THE GRAMMAR OF DISCOURSE

Transcription

1 THE GRAMMAR OF DISCOURSE

2 TOPICS IN LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS Series Editors Thomas A. Sebeok and Albert Valdman Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana ISSUES IN INTERNATIONAL BILINGUAL EDUCATION The Role of the Vernacular Edited by Beverly Hartford, Albert Valdman, and Charles R. Foster LINGUISTICS AND LITERACY Edited by William Frawley THE GRAMMAR OF DISCOURSE Robert E. Longacre

3 THE GRAMMAR OF DISCOURSE Robert E. Longacre Summer Institute of Linguistics University of Texas at Arlington Arlington, Texas Plenum Press New York and London

4 Ubrary of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Longacre, Robert E. The grammar of discourse. (Topics in language and linguistics) "Based on an earlier work, An anatomy of speech notions, 1976"-Pref. bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Discourse analysis. I. Longacre, Robert E. Anatomy of speech notions. II. Ti tie. III. Series. P302.L ' ISBN ISBN (ebook) / Plenum Press, New York Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1 st edition 1983 A Division of Plenum Publishing Corporation 233 Spring Street, New York, N.Y All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher

5 To JAMES LaRIaT pioneer in the study of discourse

6 PREFACE While this volume is based on an earlier work, An Anatomy of Speech Notions (1976), the overall orientation of the present volume is distinctive enough to make it a new work. The former volume was essentially a half-way house to discourse. While including a chapter on discourse structure, it was not as a whole explicitly oriented towards considerations of context. The present volume, however, strives to achieve a more consistently contextual approach to language. A great deal of research and theorizing concerning discourse grammar or textlinguistics has characterized the past decade of linguistic studies. This recent work has, of course, influenced the present volume. In addition, my personal research in several areas has led to increased insistence on the indispensability of discourse studies. Crucial here was my direction of field workshops involving personnel of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, first in relation to languages of Colombia, Panama, and Ecuador ( ), and later in relation to languages of Mexico (1978). Of further relevance have been my own studies of narrative structure in Biblical Hebrew. Last but not least, is the stimulus and feedback which I have received from my graduate students (whose research is embodied in several theses and dissertations), especially Keith Beavon, Shin Ja Joo Huang, Larry Jones, Mildred Larson, Linda Lloyd, and Mike Walrod. Stephen Eckerd's work has been decisive in the revision of the system of cases and case frames which are found in Chapters 4 and 5. I am heavily indebted to him in these chapters. I gratefully acknowledge here the dedicated secretarial assistance rendered by Carolyn Skinner, Eula Stephens and Anne Short, as well as the criticisms and suggestions of Harwood Hess. I also gratefully acknowledge the assistance

7 viii PREFACE of Kathy Niver in the final preparation and editing of the manuscript. Robert E. Longacre University of Texas at Arlington

8 ACKNOWLEDGMENT I wish to thank the following authors, editors, and publishers for granting permission to quote from their materials in this book: R.l1.W. Dixon from his 1977 article "Where Have All the Adjectives Gone?"; K.L. Pike and E. Pike for the right to reproduce their four-box diagram from Pike and Pike, 1979; to E.A. Nida and the University of l1ichigan Press for the right to reproduce a passage from Morphology 1949; to Austin Hale for the right to reproduce a chart from his article "Towards a Systematization of Display Grammar" in the volume Clause, Sentence, and Discourse Patterns in Selected Languages of Nepal, which he edited, and to the publisher, the Summer Institute of Linguistics; to Harcourt, Brace, and Jovanovich for the quotation from Carl Sandburg's Abraham Lincoln: the War Years, Volume 1 (1939); to Father Walter Cook and the Georgetown University Press for the right to reproduce a chart from "A Case Grammar Matrix," Georgetown University Languages and Linguistics Working Papers No.6 (p. 26, fig. 3); to the University of California Press for the quotation from Stephen Pepper's World Hypotheses (originally published by the University of California Press, 1942; reprinted 1970 by permission of the Regents of the University of California); to Philip Larkin for the quotation from his poem "Mr. Bleaney" from The Whitsun Weddings, and to the publishers, Faber and Faber; to The Great Ideas Today and the Encyclopedia Britannica for the quotation from Sidney Hook ("The Hero as World Figure") and Joy Bayum ("Heroes in Black and White") in the volume The Great Ideas Today, 1973; and to Charles Scribner's Sons for the quotation from Hemingway's "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" in the third edition of Studies in the Short Story (1968), edited by Adrian H. Jaffe and Virgil Scott; and to the Airmont Publishing Co. for the right to quote the passage from Hark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. ix

