single linguistic utterances and examine how people interpret linguistic expressions as part of a larger whole. The question will therefore be: How are elements of language grouped together in texts?

A text is the spoken or written evocation of an event or series of events. However, the words of a text by themselves never form the whole picture and cannot be the sole object of text linguistics. What matters is not only the words and sentences as they form the text, but our interpretation of that text and the basis for that interpretation. It becomes obvious that a text almost never contains all the clues needed to interpret it, but that we add a lot to the text on the basis of our cultural or world knowledge. This is our text representation, i.e. the interpretation of a coherent whole on the basis of the text elements and of our own mental grasp of the world. Coherence is therefore not, first of all or primordially, based on linguistic expressions in the text, but basically and ultimately, on conceptual links between the various entities referred to in the text and between the various events evoked. The former is known as referential coherence, the second as relational coherence. These will form the main issues in this chapter, which we will end by giving a survey of a fairly large number of coherence relations.

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8.1 Communication, text, and text linguistics

While writing we mainly or exclusively communicate by words. This is verbal communication. While speaking we not only communicate by words or verbal communication, but also by means of loudness, rhythm and speed. These elements accompanying our words are known as paralinguistic (or paraverbal) communication. Our gestures, facial expressions and body language are nonverbal communication.

In spoken communication the text — the words we speak — is but one of the three means of expression. In written communication the text is almost all there is. In both cases, however, the text is but one aspect or one part of the communication; the other part is what the listener or reader brings with him when he or she interprets this text. This includes the world of the speaker and hearer, their ideas and feelings, as well as their cultural or world knowledge.

Text can consequently be defined as the linguistic expressions used in communication between people and the interpretation the hearer or reader makes of them. This definition applies to both oral and written communication, but has the additional condition that text here only denotes the verbal part of the communication, excluding the paralinguistic and non-verbal aspects. This text definition also presupposes the cultural or world knowledge on which the text interpretation is based. Schematically, this definition can be represented as in Table 1.

Table 1. Communication, text, and cultural knowledge

Text linguistics is the study of how S (speaker, writer) and H (hearer, reader) manage to communicate via texts, that is how they go beyond the text (words) they produce or have in front of them to see the relations between the sentences, the paragraphs, the sections, etc. In this chapter we will limit ourselves

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mainly to the relations between sentences. This is an intricate network of relations that warrants its own study, separate from higher relations in the text and text types.

8.2 Text representation

In the third part of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (‘A voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Glubbdubdrib, Luggnagg and Japan’), Gulliver describes a number of scientific projects at the Academy of Lagado. The following describes the second project, which was intended to do away with “words” altogether.

The other project was a scheme for entirely abolishing all words whatsoever; and this was urged as a great advantage in point of health as well as brevity. For it is plain that every word we speak is in some degree a diminution of our lungs by corrosion, and consequently contributes to the shortening of our lives. An expedient was therefore o ered that, since words are only names for things, it would be more convenient for all men to carry about them such things as were necessary to express the particular business they are to discourse on. And this invention would certainly have taken place, to the great ease as well as health of the subject, if the women, in conjunction with the vulgar and illiterate, had not threatened to raise a rebellion, unless they might be allowed the liberty to speak with their tongues, after the manner of their ancestors; such constant irreconcilable enemies to science are the common people. However, many of the most learned and wise adhere to the new scheme of expressing themselves by things, which has only this inconvenience attending it, that if a man’s business be very great, and of various kinds, he must be obliged in proportion to carry a greater bundle of things upon his back, unless he can a ord one or two strong servants to attend him. I have often beheld two of those sages almost sinking under the weight of their packs, like peddlers among us; who, when they met in the streets, would lay down their loads, open their sacks, and hold conversation for an hour together; then put up their implements, help each other to resume their burdens, and take their leave.

Of course, the idea that we might prefer to converse in “things” rather than “words” may strike us as rather odd, but actually such ideas have outlived the days of Swift considerably. What Swift expresses ironically is also adhered to by philosophers such as Leibniz at a scientific level. Also the logical analyses by the British philosopher Bertrand Russell are based on the Misleading Form Hypothesis.

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Figure 1. Conversation between sages using things, not words

This hypothesis dictates that natural language is not very well suited to formulate accurate descriptions of the world around us because natural language is ambiguous and misleading. Therefore, it should be emulated by a more exact mode of representing the world: the logical form of sentences.

In this chapter we will show that communication formulated according to the “new scheme of expressing [oneself] by things” di ers in a significant number of ways from natural texts, and that “the women, in conjunction with the vulgar and illiterate” were very right to protest against such an unnatural way of communication.

The first thing that is wrong about the Lagadan vision of language is that it assumes that language is merely descriptive, that it only represents certain states of a airs. Such a function has already been referred to as the ideational function of language in Chapter 7. It is of course an important one, and in fact until fairly recently it has been the almost exclusive object of semantic studies. But in producing texts, people do other things than merely describe. Texts contain many indications as to the role of the speaker or writer and to the function of the sentences, referred to as the interpersonal function in Chapter 7. For one thing, as we saw in Chapter 7, natural texts contain politeness information. For

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example, the di erence between (1a,b,c) is not one of content, as it has the same ideational information, but one of appropriateness.

