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And all around, and above, there is the sort of action reminiscent of war movies: the clatter of helicopter rotors, whistling jet airstrikes and, when the city burns, a fire so realistic you could toast bread on it. They could still be our friends. But now they never will be. Now there is the sort of hatred I've described, the sort of cruelty, savagery, barbarity. And there's the added motivation of a $25,000 car, so I'm giving it my best shot." Going Places Direct showed no compassion when you explained your problem and insisted that you pay a £90 re-booking fee (you = ‘I’) (Cobuild: times/10. Text: N2000951104) (8) Mary: Mm-hmm. (Cobuild: npr/07. Text: S2000911102)1
In both examples, the grammatical structure of the postverbal NP may provide an explanation for the use of the definite determiner the in a context which does not normally allow for definite NPs. In both cases, the noun referring to the type (sort) functions as the Head of the NP. It is followed by a Postmodifier (of action, of hatred). This complex Head is in its turn modified by a Postmodifier (reminiscent of war, I’ve described). It seems that the definite determiner, then, has its ‘normal’ function in the NP as such: it signals that the identity of the referent of the head noun it modifies is somehow recoverable. In other words, the hearer is supposed to be able to identify the specific ‘sort’ of thing that is being talked about. More specifically, the information needed to identify the referent of N1 is present within the same NP in the form of the postmodifier: the definite determiner is, therefore, esphorically motivated. A possible paraphrase of example (5) may illustrate this: there is an instance of action of the sort reminiscent of war. This paraphrase also makes clear why this type of NP containing the definite article the is acceptable in a cardinal existential: although the hearer is supposed to identify the type of thing talked about (through the information given by the postmodifier), the actual instance of this type of thing referred to is a new instance, which is being introduced into the discourse. The reference to a new instance is a pragmatic inference; the NP as a whole refers primarily to an identifiable type. However, the pragmatic inference to instances is one that must be made due to the specific nature of the existential context.3 Therefore, the reference of the complex NP in this type of examples can be said
122 Peter Willemse to be ‘pseudo-definite’ rather than truly definite (or truly indefinite, for that matter): although on one level of interpretation, the identity of the referent is recoverable (viz. the ‘type’ of thing), on another level, an instance is still being introduced into the discourse as a new entity, which is, consequently, not ‘presumed known’ to the hearer. We can briefly refer here to another type of pseudo-definite NP which involves a similar reference mechanism, viz. NPs containing specific types of postdeterminers. Postdeterminers are elements which occupy the slot following the determiner slot in the NP and which fulfill a function ancillary to the functions of (definite/indefinite) identification and/or (absolute/relative) quantification realized primarily by the determiner (see Davidse 2001 for a more comprehensive discussion of postdeterminers). Consider the following examples: (7)
(8)
The Woody Allen-Mia Farrow breakup, and Woody’s declaration of love for one of Mia’s adopted daughters, seems to have everyone’s attention. There are the usual sleazy reasons for that, of course—the visceral thrill of seeing the extremely private couple’s dirt in the street, etc. [San Francisco Chronicle, 24/8/92; cited in Ward and Birner 1995:732] There was the usual crop of letters to the Member of Parliament concerned, and about once every twelve months a really abusive one from the tortured victim himself.
Ward and Birner (1995: 732) describe this kind of postverbal NPs as having “dual reference, both to a type and a token”. They point out that, although the type has ‘hearer-old’ status, which justifies the use of the definite article, the ‘token’ or instance referred to is ‘hearer-new’, which accounts for the acceptability in existential contexts. It is clear that the underlined NPs in examples (7) and (8) introduce new entities into the discourse. At the same time, a definite determiner is used to signal the identifiability, not of the instances, but of the type. In (7), for instance, although the specific reasons for the public fascination with the breakup are being introduced into the discourse and thus not presumed known to the hearer, the speaker does assume that the hearer knows the type of reasons that are usually the basis for such public attention. The postdeterminer fulfills a secondary identifying function, in that it helps the hearer to make mental contact with the right type: it provides a clue for the hearer to identify the correct type. It may be clear that a very similar explanation holds for type-subtype constructions, although in the latter type of construction the reference to the type is given an explicit linguistic realization in the form of the head noun the sort of, whereas the notion of ‘type’ is not lexicalized in the case of a postdeterminer with dual reference.
Esphoric reference and pseudo-definiteness 2.2
123
Possessive constructions
This second category contains different types of pseudo-definite NP which are structurally and semantically very similar, in that they all express some kind of possessive relation (in the broad sense) between NP1 and NP2. More specifically, it concerns two types of constructions which express types of relationships which “can be regarded as prototypical for possessive constructions” (Langacker 1991: 169), viz. part/whole and kinship relations. The first type is formed by NP complexes in which NP1 specifies a part or component of the referent of NP2. This category can be further subdivided according to the degree of abstractness of the part-whole relation which holds between the two NPs. The part-whole relation can be situated on a concrete, spatio-temporal level (meronymy), as in the following example, which was also the only attested example of this type in my existential corpus: (9)
In a room outside the court he talked with the French prosecuting counsel, who showed him some of the evidence he was going to submit. There was the shrunken head of a Polish boy whose crime had been that he had fallen in love with a German girl. The head, mounted on a plaque like some trophy of the hunt, had been found in a German official's house, used as an ornament.
The use of the definite article in an example like this can be explained straightforwardly in terms of an esphoric bridging relationship. ‘Bridging’ is defined by Martin (1992: 124) as a type of indirect reference in which the identity of a part is recovered through an experiential connection which exists between that part and another part of the same whole or between that part and the whole it belongs to, or vice-versa. In the type of construction under discussion here the bridging relationship is an esphoric one because it holds between the first and the second NP within the same complex NP. NP2 introduces the entity ‘Polish boy’ into the discourse; it realizes presenting reference and consequently uses an indefinite form (the indefinite article a). The first NP has presuming reference and consequently uses a definite form (the definite article the); the identity of its referent is recoverable by virtue of an experiential connection with the entity introduced by the second NP: a head is part of (the body of) a boy. Examples like these shed an interesting light on Martin’s (1992) taxonomy of retrieval types. Bridging and esphora are more intertwined than it would seem at first sight. In fact, bridging is often the motivating factor for the use of a definite form in a pseudo-definite, esphoric NP. In such cases, the esphoric nature of the NP lies in the fact that the information necessary to identify its referent, and thus to justify the use of a definite determiner, is to be found further on in the same NP; the actual information is then retrievable through bridging ‘from’ the second NP.
124 Peter Willemse In the majority of the cases attested in the corpus, the part-whole relation was of a more abstract nature. A first group contains examples such as the following: (10)
(11)
there was a limp wad of lettuce whose leaves glistened with a fine film of oil; there was a clean piece of wood jutting out with a shining nail bent at the end of it; there were several eggshells showing bits of yellow yolk; there was the stump of a cigar bearing the marks of a man's teeth; and there was a clump of fluffy dust freshly gathered from some floor It comes from a pleasant er beach in Cornwall I won't want to say exactly where it is in case it affects the tourist potential of the beach but er on the slope where that photograph was taken from there is the remains of an
In these part-whole constructions, a certain spatio-temporal element is still present. They are different from the type represented by example (9), however, in that the part-whole relation which they symbolize implies a process. In all of the examples of this type found in my corpus, the head noun of the first NP is situated in the lexical field of ‘remains’. It is clear that remains are not an intrinsic part of a whole; rather, they are the result of a process of change, often more specifically a process of destruction or demolition. It is this process which is implicitly evoked in this type of examples. In (10), for instance, a stump is what is left of a cigar after it has been smoked; thus the process of smoking is implied. In (11), the remains are what is left of the tin mine which has presumably been abandoned and fallen into disrepair; thus the process of change which the mine has undergone is activated. In order to explain the use of the definite determiner in examples of this kind, it can be remarked that the process which is implicitly activated is one that is strongly associated with, and possibly even collocationally linked to (e.g. in the case of cigar and ‘smoking’), the referent introduced by the formally indefinite second NP. Consequently, it can be assumed that the process itself is evoked fairly automatically and easily in the hearer’s mind. The first NP, then, refers to the result or end product of this process and can do so with a definite form since the process which has been evoked in the hearer’s mind in its turn implies a specific result. Instead of a relation between a material part and a material whole, the more abstract part-whole relationship which is present in this type of examples can be said to be one between a process and one of its ‘phases’. A process is equally implied in the following examples, which are still further removed from the concrete, spatio-temporal level: (12)
He added: `We still don't know how many are required. I just wish there were 20 games left. There's the making of a good team here. There is real ability. In the first half we definitely suffered from tension after their goal. But in the second half we looked good."
Esphoric reference and pseudo-definiteness (13)
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In this sample, he uses only a few, such as the s for plural, although there is the beginning of a negative construction in `no book" and the beginning of a question form in `where going?" although he does not yet have the auxiliary verb added to the question.
In (12), a process such as ‘creating a team’ is implied; in (13), the process which is implicitly activated is that of the child ‘acquiring (linguistic constructions)’. The use of the definite determiner in the first NP in these examples can be explained in the same way as for examples (10) and (11): the first NP refers to a ‘phase’ of the process associated with, and thus implied by, the referent of the second NP. In a number of similar examples, finally, the process is explicitly realized in the form of a gerundive or a nominalization: (14)
(15)
There is the birth of healing and that may be a silly thing to say but I think if I may be allowed to develop the theme I think that there is a p
Another similar type of pseudo-definite NP complex is the one where a kinship or family relation is the link between the referent of the first and the second NP. Examples of this were only found in the corpus containing attributive clauses: (16)
(17)
Next month the Network is bringing Dr Kenneth Kaunda, the former president of Zambia, to Scotland (he is the son of a Church of Scotland minister) as part of the crusade to fight the `cancer of debt" in the world's poorest countries. The 7ft 1in centre, who has a home in West Hampstead, is the son of a Nigerian diplomat but has lived in England since he was two.
In these cases, the definite article is again motivated by ‘forward bridging’ and again, a conceptual-associative link rather than a hyponymy or meronymy relationship is the basis for the bridging: kinship nouns evoke in their conceptual structure other people who fulfill certain roles in relation to the person they refer to. For instance, a son is always someone’s son; the concept son evokes in its structure the concept of parents, or at least of one specific parent (mother or father). The referent of the second NP corresponds to this concept.
126 Peter Willemse 1.3
General-Specific constructions
This third category contains a number of types of pseudo-definite NPs in which the first NP is in some way more general than the second NP. A further distinction has to be made between appositive and non-appositive cases of general-specific pseudo-definite NPs. When the construction is appositive in the sense of Van Langendonck (1999), the first NP categorizes the second NP. When the construction is non-appositive, the relation between NP1 and NP2 is one of ‘symbolizing’. 1.3.1 Appositive In by far the majority of my corpus examples, the relationship between NP1 and NP2 is one of apposition, and more specifically of restrictive or close apposition. Van Langendonck (1999: 113) points out that “in close appositional structures, there are two appositives which together form an intonational unit and cannot always be interchanged”. Several subtypes can be distinguished, according to the sort of noun that functions as the head noun of NP1. nouns of modality (18) By several accounts, there is the possibility of an Iraqi attack, either by missile or by bomb on the air base--the allied air base where the US forces are in Saudi Arabia at Dhahran. (19) He reckons the beans cause wind, and he feels there's a danger the eggs can be underdone and there's the chance of sickness. ‘phenomenal’ nouns (20) At that moment there was the sound of a door opening. (21) The crowd surged as the musicians pounded and whined. There was the scent of sweat, and the stench of arrack on hot breath. nouns denoting ‘subject matter’ (22) Fitness became a problem and, of course, there was the matter of personal discipline - more off the park than on it. (23) I think we certainly on the
Esphoric reference and pseudo-definiteness (25)
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Noosa is a great course it's fast and the climate is good.
It is interesting to consider the semantic relationship between NP1 and NP2 in this type of construction. Van Langendonck’s (1999) remarks on close appositions involving proper names (PNs) shed an interesting light on this. Van Langendonck uses close apposition as a formal criterion for proper-namehood, since he regards PNs as a semantic-syntactic class rather than as a word-class and opposes them to ‘proprial lemmas’, lexemes which prototypically function as PNs but can also be used in other ways. The element “with the potentially most specific reference” (Van Langendonck 1999: 116) in a close apposition in which “two minimal nominal units are juxtaposed, sometimes with the help of the apposition marker of” (116) is the proper name. Interestingly, Van Langendonck argues that the common noun element in a close apposition containing a PN “indicates the basic level category to which the proper name in question belongs” (Van Langendonck 1999: 113, 120f). For instance, in a close apposition like the city of Antwerp, Antwerp is the unit with the most specific reference and therefore functions as a PN. The other unit, the city, functions as a common noun and indicates the basic level category which Antwerp belongs to. However, the category indicated by the common noun in the appositional construction is not necessarily the basic level category; especially in the case of personal name appositions, it can also be a more specific category (e.g. Prime Minister Blair, the Parisian Chirac, etc.). Although Van Langendonck mentions “minimal definite determination” (Van Langendonck 1999: 116) of the two units as a prerequisite for the close apposition test for proper-namehood to work, the constructions under discussion here seem to display similar features while the second unit has indefinite determination. In all of the different subcategories of appositional pseudo-definite complex NPs, the first NP categorizes the referent of the second NP in some way. In example (20), for instance, the phenomenon referred to by NP2 is categorized as a ‘sound’ in NP1. In example (24), the day out referred to by NP2 is classified as a ‘bonus’. These two examples also make clear that although NP2 normally restricts the number of possibilities regarding possible categorizations, the speaker has a certain amount of freedom and thus ‘creative’ or ‘rhetorical’ categorization is possible to a greater or lesser extent. The categorization of a day out as a bonus in (24) is an example of a fairly ‘creative’ categorization on the part of the speaker, whereas the categorization of the phenomenon referred to as a ‘sound’ in (20) seems to be more determined by the nature of the referent that is being categorized. In the cases where the head noun of the first NP is a noun of modality, the categorization also very often has a creative or rhetorical character. The fact that the categorizing NP has definite determination not only when the categorized NP is definite (for instance in the case of PNs) but even when the second NP is indefinite (in the constructions under discussion here) allows us to conclude that in English, category indications appear to be typically definite, irrespective of the definiteness status of the NP which is being categorized.
128 Peter Willemse Another important question regarding this type of pseudo-definite contruction pertains to the motivation of the use of the definite determiner in the first (categorizing) appositive even though the second (categorized) appositive is indefinite. There are still two different possibilities here. In a first type of construction, N1 functions as the Head of the construction while the second NP is a Postmodifier indicating a subtype of the type designated by N1: (26) (27)
Then the low whine of the vacuum cleaner came to his ears, and when it stopped there was the musical flow of water in the bathroom. There was the smell of pot all over the apartment. [quoted in Woisetschlaeger 1983: 142]
In these cases, the pseudo-definite status of the whole NP complex can be explained in terms of ‘dual reference’. On the one hand, there is (definite) reference to a generic concept. Woisetschlaeger (1983: 142) observes that in examples such as these, “some generic concept having narrow enough specifications to qualify for prior identification” accounts for the definite form of the NP. Using different terminology, what is identifiable in these examples is the type of thing talked about. On the other hand, there is (implied) reference to a new instance of this known type: “definiteness, and the attendant existential presupposition, attaches to the concept referred to by the generic, while the existence claim introduced by existential there attaches to some instantiation of the generic concept” (Woisetschlaeger 1983: 143). It should be noted that dual reference is no longer present and that only a reading in terms of instantial reference is possible in case the definite article in the first NP is replaced by an indefinite article: (27’) There was a smell of pot all over the apartment. The second type of appositive construction has a different internal structure. In this type, N2 rather than N1 functions as the Head of the construction and the first NP is a Premodifier to this Head. In many of these cases, NP2 contains a participle: (28)
Suddenly, from nowhere, there was the sound of a very fast Forbes saying that all Americans need only pay a single income tax rate of less than 20 per cent. The middle classes should be given a big break.
In these cases, the definite determiner has to be explained in terms of ‘forward bridging’ rather than dual reference. This type of pseudo-definite is thus, again, esphorically motivated; the first NP ‘points forward’ to the second NP, in the sense that the information needed to identify the referent of the first NP is given in the second NP, which introduces an instance into the discourse. Note that an alternative in which NP1 has an indefinite article is not possible here:
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(28’) *There was a sound of a very fast Forbes saying that all Americans need only pay a single income tax rate of less than 20 percent. It seems, then, that pseudo-definite appositive constructions can be put on a cline regarding their internal organization and their referential status. At the far ends of the cline, there are the two different readings, one in terms of dual reference (where N1 is the Head and NP2 functions as a Postmodifier) and the other in terms of instantial reference with forward bridging from the Premodifier NP1 to the Head NP2. Some examples clearly allow for only one of these two possible readings, while others are more or less ambiguous. It seems that the more specific and instance-like NP2 is, the more ‘fixed’ the definiteness of NP1 (recall the impossibility of a paraphrase with the indefinite article) and the more natural a reading in terms of forward bridging becomes. Finally, a special subclass of appositive pseudo-definite NPs is formed by the cases in which the first appositive indicates a measure or degree: (29)
(30)
The title tells it all, and there's the flavour of Whiskey Galore and The Titfield Thunderbolt about the movie, which offers chuckles and beautiful Welsh locations as a group of villagers insist on their hill" officially recorded as a mountain the very first mountain in Wales. Every time there was a lull, every time there was the hint of an opportunity for any Tory to giggle at her personally, in came the trolleys again rank upon rank of them, as patients queued while wicked Conservatives `tore the National Health Service limb from limb
As is clear from examples such as (29) and (30), lexical extension mechanisms such as metaphor play a role in these cases: a phenomenal noun occurs as the head noun of NP1, but a ‘literal’ categorization of the referent of the second NP in terms of this type of phenomenon is not intended. 1.3.2 Non-Appositive The last type of pseudo-definite NPs occurring in my corpus includes the ones in which a ‘symbolic’ relation, and more specifically a relation of ‘representing’ or ‘depicting’, exists between the referents of NP1 and NP2. (31)
(32)
Turn your back on the rock and follow the coastal path the other side of the church to the covered fontaine de St They. There is the statue of a saint in one niche and, until a few years ago, the other contained a stone, apparently also revered, showing that the old practices of Morgan's people have not wholly faded away. There was the wedding picture of a young black couple among his papers. [quoted in Woisetschlaeger 1983, example 15f]
130 Peter Willemse This type of pseudo-definite NP allows for alternation with a formally indefinite NP, containing an indefinite article: (31’) There is a statue of a saint in one niche. (32’) There was a wedding picture of a young black couple among his papers. Moreover, in Dutch, a language which is typologically closely related to English, similar constructions allow only for the indefinite article; a pseudo-definite variant is not possible in examples like: (33)
Er staat een beeld van een heilige in de ene nis. There stands a statue of a saint in the one niche.
The motivation for the use of the definite article in the first NP is, again, a ‘forward bridging’ relation between the two NPs in the NP complex. As has already been remarked earlier, a relationship of collocation or association is a possible basis for bridging. In these cases, the concepts evoked by NP1 and NP2 are strongly associated with each other; we can therefore assume that one concept evokes the other fairly automatically. Note that in this type of construction, the second, and not the first noun, is the node of the collocation. However, these are still cases of ‘forward’ bridging, because the definite article is motivated by, and thus ‘points forward’ to, the second NP. 3.
Conclusion
The category of ‘esphoric reference’ as it has been defined and discussed in the literature (Martin 1992) covers a number of constructions which are still quite different in nature. First of all, ‘truly’ definite NPs may involve esphora, in that the information needed to identify the referent of the NP is present in the NP itself, for instance in the form of a restrictive relative clause. Besides these ‘real’ definites, there are a number of ‘pseudo-definite’ types of esphoric NPs, which, although they show formal signs of definiteness, realize indefinite reference to instances that are being introduced into the discourse. This paper has zoomed in on these constructions and has studied them in an environment which specifically excludes truly definite NPs, viz. the postverbal position in the unmarked type of existential sentences. On the basis of a corpus analysis, a classification of the different types of pseudo-definite NPs was made. The construction types realized by the pseudo-definite NPs and the semantic relation between NP1 and NP2 formed the basis of the classification. An important question that was asked for each type concerned the motivation of the use of the definite article in the first NP of the pseudo-definite NP complexes: why does the first NP contain a definite determiner even though the unit it is part of really realizes indefinite reference? It turns out that there are two basic explanations for this.