9 CONTENTS Introduction xv 1 MONOLOGUE DISCOURSE 1.1 DISCOURSE TYPOLOGY IN NOTIONAL AND SURFACE 1 STRUCTURES Notional Types Surface Structure Types Skewing of Notional and Surface Structure Embedding Relations of the Five Surface Structure Types MAIN LINE VS SUPPORTIVE MATERIAL THE COMPOSER PLOT AND SIMILAR STRUCTURES Plot as Notional Structure Correlation of Notional and Surface Features Marking of the Surface Structure Peak Similar Structures 38 2 REPARTEE SIMPLE REPARTEE 2.2 COMPLEX REPARTEE 2.3 ABEYANCE REPARTEE 2.4 COMPOUND REPARTEE. 2.5 NON-VERBAL RESOLUTION AND FURTHER PARAGRAPH TYPES. 2.6 THE NUMBER OF SPEAKERS IN A DIALOGUE 2.7 OUT OF PHASE RELATIONS BETWEEN NOTIONAL AND SURFACE STRUCTURES xi

10 xii REPARTEE AS A GAME 2.9 SUMMARY COMBINATION OF PREDICATIONS 3.1 CONJOINING Coupling Contrast Comparison 3.2 AL TERNATION Alternation with Only Two Possible Alternatives Alternation w ith More than Two Alternatives 3.3 TEMPORAL Overlap Succession 3.4 IMPLICATION Conditionality Causation 3,4.3 Contrafactuality Warning 3.5 PARAPHRASE 3.5:1 Equivalence Paraphrase Negated Antonym Paraphrase and Similar Structures Generic-specific Paraphrase Amplification Paraphrase Specific-generic Paraphrase Contraction Paraphrase Summary Paraphrase 3.6 ILLUSTRATION Simile Exemplification DEIXIS Introduction Identification Some Further Varieties of Deixis. 3.8 ATTRIBUTION Speech Attribution Awareness Attribution 3.9 FRUSTRATION Frustrated Coupling Frustrated Succession Frustrated Overlap Frustrated Hypothesis Frustrated Contingency CONTENTS

11 CONTENTS Frustrated Efficient Cause Frustrated Final Cause Frustrated Attribution Frustrated Modality Some Restrictions 3.10 DEFINITION OF SYMBOLS xiii CASES OR ROLES 4.1 EXPERIENCER 4.2 PATIENT 4.3 AGENT 4.4 RANGE 4.5 MEASURE 4.6 INSTRUMENT 4.7 LOCATIVE. 4.8 SOURCE. 4.9 GOAL PATH 4.11 PERIPHERAL CASES 4.12 CASES POSITED BY HALE AND THE PIKES CASE FRAMES A SCHEME OF CASE FRAMES Ambient Case Frames Ambient-Experiential Case Frames Experiential Case Frames Factual Knowledge Case Frames Case Frames of Desire/Cognition Case Frames of Sensation, etc Physical Case Frames Case Frames of Measure Locative Case Frames Case Frames of Motion, Propulsion, Locomotion Case Frames Referring to Property FURTHER SYSTEMATIC CONCERNS Reflexives Causatives Surface Structure Passives Existentials and Equatives RELEVANCE OF CASE FRAMES TO DISCOURSE Generatively Analytically SOME FURTHER LEVELS OF NOTIONAL STRUCTURE 6.1 DERIVATION