(1)a. Would you pass me the butter, please?

b.Pass me the butter!

c.Pass me the butter, would you?

Texts may also contain information concerning the way they are structured, called the textual function of language. For example, a sentence like (2) does not add much to the ideational content of the text, yet it performs an important function in that it guides the reader in processing the text.

(2) In the following section I will briefly go into the history of car mechanics.

The second reason why the Lagadan version of communication and its interpretation and production is wrong has to do with how it views meaning. It assumes that “words are just names for things”, and that therefore each word stands directly for a thing in the world. A Lagadan communication new style consists of a number of objects. In other words, the meaning of a conversation as a whole could then be equated with the collection of the “things” brought to bear by the participants in the conversation while in actual fact texts, whether spoken or written, consist of sentences or rather idea units.

It might be tempting to consider the interpretation of a text as the sum of the interpretation of the individual sentences of a text. However, there is good reason to assume that this view on text interpretation is not correct. For one thing, as (3) illustrates, readers add all sorts of information to the sentences in the text when they process it.

(3)On our way to the reception, the engine broke down. We were late for the party.

Conversational partners will have no di culty in understanding that the engine that broke down is part of the car and that the person uttering (3) was in this car. But this car is not mentioned explicitly in the text. Readers or hearers will also assume that there is a causal link between the engine breaking down and being late for the party. These implicit assumptions, called inferences, are usually based on the reader’s previous experience. (Conversational implicatures, which were discussed in Chapter 7, are a subset of these inferences.) The fact that we always make a great many inferences when we interpret a text is evidence for the fact that a text is more than the sum of the interpretations of the individual sentences.

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marking of its coherence by means of cohesive links. The following is also an example of a coherent text.

(5)(a) Twelve year term of imprisonment. (b) london, april 10. (c) The London court has convicted a Brighton resident to twelve years imprisonment for accessory to murder. (d) The victim was fatally wounded in a shooting incident in a Winchester restaurant last year.

Even though this mini-text seems quite coherent, there are no words that explain what the situations described in (c) and (d) have to do with each other. Also, none of the concepts mentioned in the fourth sentence repeat any material from the third sentence. In other words, there are no cohesive links (or there seems to be no cohesion) between (c) and (d). Yet, no one would find it di cult to understand. The explanation is that we add the missing links from cultural knowledge, i.e. our knowledge of the world. For this we use the murder script, whereby the term script refers to our idea of what a murder case is composed of and is used in a slightly more general sense than it was in the phrase cultural script introduced in Chapter 6, which only relates to our norms of behaviour. We know from previous experience that murders come along with murderers, victims, means, motives, murder sites, and the like, and it is this cultural knowledge that allows us to construct a coherent representation of text (5). The example shows, therefore, that it is possible to have coherence without explicit cohesion.

The coherence of a text can be signalled through cohesive links such as word repetition or the use of subordinate or superordinate terms, but the following fragment shows that the presence of such cohesive links is not a guarantee for coherence:

(6)I bought a Ford. A car in which President Wilson rode down the Champs Elysées was black. Black English has been widely discussed. The discussions between the presidents ended last week. A week has seven days. Every day I feed my cat. Cats have four legs. The cat is on the mat. Mat has three letters.

This text seems to have many cohesive links, mostly word repetitions. Still, it is very di cult to assign it a coherent interpretation. Therefore, we may conclude that coherence is not so much a property of the linguistic expressions in the texts itself, but of the representation that S and H make of this text.

Coherence can be established in one of two ways: By repeated reference to the same referents or ‘mental objects’ in a text, called referential coherence, and

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Not all of the referents in a text are equally prominent. Some are talked about continuously, some are new to the text, and others have a subsidiary role. Careful studies of this identificational function of referential expressions have shown that the way in which concepts are referred to depends on the prominence of the concept. For instance, if an object is completely new to the text, it has to be introduced. In a Lagadan conversation this would mean that an object is taken from the bag. In natural language, at least in West European languages, the typical way to do this is by using an indefinite expression i.e. an expression with an indefinite article or pronoun. This is found in the typical introductory sentence of fairy tales:

(10) Once upon a time there was a little girl.

Once the referent has been introduced it can be referred to in various ways, depending on the prominence of the concept. The more prominent it is, the less linguistic material is needed to identify the referent. If it has constantly been in the ‘focus of attention’, the natural way of referring to it is by the use of a pronoun:

(10) a. She was called Goldilocks.

This is a reduced way of referring to the girl whereas a non-reduced form would be The girl was called Goldilocks. An English pronoun contains semantic information only about gender, person and number (pronouns in other languages may give even less information). More information, in the context of (10a), is not needed because the referent can be inferred from the immediate context. Sometimes, if the reference is even further reduced, it becomes elliptical:

(10) b. Once upon a time there was a little girl Ø called Goldilocks.

If the girl is less prominent, for instance because she was referred to a while ago, meaning that another object has come into focus, more content, e.g. not a pronoun but a full noun phrase is needed to establish co-reference, i.e. reference to the same person or object.

(10)c. Once upon a time there was a little girl called Goldilocks. She lived in a forest that belonged to a rich and powerful king. The king had a

son called Jeremy, who loved hunting. One day, as he was chasing a deer, he saw {??her/the little girl}.