Esphoric reference and pseudo-definiteness
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The first possible motivation is what I have called, using a term from Ward and Birner (1995), ‘dual reference’. The definite article can in that case be explained by definite reference to a generic concept, to a known type. The NP complex is, however, only ‘pseudo-definite’ and can hence take the postverbal position in an unmarked existential, because at the same time there is reference to new instances, which are being introduced into the discourse. The reference to new instances is a pragmatic inference which must be made due to the particular nature of the grammatical environment of the unmarked existential, which does not allow true definites. The second explanation is a relation of what I have termed ‘forward bridging’ within the NP. The first NP in the NP complex takes a definite article because its referent is identifiable by virtue of a bridging relationship to the information supplied in the second NP. The definite article is thus esphorically motivated, with bridging as the ultimate foundation for the esphoric relationship. The basis for the bridging relation may in its turn be hyponymy or meronymy or, alternatively, a collocational or associative link. Notes 1. The term ‘attributive’ is used by Halliday (1967, 1985, 1994); an equivalent term, used by Declerck (1988), among others, is ‘predicative clause’. 2. All the examples quoted in this paper, except when otherwise indicated, are extracted from the COBUILD corpus via remote log-in and are reproduced here with the kind permission of HarperCollins publishers. 3. Unlike in other types of constructions, where the pragmatic inference to (new) instances is ‘optional’ and therefore creates vagueness. For instance, in They decided to bomb various sorts of targets, there is certainly and primarily reference to different (sub)types of targets (e.g. military target, civilian target, etc.). On a second level of interpretation, then, specific instances of targets may be evoked as well (e.g. a military base in Kabul, a residential area in Bagdad, etc.). However, the sentence is perfectly acceptable without this inference; in existential contexts, on the other hand, ungrammaticality arises when the interpretation in terms of instances is not activated.
References Davidse, K. (1999), ‘The semantics of cardinal versus enumerative existential constructions’, Cognitive Linguistics 10(3), 203-250. Davidse, K. (2000), ‘A constructional approach to clefts’, Linguistics 38-6, 11011131.
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Davidse, K. (2001), Postdeterminers: their secondary identifying and quantifying functions. Preprint n°177, Linguistics Dept., K.U. Leuven. Declerck, R. (1988), Studies on Copular Sentences: Clefts and Pseudo-Clefts. Leuven: Leuven University Press and Foris Publications. Du Bois, J. (1980), ‘Beyond Definiteness: the trace of identity in discourse’, in W. Chafe (ed.), The Pear Stories: cognitive, cultural and linguistic aspects of narrative production, 203-274. Norwood: Ablex. Halliday, M.A.K. (1967), ‘Notes on Transitivity and Theme in English’, Journal of Linguistics 3 (1), 37-81. Halliday, M.A.K. (1994), Introduction to functional grammar. 2nd Ed. London: Arnold Halliday, M.A.K. and R. Hasan (1976), Cohesion in English. London: Longman. Langacker, R.W. (1991), Foundations of cognitive grammar. Vol. II: Descriptive Application. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Lumsden, M. (1988), Existential Sentences. Their Structure and Meaning. London: Croom Helm. Martin, J. (1992), English text: System and Structure. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Milsark, G (1976). Existential Sentences in English. Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics Milsark, G. (1977). ‘Toward an explanation of certain peculiarities of the existential construction in English’, Linguistic Analysis 3: 1-29. Van Langendonck, W. (1999), ‘Neurolinguistic and syntactic evidence for basic level meaning in proper names’, Functions of Language 6.1: 95-138. Ward, G. and B. Birner (1995), ‘Definiteness and the English existential’, Language 71, 4: 722-742. Woisetschlaeger, E. (1983), ‘On the question of definiteness in ‘an old man’s book’’, Linguistic Inquiry 14, 1: 137-154.
Why “an angel rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm”: A corpus-based comparative study of metaphor in British and American political discourse. Jonathan Charteris-Black University of Surrey Abstract This paper compares choice of metaphor in two political corpora: the Inaugural speeches of American Presidents and party political manifestos of two British political parties during 1974-1997. Initially metaphors are classified according to their source domain; they are then analysed from a cognitive semantic approach. The major findings are that metaphors from the domains of conflict, journeys and building are common to both corpora. However, the British corpus includes metaphors that draw on the source domain of plants whereas the American corpus contains metaphors that draw on source domains such as fire and light and the physical environment that do not occur in the British corpus. These variations suggest differences in metaphors between British and American political discourse and provide insight into cultural differences. The cognitive analysis reveals the importance of the conceptual metaphors POLITICS IS CONFLICT, PURPOSEFUL SOCIAL ACTIVITY IS TRAVELLING ALONG A PATH TOWARD A DESTINATION and A WORTHWHILE ACTIVITY IS A BUILDING in both corpora. However, SOCIAL PURIFICATION IS HEAT and A SOCIAL CONDITION IS A WEATHER CONDITION occur only in the American corpus. There is some evidence that British political discourse has borrowed metaphors based on the concept POLITICS IS RELIGION from American political discourse. 1.
Introduction
In this paper I am interested in exploring variation in metaphor choice within the domain of politics by comparing the metaphors found in a corpus of American presidential speeches with those found in a corpus of British party political manifestos. Speeches and political manifestos are both types of political discourse with the shared function of persuasion, therefore we may anticipate some overlap in metaphor use. However, it may also be expected that differences in the historical traditions and cultures of Britain and the United States may lead to differences in the types of metaphors that are selected to attain similar rhetorical objectives within political discourse.
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Jonathan Charteris-Black
2.
Political speeches, manifestos and metaphor
Metaphor plays an important rhetorical role in persuasive language because it has the potential to exploit the associative power of language in order to provoke an emotional response on the part of the hearer. In the domain of politics metaphors have a crucial role since they combine a discourse function of communicating policy with an expressive function of persuasion – both as regards evaluating policy and evaluating the reliability and integrity of politicians. Metaphors are valuable because they facilitate the exploration of possible political objectives – while not committing the speaker to any of these – and because they encourage affective involvement of the type sought by successful political leaders. Using Halliday’s terms they therefore combine ideational and interpersonal functions of language (Halliday 1994). One of the main difficulties in comparing British and American political discourse is that there are not identical text types in the conventions of the two political systems. In the British system the policy statements that lay out the intentions of a political party are communicated in written manifestos published prior to an election. In the American system one means of communicating policy statements are the Inaugural addresses that occur in the January following the election of a new President; they receive wide media coverage because they set out policy for the duration of the administration. The rationale for comparing these two text types is that they broadly share a common communicative purpose of persuading the voting public of the value of the government’s intended policy. Manifestos are documents stating the intentions and policies of political parties that have the communicative function of persuading the electorate to vote for a political party. They are usually generated through collaborative processes of drafting and redrafting and entail multiple authorship. They provide phrases that may subsequently be used as slogans in speeches. Political speeches differ from many other types of spoken discourse because there is usually some use of pre-prepared written script; they are characterised by a higher degree of planning than is normal in spontaneous speech and scripts are often prepared by a team of ‘ghost’ writers. Therefore, manifestos and political speeches are similar in that they both involve collaborative planning. They also share the communicative purpose of persuasion – both as regards the ideology of a political party and as regards the integrity and values of politicians. My view of metaphor originates in Richards’ (1936) tensile view of metaphor in which ‘metaphor’ refers to the semantic tension arising from a shift in the use of a word from one domain or context to another. Metaphors are not inherent in word forms but arise from the relationship between words and their contexts. Excellent summaries of metaphor are available in Black (1962), Gibbs (1994), Goatly (1997), Ortony (1979) and Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1999). Some of the background issues relating to defining metaphor are discussed Charteris-Black (2000), Charteris-Black and Ennis (2001), Charteris-Black and Musolff (2003), Charteris-Black (2004).
Metaphor in British and American political discourse 3.
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Research method
The aims may be summarised by the following research question: What are the similarities and differences between the metaphors employed in American inaugural speeches and British election manifestos? Two corpora – one American and one British – were used to assist in answering this question; the first is a corpus comprising the 51 Inaugural addresses of American Presidents spanning approximately 200 years from George Washington to Bill Clinton and was 98,237 words in length. The second was a corpus comprising the party political manifestos for the Labour and Conservative Party in the period 1945-1997 inclusive and was 132,775 words in length.1 For convenience I will refer to the corpus of Inaugural speeches as ‘the American corpus’ and the corpus of political manifestos as the ‘British corpus’. While diachronic variation was not the main focus of this study, it is possible that some of the differences observed between the two corpora may be partially attributed to the difference in the time period they cover. However, since Inaugural speeches often refer intertextually to the speeches of earlier presidents it was considered acceptable to treat them as a coherent and homogeneous body of texts. In the same way, the structure of the British party manifestos has remained relatively unchanged during the period covered and so this was also considered a coherent body of texts. In both cases the function of language combines communication of ideas with persuasion and this similarity of communicative purpose makes them comparable genres. However, diachronic factors could be taken into account in interpreting the findings and may indeed form the central focus of future research in this area. The methodology combines qualitative with quantitative approaches. Initially, qualitative analysis of a sample of each corpus revealed a set of words that have the potential to be used as metaphors. Identification of metaphor was based on the definitions discussed above. The procedure was to analyse potentially metaphorical linguistic forms in the two corpora to establish whether on each occasion of use they should be classified as metaphor. For example, ‘windfall’ typically refers to apples blown down by the wind; however, it is also found in New Labour discourse in expressions such as ‘windfall tax’; this innovative use in a political context is the basis for identifying all uses in this corpus as metaphor. Admittedly, for some speakers ‘windfall’ may more commonly be used in the context of taxation than that of fruit or the weather – however, there are invariably subjective issues of variation between language users that influence metaphor identification. A further example from the American corpus is that words such as ‘path’ and ‘step’ may be used as metaphors that draw on the domain of journeys (see example 9); however, the President sometimes refers to the “white steps” on which he is standing while speaking. Evidently, such a use of ‘step’ refers literally to the steps of the White House. It is necessary to examine each of the contexts of words and phrases that
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have the potential to be used metaphorically to establish whether there is the presence or absence of the semantic tension that is the basis for their classification as actual metaphors. Metaphors were classified according to the lexical fields of their linguistic forms; these are generally referred to as source domains. It was then possible to undertake further qualitative analysis to propose conceptual bases for metaphor clusters using a cognitive semantic framework (cf. Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999). So, for example, a conceptual metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY could be said to motivate uses of ‘step’, ‘path’ etc when occurring in a context that does not refer to physical movements in space. I established the resonance of source domains for metaphors using a simple statistical measure: first the types and tokens of the metaphors are calculated. Types are separate unique linguistic forms while tokens are the number of times each form occurs irrespective of whether it has already occurred – tokens include repetitions of identical linguistic forms whereas types do not. Then the total number of types for each lexical field, or source domain, is multiplied by the total number of tokens in that source domain; this provides a measure of its resonance. This can then be converted to a percentage by dividing the resonance of each source domain by the total of the resonances for all the source domains. This calculation overcomes the problem of the difference in the size of the two corpora; it also facilitates comparison of source domains in a way that takes into account their productivity in terms of the types and tokens of the metaphors that they produce. It permits identification of similarities and differences between the productivity of metaphor source domains within a single corpus and between different corpora. 4.
Findings
I will first present an overview of the findings then address each part of the research question. The findings as regards the resonance of metaphor source domains are shown in Table 1. From the bottom row we can see that more than twice as many types of metaphor were identified in the American corpus as compared with the British one. However, the larger British corpus contained many more tokens of metaphor indicating that in the British corpus there is a tendency for metaphors to repeat the same linguistic forms. There are areas of similarity in metaphor domains between the two corpora since conflict, journeys and buildings are the three most resonant lexical fields in each corpus. These domains account for 66% of total resonance in the American corpus and 89% of total resonance in the British corpus; however, there are also variations in metaphor use.
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Table 1. Comparison of metaphor types in British and American political corpora classified by source domain Source domain
American corpus Types Tokens
British corpus
Reson- % of Types Tokens Reson- % of ance total ance total (types x (types x tokens) tokens)
Conflict
18
116
2,088
36
9
494
4,446
54
Journeys
12
76
912
16
5
Buildings
12
66
792
14
7
187
935
11
287
2009
24
Fire & light
15
51
765
13
-
-
-
-
Physical environment
16
35
560
9
-
-
-
-
Plants
-
-
-
-
5
150
750
9
Religion
6
72
432
7
4
46
184
2
Body part Total
4
76
304
5
-
-
-
-
83
492
5,853
100
30
1,164
8,324
100
First, we may notice that while conflict is the most common lexical field for metaphor in both corpora it is more resonant in the British than in the American Corpus. Perhaps this may be explained by the combative discourse function of the pre-election party political manifesto as compared with the post–election inaugural speeches where there is less need to combat a defeated opposition party. Another interesting distinction is that while journey metaphors are more common in the American Corpus, building metaphors are more common in the British Corpus where they account for nearly a quarter of all metaphors. This is an interesting difference in resonance that can be explained with reference to different cultural experiences – new experiences arising from journeys are salient for Americans while the sense of security and solidity arising from buildings are salient for the British. A few lexical fields occurred in only one of the corpora; for example, metaphors based on fire and light were only found in the American corpus. Fire and light metaphors often convey idealism in the American corpus, while in the British corpus religious metaphors such as ‘vision’ are used for this purpose. Another major difference between the two political corpora is that the American corpus tends to employ physical environment metaphors in situations where plant metaphors are employed in the British corpus (cf. example 10 below); in each case these two lexical fields constitute 9% of the total resonance. This may have a cultural explanation in that gardening is a major pastime in British society; the garden is a domain of private but external space. Conversely, American cultural and historical experience draws on undomesticated space and this reflects in the use of words such as ‘valley’, ‘horizon’, ‘jungle’, ‘mountain’
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or ‘desert’ in a political context. For the majority of English people nature is conceived as something to be controlled by physical intervention, whereas for Americans nature is conceived as larger and more elemental and to be controlled by travel. Such metaphor preferences demonstrate the influence of cultural practice and the physical environment on metaphor use. In answering the first part of the research question that refers to similarities I will consider the three lexical fields for metaphor that were common to both corpora. 5.
Metaphors common to both American and British political discourse
Conflict metaphors Metaphors from the lexical field of conflict were originally identified in relation to spoken language in terms of debate and represented as ARGUMENT IS WAR (cf. Lakoff and Johnson 1980). Conflict is the most common lexical field in both corpora and provides evidence of a conceptual metaphor POLITICS IS CONFLICT. I suggest that metaphors of conflict are chosen to emphasise the personal sacrifice and physical struggle that is necessary to achieve social goals while subliminally creating the opportunity for positive evaluation of actual military conflict. Table 2 shows some examples from the American corpus. Nearly all the conflict metaphors have a very similar rhetorical pattern: in pragmatic terms the choice of a conflict metaphor determines the nature of the speaker’s evaluation. The conflict is either for abstract social goals that are positively evaluated such as rights, freedom, faith etc. or against social phenomena that are negatively evaluated such as poverty disease, injustice etc.; these social ills are conceptualised as ‘enemies’. In addition, the stages through which social progress is to be made are conceptualised in terms of the stages of a military action: the trumpet that calls to action, attack, retreat, truce and eventual victory or surrender. POLITICS IS CONFLICT implies an isomorphic relationship between the domains of politics and war. Similarly, in the British corpus both parties defend abstract social goals that are positively evaluated by their own party but – perhaps because of the combative function of the election manifest – imply that such goals are under threat from political opponents: (1)
We will defend the fundamental right of parents to spend their money on their children’s education should they wish to do so. (Conservative)
(2)
While continuing to defend and respect the absolute right of individual conscience… (Labour)
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Table 2. POLITICS IS CONFLICT – The American Corpus Conflict lexicon enemies
Tokens
Examples
10
destroy
8
victory
6
struggle
6
fight
3
trumpet
3
battle
3
…we will fight our wars against poverty, ignorance, and injustice – for those are the enemies against which our forces can be honorably marshaled. (Jimmy Carter) …wise and correct course to follow in taxation and all other economic legislation is not to destroy those who have already secured success but to create conditions … (Calvin Coolidge) Every victory for human freedom will be a victory for world peace. (Ronald Reagan) …as a call to battle, though embattled we are—but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, "rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation" (Jimmy Carter) We will be ever vigilant and never vulnerable, and we will fight our wars against poverty, ignorance, and injustice (Jimmy Carter) We have heard the trumpets. We have changed the guard. (Bill Clinton) We know the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong. Do you not think an angel rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm?’ (George W. Bush)
Parties may also defend social institutions or groups in society that are positively evaluated: (3)
Labour created the National Health Service and is determined to defend it. (Labour)
(4)
We will continue to defend farmers and consumers. (Conservative)
However, while ‘defence metaphors’ are used in similar ways by both the major British parties, ‘attack metaphors’ are used rather differently; The following examples show that the Labour party fights against or attacks a general range of social ills while the Conservative party defends social virtues: (5)
Economic success is not an end in itself. For the Labour party, prosperity and fairness march hand in hand on the road to a better Britain. During the next Parliament, we intend to continue our fight against all form of social injustice. (Labour)
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(6)
We will fight against crime and violence which affects all Western societies…At the same time, we shall attack the social deprivation which allows crime to flourish. (Labour)
(7)
We have to compete to win. That means a constant fight to keep tight control over public spending and enable Britain to remain the lowest taxed major economy in Europe. It means a continuing fight to keep burdens off business. (Conservative)
(8)
We will continue to fight for free and fair trade in international negotiations. (Conservative)
When ‘fight’ is used in a Conservative manifesto it signifies defending something that is represented as under attack from Labour. Conversely, ‘fight’ is used in Labour manifestos to represent its policies as an attack on negatively evaluated social ills, the cause of which is not usually identified. One explanation of the extensive use of metaphors related to the conceptual metaphor POLITICS IS CONFLICT in both corpora is that decisions about whether or not to engage in political conflict are perhaps the most important decisions that politicians have to make. This is particularly the case in the USA where the President has the sole right of veto over whether or not nuclear missiles should be launched. This reflects in the use of the word ‘defend’ in the presidential oath: clearly the American constitution emerged out of conflict both against external political enemies (Britain and France) and internal enemies (the native inhabitants, later the Civil War). Interestingly, ‘terrorism’ can be defined either as an external or as internal threat. With the continuing importance of American military involvement as a basis for international power, and the role of Britain in legitimising post-colonial dominance, it is of little surprise that conflict remains a highly potent source domain in both American and British political discourse. When metaphors based on POLITICS IS CONFLICT are used by democratic politicians, they treat the struggle against social ills in the language usually reserved for military conflict. In subliminal terms this creates the potential for military combat to be represented as socially beneficial (cf. Lakoff 1991, Jansen and Sabo 1994). Journey metaphors Journey metaphors have quite a long history in cognitive linguistic research. Originally, Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 44) proposed LOVE IS A JOURNEY; Lakoff and Turner (1989) then proposed LIFE IS A JOURNEY. A more generic representation is PURPOSES ARE DESTINATIONS (Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 52-53). In these representations a journey is taken as a prototype purposeful activity involving movement in physical space from a starting point to an end point or destination. Since politicians are concerned with goal-oriented social activity, I propose a similar representation: PURPOSEFUL SOCIAL ACTIVITY IS TRAVELLING
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ALONG A PATH TOWARD A DESTINATION.
Normally, journey metaphors evaluate policies positively because the ends are socially valued ones. A single conceptual metaphor can account for the semantic coherence of a whole speech; this is evident from an analysis of Lyndon Johnson’s inaugural address (January 20th 1965). The theme of this speech is change; the sentences in example 4 are chosen from a total of thirty-four sentences and their positions are shown in parentheses: (9)
Even now, a rocket moves toward Mars. (4) They came here — the exile and the stranger, brave but frightened — to find a place where a man could be his own man. (7) First, justice was the promise that all who made the journey would share in the fruits of the land. (8) Think of our world as it looks from the rocket that is heading toward Mars. It is like a child's globe, hanging in space, the continents stuck to its side like colored maps. We are all fellow passengers on a dot of earth. (16) For this is what America is all about. It is the uncrossed desert and the unclimbed ridge. It is the star that is not reached and the harvest sleeping in the unplowed ground. Is our world gone? We say "Farewell." Is a new world coming? (31) To these trusted public servants and to my family and those close friends of mine who have followed me down a long, winding road, (32)
The journey metaphors attempt to evoke the original historical experience of the Pilgrim Fathers (7 and 8); the opening up of the American west (31) and the space programme (4 and 16). These are integrated with the more general use of journey metaphors to describe human relationships as implied by Lakoff and Johnson’s LIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphor, as in (32). We can see from the distribution of these metaphors that they form a path through the text inviting the listener to participate in a journey. In metaphorical terms the President is represented as a guide; since only the guide knows the destination, the speech provides a type of map towards it. Since journeys may be to unknown destinations, the choice of this conceptual basis has the rhetorical goal of persuading the American people to accept innovation and social change. However, travel can be slow and arduous because of impediments to movement and hence there will be ‘barriers to overcome’ and ‘burdens to bear’. Lakoff and Johnson (1999: 188) represent metaphoric use of words such as ‘burden’ as DIFFICULTIES ARE IMPEDIMENTS TO MOVEMENT. In a political context these metaphors express the need for patience since it takes time and effort to reach a destination. This is rhetorically effective because it implies that the
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electorate should not expect instant results and that, at times, they may need to suffer to achieve goals; it also implies that hardships are to be tolerated because these goals are worthwhile. The extracts shown in the following examples all share the notion of a burden whose weight should be endured (or ignored altogether) because of the value placed on the destination: (10)
… indeed all free men, remember that in the final choice a soldier’s pack is not so heavy a burden as a prisoner’s chains. (Dwight Eisenhower)
(11)
Let us accept that high responsibility not as a burden, but gladly – gladly because the chance to build such a peace is the noblest (Richard Nixon)
Building metaphors Metaphors from the source domain of building are typically evaluative, carry a strong positive connotation and are employed to express aspiration towards desired social goals such as peace, democracy and progress towards a better future. They emphasise social cohesion, social purpose and control of one’s environment. These metaphors can be divided into two types. First, there are those that refer to the parts of a building – foundations, threshold, doors, etc. and others that refer to types of building such as house, or bridge. The most frequent part of a building that is used metaphorically is ‘the foundations’. In such metaphors an abstract phenomenon is positively evaluated which permits us to infer a conceptual representation A WORTHWHILE ACTIVITY IS A BUILDING. ‘Laying foundations’ is a conventional metaphor for a solid and valuable policy – although it may not in fact be taken through to completion. We know that any building which is to be durable must first have foundations and that these may take a long time to construct; however, we also know that the laying of foundations does not necessarily imply the completion of a building. If the money to buy materials or to pay builders runs out then the building will not be built. So in reality it is very difficult to predict the extent to which laying foundations will guarantee the successful completion of a construction. Building metaphors make an interesting comparison with journey metaphors. Building and travelling are conceptually related, as they are both activities in which progress takes place in stages towards a predetermined goal. Topographically, both involve increase in the surface that is covered; in the case of journeys this is linear movement along a horizontal path whereas for buildings there is three-dimensional increase along a vertical path. Both activities highlight the need for patience since they require time and effort. Difficulties entail a need to make sacrifices and not to expect instant outcomes. Since we think of achieving goals as inherently good, in pragmatic terms, both journey and building metaphors imply a positive evaluation of political policy. They require a plan or map and an architect or guide, and it may be this conceptual proximity accounts for their resonance in the corpus.