12 xiv CONTENTS INFLECTION Verb Inflection Noun Inflection 6.3 CONCRETION Nominal Concretions Verb Concretions 6.4 PERFORMATIVES Repartee Performatives Type-Specific Performatives A FRAMEWORK FOR DISCOURSE ANALYSIS 7.1 HIERARCHY TAGMEME AND SYNTAGMEME THE LAW OF PRIMARY EXPONENCE GENERAL THEORY OF EXPONENCE 7.5 CHARACTERISTICS OF THE VARIOUS LEVELS 7.6 VARIETY IN NATURE SIMILARITIES BETWEEN LEVELS SOME DEVIANT SCHEMATIZATIONS 7.9 NOTIONAL AND SURFACE STRUCTURE IN A HIERARCHICAL FRAMEWORK 7.10 SURFACE STRUCTURE MEANING 7.11 NOTIONAL STRUCTURE FORM 7.12 MAPPING OF NOTIONAL LEVELS ONTO SURFACE LEVELS 7.13 TAGMEME AND SYNTAGMEME IN THIS SETTING 7.14 MULTIPLE PERSPECTIVE A TRIMODAL MODEL A CONCLUDING ESSAY: TOWARD MAXIMUM CONTEXT APPENDIX: THE NOTIONAL AND SURFACE STRUCTURE OF ENGLISH CLAUSES.. BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX

13 INTRODUCTION As a book on discourse, this volume is dedicated to the thesis that language is language only in context. For too long a time, linguistics has confined itself to the study of isolated sentences, either such sentences carefully selected from a corpus or, more often than not, artfully contrived so as to betray no need for further context. Thus, boards in the linguistic classroom have been filled with such sentences as 'John kissed Mary' or 'Stephen knew that Mary knew th~t something was wrong' to the avoidance of such sentences as 'Consequently, he kissed her' or 'Obviously he knew that Mary knew that something was wrong.' Sentences have been discussed and dissected as to possible multiple meanings and ambiguities without taking into account the natural function cf context in resolving most ambiguities. Meanwhile, many difficult problems have been restricted to partial explanations or have been totally shelved in the absence of contextual considerations. Among these problems have been deixis and the use of articles; pronominalization, and other anaphoric ways of referring to a participant; better understanding of tense, aspect, mode, and voice in verbs; use of optional temporal and spatial expressions; the function of extra-position, left dislocation, and other such features; subject selection, object selection, and other focus phenomena; the function and thrust of conjunctions and other sequence signals; and the function of mystery particles which occur in connected context in some languages, which the native speaker knows where to use and where not to use, but which defy translation. Undoubtedly, a discourse revolution (Longacre, 197ge) of some sort is shaping up in response to the demand for context and for greater explanatory power. It is hoped that this volume can be a contribution to that foment. This volume is called The Grammar of Discourse: Notional and Surface Structures. As such, the goals of this xv

14 xvi INTRODUCTION volume are restricted. It is not entitled The Semantics of Discourse, although it contains in its title the words Notional Structures. The term semantics would be too broad and would indicate material of a sort especially excluded from this volume. We are not here concerned with questions concerning the referential content structure of a discourse. We are not concerned whether a text is about chickens, turkeys, or other barnyard fowl, about the love life of the ancient Greeks, about energy alternatives for America in the late 20th century, or a humorous dialogue between parents and teenagers. Rather, we are concerned in this volume with such features as plot progression in a narrative from stage to inciting incident to further build-up to a climax of confrontation to denouement and to final resolution; with dialogue relations such as question-answer, proposal-response, remark-evaluation; with ways of combining predications according to coupling, contrast, temporal succession, temporal overlap, causation, paraphrase, and the like; and with the world of role relations such as patient, experiencer, agent, goal and source. We note concerning these notions that: 1. They are not language specific but belong to the general notional structure of language as spoken by human beings anywhere. 2. They are independent of particular texts and particular referential content structure in a given language. 3. At least some of them resemble categories which we are accustomed (on lower levels) to call grammar. 4. They emerge as categories which are marked in the surface structure of at least some languages. I believe, therefore, that all of these notional considerations belong to the form of language and to the form of discourses within it, i.e., on the formal rather than on the content side. I see, therefore, no reason why they should not be considered to be GRAMMAR as opposed to the world of referential and content structure. Admittedly, they are the deep or semantic side of grammar. But even if we admit the latter word, semantic here does not include the referential function. Rather this volume sets out to explore and catalogue notional structures which figure in the structure of discourse and to confront them with and relate