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I will now address the second part of the research question by considering metaphors that only occurred in one of the corpora. 6.
American corpus: light and fire metaphors
The analysis suggests that light & fire metaphors are particular to American political discourse. The lexical field of light has traditionally been linked with the target domain of understanding and metaphors that draw on it are motivated by a conceptual metaphor KNOWING IS SEEING (cf. Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 53-54). However, for this political data I suggest a conceptual metaphor HOPE IS LIGHT that invariably implies a positive evaluation. It is likely that spiritual notions will be evoked because of the importance of hope in religious discourse. As we can see from Table 3, light is contrasted with darkness that is associated with ignorance, failure to understand and evil. Light is always positive – because of its polarity with darkness. In other circumstances fire metaphors can also be used for positive evaluation. This is because George Washington first used the fire metaphor in an inaugural address and the metaphorical link between fire and liberty has become a source of intertextual reference in presidential addresses – as we can see from the following examples: (12) since the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government (George Washington) (13)
The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government are justly (Theodore Roosevelt)
(14)
He would extinguish the fire of liberty, which warms and animates the hearts of happy millions (James Polk)
Fire is represented as the guarantor of liberty. This may be because it implies that some form of burning or destruction will be necessary: this is in keeping with America’s revolutionary wars, struggle for independence and Civil War. In these metaphors conflict can be represented as a means to peace. Consider the following examples:
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Table 3. Light and fire metaphors (American Corpus) Light & Fire lexicon (n=15)
Tokens
Examples
light
15
dark
8
fire(s)
7
I have spoken of a thousand points of light, of all the community organizations that are spread like stars throughout the Nation, doing good. (George Bush) Finally, to those nations who would make themselves our adversary, we offer not a pledge but a request: that both sides begin anew the quest for peace, before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all humanity in planned or accidental selfdestruction (John F. Kennedy) and since the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government are justly considered, perhaps, as deeply, as finally, staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people. (George Washington)
bright
4
dawn
3
beacon
2
These principles form the bright constellation which has gone before us and guided our steps through (Thomas Jefferson) so that together, we can see the dawn of a new age of progress for America, and together, as we celebrate our 200th anniversary as a nation, (Richard Nixon) We will again be the exemplar of freedom and a beacon of hope for those who do not now have freedom. (Ronald Reagan)
(15)
And it is imperative that we should stand together. We are being forged into a new unity amidst the fires that now blaze throughout the world. In their ardent heat we shall, in God's Providence, let us hope, be purged of faction and division (Woodrow Wilson)
(16)
Mill fires were lighted at the funeral pile of slavery. (Benjamin Harrison)
In such cases fire originates in Washington’s “fires of liberty” and provides evidence of the conceptual metaphor SOCIAL PURIFICATION IS HEAT. Therefore, different aspects of the source domain are highlighted in particular choices of
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metaphor. For example, it seems that when words such as ‘kindled’ or ‘flames’ are used metaphorically to convey notions of anger, it is the speed and rate of burning that are important rather than heat. In this corpus heat is a positive rather than a negative attribute of fire because it is associated in scientific senses with the notions of purification (as when impure metals are converted to pure ones by the application of heat). Similarly, fire metaphors are also positive when they highlight the quality of fire to produce light as in metaphorical uses of ‘beacon’. In this respect it depends on which aspect of the source domain is highlighted whether a President conveys a positive or negative evaluation. Such malleability makes fire a useful and potent cognitive domain as it can combine different aspects of our knowledge of an element to convey an evaluation that is appropriate to a specific discourse context. Similarly, light and darkness provide prototype poles for creating contrasts between spiritual or moral notions of goodness and evil. Light and fire metaphors therefore share both a cognitive and pragmatic role in American political discourse. 7.
British corpus: plant metaphors
Metaphors from the domain of plants are an important group comprising 9% of all metaphors in the British Corpus. Many of these were accounted for by a conventional metaphor for 'growth' in the context of describing economic expansion. We also find a similar use of ‘flourish’ to imply a strong positive evaluation: (17)
As we want small businesses to flourish, we will go even further. (Conservative)
(18)
To build a responsible society which protects the weak but also allows the family and the individual to flourish. (Conservative)
In these cases ‘flourish’ identifies those social entities that are highly valued. In some cases these are the same for both parties, for example 'families', but in others they are specific to parties, for example 'business' is claimed to 'flourish' under the Conservatives and 'democracy' is claimed to 'flourish' under Labour. There is also evidence of effective use of plant metaphors for the purpose of political persuasion. Let us consider the use of the term ‘windfall’. As in the Labour Party 1997 manifesto, it is always used in a nominal compound form ‘windfall levy’. The use of this metaphor is important in that it conceals agency: it is not clear that this is in fact a tax imposed by the government of the day. The Bank of English corpus shows that the other familiar collocations of this word are ‘windfall tax’, ‘cash windfall’, and ‘windfall profits’. Here public revenue is conceptualised as being obtained without any effort because it is through the natural process of the wind blowing. There is no victim and no effort involved in obtaining a social benefit. This is an example of a creative use of metaphor that
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deliberately construes an event as effortless because there is no animate agent and positive because it is seen as a gift of nature. In the 'windfall' metaphor the agency of government is concealed. Many plant metaphors imply a strong positive evaluation because of the connotation formed by the association of fertility with life, as in the following examples: (19)
We will nurture investment in industry, skills, infrastructure and new technology (Labour)
(20)
More realistic attitudes to profit and investment take root. (Conservative)
Here the expansion of investment is represented as a natural process in which there is an analogy between the roots that are the pre-requisite of a healthy plant and the investment that is conceptualised as the pre-requisite of a healthy economy. This is based on the fact that both are invisible causes of visible effects – they create a semantic association between consumer wealth and fertility. Metaphors such as ‘nurture’ and ‘took root’ are extensions of the highly conventionalised use of ‘growth’ to refer to economic expansion. As with the building and journey metaphors, there is, then, an isomorphic correspondence between the sequence of events that led to a successful outcome in the natural world and in the world of business. 8.
American corpus: physical environment metaphors
I decided to combine two sub-domains that are both related to the physical environment; these are weather metaphors and metaphors for natural geographical features. Such metaphors may appeal particularly to that significant minority of the North American population that inhabits rural and semi-rural areas such as the vast Midwest. Weather metaphors are a conventional source domain for conveying abstract notions of change and associated ideas; they have been related in the cognitive linguistic literature to a conceptual key CIRCUMSTANCES ARE WEATHER (e.g. Grady et al. 1997: 109). For example, our knowledge that wind brings about a change in the weather provides a useful metaphorical representation of cause and effect. (21)
Thus across all the globe there harshly blow the winds of change. (Dwight Eisenhower)
(22)
… in the shadows of the Cold War assumes new responsibilities in a world warmed by the sunshine of freedom but threatened still by ancient hatreds and new plagues. (Bill Clinton)
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It is significant that metaphors associated with changing conditions are much more common than those associated with stable ones. The more intense the weather condition, the more intense the change implied. Weather metaphors evoke either a positive or a negative evaluation. I propose that in the domain of politics, therefore, a specific conceptual metaphor is A SOCIAL CONDITION IS A WEATHER CONDITION. This is related to the more generic conceptual metaphor CIRCUMSTANCES ARE WEATHER. Geographical metaphors highlight a particular aspect of a physical geographical feature of the landscape; typically, this is either vertical (e.g. valley, mountain) or horizontal (e.g. desert, horizon). (23)
Together let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the ocean depths, (Dwight Eisenhower)
(24)
Vitality has been preserved. Courage and confidence have been restored. Mental and moral horizons have been extended. (Theodore Roosevelt)
Physical environment metaphors have the pragmatic effect of evaluating social conditions as if they were physical ones and are specific realisations of the generic level conceptual representation STATES ARE LOCATIONS (cf. Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 180). 9.
Metaphor borrowing: religious metaphors
The lexical field of religion comprised 7% of the resonance in the American corpus and 2% in the British corpus; most of the uses in the latter occurred in the more recent section of the corpus which implies a degree of borrowing. It would be interesting to compare this with an earlier corpus of British political speeches, although it was not possible to locate one on this occasion. It should come as no surprise that religious metaphors are commonly used in American political speeches: religion has played an important part in the evolution of the USA and Christian evangelism has been an important source of inter-racial and inter-ethnic harmony. Religion serves as a source domain for invoking spiritual aspirations into the political domain and links the President with a commitment to Christian religious belief. This suggests further evidence for a conceptual metaphor POLITICS IS RELIGION. Example (25) contains extracts from Bill Clinton’s first inaugural speech: (25)
A spring reborn in the world's oldest democracy, that brings forth the vision and courage to reinvent America (3) Though we march to the music of our time, our mission is timeless. (5)
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Jonathan Charteris-Black We must bring to our task today the vision and will of those who came before us. (16) Our democracy must be not only the envy of the world but the engine of our own renewal. (19) The brave Americans serving our nation today in the Persian Gulf, in Somalia, and wherever else they stand are testament to our resolve. (35) An idea ennobled by the faith that our nation can summon from its myriad diversity the deepest measure of unity. (40) And so, my fellow Americans, at the edge of the 21st century, let us begin with energy and hope, with faith and discipline, and let us work until our work is done. The scripture says, "And let us not be weary in well-doing, for in due season, we shall reap, if we faint not." (41) From this joyful mountaintop of celebration, we hear a call to service in the valley. We have heard the trumpets. We have changed the guard. And now, each in our way, and with God's help, we must answer the call. (42) Thank you and God bless you all. (End)
Clearly, the references to ‘vision’, ‘faith’, ‘mission’ etc. form a cohesive chain that prepares the way for the strongly religious theme of this coda. This is a further example of how metaphor can be used systematically to create coherence in a political text. I propose that the New Labour Party in Britain has borrowed from American political discourse to introduce the lexical field of religion into British political metaphors. It is no secret that Tony Blair had a close social relationship with Bill Clinton as well as sharing a similar political allegiance to social democracy. Example (26) shows some typical uses of vision metaphors in the 1997 New Labour manifesto: (26)
But a Government can only ask these efforts from the men and women of this country if they can confidently see a vision of a fair and just society. (New Labour) The vision is one of national renewal, a country with drive, purpose and energy. A Britain equipped (New Labour) Our vision for Britain is founded on these values. Guided by them, we will make our country more (New Labour) An independent and creative voluntary sector, committed to voluntary activity as an expression of citizenship, is central to our vision of a stakeholder society (New Labour)
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The ‘vision’ metaphor is based on the conceptual metaphor SEEING IS UNDERSTANDING (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 48); it implies that there is an altruistic objective that is understood by the party and towards which its policies are directed. It is one that is analogous to spiritual progress because it claims that the objective is to make the world a better place to live in. These metaphors provide evidence that the conceptual metaphor POLITICS IS RELIGION has entered British political discourse from American political discourse. 10.
Conclusion
In this cognitive semantic and corpus-based comparison of metaphors in British election manifestos and American Inaugural speeches I have found both similarities and differences. The three most common lexical fields for metaphor are shared by both varieties: conflict, journeys and buildings. I have argued that conflict metaphors are the most common in both varieties because of the salience of conflict in relation to politics and because they emphasise notions of struggle and personal sacrifice to attain social objectives. I have also suggested that use of such metaphors may create the potential for passive acceptance of actual military conflict because it is subliminally associated with objectives that are evaluated as being socially beneficial – as in the current ‘war on terrorism’. I have also identified some lexical fields that only occur in one of the varieties: plants in the British corpus and fire & light and the physical environment in the American corpus. I have suggested some culturally and historically related explanations such as the British passion for gardening leading to the positive associations of words such as ‘growth’ and ‘nurture’, and the American experience of struggling for independence leading to a positive evaluation of fire metaphors. I have also suggested that the recent introduction of metaphors from the lexical field for religion into British political discourse by New Labour is borrowed from American political discourse where they have more established origins. Further research is necessary to establish whether a wider range of text types taken from political discourse confirms or conflicts with these findings. It would also be interesting to establish whether differences in the use of metaphor occur between varieties of general English or whether they are restricted to particular domains of language use, such as politics. It would also be relevant to study diachronic shifts in the use of metaphor within the domain of politics. Finally, it would be interesting to find out whether the types of evaluation that I have suggested motivate the use of metaphor in political discourse achieve their intended effect by collecting empirical data on reader/hearer response to metaphor in political contexts.
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Notes 1. The British party manifestos are available on the web at http://www.psr.keele.ac.uk/platform.htm and the American Inaugural addresses at http://www.bartleby.com/124/. References Black, M. (1962), Models and metaphors. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Charteris-Black, J. (2000), ‘Metaphor and vocabulary teaching in ESP economics’, English for Specific Purposes 19: 149-165. Charteris-Black, J. and T. Ennis (2001), ‘A comparative study of metaphor in English and Spanish financial reporting’, English for Specific Purposes 20: 249-266. Charteris-Black, J., and A. Musolff (2003), ‘Battered hero or innocent victim? A comparative study of metaphors for euro trading in British and German financial reporting’, English for Specific Purposes. 22:153-176 Charteris-Black, J. (2004) Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis. Basingstoke: Palgrave-MacMillan Gibbs, R.W. (1994), The Poetics of the mind: figurative thought, language and understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goatly, A. (1997), The Language of metaphors. London & New York: Routledge. Grady, J.E., T. Oakley and S. Coulson (1997), ‘Blending and metaphor’, in: R.W. Gibbs and G.J. Steen (eds), Metaphor in cognitive linguistics. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamins, 101-124. Halliday, M.A.K. (1985), An introduction to functional grammar. 2nd ed. London: Edward Arnold. Jansen, S.C. and D. Sabo (1994), ‘The sport/war metaphor: hegemonic masculinity, the Persian Gulf war, and the New World order’, Sociology of Sport Journal 11: 1-17. Lakoff, G. (1991), ‘The Metaphor System used to justify war in the Gulf’, Journal of Urban and Cultural Studies, 2(1): 59-72. Lakoff, G. and M. Johnson (1980), Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, G. and M. Johnson (1999), Philosophy in the flesh : the embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought. New York: Basic Books. Lakoff, G.and M. Turner (1989), More than cool reason: a field guide to poetic metaphor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ortony, A. (1979), Metaphor and thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Richards, I.A. (1936), The philosophy of rhetoric. New York and London: Oxford University Press.
Signalling spokenness in personal advertisements on the Web: The case of ESL countries in South East Asia Peter K. W. Tan, Vincent B. Y. Ooi and Andy K. L. Chiang National University of Singapore Abstract The continuing impact of the World Wide Web (or the ‘Web’) on everyday life focuses our attention on the ways in which the notions of speech community, culture and language are patterned in this mega ‘corpus’ of all time. This paper investigates how people in South East Asia – in particular Brunei, the Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore – use English in personal advertisements on the Web. The study is part of a Web corpus project investigating related questions in computer-mediated communication (see Herring 1996). The corpus is currently being built and is derived entirely from the Web. In ESL (English as a Second Language) nations, or ‘outer circle’ (Kachru 1992) countries, English is often relegated to the position of a ‘neutral’ and ‘transactional’ (as opposed to ‘interactional’) language where ‘affect’ (emotion) is played down and less developed in the private and personal (as opposed to public) domains. We might assume English used for informal purposes to be less developed. Yet, Web gurus recommend the use of spoken, as opposed to written, norms when writing for the Web. This paper then focuses on how this tension is resolved. Using a combination of a pen-and-paper and corpus-based approach (see Ooi 2001), we specifically focus on the use of appraisal, attested by Eggins and Slade (1997) to characterise spoken language. Specifically, we examine a range of amplification items. We compare the frequencies of the items found in our personal advertisement sub-corpus and selected written and spoken portions of the Singapore component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-SIN) and attempt to account for the patterns discovered. The results suggest that although South East Asian ‘netspeak’ is aligned to spoken language, this alignment is partial. 1.
Preamble
This paper arose out of a project at the National University of Singapore whose main aim was to investigate E-English (Netspeak, English in cyberspace or computer-mediated communication).1 We have, at the moment, collected the bulk of the data, which run into 3.6 million words. The question that we asked was
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whether we could discern a sense of a speech community through examining the kind of English used (see Herring 1996). 1.1
The corpus
With the help of a research assistant, we targeted data associated with four South East Asian nations: Singapore, Malaysia (West and East), the Philippines and Brunei (see Figure 1). One of the things that distinguish these nations from others in the region, like Indonesia, Thailand or the Indo-Chinese nations, is that these nations have undergone the colonial experience under English-speaking colonial powers – Britain and the US. These nations have therefore had a longer history of having employed the English language and, it might be surmised, a higher likelihood of having indigenised forms of English. At the moment, the corpus consists of four sections: (a) news, (b) electronic discussion groups, (c) personal advertisements and (d) electronic chat.
Figure 1. Map of South East Asia 1.2
Netspeak and the New Englishes
There has been much discussion about Netspeak and a very popular assumption is that Netspeak is much closer to spoken language than written language. Many
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might very easily be led to believe this particularly as Web gurus and style guides (e.g. Hale and Scanlon 1999) push for more spoken styles. There has been a lot of sociological, but hardly any linguistic, investigation into the nature of Netspeak. Crystal (2001) gives a very useful coverage of the issue and his conclusion is that it is plain that Netspeak has far more properties linking it to writing than to speech […] Netspeak is better seen as written language which has been pulled some way in the direction of speech than as spoken language which has been written down. (Crystal 2001: 47) At the end of his book, however, he claims that Netspeak is ‘something completely new […] From now on we must add a further dimension to comparative enquiry: “spoken language vs. written language vs. sign language vs. computer-mediated language” ’ (Crystal 2001: 238). Baron, discussing the email component of Netspeak in a chapter entitled ‘Why the Jury’s Still Out on Email’, concludes that ‘Email is clearly a language form in flux’ (Baron 2000: 252) and describes it, like pidgins and creoles, as a ‘(bilingual) mixed contact system’, which therefore accounts for ‘its seemingly schizophrenic character (part speech, part writing)’ (p. 258). What is obvious from our vantage point is that Netspeak is evolving. It will continue to adapt the linguistic resources already available, but whether the development will be more in the direction of the spoken or written norms of the language remains to be seen. We accept Biber’s position that it is not always helpful to see the spoken-written dimension in absolute terms (1988: 25); however, in a later study comparing spoken and written registers, he was able to identify ‘a fundamental distinction between written and spoken registers’ (Biber 2001: 238) based on the way complexity is exploited. The spoken-written distinction is therefore not just virtual but real (see Collot and Belmore 1996 and Yates 1996). In our corpus, though, a further complication arises. For various historical as well as linguistic reasons, Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei and the Philippines have traditionally been labelled ESL (English as a Second Language) nations. Alternatively, employing Kachru’s (1992) labels, these nations represent ‘outer circle’ countries (as opposed to the ‘inner circle’ countries of the UK, US, Canada, Australia, etc. and the ‘expanding circle’ countries of China, Japan, etc.). Firstly, in the linguistic ecology of these nations, English is sometimes relegated to the position of a ‘neutral’ and ‘transactional’ (as opposed to ‘interactional’) language (Brown and Yule 1983) where ‘affect’ (emotion) is played down. Writing about Kenya and Nairobi (also ‘outer circle’ countries), Hudson-Ettle and Schmied also comment on the use of English (or the lack of it) there:
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Peter Tan, Vincent Ooi and Andy Chiang The man or woman on the street speaks Kiswahili and despite the fact that English is the medium of secondary and tertiary education and other public domains, the language preferred for conversations is Swahili. (Hudson-Ettle and Schmied 1999: 4)
We can also therefore see this in terms of languages associated with the public and private spheres. This can be regarded as being analogous to the position of Latin in medieval Europe. Like Latin, English is the language employed largely only in writing and in situations where one is on one’s best behaviour. Yet there are parts of the Web that deal with situations where ‘affect’ is important and which veer more towards the private sphere – such as personal advertisements. We might expect a variety more associated with spoken English to be employed here. Secondly, where more informal or colloquial versions of English exist, these tend to be more divergent from the informal varieties of the ‘inner circle’. This stands to reason: standardisation arose out of the need to minimise variation (see, for example, Bex and Watts 1999; Milroy and Milroy 1999; Crowley 1989), and therefore standard, written Englishes tend to be more similar to each other than informal, spoken Englishes. 1.3
Mode fluidity
Social commentators have already noted that genres and text types are not rigid and unchanging. For example, Fairclough (1994) and others have commented on the conversationalisation of public discourse like advertising, so that print advertisements can take on features associated with spoken conversation. Conversationalisation is, for him, in part ‘to do with shifting boundaries between written and spoken discourse practices’ (Fairclough 1994: 260). This observation is of course not entirely new. Indeed, years earlier, Leech had already commented on the use of the ‘public-colloquial’ style for advertising (Leech 1966: 75). And we are also aware that language associated with computers is fluid and tolerances are being tested (Bruthiaux 2001). The question is whether this could be said of personal advertisements on the Web as well. 2.
The focus
In this paper therefore, we will focus on the personal advertisements sub-corpus. The genre of personal advertisements has received some previous attention (Ooi 2001; Kadir 2000). These studies, though, do not focus on the main question that we will try to answer in this paper: to what extent are the resources of spoken
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English capitalised on (presumably to convey the notion of ‘affect’ mentioned above) in South East Asia? 3.
Methodology
3.1
Evaluation and appraisal
Clearly, it is not possible here to try to examine many dimensions of spoken English in the sub-corpus. For the purpose of this paper, a very small section of the lexico-semantic system of English has been extracted. The notion of evaluation (e.g. Hunston and Thompson 2001) or appraisal has been receiving much attention of late. Eggins and Slade (1997) see appraisal (together with humour and involvement) as elements that characterise casual conversation. Figure 2 summarises the appraisal system available (Eggins and Slade 1997: 137). (It should be added that the phenomenon of evaluation in narrative has already been commented on by Labov and Waletzky (1967) much earlier.)
reaction Appreciation (of text/process)
composition valuation (un)happiness
Affect (emotion) Appraisal
(in)security (dis)satisfaction
Judgement (behaviour)
social sanction social esteem enrich
Amplification
augment mitigate
Figure 2. The Appraisal System
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3.2
Augmenters and mitigators
We select from Eggins and Slade’s (1997) appraisal system the sub-system of amplification. Within that, we select a range of what we will call augmenters and mitigators. Elsewhere in the literature other labels are used. Carter and McCarthy (1995) talk about intensifiers and hedges in relation to the Cambridge and Nottingham Corpus of Discourse in English (CANCODE). Biber (1986a, 1988), and Conrad and Biber (2001) subdivide each of our categories into two. Unmarked augmenters are called amplifiers (completely, greatly), whereas informal ones are labelled emphatics (for sure, a lot). Similarly, unmarked mitigators are termed downtoners (almost, merely), whereas informal ones are christened hedges (more or less, sort of). Emphatics and hedges seem to occur together and are dominant in informal conversation (Biber 1986b). Even with all four categories taken together, the total mean frequencies for written genres are distinct from those for conversational genres: 7.7 for academic prose and 10.9 for romantic fiction, as opposed to 21.8 for face-to-face conversation and 21.0 for telephone conversation (Biber 1988: 255, 260, 264, 265). The use of augmenters can also be a feature of ‘Opinionated’ (as opposed to ‘Objective’) style (Biber 1986: 18), one dimension distinguishing spoken and written texts. The augmenters that we have chosen to examine are: very, a lot, really, too, ever, incredibly and lah. These items were selected partly on the basis of Eggins and Slade’s examples, and partly with the aim of combining intuitively common items like very and less common items like incredibly. The inclusion of lah needs further explanation. We follow Gupta (1992) in her analysis of lah as a pragmatic particle with an assertive function.2 (Pragmatic particles in her analysis can serve one of three functions: contradictory, assertive or tentative.) Lah as a pragmatic particle is available in the informal varieties of English in Singapore, Malaysia and Brunei and is potentially employable by the majority of the advertisers. The mitigators that we will examine are: only, just, a bit and somewhat. To ensure that the selected items represented a combination of more frequent and less frequent items, we subjected the sub-corpus to a CLAWS (Constituent Likelihood Automatic Word-Tagging System) tagging and examined the rank of the adverbs. Multi-word items could not be examined (which meant the exclusion of a lot and a bit); and of course lah, being a regionalism, could not be included; incredibly was also not included. The result showed items from a range of rankings, including a number of high ranking ones (see Table 1). We were satisfied with our selection of high- and low-ranking augmenters and mitigators.
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Table 1. Ranking of adverbs using CLAWS tagging Item just very really only too ever somewhat 3.3
Rank 1 3 9 16 21 26 151
Sub-corpora from ICE-SIN as points of reference
As a point of reference we made use of sections of the Singapore Component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-SIN) to contrast the spoken and written tendencies. ICE-SIN was chosen because there was no readily available corpus that included Malaysian, Bruneian and Filipino English. We felt that corpora that contained mainly British or American English (which are more readily available) would not be appropriate for comparison with our sub-corpus. Given that, for historical reasons, Singaporean English shares many features with Malaysian English and Bruneian English, we felt that it would not be inappropriate to use ICE-SIN as a reference point for South East Asian English. For our purpose, we extracted the ‘private dialogues’ portion of ICE-SIN (a section totalling 217,121 words) to represent spoken language, and the ‘informational’ printed portion (a section totalling 277,154 words) to represent written language (see Appendix 1, where these varieties have been highlighted in bold face). The reason for selecting these particular sub-corpora had partly to do with some compatibility in terms of size (each contains 100 texts), but more importantly we wanted to focus on stereotypical spoken and written texts because this contrast is what is in people’s mind when they are encouraged to write for the Web as if they were speaking. 4.
The personal advertisements
The personal advertisements were taken from three websites: (a) (b) (c)
Lavalife (http://www.all-dating-online.com/lavalife.html), One and Only (http://www.oneandonly.com/) and Excite Personals (http://exsiteads.freeservers.com/)
Country-specific advertisements were chosen, and we also chose advertisements from all four sex and orientation options:
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(a) (b) (c) (d)
MSW (men seeking women), WSM (women seeking men), MSM (men seeking men) and WSW (women seeking women).
The composition and structure of the personal ad sub-corpus is summarised in Table 2. Table 3 gives the sizes of the files in the sub-corpus laid out in the same way as in Table 2. The highest proportion of advertisements was from the One & Only site. The size of the sub-corpus is 110,247 words, with Malaysian, Philippine and Singaporean adverts contributing roughly equal proportions of text and the Bruneian adverts contributing a substantially smaller proportion. This is appropriate because Brunei has a much smaller Web presence than the other countries – not surprising, if we consider Brunei’s population of 350,000 in contrast to Singapore’s 4 million, Malaysia’s 22 million and the Philippines’ 81 million. Singapore’s relatively smaller population is compensated for by its higher computer and Internet penetration. Table 2. Composition of sub-corpus Data source Region
Lavalife
Brunei
East Malaysia MSW WSM MSM West Malaysia
Philippines
Singapore
MSW WSM MSM WSW MSW WSM MSM WSW
One & Only MSW WSM MSM MSW WSM MSM WSW MSW WSM MSM WSW MSW WSM MSM WSW MSW WSM MSM WSW
Excite Classifieds
MSW WSM MSM WSW MSW WSM MSM WSW MSW WSM MSM WSW
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The sub-corpus can also be divided according to the sex and orientation of the advertisers (Table 4). These proportions also represent the kinds of adverts available on the Web: heterosexual women and homosexual men seem to be more highly represented in these personal advertisements. Overall, as well, seen against the sexual orientation of the population as a whole (popular estimates do not give a figure of more than 10% homosexuals), we can see that homosexual adverts (representing over 43% of adverts) have a strong presence. Table 3. Size of the sub-corpus Data source Region Brunei
Lavalife
East Malaysia West Malaysia Philippines
Singapore
549 503 588
436 2,198 570 86 1,400 2,856 2,323 109 11,618
One & Only 3,956 1,778 308 352 438 1,220 438 3,813 5281 8,609 4,180 3,160 5,185 5,898 2,717 3,769 7,246 4,797 3,745 66,890
Website totals Website % 10.5% 60.7% *East and West Malaysia together
Excite Classifieds
1,764 2,591 4,362 493
1,058 9,574 3,388 218 1,971 2,629 3,546 134 31,728 28.8%
Country totals
Country percentages
6,042
5.5%
35,181*
31.9%*
34,488
31.3%
34,525
31.3%
110,236 100.0%
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Table 4. Sex and Orientation Figures Sex/Orientation MSW WSM MSM WSW Total 5.
Words 22,228 40,279 35,609 12,120 110,236
Percentages 20% 37% 32% 11% 100%
Results and discussion
Tables 5 and 7 (and the accompanying Figures 3 and 4) show the number of occurrences and the normalised frequencies of the augmenters and mitigators selected. We use the abbreviations PA, SP and WR for the personal advertisements sub-corpus, the selected spoken sub-corpus from ICE-SIN and the selected written sub-corpus from ICE-SIN respectively. Normalised figures represent the number of tokens per 10,000 words. Table 5. Augmenters tokens incredibly 1 lah 2 ever 37 a lot 56 really 167 too 176 very 327 Total 766
PA normalised 0.1 0.2 3.4 5.1 15.1 16.0 29.7 69.6
tokens 0 1677 34 331 495 334 1087 3958
SP normalised 0.0 77.2 1.6 15.2 22.8 15.4 50.1 182.3
tokens 2 0 22 18 32 113 270 457
WR normalised 0.1 0.0 0.8 0.6 1.2 4.1 9.7 16.5
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100 80 PA
60
SP
40
WR
20 0 incredibly
lah
ever
a lot
really
too
very
Figure 3. Normalised frequencies of augmenters All the items were also checked for statistical significance using chi-square (χ2, p>0.05); each item in each sub-corpus was checked against the same item for each of the other sub-corpora. The results for the augmenters are found in Table 6. Table 6. Significant differences in the distribution of augmenters incredibly PA – SP too small* SP – WR too small* PA – WR too small* *‘too small’ indicates that statistical significance
lah ever yes yes too small* yes yes yes the frequencies were
a lot yes yes yes too low
really too very yes no yes yes yes yes yes yes yes for the computation of
We should probably disregard items where all three sub-corpora register very low normalised frequencies (say, below 5 per 10,000 words): this would push out incredibly and ever. All the other augmenters have a significantly higher frequency in SP than in WR. The most dramatic case is lah, where SP had a normalised frequency of over 77 and WR had a frequency of 0. Thus far, then, we can say that the frequencies of the augmenters provide a fairly reliable index to the spokenness or writtenness of a text and therefore confirm the tendencies seen in Biber (1988).3 The difference in the PA frequencies from the SP and WR frequencies are also statistically significant with an exception in the case of too, where the differences in the PA and SP scores are not statistically significant. In most cases, PA frequencies fall between those of SP and WR. In fact, in the case of too (and of ever, which we discarded from consideration earlier), the PA frequency exceeded that of SP. By and large the figures confirm the expectation: that PA tends towards SP norms – but not quite reaching them, in most cases. However,
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the situation is not always that clear-cut. We could arguably say that the PA frequency for a lot tends towards WR norms. However, the outstanding item is lah, which only occurred twice, once in the Malaysian portion of the sub-corpus and once in the Bruneian portion. There is certainly strong resistance to the use of lah in personal advertisements in the region. Table 7. Mitigators tokens somewhat 5 a bit 45 only 151 just 398 Total 599
PA normalised tokens 0.5 6 4.1 132 13.7 369 36.1 1,094 54.3 1,601
SP normalised 0.3 6.1 17.0 50.4 73.7
tokens 16 10 478 167 671
WR normalised 0.6 0.4 17.2 6.0 24.2
60 50 40
PA SP WR
30 20 10 0 somewhat
a bit
only
just
Figure 4. Normalised frequencies of mitigators Table 8. Significant differences in the distibution of mitigators PA – SP SP – WR PA – WR
somewhat no no no
a bit yes yes yes
only yes no yes
just yes yes yes
Tables 7 and 8, together with Figure 4, show the figures for mitigators. What is interesting is that mitigators do not seem to display as robust a difference between the sub-corpora as the augmenters. Figure 4 shows three curves more or less keeping step with each other until we reach just. The distributions of somewhat and only in the sub-corpora are not always significantly different. Of those that are – a bit and just – the pattern seen in the augmenters is replicated. The PA
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frequencies lie between those of SP and WR, and closer to SP rather than WR. This might suggest that some mitigators are more important than others in showing up the differences between the three modes. Interestingly, the importance of a mitigator is not dependent on whether it is a high- or lowfrequency item: only, which is more frequent than a bit and less frequent than just, is not important as a distinguisher between the three modes. How then can we account for the less dramatic difference in the case of the mitigators? We could perhaps hypothesise that it might be more important to mitigate (as opposed to augment) in written texts. This also makes sense in the light of the distinction between the Opinionated and Objective style (Biber 1986a): augmenters contribute to the Opinionated style but mitigators do not. The difference here is also understandable if we consider that in a stereotypical written genre, academic writing, it is important to not over-generalise and delimit one’s conclusions. 6.
Conclusion
So, to what extent are the resources of spoken discourse relied on in PA? On the basis of the augmenters and mitigators selected, we could say that personal advertisers tend to make use of features of spokenness. The analysis shows, corroborating Crystal, that the language of PA represents ‘written language which has been pulled some way in the direction of speech’ (Crystal 2001: 47). Given the focus on the ‘interactional’ function of language, it is not surprising that advertisers try to take on board these features. This is the case despite the fact that the sub-corpus is from ‘outer circle’ countries where English tends to be used for more ‘transactional’ functions. However, the situation is not entirely cut and dried. There is very strong resistance to the employment of the pragmatic particle lah in personal advertisements. It is not entirely clear to us why this should be the case, although it is not impossible that the notion of a ‘borderless’ cyberspace might discourage advertisers from employing items like lah that point towards the local or suggest an insular or parochial outlook. A non-local spoken model might also be preferred if advertisers are open to responses to non-local sojourners in the region. It would therefore be premature to say at this stage that Netspeak in South East Asia is closely associated with the norms of spoken language although it seems to be an important contributor to the norms associated with personal advertisements. We obviously need to examine other parts of the corpus, e.g. the chat data, where localisation does not seem to be such a taboo.
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Notes 1. We are grateful for the support of the National University of Singapore, research project ref. no. R-103-000-019-112, for this paper. We are also grateful to the Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore, for the use of the ICE-SIN corpus. 2. Besemeres and Wierzbicka (2003) propose an alternative analysis of lah based on the claim of common ground (like you know). This analysis does not contradict our understanding of lah as playing an emphasising function. 3. For a rougher guide, we might also add that the word frequency list (see Appendix 2) which gives I as the most frequent item seems to suggest spokenness as well (personal pronouns typically rank very high in spoken texts). References Baron, N. (2000), Alphabet to email: How written English evolved and where it’s heading. London: Routledge. Besemeres, M. and A. Wierzbicka (forthcoming), ‘Pragmatics and cognition: the meaning of the particle “lah” in Singapore English’, Journal of Pragmatics and cognition 11(1): 1-36. Bex, T. and R. J. Watts (eds) (1999), Standard English: the widening debate. London: Routledge. Biber, D. (1986a), ‘On the investigation of spoken/written differences’, Studia Linguistica 40(1): 1–21. Biber, D. (1986b), ‘Spoken and written textual dimensions in English: resolving the contradictory findings’, Language 62(2): 384–414. Biber, D. (1988), Variation across speech and writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Biber, D. (2001), ‘On the complexity of discourse complexity: a multidimensional analysis’, in: S. Conrad and D. Biber (eds), Variation in English: multi-dimensional studies. London: Longman. 215–240. Brown, G. and G. Yule (1983), Discourse analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bruthiaux, P. (2001), ‘Missing in action: verbal metaphor for information technology’, English Today 67 (Vol. 17 No. 3): 24–30. Carter, R.A. and M.J. McCarthy (1995), ‘Grammar and the spoken language’, Applied Linguistics 16(2): 141–158. Collot, M. and N. Belmore (1996), ‘Electronic language: a new variety of English’, in: S. Herring (ed.), 13–28.
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Conrad, S. and D. Biber (2001), ‘Multi-dimensional methodology and the dimensions of register variation in English’, in: S. Conrad and D. Biber (eds), Variation in English: multi-dimensional studies. London: Longman. 13–42. Crowley, T. (1989), Standard English and the politics of language. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Crystal, D. (2001), Language and the Internet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eggins, S. and D. Slade (1997), Analysing casual conversation. London: Cassell. Fairclough, N. (1994), ‘Conversationalisation of public discourse and the authority of the consumer’, in: R. Keat, N. Whiteley and N. Abercrombie (eds), The authority of the consumer. London: Routledge. 253–268. Gupta, A.F. (1992), ‘The pragmatic particles of Singapore colloquial English’, Journal of Pragmatics 18: 31–57. Hale, C. and J. Scanlon (1999), Wired style: principles of English usage in the digital age. New York: Broadway Books. Herring, S. (ed.) (1996), Computer-mediated communication: linguistic, social and cross-cultural perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hudson-Ettle, D. and J. Schmied (1999), Manual to accompany the East African component of the International Corpus of English: Background information, coding conventions and list of source texts. Chemnitz: Department of English, Chemnitz University of Technology. Hunston, S. and G. Thompson (2001), Evaluation in text: authorial stance and the construction of discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kachru, B.B. (ed.) (1992), The other tongue: English across cultures, 2nd edn. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Kadir, M.A. (2000), ‘Love @ cyberspace: A corpus-based study of personal ads on the Web’. Unpublished MA dissertation, National University of Singapore. Labov, W. and J. Waletzky (1967), ‘Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience’, in: J. Helm (ed.), Essays on the verbal and visual arts. Seattle: University of Washington Press. 12–44. Leech, G.N. (1996), English in advertising: a linguistic study of advertising in Great Britain. London: Longman. Milroy, J. and L. Milroy (1999), Authority in language: investigating standard English, 3rd edn. London: Routeldge. Ooi, V.B.Y. (2001), ‘Investigating and teaching genres on the World Wide Web’, in: M. Ghadessy, A. Henry and R. L. Roseberry (eds), Small corpus studies and ELT: theory and practice (Studies in Corpus Linguistics, Vol. 5). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 175–204. Yates, S.J. (1996), ‘Oral and written linguistic aspects of computer conferencing’, in: S. Herring (ed.), 29–46.
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Appendix 1. The structure of an ICE corpus Spoken Texts (300)
Dialogues Private (100) (180) Public (80)
Monologues (100)
Unscripted (70)
Scripted (30)
Written Texts (200)
Mixed (20) NonNon-professional Printed writing (20) (50) Correspondence (30) Printed (150)
Informational writing (100)
Academic writing (40) Popular writing (40)
Reportage (20) Instructional writing (20) Persuasive writing (10) Creative writing (20)
face-to-face conversations (90) telephone conversations (10) classroom lessons (20) broadcast discussions (20) broadcast interviews (10) parliamentary debates (10) legal cross-examinations (10) business transactions (10) spontaneous commentaries (20) unscripted speeches: lectures (30) demonstrations (10) legal presentations (10) broadcast talks (20) non-broadcast speeches (10) broadcast news (20) untimed student essays (10) student examination scripts (10) social letters (15) business letters (15) humanities (10) social sciences (10) natural sciences (10) technology (10) humanities (10) social sciences (10) natural sciences (10) technology (10) press news reports (20) administrative/regulatory (10) skills/hobbies (10) press editorials (10) novels/stories (20)
Signalling spokenness in personal advertisements Appendix 2. Word frequency list The top 10 words in the personal advertisements Item I and to a the am you in me my
Frequency 3,192 2,272 1,937 1,706 1,142 820 811 796 770 769
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Textual colligation: a special kind of lexical priming Michael Hoey University of Liverpool Abstract Corpus linguistics has not attended much to text-linguistic issues. This paper argues that lexical choice has a major effect on features such as cohesion, Theme choice and paragraph division and that corpus investigation can shed light on the nature of the lexical choices made. It is argued that some lexis has a bias towards (or against) certain textual functions and that this is an inherent property of such lexis. It is also argued that lexical choices interlock, creating what I term colligational prosody. 1.