15 INTRODUCTION xvii them to the surface structure of discourse in various languages. As to the grammatical surface structure of discourse, a crucial consideration is the fact that most discourses formally mark (often by a variety of devices) a discourse PEAK. In addition, often a discourse STAGE (in narrative) or INTRODUCTION (in other discourse types) is indicated as well. Further devices of aperture and finis bracket discourses in many languages. From these and other considerations we deduce a GRAMMATICAL PROFILE of a discourse in terms of Aperture, Stage/Introduction, Pre-Peak sections (Episodes in Narrative), Peak, Post-Peak sections (likewise, Episodes in Narrative), and Finis. Such a profile is a deduction from clearly marked features in the surface structure of a discourse. Furthermore, the surface structure profile is shadowed by an underlying notional structure (plot) which it exploits and marks in various ways. In similar fashion, a dialogue discourse or drama can be exa~ ined as to its overall profile. Another grammatical consideration that is relevant to discourse is the way in which verb and noun morpho syntax are used to sort out strands of information relevance in a discourse. Thus the mainline of a discourse can be marked (in a given type of discourse) by a characteristic tense, aspect, or mood (or some combination of the three), by word order in the clause, or by a mystery particle. Various further features can also mark the more pivotal parts of the mainline from the more routine parts and can classify background, supportive and depictive material so that the more crucial bits of such information stand out. Of considerable interest to the student of discourse is the intersection of the two sets of features briefly summarized in the preceding paragraphs. What happens to the routine marking of strands of information relevance at the peak(s) of a discourse? One thing is certain, the peak of a discourse is non-routine. It may, in fact, be thought of as a zone of turbulence in regard to the general flow of a discourse. It is, therefore, no surprise that at discourse peak markers of the mainline may be phased out, be used less frequently--or be used much more frequently than in other parts of the discourse. Granted that special peak markers can also occur, we can summarize what happens at peak by

16 xviii INTRODUCTION saying 'something new has been added to and something taken away. ' The above considerations (peak and discourse profile, strands of information relevance, and the intersection of these two sets of features) do not much take into account the hierarchical, constituent structure of discourse; rather they treat the structures as wholes with characteristic shapes and textures. It is important, however, that we consider in addition to these holistic concerns the constituent structure of a discourse, viz. the structuring into paragraphs, sentences, clauses, and phrases. Each of these units has also notional and surface structures. Considerable attention is given here to the notional structures of these levels. For the surface structure of the paragraph, cf. Longacre 1979c; for the surface structure of the sentence, cf. Longacre 1970c. As for the surface structure of the clause, this is obviously a somewhat well-cultivated plot of ground. My own representation of English clause structure is found in the Appendix to this volume. One of the relatively unexplored areas of discourse structure is the relation of constituent structure to the holistic concerns already described. These are twin insights into discourse--but insights that have not yet fused into effective binocular vision. For a beginning, however, cf. Waltz 1976 (in respect to a South American language, Guanano). This volume does not touch much on the pragmatics of discourse. Ultimately, of course, such considerations are of the greatest importance. Just as we cannot analyze isolated sentences apart from their linguistic context, so ultimately, we cannot analyze discourses aside from the behavioral context which is relevant to them (cf. Chapter 8). Nevertheless, it is not possible to do everything within the confines of a single volume. For this reason, pragmatic considerations are touched on only in a few places here. In particular, pragmatic considerations figure in the structure of Chapter 2 where dialogue is considered. Dialogue is so interwoven with practical conditions of social exchange between people that it is scarcely possible to ignore the pragmatics of dialogue. Indeed, pragmatics comes into the very matter of distinguishing and relating monologue to dialogue. As I plead in this volume, units of dialogue (to which turn-