Introduction
Corpus linguistics has for perfectly understandable reasons focused most of its attention upon lexical and grammatical matters. Although there are a few textlinguistic and spoken discourse studies that make use of corpus linguistic techniques (e.g. Hoey 1997; Partington 2003; Partington and Morley 2002), they are few and far between and are rooted in no explicitly articulated theory. This paper attempts to redress this lack by articulating a theoretical relationship between lexis and text-linguistics. The paper is divided into three uneven parts. In the first, I focus on current perceptions about the organisation and nature of written discourse, identifying the features that might be open to investigation in corpora. In the second, I contrast two theoretically opposite positions, one of which I take to be essentially incompatible with corpus investigation and the other of which is amenable to such investigation. Unsurprisingly I shall favour the latter! In the third and much the longest part, I want to present sample results from a corpus-linguistic investigation of textual questions. These are hesitantly presented and are intended only as hints as to how corpus linguistics might proceed. Despite the hesitancy with which my findings are presented and the weak evidential base on which they rest, they point to a theoretical suggestion that, if accepted, would place lexis and text linguistics on a very different footing vis-à-vis each other.
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2.
The nature of text
The following propositions are accepted by a number of text linguists. None probably have the support of all, but at least none are idiosyncratically my own alone. •
Text is interactively produced and processed (see amongst many others Bakhtin 1973 [1929]; Goodman 1967, 1973; Winter 1971, 1977; Smith 1978; Widdowson 1979; Hoey 1979, 1983, 2001; Goffman 1981, Nystrand 1986, 1989).1 In other words it presupposes a writer-reader interaction in which text is the site or the residue/outcome of the interaction, depending on whether one takes the reader’s or writer’s perspective.
•
Text is linearly developed. By this I mean that each sentence builds upon what has gone before, from the speaker or writer’s point of view; from the listener or reader’s point of view, each sentence that is reached prospects the sentence or sentences to follow. There are two aspects to this feature of text. In the first place, the speaker/writer is seeking to meet the listener/reader’s expectations and the listener/reader has expectations on the basis of what the speaker/writer has already said. This point, though widely agreed, is differently articulated, depending on whose position one considers. Amongst linguists in whose work one finds some aspect of this position are Sinclair (1993), Halliday and Hasan (1985), Winter (1971, 1979, 1982), Crombie (1985), Graustein and Thiele (1979, 1987), Beekman (1970), Beekman and Callow (1974), Bolivar (2001) and Tadros (1985, 1993). In the second place, this covers the much-described phenomenon of Theme-Rheme, both as described in the Prague School (Firbas 1966, 1986; Daneš 1974) and within the Systemic-Functional tradition (most notably, Halliday 1994).
•
Text is cohesive. Whether this is a by-product of the need to be coherent (as Morgan and Sellner 1980 have argued) or a prerequisite of coherence (as was originally argued in Halliday and Hasan 1976) seems irrelevant. Almost certainly, the relationship works both ways. On occasion, writers (and more rarely speakers) consciously produce cohesive devices in order to clarify or emphasise, i.e. to create coherence; one has only to look at the way that Dickens, for example, exploits repetition for rhetorical effect to see that cohesion can be a conscious tool. On other occasions, a writer’s or speaker’s coherence is reflected automatically in the language they use, i.e. in cohesion. Either way, that it is a feature of text cannot be denied and one, furthermore, that continues to be the subject of study.
•
Text is chunked. The nature of the chunking is to some extent disputed. Some posit a strict hierarchical organisation to text (e.g. Graustein and
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Thiele 1979, 1987; Mann and Thompson 1986, 1988; van Dijk and Kintsch 1978). Some posit a patterning or structuring of some kind or other without assuming that the chunking thereby created accounts for all texts or all of any particular text (e.g. Labov 1972; Labov and Waletsky 1967; Longacre 1968, 1979, 1983; Hoey 1979, 1983, 2001; Swales 1981, 1990; Halliday and Hasan 1985; Martin 1992). There is a great deal of commonality amongst these positions but not much actual agreement. Still, some kind of chunking is acknowledged to exist and is reflected in our cultural habit of writing books with chapters, sections (in the case of academic texts) and paragraphs. •
Text is shaped in the service of particular communities of users (e.g. Halliday and Hasan 1986; Ventola 1987; Swales 1990; Martin 1992) and/or to the advantage of those with vested power in the communities (e.g. Fairclough 1989, Chouliaraki and Fairclough 2001; Hodge and Kress 1993). The work of the genre analysts in particular warns us that we must be wary in text-linguistics of over-generalising; some claims can only be made of a restricted body of data.
To these points of broad agreement in the text-linguistic community, I would want to add that text is web-like (e.g. Hoey 1991), but since that is not a widely held view I will not be developing it further here. 3.
Two theoretical positions
There seem to be two possible ways of modelling the relationship between lexis and the features of text I have just outlined. The first is that the relationships found in text – whether they are interactive, linear, cohesive, hierarchical or structural – are independent of the lexis of the language. According to this view, each sentence is constructed according to the grammar, collocations and colligations of the language in response to textual needs but without constraints broader than those particular needs. In other words, each text imposes its own demands and has its own unique sentence requirements. If this view is correct, corpus linguistics cannot offer anything useful for text-linguistics except in so far as it might offer tools for exploring individual spoken or written texts. The other way of modelling the relationship between lexis and text is to see textual relationships (interactive, linear, cohesive, hierarchical and structural) as dependent upon and created by the lexis of the language in a manner not exhausted by the demands of the individual text. According to this view, each sentence of every text is constructed along lines that have been laid down by all the texts that the speaker/writer has encountered in the course of his or her life, such that the production of a text is in fact in part a “reproduction” of previous texts along strictly controlled lines. If this view is correct, corpus linguistics is the key to the future of text-linguistics.
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The first view is presumably the default position. The second is however, I hope you will agree, a much more interesting position. You’ll reply that reality hasn’t the least obligation to be interesting. And I’ll answer you that reality may avoid that obligation but that hypotheses may not.2 What I want to claim in this paper is that every lexical item is primed for use in textual organisation. The notion of priming is taken from psychology and in this context means that our encounters with a word accustom us to expect it to be used in certain kinds of ways to such an extent that these potential uses become part of our knowledge of the word and to some extent constrain the way we are likely to use the word ourselves. More specifically I want to make the following claims: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Every lexical item (or combination of lexical items) may have a positive or negative preference for participating in cohesive chains. Every lexical item (or combination of lexical items) may have a positive or negative preference for occurring as part of Theme in a Theme-Rheme relation. Every lexical item (or combination of lexical items) may have a positive or negative preference for occurring as part of a specific type of semantic relation, e.g. contrast, time sequence, exemplification. Every lexical item (or combination of lexical items) may have a positive or negative preference for occurring at the beginning or end of an independently recognised ‘chunk’ of text, e.g. the paragraph. If a lexical item (or combination of lexical items) has any of the above preferences, it may only or especially be operative in texts of a particular type or genre or designed for a particular community of users, e.g. academic papers.
The positive and negative preferences of a lexical item with regard to the textual features just described are what I would term its textual colligations. The claims of course allow for the possibility of a lexical item having not only a positive or negative preference but also a neutral preference for each of these features. If, however, the great majority of lexical items in a language were to prove to be neutral with regard to one of the features, then the specific claim would be disconfirmed with regard to the feature in question, and if that were to prove true of all the features, then the more general claim would fall also. If on the other hand the claims were to prove correct, we could envisage a description of the language from a text-linguistic point of view including a giant matrix of all the words of the language looking something like that in Table 1. I will flesh out this matrix with some real examples near the end of this paper. For the moment, though, we need to examine the evidence for the claims made above.
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Table 1: A fragment of a hypothetical text-colligational matrix
Preference for participating in cohesive chains Preference for occurring as part of Theme Preference for occurring as part of a specified semantic relation Preference for occurring at the beginning or end of a recognisable chunk Constraints on operation of preferences
3.1
Lexical item 1 negative
Lexical item 2 positive
Lexical item 3 neutral
Lexical item 4 positive
positive
positive
positive
neutral
neutral
negative with examplification
positive with affirmation/ denial
neutral
negative
neutral
Popular fiction
Biography
positive for paragraph initial in certain phrases None observed
Positive for paragraph initial when Theme News
Claim 1: Every lexical item (or combination of lexical items) may have a positive or negative preference for participating in cohesive chains
The first claim was that every lexical item may have a positive or negative preference for participating in cohesive chains, where a cohesive chain is a set of at least three lexical (and grammatical) items that either co-refer to a single entity (identity chains) or cross-connect because of their similarity of meaning (similarity chains) (Hasan 1984; Hasan in Halliday and Hasan 1985; Parsons 1995). I shall give least attention to this claim, partly for reasons of space and partly because I have presented detailed evidence elsewhere (Hoey, forthcoming). Here I will simply note that all the following lexical items occur in my corpus as members of cohesive chains occurring in a number of different texts:3 army, baby, Blair, gay, lake, music, pit, planet, political, spleen Preliminary investigations suggest that all the following lexical items show no tendency in my corpus to occur in cohesive chains, despite their all being fairly frequent words in my corpus. It is of course much harder to establish that something does not occur and it is a painfully slow process to move from each concordance line into the original text to check for possible cohesion, so the following list must be regarded as provisional:
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Orthography is significant in this matter. The lexical item crossroads did not form cohesive chains; the lexical item Crossroads, on the other hand, which refers to a defunct British soap, chains freely. The following words are neutral in my corpus with regard to cohesion; they do not occur in chains often and when they do, the chains tend to be short, e.g. The first reason, The second reason: option, reason, sixty These lists may not seem particularly surprising and it is tempting to account for their inclusion in other ways. My point here is that a lack of cohesive potential is as much a quality of the word surprising as the fact that it is evaluative (as in the previous sentence) and therefore unlikely to be a topic. Notice, too, that lexical items that do not have a preference for appearing in cohesive chains are every bit as common in the English language as those that do appear in cohesive chains (and in many cases more so), despite the fact that one might have predicted that infrequency would make it less likely that a word would participate in chains. It is possible to express claims about the cohesive potential more subtly than I have done here. The chains of particular words may favour repetitions, cohyponyms or pro-forms, for example; see Hoey (forthcoming b) for examples and details. A crude check on the chaining potential of repetition-favouring words can be obtained by examining the plot of distribution of a word as calculated for a word by WordSmith (Scott 1999). 3.2
Claim 2: Every lexical item (or combination of lexical items) may have a positive or negative preference for occurring as part of Theme in a Theme-Rheme relation
The second claim, that every lexical item may have a positive or negative preference for occurring as part of Theme in a Theme-Rheme relation, like all the claims, requires more detailed support than I am able to give it here. The following statistics suggest however that the claim is not meritless. 250 instances of years were examined, and it was found that 37% occurred as part of Theme. This is slightly higher than would be expected on the basis of random distribution across Theme and Rheme, though it is hardly a striking result; what is more interesting is that the great majority of the instances of Thematic years occur as part of a fronted Adjunct rather than as part of Subject.4 In other words, when years is thematised, it is usually marked. Another example is the distribution across Theme and Rheme of instances of consequence. 1615 of these were analysed (excluding instances of the rarer ‘importance’ sense), and it was found that the word consequence occurs in Theme 43% of the time, a considerably higher percentage than would occur on a random
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distribution. Again the Adjunct use seems significant. Almost half of the occurrences of thematised consequence occurred as part of an Adjunct. The word sixty occurs in Theme 75% of the time, on the basis of a sample of 294 instances. Again, orthography is relevant: 60 shows no such tendency. The claim I have just made can be made more subtly and more complexly. Some words, I would argue, have a tendency to appear in marked Theme (e.g. years and consequence, as we have just seen); others have a propensity for appearing as unmarked Theme, i.e. as Subject. Furthermore, it is possible to combine this feature with the previous one. All the cases I have given of Thematic preference have either negative or neutral cohesive preference. This means that sixty, consequence and years are not going to participate in Thematic progression (Daneš1974). There may prove to be a correlation between Marked Theme and a negative preference for cohesive chains; this would need investigating. If a lexical item has a positive preference for both Theme and cohesive chains, it will inevitably have a positive preference for Thematic Progression; again, there may be a correlation between a preference for unmarked Theme and a preference for appearing in cohesive chains, though my claim is not of course dependent upon such a correlation. It follows that as before one might be subtler and expect some lexical items to be primed for participation in Simple Thematic Progression or Linear Thematic Progression, etc. 3.3
Claim 3: Every lexical item (or combination of lexical items) may have a positive or negative preference for occurring as part of a specific type of semantic relation
The third claim was that every lexical item (or combination of lexical items) may have a positive or negative preference for occurring as part of a specific type of semantic relation, e.g. contrast, time sequence, exemplification. Such relations may be the relations between clauses or parts of clauses or between larger chunks of text; they may also reflect relations between speaker and listener, for example indicating the relation between a speaker or writer’s utterance and a listener or reader’s utterance. I give here just two examples of what this claim is intended to cover: ago and reason. An example of a lexical item associated with a semantic relation is ago. More specifically ago has an association with contrast when it is part of Theme. Of 65 Thematised instances of ago examined, 23 (35%) were followed by a contrast and 5 (8%) preceded by a contrast. If 10 instances of not long ago and as long ago as are removed from the calculation, the percentage associated with contrast rises to 51%. These are small figures and not too much can be claimed of them. But informal examination of larger quantities of data suggests that they are not misleading. When ago is not part of Theme, there is still an association with contrast but the manifestations are somewhat different (see Hoey forthcoming a). The word reason may seem a rather obvious choice of word to illustrate the association of a lexical item with a particular semantic relation, and of course
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reason is intimately associated with the reason-result relation and other similar relations, but it is not this association that I wish to draw attention to here. Consider Table 2, which shows the distribution of the different structures of postmodification of reason. Five postmodifying options are considered: reason postmodified by a ø-clause (as in the reason he can continue to do that), reason postmodified by a that-clause (as in the reason that this lobbying has had little effect), reason postmodified by a prepositional phrase headed by for (as in part of the reason for this), reason postmodified by a why-clause (as in another reason why pop shows are getting better), and reason postmodified by to + V as in any reason to celebrate). Table 2: Distribution of postmodified reason structures and their association with affirmation/denial
reason + ø clause reason + that clause reason + for X reason + why clause reason + to V
Subject reason affirmed
Subject reason denied
Complement reason affirmed
Complement reason denied
Object reason affirmed
Object reason denied
698
17 (38)
210
42
14
4
77
-
40
9
-
3
1091
36 (49)
610
392
305
161
7
10 (17)
594
629
61
223
22
3
286
536
732
426
The table shows how these options distribute across three of the functions available in the clause – Subject, Complement and Object – and indicates whether they are associated with an affirmation or a denial. Affirmation occurs when a reason is asserted. Denial occurs when a reason is declared to be of no importance, invalid or not known. Examples of reasons affirmed are: The council’s neglect was the reason the flats were falling apart. The reason that this lobbying has had little impact is that the industry has failed to construct a convincing case. The negatives in the latter sentence are of course not denials of the reason but denials about lobbying and the making of convincing cases. Examples of reasons denied are: I see no reason to change it.
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There is no good reason why the publishers can’t provide a normal discount to booksellers. The ratio of positive to negative clauses in general English is 9:1 (Halliday and James 1993). Where therefore the ratio of affirmation/denial for a particular syntactic choice is significantly skewed and where the frequency is high as a proportion of the total number of cases considered, it has been highlighted in the table. Where it is unclear whether it is the reason or some other aspect of the clause that is being denied or any other problem of allocation to the categories arises, the higher figure that results from inclusion of such cases is included in brackets; it will be noticed that all such cases occur in the Subject options. Of 7238 instances examined (excluding the doubtful cases), 4747 are affirming the reason, 2491 denying it, a ratio of close to 2:1. This points strongly to reason being associated with denial; that means that when reason is used, it has a good chance of being part of a pre-emptive move by the writer/speaker to say that s/he does not want to (or cannot) answer the reader/listener’s expected question ‘Why?’ or that any counter-arguments that might be offered to his/her position, whether by the reader/listener or by a third party, cannot be supported with evidence. Either way, the word provides evidence of association with affirmation-denial (Winter 1979, Williames 1985), a pivotal feature of writer/reader and speaker/listener relationships. Looked at more closely, the table allows us to state such an association more precisely. In the first place, notice that the Subject function is strongly associated with affirmation (1895:66, a whopping 29:1 ratio of affirmation to denial), whereas Complement is associated with denial (1740:1608, close to a 5050 ratio). (Object has a less marked association with denial.) So if you want to affirm your reason, put it in the Subject. If you plan to reject it or say that it is irrelevant or unknown, use the Complement (or Object). This is a useful example of a complex textual colligation where it is the operation of reason in a particular grammatical function that has a particular textual implication. Looked at another way, the different postmodifying structures with which reason appears also distribute themselves differently between affirmation and denial. So reason + ø-clause is associated with affirmation (in a ratio to denial of 15/1); the only structure to come near this weighting towards affirmation is the relatively infrequent reason + that-clause, with a ratio of 10/1 in favour of affirmation. On the other hand, reason + why-clause is associated with denial, there being an absolute majority of cases of denial in all three grammatical functions. This is another instance of a complex textual colligation, where the colligation of reason with one or other kind of clause as postmodifier is the condition that has to be met for a textual colligation to be observable. Two instances on their own prove nothing, but it is hoped that the two examples I have given at least elucidate what is meant by the third claim and suggest it may be worth further investigation.
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3.4
Claim 4: Every lexical item (or combination of lexical items) may have a positive or negative preference for occurring at the beginning or end of an independently recognised ‘chunk’ of text.
The fourth claim was that lexical items may have a positive or negative preference for occurring at the beginning or end of an independently recognised ‘chunk’ of text, e.g. the paragraph. The problem with verifying this claim is of course that it is not easy to find independently recognised ‘chunks’ of text that have validity. In writing, of course, there is rough chunking associated with paragraphing, but it is not difficult to demonstrate that paragraphs have no internal structure (except in so far that several generations of Freshman English students in the United States have been taught to write paragraphs with a particular arbitrarily imposed structure and this structure is becoming a selffulfilling prophecy). I have argued elsewhere (Hoey 1985) that paragraphs are a device used by writers to signal to readers how parts of the text relate to each other. They are not therefore an ideal starting-point for demonstrating the validity of my sixth claim. Nevertheless, in the absence of other chunking devices, it is possible to use paragraph boundaries, section divisions and of course the beginnings of texts to test the claim. The hypothesis here is that certain Thematised words or phrases have a preference for occurring at the beginning or end of a paragraph, or a preference for avoiding such positions. So a particular sentence-initial word might have a preference for being paragraph-initial. There is no assumption here that the sentence-initial word has to have a colligational preference for being sentenceinitial in order to be eligible for consideration with regard to the paragraph-initial claim. It is perfectly feasible that a particular word or phrase might have no special preference for being sentence-initial – or indeed even have preference for being in a non-sentence-initial position – and still have, when in sentence-initial position, a preference for being paragraph initial. In Hoey (1997) I report an experiment carried out to discover whether there is any relationship between paragraphing and the predilection of certain lexical items for appearing in paragraph-initial position. The experiment took the form of asking 67 students to paragraph a short passage from a history textbook that had been previously deparagraphed.5 The passage in question was the following: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Grant was, judged by modern standards, the greatest general of the Civil War. He was head and shoulders above any general on either side as an over-all strategist, as a master of what in later wars would be called global strategy. His Operation Crusher plan, the product of a mind which had received little formal instruction in the higher area of war, would have done credit to the most finished student of a series of modern staff and command schools. He was a brilliant theatre strategist, as evidenced by the Vicksburg campaign, which was a classic field and siege operation. He was a better
Textual colligation 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35
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than average tactician, although, like even the best generals of both sides, he did not appreciate the destruction that the increasing firepower of modern armies could visit on troops advancing across open spaces. Lee is usually ranked as the greatest Civil War general, but this evaluation has been made without placing Lee and Grant in the perspective of military developments since the war. Lee was interested hardly at all in ‘global’ strategy, and what few suggestions he did make to his government about operations in other theatres than his own indicate that he had little aptitude for grand planning. As a theatre strategist, Lee often demonstrated more brilliance and apparent originality than Grant, but his most audacious plans were as much the product of the Confederacy’s inferior military position as of his own fine mind. In war, the weaker side has to improvise brilliantly. It must strike quickly, daringly, and include a dangerous element of risk in its plans. Had Lee been a Northern general with Northern resources behind him he would have improvised less and seemed less bold. Had Grant been a Southern general, he would have fought as Lee did. Fundamentally Grant was superior to Lee because in a modern total war he had a modern mind, and Lee did not. Lee looked to the past in war as the Confederacy did in spirit. The staffs of the two men illustrate their outlooks. It would not be accurate to say that Lee’s general staff were glorified clerks, but the statement would not be too wide off the mark …
The students were not told how many breaks to make; this was left to their discretion. The number of breaks varied from one to eight, with slightly under half of the students making three breaks. The choices of paragraph break made by all informants is given in Table 3, choices being represented in terms of the lines in which the sentences begin. Some sentences were clearly seen as strong candidates for beginning a paragraph (e.g. the sentence beginning on line 13) while others were not chosen by any informant (e.g. the sentence beginning on line 24). Equally clearly there was no unanimity as to where to break, with no paragraph boundary finding universal approval. This undermines any claim that might be made for paragraphs having a structural status, unless of course my students are thought to have been deficient in this respect (and since they were not for the most part deficient at the level of the clause or the group, that would itself be of interest). Instead it points to there being some non-structural explanation. One such explanation lies in the textual relations in the passage, and this explanation I have explored fully elsewhere (Hoey 1985, 1997). However, a more interesting (and not incompatible) explanation is, as mentioned above, that the students were being cued by the lexical items that begin the sentences; in other words, it is possible that the students were choosing to paragraph in one place rather than another because of the way the sentences began.
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Table 3: The distribution of paragraph break choices across the range of possible break points Line on which sentence starts 2 (He..) 4 (His..) 7 (He..) 9 (He..) 13 (Lee..) 16 (Lee..) 20 (As..) 23 (In..) 24 (It..) 25 (Had..) 27 (Had..) 29 (Fundamentally..) 30 (Lee..) 32a (The..) 32b (It..)
Number of informants beginning a paragraph at this point 0 11 22 0 62 7 32 32 0 2 1 42 0 13 5
% of informants making the choice 17% 33% 94% 11% 49% 49% 3% 2% 64% 20% 8%
With this hypothesis in mind, I set about examining the lexical items that began each of the sentences that were candidates for beginning a paragraph. When I undertook that work, my corpus was greatly smaller than it now is, and the numbers looked at were not large – typically between 40 and 100 instances, and in a couple of cases fewer than this. What I was concerned to do, however, was focus my hypothesis, not prove by weight of numbers the paragraph priming of certain words or phrases. The results of my analysis were provisionally supportive of the hypothesis. To begin with, my analysis suggested that exactly 50% of single surnames (like Grant and Lee) in sentence-initial position are also paragraph initial; there are of course four places where a surname is the first word of a sentence (lines 1, 13, 16, 30) (and a further four where it appears within Theme – lines 20, 25, 27, 29).6 There did not however appear to be any tendency for single surnames to be sentence-initial; rather the opposite. So we have the hypothesis of a negative priming for surnames in Theme but a positive priming for Thematised surnames in paragraph-initial position. The exact opposite appeared for he, which begins three sentences in the passage (lines 2, 7, 9). The evidence pointed strongly towards he having a strong priming for Theme. Of 100 instances consulted 30 were sentence-initial, and this of course discounts instances of he occurring within Theme but not in 1st position in the sentence. On the other hand there was no tendency for sentence-initial he to be also paragraph-initial. In fact he occurred in paragraph-initial position in my corpus two and a half times less often than would have been expected on the basis
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of random distribution. So we have the hypothesis of a positive priming for he in Theme but a negative priming for beginning a paragraph. The data for his (line 4) illustrated a third possibility. In contrast with he, his showed a negative priming for being sentence-initial. Those few instances that were sentence-initial showed an equal negative priming for being paragraph initial. So we have the hypothesis of a negative priming for both sentence-initial and paragraph-initial position. Phrases beginning as a are not all of the same kind. I divided them into three moderately distinct categories – phrases with a non-human nominal group, e.g. as a legacy of…, as a consequence, phrases with a human referent for the noun acting as head of the group but without implication of function or role, e.g. as a boy, as a Frenchman, and finally phrases with a human referent for the head noun that described a function or role, e.g. as a biologist, as a musician. One of the candidate sentences for beginning a paragraph begins with the third class of as a(n) X (i.e. As a theatre strategist, line 20). Phrases of this third category were found, admittedly on the basis of few data, to be positively primed for paragraphinitial position; no calculation was made of their tendency to be sentence-initial. It proved very difficult to explore the textual priming of in war (line 23). In the small corpus I was working with at that time, the phrase in war itself only occurred once, in second position in a paragraph supporting a generalisation, and once as in a war in paragraph-initial position. A trawl more recently of the 100 million word supplemented Guardian corpus still only threw up 16 examples of the phrase. Of these 5 were paragraph-initial, 9 were non-initial and 2 occurred in quoted speech too short to be subject to paragraphing. The average length of the paragraphs was five sentences. Trivially sparse though these data are, they suggest that in war may have a positive bias towards being sentence-initial, a conclusion I reached when I initially analysed my data on the basis of the distribution of in plus abstract noun. Again, then, if the hypothesis were to be supported by better data, we would be looking at a phrase with a strong aversion to being part of Theme and a strong preference for paragraph-initial position in the rare circumstances of its being thematised. Looking next at it functioning as pronoun (line 24), we again have evidence of a negative colligation. I examined 149 instances of it functioning as anaphoric pro-form in sentence-initial position. Of these a mere 8% (12) were also in paragraph-initial position, compared with the 25% that might have been anticipated if its positioning were the result of random distribution. It is therefore three times less likely to appear in paragraph-initial position than would be accountable for in terms of chance. There were only 29 instances of Had X been (lines 25 and 27) in the corpus I was using at that time. One in six of these began a paragraph. Again, though based on few data, this points to a negative colligation with paragraphinitial position. With fundamentally (line 29), we again have a lexical item that is negatively primed for Theme. With my original data I had to use a number of suspect strategies in order to have enough data to analyse; re-examining the
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lexical item with my current corpus of 100 million words, and with a consequent 786 instances of fundamentally, there were still only 20 instances in sentenceinitial position for investigation. Clearly the word does not like to begin sentences. On the basis of my original data, I came to the conclusion that fundamentally had a positive colligational preference for paragraph-initial position, with 50% more likelihood of beginning a paragraph than was explicable in terms of random distribution. With the still thin but better data of the later corpus, I come to the same conclusion. Of the 20 sentence-initial cases, six begin paragraphs and 13 do not; the final instance begins a one-sentence paragraph, and this is discounted in the analysis. The average length of the paragraphs is 5 sentences (though this is distorted upwards by one particularly long paragraph). Again, fundamentally turns out to begin paragraphs 50% more often than one might expect.7 On the basis of this analysis, it was possible to correlate the positive and negative priming for paragraph-initial position with the decisions that the students had made.8 The correlation can be seen in Table 4. I have starred those results which seem anomalous. It will be seen that for the most part there is a good match between actual student choice of paragraph boundary and predicted boundary breaks on the basis of corpus evidence. Where there is a discrepancy, there are good reasons for it. In terms of the structure of the passage, the sentence starting at line 4 represents a deviation from the smooth parallelism of the comparison. Those paragraphing at line 4, despite the negative colligation of his for paragraph initiation, were doing so to mark this deviation. The rather smaller number who broke at line 7 were breaking, again in defiance of the negative colligation of he, in order to mark a return to the parallelism. Those breaking, on the other hand, at line 16 were doing so with no text-structural grounds for their Table 4: Informant choices compared with textual colligation Sentence-initial word or phrase Grant He His He He Lee Lee As a NG (human function) In NG (generalised noun) It (pronoun) Had NG Vn Had NG Vn Fundamentally Lee illustrate It (anticipatory)
Line no 1 2 4 7 9 13 16 20 23 24 25 27 29 30 32a 32b
Paragraph-initial % of informants making a paragraph colligation break at this point (67 informants) Positive 100% (by default) Negative 0% Negative 17% Negative 33% * Negative 0% Positive 94% Positive 11% Positive 49% Positive 49% Negative 0% Negative 3% Negative 3% Positive 64% Positive 0% * Neutral 20% Positive 8% *
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decision; the only thing going for such a break is the positive colligation of names with paragraph initiation. The failure to break at line 30 is less interesting; the fact that the passage is coming to an end at this juncture would have been a deterrent to some informants, irrespective of the merits of a potential break at this point. To test whether these claims were correct and to discover whether the colligations were having any effect on the judgements of students, I then doctored the original text slightly as follows; changes are indicated in bold: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35
Grant was, judged by modern standards, the greatest general of the Civil War. He was head and shoulders above any general on either side as an over-all strategist, as a master of what in later wars would be called global strategy. Lee’s Operation Crusher plan, the product of a mind which had received little formal instruction in the higher area of war, would have done credit to the most finished student of a series of modern staff and command schools. He was a brilliant theatre strategist, as evidenced by the Vicksburg campaign, which was a classic field and siege operation. He was a better than average tactician, although, like even the best generals of both sides, he did not appreciate the destruction that the increasing firepower of modern armies could visit on troops advancing across open spaces. Lee is usually ranked as the greatest Civil War general, but this evaluation has been made without placing Lee and Grant in the perspective of military developments since the war. He was interested hardly at all in ‘global’ strategy, and what few suggestions he did make to his government about operations in other theatres than his own indicate that he had little aptitude for grand planning. He often demonstrated more brilliance and apparent originality as a theatre strategist than Grant, but his most audacious plans were as much the product of the Confederacy’s inferior military position as of his own fine mind. The weaker side has to improvise brilliantly in war. It must strike quickly, daringly, and include a dangerous element of risk in its plans. Had Lee been a Northern general with Northern resources behind him he would have improvised less and seemed less bold. Had Grant been a Southern general, he would have fought as Lee did. Fundamentally Grant was superior to Lee because in a modern total war he had a modern mind, and Lee did not. Lee looked to the past in war as the Confederacy did in spirit. The staffs of the two men illustrate their outlooks. It would not be accurate to say that Lee’s general staff were glorified clerks, but the statement would not be too wide off the mark…
The changes were designed to test whether students had been influenced by the textual colligations. I hypothesised that the change to line 4 would reinforce the structural pressure to break at this point and that there would be a consequent increase in the popularity of this sentence as a paragraph boundary. I likewise
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hypothesised that removal of the positive colligation at the beginning of line 16 would render it unattractive as a candidate boundary. I further hypothesised that the removal of positive colligations from the Themes of the sentences beginning in lines 20 and 23 would reduce their attractiveness as potential paragraph breaks. Having made these changes, I gave the task to a set of 32 informants drawn from the same undergraduate degree programme; needless to say, the second set of informants did not include any from the first set. Their paragraphing decisions are recorded in Table 5. The first column represents the potential paragraph breaks (by line number); I have indicated where the potential break in question has had its wording altered. The second column indicates the number of informants choosing to break at this point and the third represents this as a percentage of the cohort; the final column gives the results from the original experiment for purposes of comparison. Table 5 contains broad support for my position. The alteration at line 4 – from his with its negative priming for paragraph-initial position to Grant with its positive priming for such positioning – brings with it a surge in the percentage of informants choosing to paragraph at this point (and a corresponding reduction in the percentage paragraphing at line 7). The alteration at line 16 in the reverse direction, i.e. from Proper noun to pronoun, is associated with a reduction in the Table 5: A comparison of the two cohorts of informants in respect of their paragraphing decisions on the original and altered de-paragraphed text Line
2 4 7 9 13 16 20 23 24 25 27 29 30 32a 32b
Number of informants choosing this point as a paragraph break 0 12 6 1 31 1 7 19 0 5 1 19 2 5 1
% of informants choosing % of original informants this point as a paragraph choosing this point as a break paragraph break 38% 17% 19% 33% 3% 97% 94% 3% 11% 22% 49% 59% 49% 16% 3% 3% 2% 59% 64% 6% 16% 20% 3% 8%
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number of informants paragraphing there. The change at line 20 – removing the positively primed fronted adjunct as a X and replacing the proper noun with a pronoun – sees a halving of the proportion of people choosing to paragraph at this juncture despite there being good text-linguistic grounds for making such a break. All these changes in the popularity of the relevant line breaks are in line with Claim 4. One result is not as expected. The removal of the fronted adjunct In X sees an increase rather than a decrease in the percentage of people choosing to break at line 23. The increase at first sight seems to provide counter-evidence for the claim advanced in this paper. On closer examination, however, the increase is supportive of the claim, not challenging to it. The reason is that the structure the + adjective + noun turns out to be an even stronger paragraph-initiator than in X. It is a relatively rare structure. In a concordance of the of 1548 lines created from seven BNC files, there were only 116 instances with this structure (7.5%). Of these 116 instances, 51 (44%) were either paragraph initial or text initial, approximately twice as many as would have been expected on the basis of random distribution. So the move of In war to non-initial position only had the effect of bringing to the front of the sentence a structure even more associated with paragraph initiation than the structure it replaced. The association of certain words or phrases with paragraph initiation is not the only kind of chunking that can be attested. Some words or phrases have a strong tendency to be associated with text initiation. In my corpus, for example, sixty and today both have strong tendencies to appear in text-initial sentences; in the case of sixty it also has a tendency to appear at the beginning of its sentence. Hoey (2000) describes a small-scale experiment to investigate this phenomenon, making use of a jumbled version a short text by Ingmar Bergman. Both the text-initiation experiment and the paragraph-initiation experiment described here (and in Hoey 1997) only hint at the way forward (apart from any worry one might have about the experimental designs used) because a corpus of 100 million words is quite small when one is counting paragraphs and tiny when one is counting texts. 100 million words constitutes very approximately only one million paragraphs and (equally approximately) a mere 200,000 short texts, and a corpus of one million words would for many purposes be regarded as a modest corpus while a corpus of 200,000 words would normally be regarded as barely adequate for all but the most common words in the language. Nevertheless what evidence there is provides support for the claim that lexical items are primed (positively or negatively) to appear in paragraph initial or even text initial position. 3.5
Claim 5: Textual colligations may only or especially be operative in texts of a particular type or genre or designed for a particular community of users, e.g. academic papers
The final claim will be given little attention, but it is an important one. This is that all of the above claims should be regarded as domain-specific. In other
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words, a word is not primed for textual use in all contexts but only under certain conditions. Thus, for example, ago may, as I have argued here, be associated with contrast in newspaper text and it might be it has a similar association in academic articles; a corpus of fictional narrative on the other hand would be unlikely to throw up this textual colligation. It might well be that both news articles and fictional narratives favour the word appearing in text-initial position – certainly I have evidence for this in news texts – but it is extremely doubtful whether there is any such association in advertisements. And so on. Textual colligation claims must be tied to particular genres, text-types, domains, communities of users (defined temporally as well as in terms of employment and place) and the like. It is probably this property of domain specificity that has led to textual colligation being overlooked in corpus studies hitherto, in that large general corpora are ideal for picking up patterns across a wide range of domains but have to be used carefully to pick up features true of only certain kinds of text. 4.
Colligational prosody
Once we recognise that our generalisations must be bounded, it is possible to produce a fragment of a matrix of the kind hypothetically posited (as Table 1) at the outset of this paper. Thus the phrase sixty years ago today can be represented as shown in Table 6. Table 6: A fragment of a text-colligational matrix Preference for participating in cohesive chains Preference for occurring as part of Theme Preference for occurring as part of a specified semantic relation Preference for occurring at the beginning or end of a recognisable chunk
Constraints on operation of preferences
sixty negative
years positive
ago negative
today negative
positive
weakly positive contrast or change
positive
neutral
contrast
contrast
positive for paragraph initial (when Theme)
positive for paragraph initial in certain phrases (when Theme) Feature articles
positive for paragraph initial (when Theme)
contrast
positive for paragraph initial and text initial (when Theme) Feature articles
Feature articles
Feature articles
It will be observed that the individual words that make up the phrase sixty years ago today share a number of properties. Thus sixty, ago and today share the property of having negative preference for cohesive chains and that sixty, years and ago share a preference for being Thematised. We can label this ‘colligational
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prosody’ and its presence is both explained by and helps to explain the power of collocation. Table 7 represents the colligational prosodies of our chosen phrase. Table 7: Colligational prosody in the phrase sixty years ago today sixty
years
ago
today
negative
negative
Preference for participating in cohesive chains
negative
Preference for occurring as part of Theme
positive
weakly positive
positive
Preference for occurring as part of a specified semantic relation
contrast
contrast or change
contrast
contrast
Preference for occurring at the beginning or end of a recognisable chunk
positive for paragraph initial
positive for paragraph initial (when Theme)
positive for paragraph initial
positive for paragraph initial
and text initial in certain phrases (when Theme)
and text initial (when Theme)
Feature articles
Feature articles
Feature articles
and text initial (when Theme) Constraints on operation of preferences
5.
Feature articles
Conclusions
I have been arguing in this paper for a new perspective on text-linguistics, one that is rooted in the lexical item, not, as previously, a perspective that sees lexis as a network in the text contributing to its cohesion or as contributing to the signalling of the text organisation (though this perspective is not rendered obsolete), but a perspective that makes no distinction between the description of the text and the description of its component lexis. I have tried to show that the properties of text can all be tackled through the concept of textual colligation. More specifically I have argued that lexis is primed for textual use, such that the choice of a lexical item is simultaneously the choice of its primings. Any lexical item is primed positively or negatively with respect to cohesion, semantic relations in the text, Theme and textual divisions. This is not to say that the choice of a lexical item compels certain textual developments but it certainly makes those developments more likely. The case of paragraphing in particular suggests that some thorny text-linguistic problems might be amenable to solution, or at least clarification, if a lexical perspective is adopted. Just as importantly, the work I have reported here, if supported in subsequent investigations, suggests that a corpus-centred account of the lexical item that stops at the phrase may be unnecessarily limited. A full account of the word may be some way off yet.
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Notes 1. Dubois (2002) provides powerful evidence of this; one of his informants comments on an Epistle of St Paul as he reads it without apparent awareness of an audience. 2. The sharp-eyed and knowledgeable will recognise that the last two sentences of this paragraph are a direct quotation from Donald A. Yates’ translation of ‘Death and the Compass’ by J.-L. Borges. They therefore perfectly illustrate the point about writing being reproduction. The speaker of these sentences in the story is however led to his doom by false hypotheses so we cannot assume that the sentiments are safe or Borges’ own. 3. Here and henceforward the evidence is drawn from concordances created out of a corpus of 100 million words, made up predominantly of Guardian newspaper data (approximately 96 million) with a topping up from the BNC and a Liverpool-constructed database of spoken English of approximately _ million words. 4. Given that there are approximately twice as many tokens in Rheme as in Theme, a lexical item could be said to occur in accordance with our expectations if it occurs in Theme a third of the time. Random distribution would suffice as an explanation of the occurrence of a lexical item in Theme or Rheme if the occurrence of the lexical item in Theme and Rheme was unaffected by the nature of the lexical item itself. 5. The passage, from Lincoln and His Generals by T. Harry Williams, was originally selected and deparagraphed by Richard Young and Alton Becker and their work was reported in a mimeographed paper. A more general account of their research was reported in Koen et al. (1969). Although the research reported here used many more informants than did theirs and my findings are different from (though not unrelated to) their findings, I wish to pay tribute to their pioneering work without which I would certainly never have considered exploring these matters. The line numbering and line breaks are as in the original Young and Becker experiment. A discussion of their work and this experiment can be found in Hoey (1985). 6. The full details of my original analysis can be found in Hoey (1997). 7. In addition I analysed paragraph-initial cases of more fundamentally, most fundamentally, and but fundamentally. There were 31 of these and 19 of them also began paragraphs. 8. I also analysed the paragraph-initial properties of illustrate and anticipatory it, but since these are not psychologically likely break points because of the closeness to the end of the passage, I have not dwelt on them here. For what it is worth, on the basis of few data, illustrate seemed to have a weak preference for paragraph-initial position and an equally weak preference for paragraphfinal position; it would probably be best characterised as neutral with regard
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to paragraph positioning. Anticipatory it showed quite a strong tendency to be paragraph-initial, as strong as fundamentally.
References Bakhtin, M. (1973), Problems of Dostoevsky’s poetics [1929], translated by R. W. Rotsel. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Ardis. Beekman, J. (1970), ‘Propositions and their relations within a discourse’, Notes on Translation. 37: 6-23. Beekman, J. and J. Callow (1974), Translating the word of God. Michigan: Zondervan Press. Bolivar, A. de (2001), ‘The negotiation of evaluation in written texts’, in: M. Scott and G. Thompson (eds), Patterns of text, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 129-158. Chouliaraki, L. and N. Fairclough (2001), Discourse in late modernity: rethinking critical discourse analysis. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Crombie, W. (1985), Process and relation in discourse and language learning. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Daneš, F. (1974), ‘Functional sentence perspective and the organization of the text’, in: F. Daneš (ed.), Papers on functional sentence perspective, Prague: Academia. 105-28. Dijk, T. van and W. Kintsch (1978), ‘Cognitive psychology and discourse: recalling and summarizing stories’, in: W.U. Dressler (ed.), Current trends in textlinguistics, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. 61-80. Dubois, J. (2002), ‘What is (natural) discourse? Implications for spoken corpus research’. Paper presented at ICAME 2002 (the 23rd International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora of Modern and Medieval English), Göteborg, 22-26 May 2002. Fairclough, N. (1989), Language and power. London: Longman. Firbas, J. (1966), ‘Non-thematic subjects in contemporary English’, Travaux Linguistiques de Prague 2: 239-256. Firbas, J. (1986), ‘Given and new information and some aspects of the structures, semantics and pragmatics of written texts’, in: C.R. Cooper and S. Greenbaum (eds), Studying writing: linguistic approaches, Written Communication Annual, Vol. 1, London/Beverley Hills, Cal.: Sage. 40-71. Goffman, E. (1981), Forms of talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Goodman, K. (1967), ‘Reading: a psycholinguistic guessing game’, Journal of the Reading Specialist 6: 126-135. Goodman, K. (1973), ‘On the psycholinguistic method of teaching reading’, in: F. Smith (ed.), Psycholinguistics and reading, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 177-182.