17 INTRODUCTION xix taking and repartee are relevant) are not in immediate correspondence with the size level units of monologue (morpheme, stem, phrase, clause, sentence, paragraph, discourse). Dialogue units relate rather closely to the pragmatics of the situation, while the hierarchical units within a monologue relate to the pragmatics of the situation in a more indirect way. Nevertheless, it will be necessary to insist that the form which a given text takes is responsive at multiple points to the demands of the communication situation--even though such further considerations are beyond the immediate scope of this volume. Chapter 6, however, does touch briefly on the matter of performatives assumed in monologue discourses and assumptions made relative to the whole discourse. In brief then, this volume is almost entirely non-overlapping with such a volume as van Dijk's Text and Context (1977), whose two halves are respectively semantics and pragmatics. In the semantics of discourse, van Dijk considers mainly matters of referential content, although he gets a bit into the sort of sequential considerations which I cover in this volume as well. In the section on pragmatics he likewise touches on matters which are largely beyond the sphere of this volume. Turning again to the notional categories which are especially featured in this volume, I suggest that the questions which are considered here are very worthwhile questions for the student of discourse. If we assemble the various notional categories which characterize human discourse in all languages, the ensemble is impressive. It amounts, in fact, to a natural metaphysic of the human mind, an anatomy of our intellects in their abstract functioning. As such, it intimately relates to our humanity and ties into certain questions discussed in the final chapter of this volume. To understand the notional structure of human discourse is to know in broad outline what to look for before we sit down to find it in discourses within a given language. Our only question will be to what degree and in what form do these various notional categories come to the surface in the surface grammar of a given language. The goal of this volume is then somewhat like the dream of the generative semanticist of the recent linguistic past. If we can describe the universal soft underbelly of language, this should greatly simplify the exploration of the upper structure. Our job will essentially be not to posit new notional

18 xx INTRODUCTION categories for every language that we find, but to simply map the universal notional categories onto the grammatical structure of the surface of a language. This should considerably simplify our task. As a whole, I avoid in this volume the term deep structure for the structures which are here assumed to underlie the surface grammar of languages. The main reason for avoiding the term deep structure is the fact that it has been used in so many different senses, from the relatively shallow deep structures of Chomsky and his immediate colleagues, to the rock bottom semantic structures of the generative semanticist. However, the term deep structure does involve a metaphor which is useful in at least one point, that is, it raises the possibility of considering that notional and surface structures are not a clear dichotomy but a polarity. If we speak of the deep and surface structure of a discourse, we can also speak of the relative depth or relative superficiality of an item of which we are speaking. We can avoid, on the one hand, frantic attempts to expunge from the surface structure grammar elements which look semantic, and on the other hand accept the fact of a formal structuring of the underlying structure as well. We can find some meaning exp~essed on the surface without being scandalized and we can find a formal side to the deep structure as well. These considerations are explored at the end of Chapter 7. In the chapters which compose the body of this book: Chapter 1 relates to monologue discourse; Chapter 2 relates to dialogue discourse; Chapter 3 sketches the notional structures involved in combinations of predications; Chapters 4 and 5 deal with the internal structure of predications (the world of so-called case grammar); Chapter 6 deals with a few further problems relating to stems, words and phrases. After sketching all these notional structures in some detail, Chapter 7 suggests a framework for discourse analysis, in which all the bits and pieces can fit comfortably. If Chapter 7 is my linguistic credo, Chapter 8 is my philosophical/religious credo regarding the place of language and man in the scheme of thing&. Just as we need linguistic context to make isolated sentences intelligible and broad, non-linguistic pragmatic context to make discourses intelligible, so we may well raise the question as to what is necessary and sufficient to make the whole human

19 INTRODUCTION xxi venture something other than existential loneliness and frustration.