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Graustein, G. and W. Thiele (1979), ‘An approach to the analysis of English texts’, Linguistiche Studien A55: 3-15. Graustein, G. and W. Thiele (1987), Properties of English texts. Leipzig: VEB Verlag Enzykapadie Leipzig. Halliday, M.A.K. (1994), An introduction to functional grammar (2nd ed.). London: Edward Arnold. Halliday, M.A.K. and R. Hasan (1976), Cohesion in English. London: Longman. Halliday, M.A.K. and R. Hasan (1985), Language, context and text: Aspects of language in a social-semiotic perspective. Geelong: Deakin University Press (republished in 1989 by Oxford University Press). Halliday, M.A.K. and Z.L. James (1993), ‘A quantitative study of polarity and primary tense in the English finite clause’, in: J. Sinclair, M. Hoey and G. Fox (eds), Techniques of description: spoken and written discourse. A festschrift for Malcolm Coulthard, London: Routledge. 32-66. Hasan, R. (1984), ‘Coherence and cohesive harmony’, in: J. Flood (ed.), Understanding reading comprehension, Delaware: International Reading Association. 181-219. Hodge, R. and G. Kress (1993), Language as ideology (2nd ed.). London: Routledge. Hoey, M. (1979), Signalling in discourse. Discourse Analysis Monographs No 6, Birmingham: ELR, University of Birmingham. Hoey, M. (1983), On the surface of discourse. London: George Allen and Unwin (reprinted in Reprints in Systemic Linguistics series, University of Nottingham, 1991). Hoey, M. (1985), ‘The paragraph boundary as a marker of relations between the parts of a discourse’, M.A.L.S. Journal 10: 96-107. Hoey, M. (1991), Patterns of lexis in text. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hoey, M. (1997), ‘The interaction of textual and lexical factors in the identification of paragraph boundaries’, in: M. Reinhardt and W. Thiele (eds), Grammar and text in synchrony and diachrony in honour of Gottfried Graustein, Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert Verlag & Madrid: Iberoamericana. 141-67. Hoey, M. (2000), ‘The hidden lexical clues of textual organisation’, in: L. Burnard and T. McEnery (eds), Rethinking language pedagogy from a corpus perspective, Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 31-42. Hoey, M. (2001), Textual interaction. London: Routledge. Hoey, M. (forthcoming a), ‘The textual priming of lexis’, to appear in G. Aston (ed), Proceedings of TALC, Bertinoro, 2002. Hoey, M. (forthcoming b), ‘Lexical priming and properties of text, to appear in A. Partington, J Morley and L Harman (eds), Corpora and Discourse. Bern: Peter Lang. Koen, F., R. Young and A. Becker (1969), ‘The psychological reality of the paragraph’, Journal of Verbal Learning & Verbal Behavior, 8.1: 49-53.
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Labov, W. (1972), Language of the inner city: Studies in the Black English vernacular. Philadelphia, Pa: University of Pennsylvania Press. Labov, W. and J. Waletzky (1967), ‘Narrative analysis: oral versions of personal experience’, in: J. Helm (ed.), Essays on the verbal and visual arts, Seattle: University of Washington Press. 25-42. Longacre, R.E. (1968), Discourse, paragraph and sentence structure in selected Philippine languages. S.I.L. Publications in Linguistics & Related Fields, No 21, Vols. 1 & 2. Dallas, Texas: Summer Institute of Linguistics Publications. Longacre, R.E. (1979), ‘The paragraph as a grammatical unit’, in: T. Givón (ed.), Discourse and syntax, New York: Academic Press. 115-34. Longacre, R.E. (1983), The grammar of discourse. New York: Plenum Press. Mann, W.C. and S.A. Thompson (1986), ‘Relational processes in discourse’, Discourse Processes 9.1: 57-90. Mann, W.C. and S.A. Thompson (1987), Rhetorical Structure Theory: a theory of text or g a n i z a t i o n . Monica del Rey, Ca: Information Science Institute/University of Southern California. Martin, J.R. (1992), English text: system and structure. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Morgan, J.L. and M.B. Sellner (1980), ‘Discourse and linguistic theory’, in: R.J. Spiro (ed.), Theoretical issues in reading comprehension: Perspectives from cognitive psychology, linguistics, artificial intelligence and education, Hillside, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 165-200. Nystrand, M. (1986), The structure of written communication: Studies in reciprocity between writers and readers. Orlando: Academic Press. Nystrand, M. (1989), ‘A social interactive model of writing’, Written Communication 6.1: 66-85. Parsons, G. (1995), ‘Measuring cohesion in English texts: the relationship between cohesion and coherence’. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Nottingham. Partington, A. (2003), The linguistics of political argument: The spin-doctor and the wolf-pack at the White House. London: Routledge. Partington, A. and J. Morley (2002), ‘From frequency to ideology: comparing word and cluster frequencies in political debate’. Paper given at the 5th TALC (Teaching and Language Corpora) conference, Bertinoro, 26-31 July. Scott, M. (1999), WordSmith Tools, Version 3, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sinclair, J.McH. (1993), ‘Written discourse analysis’, in: J. Sinclair, M. Hoey and G. Fox (eds), Techniques of description: spoken & written discourse. A festschrift for Malcolm Coulthard, London: Routledge. 6-31. Smith, F. (1978), Understanding reading (2nd ed.). New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Swales, J. (1981), Aspects of article introductions. Aston ESP Monographs No 1, Birmingham: Aston University.
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Swales, J. (1990), Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tadros, A. (1985), Prediction in text. Discourse Analysis Monographs, Birmingham: ELR, University of Birmingham. Tadros, A. (1993), ‘The pragmatics of text averral and attribution in academic text’, in: M. Hoey (ed.), Data, description, discourse, London: HarperCollins. 98-114. Ventola, E. (1987), The structure of social interaction. London: Frances Pinter. Widdowson, H. (1979), ‘The process and purpose of reading’, in: Explorations in applied linguistics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 173-84. Williames, J. (1985), ‘The interactive nature of the newspaper letter’, M.A.L.S. Journal, New Series 10: 108-140. Winter, E. (1971), ‘Connection in science material: a proposition about the semantics of clause relations’, C.I.L.T Papers and Reports No 7 (London: Centre for Information on Language Teaching and Research for British Association for Applied Linguistics). 41-52. Winter, E. (1977), ‘A clause-relational approach to English texts: a study of some predictive lexical items in written discourse’, Instructional Science 6.1: 191. Winter, E. (1979), ‘Replacement as a fundamental function of the sentence in context’, Forum Linguisticum 4.2: 95-133. Winter, E. (1982), Towards a contextual grammar of English. London: George Allen & Unwin.
Adverbials in IT-cleft constructions Hilde Hasselgård University of Oslo Abstract On the basis of material from the International Corpus of English this paper presents a study of IT-clefts with an adverbial in cleft position. Most of these ITclefts are of the informational-presupposition type (Prince 1978), i.e. the cleft clause conveys new information. Various textual functions of the IT-clefts are explored, using the classification of Johansson (2002). Unexpectedly, the function of giving contrastive focus to the cleft constituent does not seem to be predominant in this material. An alternative hypothesis is explored: the IT-cleft construction is seen primarily as a thematizing device, whereby the cleft constituent receives thematic focus (which may imply contrast) and the themerheme division is made particularly explicit. 1.
Introduction
The IT-cleft construction has been studied both as a focusing device (e.g. Prince 1978, Gundel 2002) and as a thematizing device (e.g. Gómez-González 2000). The construction is of interest in studies of information structure because it allows a speaker/writer to spread the information of a single proposition over two clauses and, consequently, two information units. It is normally assumed that the cleft construction is a means of steering the focus towards the clefted constituent (e.g. Gundel 2002: 118). The IT -cleft can have various types of phrases and clauses as its focus, as shown below. IT-cleft = IT + BE + clefted constituent [NP, PP, AdvP, (non-)finite clause] + cleft clause
1
Adjunct adverbials, in contrast to conjuncts and disjuncts, can be the focus of an IT-cleft construction (cf. Quirk et al. 1985: 504), as illustrated in (1): (1)
Can we call a special meeting or something? Maybe just that it’s this week that uhm there aren’t enough people around < S1B-078 #172-173:1:C>2
The aim at hand is to examine such adverbials in IT-cleft constructions in order to discover the information structural role of the focused adverbial as well as the function of the whole IT -cleft construction in context. The study is primarily based on the British component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB).
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2.
Types of adjunct in cleft position
Before going further, I shall briefly outline the kinds of adverbials that occur in cleft focus position in the ICE-GB. Table 1 shows the occurrence of different semantic types of adjunct in cleft position. The distribution of semantic types of adjuncts in cleft position is not surprising; time and place adjuncts are the most common types of adjuncts in most registers irrespective of position (cf. Biber et al. 1999: 783 f.). Table 1. Adjuncts in cleft position in the ICE-GB Semantic type Time Place Manner3 Cause/reason Condition Total
N 23 15 7 5 1 51
% 45.1 29.4 13.7 9.8 2.0 100
The adverbials in cleft position have different realizations, of which the most common is the prepositional phrase (Table 2). Table 2 includes a column containing Johansson’s (2002:90) figures for the realization of adverbials in cleft position in the English part of the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus (ESPC). As shown in the table, the proportions of different realization types are relatively similar across the two corpora. The frequency of the different realization types corresponds quite well to the overall realization of adverbials regardless of position (Hasselgård: in prep., Biber et al. 1999: 769). One can thus assume that adjuncts in cleft position are similar to those in other positions as regards their semantic types as well as their realization. Table 2. Realization of adjuncts in cleft position in ICE-GB and the EnglishSwedish Parallel Corpus (ESPC figures from M. Johansson 2002:90) Realization Prepositional phrase Adverb phrase Noun phrase Clause Total
ICE-GB N % 34 66.7 8 15.7 2 3.9 7 13.7 51 100
ESPC N % 58 73.4 12 15.2 1 1.3 8 10.1 79 100
Adverbials in IT-cleft constructions 3.
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The information structure of IT-clefts
The most common assumption about the information structure of IT-clefts is that the clefted constituent represents new, often contrastive, information (e.g. Biber et al. 1999: 959). The subordinate clause typically conveys presupposed information (e.g. Prince 1978: 896). She calls this stressed focus IT-clefts, thereby indicating the discourse function of such clefts, namely to give special focus to the clefted constituent. Gundel (2002: 118) refers to this information structure in clefts as prototypical. Similarly, Collins (1991: 84) follows Halliday in claiming that this information structure constitutes the unmarked type of IT-cleft: ‘… the theme/new combination is unmarked: the construction creates, through predication, a local structure – the superordinate clause – in which information focus is in its unmarked place, at the end.’4 This is illustrated in Table 3, from Halliday (1994). Table 3. Marked and unmarked information focus combined with unpredicated and predicated Theme (Halliday 1994: 301) Unmarked you Theme Given Nominalized it’s you (predicated Theme) Theme New Non-nominalized
were to blame Rheme New (focus) who were to blame Rheme Given
Marked you Theme New it’s you Theme Given
were to blame Rheme Given who were to blame Rheme New (focus)
The term ‘unmarked’ here does not, however, reflect quantitative data. In Collins’s comprehensive study of cleft constructions, only 36% of the IT-clefts have a new clefted constituent and a given cleft clause (1991: 111), although the clefted constituent is new in a clear majority of cases. Another type of information structure in IT-clefts is described by Prince (1978) (and others after her: Collins 1991, Delin and Oberlander 1995, Johansson 2002), namely the informative presupposition cleft, in which the cleft clause conveys new information. The clefted constituent may contain either given or new information in an informative presupposition cleft. In (2), both the clefted constituent and the cleft clause are new, since the sentence occurs text-initially. (2)
It was just about 50 years ago that Henry Ford gave us the weekend. (Prince 1978: 898)
According to Prince (1978: 898) the information in the cleft clause is encoded as a (non-negotiable) fact. Although it is new, it is presupposed rather than asserted, i.e. it is marked as ‘known to some people although not yet known to the intended hearer’ (ibid: 899). Prince says that ‘The whole point of these sentences is to inform the hearer of that very information’ (ibid: 898). Delin (1992: 296),
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however, claims that ‘the information within an it-cleft presupposition appears to remind rather than inform’, even though it may not in actual fact be known to the hearer (ibid: 297). 4.
Information structure in IT-clefts with focused adverbial
Descriptions of IT-clefts in grammars and elsewhere are mostly concerned with focused nominal elements. This may be partly because of the possibility of comparing IT-clefts and wh-clefts,5 and partly because nominal elements are the most frequent type of clefted constituent. In ICE-GB they are almost three times as frequent as focused adverbials, which agrees quite well with Johansson’s findings (2002: 90). It is possible that there is a correlation between the type of clefted constituent and the type of cleft construction. Both Collins (1991: 112) and Prince (1978: 899) note that the informative presupposition type of IT-cleft is quite common when the clefted constituent is an adverbial. Conversely, it is possible that the stressed focus cleft is less apt to accommodate adverbials as the clefted constituent. In this connection we may note that the most frequently quoted example of an informative-presupposition cleft has an adverbial in cleft position, namely (2). In the ICE-GB material it was indeed quite common to find new information in both the clefted constituent and in the cleft clause, as in (2). It was also quite common for the clefted constituent to represent given information and for the information in the cleft clause to be new, as in (3). This is the reverse of the ‘canonical’ information structure in IT -clefts. Although this pattern is discussed as a variant of informative presupposition cleft by e.g. Prince (1978: 899) and Gundel (2002: 118 f), its frequency was unexpected.6 (3)
However there are worrying signs for the Republicans in the contests for state governors. Because of the shift in population to the warmer parts of the country states like Florida Texas and California are to be given extra seats in Congress. The governors of those states will have a big say in redrawing the boundaries. And it’s here that the Democrats have made significant headway. They have won the elections for governor in both Florida and Texas from the Republicans although Mr Bush’s party appears to have held on to the biggest prize of all California. (S2b 006#15-19)
The occurrence of clefted constituents conveying given information is also briefly noted by Biber et al. (1999: 962): ‘The focused element in an IT -cleft is not infrequently a pronoun or some other form which expresses given information. […] The early position of the focused element makes it suitable both for expressing a connection with the preceding text and for expressing contrast.’ The examples given are of the type it was me…, it was then…, it is these…. In the material examined for the present study, just over half of the clefted adverbials
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were anaphoric, cf. examples (1), (3), and (7). The great majority of the IT-clefts, close to 90%, were of the informative presupposition type. Based on the distribution of given and new information over the clefted constituent and the cleft clause, Johansson (2002: 185 ff.) arrives at four patterns of IT-clefts: • • • •
Type A: Clefted constituent is given/inferable; cleft clause is given/inferable Type B: Clefted constituent is given/inferable; cleft clause is new Type C: Clefted constituent is new; cleft clause is new Type D: Clefted constituent is new; cleft clause is given/inferable
Assessing the information status of adverbials is difficult because they often contain some given and some new information, e.g. the nominal complement of a prepositional phrase may be given while the relation expressed by the preposition may be new. Such phrases have been classified as inferable, and grouped together with given information, following the practice of Johansson (2002). Needless to say, it was necessary to study the examples in their wider context in order to determine the status of the information conveyed by the two parts of the cleft construction. Information patterns A-D were all found in the ICE-GB material. Their distribution is shown in Table 4. Table 4. Information structure of IT-clefts in the material Pattern Type A (all given) Type B (given + new) Type C (all new) Type D (new + given) Total
Adverbial given inferable inferable given inferable
Cleft clause given given inferable new new
N 1 1 3 18 8
Total
%
5
10
26
51
new
new
18
18
35
new new
given inferable
0 2
2
4
51
100
There are quite a few differences between the results given in Table 4 and the corresponding results of Johansson (2002: 188), which embraces all types of clefted constituent. First and foremost, Johansson finds that Types A and B are equally frequent (38% each), while Type C is least frequent in his material (10%). Type D accounts for 14% in Johansson’s material of English original texts. Although the number of IT-clefts with adverbials is rather too low to give conclusive results, the comparison of Johansson’s material (based on 240 examples) and mine suggests that the information structure of clefts with adverbials differs markedly from that of clefts with noun phrases. The most
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important difference is that the IT -clefts with adverbials occur by far most commonly with cleft clauses conveying new information (86%), while the cleft clauses of IT-clefts in general seem to be divided about equally between given and new information (Johansson 2002: 188). It may, however, be noted that Collins (1991: 111) reports that 63% of his IT-clefts have new/contrastive information in the cleft clause. It is possible that the differences may be due to the fact that Collins’s material as well as my own from ICE-GB contains both spoken and written material while Johansson’s contains only written material. 5.
Discourse functions of cleft constructions
Studying the IT-clefts with adverbials in context, I found that they seem to have a range of textual functions in the organization of the information flow. Collins (1991: 106) makes a similar observation: ‘The use of adverbials in cleft focus position seems to have important textual functions, e.g. by acting as a bridge from one topic to another or launching a (new) discourse topic’. Returning to (3), for example, we can note that the cleft sentence marks a transition between two sections of the text. The discourse topic before the cleft sentence is ‘demographic and political features of Florida, Texas and California’. After the cleft sentence the text has moved on to the success of the Democratic Party, a topic that was introduced in the cleft clause. Johansson (2002: 193) proposes four main discourse functions of ITclefts (irrespective of the type of clefted constituent). I decided to use these categories in order to facilitate comparison with his results, and was able to identify all of them in the material for this study. The categories are the following: • • • •
Contrast (the clefted constituent marks a contrast to something previously mentioned/assumed.) Topic Launching (the clefted constituent becomes the topic of the subsequent discourse.) Topic Linking (the two parts of the cleft construction – clefted constituent and cleft clause – link together two discourse topics.) Summative (the IT-cleft concludes or rounds off a text or a section of a text.)
Interestingly, the notion of contrast does not seem to be a particularly prominent feature of the clefted adverbials in the ICE-GB material. On the other hand, the notion of focus is present in all the examples; after all, an IT -cleft usually represents marked syntax as compared to its non-cleft counterpart. There is thus some extra attention associated with the clefted constituent, even though this need not be contrastive, and according to Delin (1990: 5 f) it need not be associated with prosodic focus either. In the following I shall give examples of the discourse functions found in the material, using Johansson’s classification. As will be shown, there are also
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cases where it may be argued that the cleft construction represents a merger of two categories, and additional categories will be suggested. 5.1
Contrast
In the ‘canonical’ cleft (Gundel 2002: 118) the clefted constituent conveys new information which is explicitly contrasted with something mentioned in the preceding context. The cleft clause represents information that is known to the speaker. In (4) the subject of reading books at an early age has already been talked about, while the clefted constituent introduces a reader of a different age from those previously discussed. (4)
I struggled terribly with them in my early teens and had no success at all. It wasn’t till I was perhaps twenty-five or thirty that I read them and enjoyed them <S1A-013 #237-238:1:E>
It is also possible to express contrast in examples where the cleft clause conveys new information. In such cases there is usually also another discourse function associated with the IT-cleft. For instance, the clefted constituent may launch a new discourse topic at the same time as marking a contrast (see next section), or there may be a transition between two discourse topics (section 5.3). 5.2
Topic launching
An IT -cleft can introduce a discourse topic in the clefted constituent. This constituent may be brand new or inferable, but in any case it is made prominent by means of the clefted constituent and developed as a topic in the subsequent discourse. In (5) the clefted constituent introduces ‘those men and women serving our country in the Middle East’, a group which is a discourse topic in the section that follows. It also represents a shift in the speech, introducing a ‘human angle’. Interestingly, the you in the next sentence refers to the same group, in contrast to the you in the sentence preceding the cleft, which is much wider in its scope. (5)
We must try to work out security arrangements for the future so that these terrible events are never repeated <,> and we shall I promise you <,> bring our own forces back home just as soon as it is safe to do so <,> It is to those men and women serving our country in the Middle East <,> that my thoughts go out most tonight # and to all of their families here at home <,> To you I know this is not a distant war. It is a close and ever present anxiety <,> I was privileged to meet many of our servicemen and women in the Gulf last week <,> <S2B-030 #63-68:1:A>
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Topic launching + Contrast Example (6) represents a combination of two discourse functions in the IT-cleft. The clefted constituent to Africa represents a contrast to the previous setting, the Soviet, but at the same time introduces Africa as a new discourse topic in a text about the world’s population. Clearly, the cleft clause does not convey given or even presupposed information. Since all the information in the sentence is new, the IT-cleft construction provides a means of avoiding placing new information sentence-initially, or to ‘keep focal material out of surface subject position’ (Gundel 2002: 126). (6)
Shortages of food have been a repeated feature of recent Soviet experience <,> with heavy dependence on grain imported from the United States as the Soviets’ own production has failed <,> But the spotlight has been on empty shops in the towns rather than empty larders in the countryside <,> It is to Africa that the television cameras go to show what happens when local natural resources are so inadequate for the population living off them that drought or continuous small-arms war causes famine for the people counted in millions and death for many of them <,> Apart from such disasters in succession in the same or in different places infant mortality is the main counter to the birth rate’s effect in Africa <,> and in parts of the continent the heterosexual incidence of Aids may prove to have halted or even reversed the growth in the population of potential parents and condemned large numbers of children to early death <,> <S2B-048 #80:1:A>
5.3
Topic linking: Transition
It is the two-part structure of the IT -cleft that allows it to link together two discourse topics: the current discourse topic is referred to in the clefted constituent, while a new discourse topic is introduced in the cleft clause. I would actually prefer to call this function ‘Transition’ since it not only links together two topics but also provides a bridge between two sections of a text. In other words, the cleft sentence becomes a vehicle for topic shifting. Because the new topic is presented as ‘known’ or ‘presupposed’ according to Prince, it is an unobtrusive way of introducing new information which can then be the starting point for the next section of the text. In (3) the cleft clause ‘the Democrats have made significant headway’ marked the beginning of a new section of the text. In example (7) the idea of topic shifting is even clearer, because C’s attempt to shift the topic is refused by A, who wants to spend more time on the previous topic. Thus, in (7), the transition does not fulfil its function, while in (3) and (8) the topic is successfully shifted.
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(7) C: But really what’s happened with my sort of history is when I met uh did a little recording with Chandos Records uhm and the Ulster orchestra who was conducting there came up with enough money to do their first record and they got Chandos interested. It was then that uh I fell in love with music like Hamilton Harty and a bit of Stanford <,> and the Arn the Arnold Bax Saga became something quite uh excellent. A:Well that’s a day we certainly want to come back to a bit later. But if we could just for a moment concentrate on the latter years of the nineteenth century. < S1B-032 #22:1:C> Contrast + transition Example (8) has a combination of marking a contrast with the clefted constituent and creating a transition by means of the cleft clause. The contrast is between the Villa Somalia mentioned earlier and the office building. The introduction of the letters in the cleft clause starts off a new section of the discourse. (8)
{BEGINNING OF TEXT} The Villa Somalia which was Siad Barre’s official residence in Mogadishu still lies abandoned <,> guarded by a handful of young men from the United Somali Congress the rebel force which took control of Mogadishu at the end of January <,> But it was in one of the office buildings that I discovered the letters <,> thousands of them <,> addressed to His Excellency President Mohammed Siad Barre but all unopened <,> I picked up one from Britain <,> It had been posted in September nineteen eighty-eight and was signed by a retired schoolteacher from Guildford in Surrey <,> writing on behalf of Amnesty International to plead for the release of a blind Somali preacher who’d been imprisoned for his religious beliefs <,,> < S2B-023 #61:3:A>
5.4
Summative
Summative IT-clefts tend to occur towards the end of a text or a section of a text, and represent a kind of conclusion or rounding off. Example (9) occurs at the very end of a speech and contains two cleft constructions. They share a clefted constituent which is inferable. It is not contrastive, but may have the ‘uniqueness feature’ noted by Delin and Oberlander (1995: 469). The cleft clause in the second cleft is new. Although it is backgrounded by means of subordination (Delin and Oberlander 1995: 473), it represents a kind of punchline and softens the war-talk in a clever way. (9)
The purpose of war is to enforce international law. It is to uphold the rights of nations to be independent and of people to live without fear. It is in that spirit <,> that the men and women of our forces and our allies are going to win the war <,> And it is in that spirit that we must build the peace that follows. <S2B-030 #103-105>
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Contrast + summative In example (10) we see both contrast and the summative function, towards the end of an obituary. The clefted constituent resolves an ‘either-or’ relationship (Perzanowski and Gurney 1997: 218) – i.e. a writer for children as opposed to adults - while the summative function is evident from the cleft clause. (10)
Dahl’s books often portrayed children battling against evil adults. […] As an adult author Dahl’s fame was to come much later when his Tales of the Unexpected were transferred to television. Yet it will be as a children’s writer he’ll be remembered. His lasting legacy includes another two books still to be published. Roald Dahl who’s died at the age of seventy-four <,> {END OF TEXT} < S2B-011 #17:1:B>
5.5
Thematization
In certain cases the main function of the cleft seems to be to make extra clear what is to be understood as the theme and the rheme of a sentence. A good example is (11), which represents a complete text. Thus there can be no contrast involved, nor any topic-linking, topic-launching, or summary. Rather, in this case, the writer wants to give thematic prominence to the regret he/she feels. It may be noted that a non-cleft version (11a) cannot easily have the same constituent in thematic position. (11)
It is with much regret that I find it necessary to send you a copy of the enclosed letter which is self explanatory. <W1B-026 #121:15> {= entire text} (11a) ? With much regret I find it necessary to send you a copy of the enclosed letter which is self explanatory. Thematization is an added discourse function as compared to Johansson’s, although he mentions it as a variety of topic linking (2002: 199). One reason why it seems appropriate to propose it as a separate category is the fact that some examples simply do not fall neatly into any of the other categories, such as (11) above. On the other hand, thematization seems to be an accompanying factor in most of the examples where the cleft can be assigned to one of the functional categories described above. Furthermore, SFL tradition views both I T -clefts and WH -clefts as thematization devices (predicated theme and thematic equative, respectively; see also Table 3). Here one must bear in mind the basic function of Theme and Rheme which is a partition of the message into two parts, each of which carries a type of prominence. Thematic prominence has to do with the functions of Theme as the point of departure of the clause as message, or ‘the ground from which the message is taking off’ (Halliday 1994: 38). Rhematic prominence on the other hand has to do with the fact that the (end of the) Rheme tends to be the locus of new information (cf. Fries 1994: 233 f). Gómez-Gónzales (2000: 303 ff.)
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describes the IT-cleft as a special theme construction, i.e. one that marks off the theme of a sentence and gives it extra focus. Similarly, Collins (1991: 171) notes that ‘the theme in clefts carries a “textual” form of prominence’. If the IT-cleft is seen as a construction for thematization, it should follow that the theme in this construction, like other themes, can be given, new, contrastive or non-contrastive. Perzanowski and Gurney (1997: 214) note that ‘certain types of it-clefts […] frequently occur in negative contexts’. This is also a finding of the present study, where three examples had not until… as the clefted constituent, such as (12). In such cases, a non-cleft version is not without problems, given that the speaker wants a particular theme-rheme structure. That is, the corresponding noncleft version will require subject-verb inversion (12a). The IT-cleft may thus be a way of using a marked construction in order to avoid one that is even more marked. (12)
However it wasn’t until his fourth album that the instrument’s capabilities were more fully explored <,> <S2B-023 #22:1:A> (12a) Not until his fourth album was the instrument’s capabilities more fully explored. Gundel (2002) and Johansson (2002) both document that IT -clefts are more common in Norwegian/Swedish than in English. Looking for more examples similar to (12) above, I have, however, found several examples of English ITclefts corresponding to other thematization structures in Norwegian, where fronting of adverbials is more common and less marked than in English (Hasselgård 1997: 14). In example (13), from the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus (ENPC), the Norwegian original does not have a cleft, but a fronted adverbial. The translator, struggling to keep the thematic structure intact, opts for a cleft – possibly again to avoid an even more marked structure. (13)
Først på den tredje dagen hadde Aua våknet. (ENPC: MN1) Lit: first [=only] on the third day had Aua awakened. It was not until the third day that Aua awakened. (MN1T)
However, the thematizing function of IT-clefts does not only occur where a noncleft alternative would be awkward. In (14), for example, a non-clefted alternative with a fronted adverbial is quite acceptable (14a), although there may be slightly less focus on the adverbial. The clefted constituent does not mark any contrast, nor does it close or launch a topic. According to Collins (1991: 175) the IT-cleft enables an ‘unambiguous mapping of theme on to new information in the unmarked instance’, as themes in IT-clefts are likely to convey new information (Collins 1990: 111). In (12)-(14) the clefted constituent is indeed new. (14)
It was in nineteen hundred and six that the Queen’s great-grandfather King Edward the Seventh decreed that privates in the Household Cavalry should henceforth to be known as troopers
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(14a) In nineteen hundred and six the Queen’s great-grandfather King Edward the Seventh decreed that privates in the Household Cavalry should henceforth to be known as troopers Delin and Oberlander (1995: passim) suggest yet another discourse function of IT-clefts, in that the content of the cleft clause is marked as prior in time to the main story line. An example of this may be (15). However, the content of the preceding sentence is also ‘prior in time to the main story line’, so I am not convinced this property is contributed by the IT-cleft construction. Instead I have classified the example as Thematizing. As in (11)-(13) a non-cleft version could not easily have the same theme-rheme structure. In a sense it is also topiclaunching, in that it occurs early in a section concerned with stages in this person’s military career. However, this can also be seen as a function of Theme. (15)
And the Field Officer Brigade waiting rides up to Her Majesty the Queen. He was not granted security for officer training when he joined the regiment in nineteen sixty-eight because of his Polish ancestry. It was as a G u a r d s m a n that he came to the Second Battalion which now he commands and eventually became a lance sergeant instructor at the Guards Depot. When he was finally accepted for Sandhurst he went on to win the Sword of Honour and has since served as an officer with every company of each battalion of the regiment. < S2A-011 #122-125:1:A>
It is tempting to propose that the basic function of IT-clefts is thematization, and that other functions are subsidiary to this. In other words, the marking of contrast with a preceding topic, the launching of a new topic and the preparation for a new topic may all be seen simply as functions of Theme. 5.6
Discourse functions and information structure
Johansson (2002: 193) suggests that the discourse functions of clefts are associated with the different patterns of information structure outlined in section 4 above. According to his findings, type A correlates with the discourse functions contrast and summative, type B with topic linking, type C with topic launching, and type D with contrast. Table 5 presents a summary of the occurrence of the various discourse functions of IT-clefts with adverbials in the present material. This has been correlated with the type of information structure identified in each cleft sentence. Because few of the IT -clefts with adverbials were of the stressed focus type, there are few examples of contrast. There are thus not enough examples of this function to make a valid comparison with Johansson’s results, although it is interesting that several of the contrast examples belong to type C (all new). It may be noted that when a clefted constituent conveying new information expresses contrast, the implication is ‘contrary to expectation’ rather than ‘contrary to what has been claimed’. Type B (given + new) seems to be a good indicator of Topic
207
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linking, or transition from one topic to another, as in Johansson’s material. Type C (all new) is a relatively good indicator of Thematization, although this type also has a range of other functions. Type D is too scarcely represented to provide any basis for even tentative conclusions. Table 5. Discourse functions identified – ranked according to frequency of occurrence and correlated with information structure Function Transition Thematization7 Contrast8 Summative Topic launching Contrast + transition Contrast + topic launching Total
6.
Type A all given 1 2 2
5
Type B Type C Type D Total given + new all new new + given 18 4 23 5 7 12 3 1 6 2 0 1 5 1 1 2 0 2 2 0 1 1 26 18 2 51
IT-clefts in different registers
Since the ICE-GB includes a range of different spoken and written registers, it was possible to check whether the registers differed as to the use of adverbials in IT -clefts. Collins (1991: 181) reports a slightly higher frequency of IT-clefts in writing (the LOB Corpus) than in speech (the London-Lund Corpus). In the ICEGB the difference between speech and writing was the opposite as regards the frequency of IT-clefts with adverbials: approximately 0.6 vs. 0.4 occurrences per 10,000 words, respectively. However, when the spoken category was divided into scripted vs. unscripted, a further difference emerged, as shown in Table 6. The category of scripted speech, making up only 6% of the corpus, accounts for 24% of the clefts with adverbials. The unscripted spoken categories and the written categories are then left with the same frequency of clefted adverbials. Table 6. Frequency of IT-clefts with adverbials in different genres in the ICE-GB Genre/medium Spoken (unscripted) Scripted speech Writing Total
No of words in ICE-GB 572,464 65,098 423,702 1,061,264
No of clefted adverbials 24 12 15 51
No of clefted adverbials per 10,000 words 0.4 1.8 0.4 0.5
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One may speculate that the discourse functions of clefts are well suited to the (rhetorical) purposes of the scripted speech categories. These categories typically belong to expository genres, particularly lectures and broadcast narration, but there are also some official speeches. Possible reasons why the informativepresupposition clefts with adverbials are handy may have to do with the possibility of assigning unambiguous thematic prominence to the clefted constituent and the possibility of presenting new information in the cleft clause without asserting it. Further, as Delin (1992: 300) claims, the information in the (presupposed) cleft clause is presented as a non-negotiable fact, which clearly has its rhetorical advantages. Further exploration of such rhetorical properties of clefts is, however, beyond the scope of this paper. 7.
Concluding remarks
The starting point for the present study was a hypothesis that IT-clefts with adverbials behave differently from other IT-clefts in discourse. The background for this hypothesis was that clefts with adverbials in focus position seemed to have an unexpected information structure, particularly that there seemed to be many examples of the given + new pattern. One of the conclusions of the present study must be that these perceived differences have to do with quantity rather than with quality, as the information structure and the discourse functions found with clefted adverbials have also been identified and described with other types of clefted constituent (e.g. by Collins 1991, Johansson 2002). Presumably, many of the differences arise from the fact that IT -clefts with adverbials tend to be informative-presupposition clefts, while other IT-clefts are more likely to be stressed-focus clefts. The typical information structure of the IT-clefts with adverbials involves a clefted constituent carrying given information and a cleft clause carrying new information or, alternatively, one in which both parts of the cleft construction are new. In both Collins (1991:11) and Johansson (2002: 188) these two types are less frequent. It is clear that clefts with adverbials have a range of textual meanings, or discourse functions. It is equally clear that one must study the clefts in context in order to get at these functions. The material offered examples of IT-clefts serving contrastive, topic-launching, transitional, and summative functions. It was suggested in section 5.5 that these discourse functions can all be regarded as somehow ancillary to the function of theme (or to the theme-rheme nexus in the case of transition). The use of an IT-cleft enhances the textual prominence of the theme. As a consequence, the construction is well suited for marking off the theme as new or contrastive. However, IT -clefts are also used when the clefted constituent is neither new nor contrastive, in which case the construction may simply serve to make the theme-rheme division of the message extra clear. This may be the case
Adverbials in IT-cleft constructions
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in clefts marking transition as well as in clefts where none of the other discourse functions outlined in section 5 can be identified. The function of transition seems particularly prominent with clefted adverbials. Clefts with this function typically have a given, often anaphoric, adverbial in cleft focus position, while the cleft clause introduces a topic for the subsequent discourse. The speaker/writer thus achieves a smooth transition between two topics, juxtaposing them by means of a relational clause, and launching the new topic unobtrusively in a subordinate clause. It was also shown that there are cases of IT-clefts being used to place an adverbial in thematic position that would otherwise be difficult to place clauseinitially. This was seen with negative adverbials (e.g. not until…), which would have required subject-operator inversion in a corresponding non-cleft sentence, and with adverbials such as with much regret (example 11), which probably could not have occurred in initial position in a non-cleft sentence. Furthermore, the ITcleft can give extra thematic focus to clefted constituents that would have come across as relatively unmarked themes in non-cleft sentences, particularly time adverbials (e.g. example 14). In the present study I have made frequent comparison with other studies of clefts, particularly Collins (1991) and Johansson (2002). There are some weaknesses involved in these comparisons. First of all, the three studies are based on rather different corpora. More importantly, assigning information values and discourse functions is no exact science, and the subjective element involved in this work may account for some of the differences between previous studies and my own. Ideally, the present study should have been extended to include IT-clefts with nominal constituents in the ICE-GB corpus. This might have made the comparisons with other IT-clefts more reliable. However, this task must be left to a later study. Another possible extension of the study would be to explore further the different uses of IT-clefts in various genres. The investigation reported in section 5.6 showed a clear difference in frequency of the construction across genres, cutting across the spoken/written dimension. A further study might look more closely into such genre differences as well as more specific rhetorical uses of the IT-cleft. Notes 1. I follow the terminology of e.g. Gundel (2002) and Delin (1992), describing the IT-cleft construction in terms of a clefted constituent and a cleft clause. No discussion of the syntactic status of the ‘relative-like’ subordinate clause will be undertaken here. 2. In the corpus examples, the IT-cleft construction has been underlined, with the clefted constituent in italics. 3. The category of manner adjuncts has been defined quite widely and includes adjuncts of means and comparison.
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4. The systemic-functional term corresponding to IT-cleft is predicated Theme (cf. Halliday 1994: 58). 5. It is usually assumed that wh-clefts do not allow focus on adverbials, though reversed wh-cleft seem to behave differently (cf. Johansson 2002: 96-97, who gives examples of (reversed) wh-clefts with where and why, e.g. Here is where I look like Marilyn Monroe). 6. Delin (1992: 294) suggests that ‘the reason that cleft presuppositions are so frequently assumed to specify information that is mutually known perhaps lies in the fact that much of the discussion of it-clefts has centred around decontextualized examples.’ 7. As it is argued elsewhere in this paper that Thematization may be the primary function of IT-clefts, it should be noted that the examples classified as ‘Thematization’ in Table 5 are those where none of the other discourse functions could be clearly identified. 8. It is assumed that the function of contrast is not prominent in the examples not classified as such in Table 5. References Biber, D., S. Johansson, G. Leech, S. Conrad and E. Finegan (1999), Longman grammar of spoken and written English. London: Longman. Collins, P.C. (1991), Cleft and pseudo-cleft constructions in English. London and New York: Routledge. Delin, J. (1990), ‘Focus in cleft constructions’, Research Series ‘Blue Book Note’ No 5, Centre for Cognitive Science, University of Edinburgh.
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international conference on English language research on computerized corpora. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1-14. Hasselgård, H. (in preparation), Manner, place, time. A corpus-based study of adverbials in present-day English. Johansson, M. (2002), Clefts in English and Swedish: A contrastive study of ITclefts and WH -clefts in original texts and translations. PhD Thesis, Lund University. Perzanowski, D. and J. Gurney (1997), ‘The functionality of it-clefts in selected discourses: The message in the medium’. Word, 48: 207-236. Quirk, R., S. Greenbaum, G. Leech and J. Svartvik (1985), A comprehensive grammar of the English language. London: Longman. Prince, E. (1978), ‘A comparison of w h -clefts and it-clefts in discourse’. Language, 54: 883-906. Corpus material The International Corpus of English, British component (ICE-GB); see
On the pragmatic functions of let’s utterances Bernard De Clerck University of Ghent
The difference between a boss and a leader: a boss says, 'Go!' – a leader says, 'Let’s go!' E. M. Kelly, Growing Disciples, 1995 Abstract This paper presents the results of research into the pragmatic functions of let’s utterances in the spoken component of the ICE-GB.1 The first part of the paper gives an overview of the grammatical features and the pragmatic uses of let’s utterances as described in the literature. The second part presents a detailed analysis of the attested let’s utterances in the corpus. Apart from testing the force and accuracy of the existing descriptions, the paper also examines the frequencies of occurrence of these functions and possible relationships with the different text categories they occur in. The goal is to provide an answer to such questions as who uses let’s utterances where, why, and how. 1.
Introduction
Constructions with let’s are intriguing. When one considers the possible meanings of the pair (a) Let us have a drink (b) Let’s have a drink one can see that (b) is not just an informal variant of (a) with the abbreviated objective pronoun us. On a semantic and a pragmatic level the picture is clearly more complex than that. The meaning of example (a) is ambiguous and can be interpreted in two ways. On the one hand, it can be interpreted as a non-inclusive request for permission (i.e. the hearer does not belong to the group referred to by us), which can be paraphrased as Allow us to have a drink. On the other hand, it can be interpreted as a hearer-inclusive proposal or suggestion for joint action, involving both the speaker and the hearer. Example (b), however, is restricted in semantic scope and has lost its non-inclusive interpretation. It no longer has the meaning ‘allow us to have a drink’. In contrast with (a), its illocutionary function is restricted to a hearer-inclusive proposal for joint action and as such Shall we
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have a drink? comes closer as a paraphrase than Allow us to have a drink.2 It appears then that let’s constructions seem to have gone through (and might still be going through) a process of semantic “bleaching” (Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 924) which also affects their pragmatic illocutionary functions. This paper focuses on these pragmatic functions and investigates the influence of semantic bleaching on the different pragmatic uses of let’s constructions in present-day British English. However, before moving on to a more fine-grained pragmatic and corpus-based analysis, I shall briefly examine the influence of the semantic bleaching process on the grammatical properties of let’s constructions. 2.
Grammatical properties of let’s constructions and the status of let and let’s
There has been a great deal of debate on the syntactic properties of let and let’s in the existing literature, including the way they should be labelled or categorised. What is interesting about this discussion is that it shows the shortcomings of traditional grammatical distinctions whenever they are confronted with the hybrid syntactic nature of a certain language item. The discussions also exemplify the interconnectedness of the pragmatics, semantics and grammar of a language and the descriptive and analytical problems that arise when the consequences of certain changes in a construction affect these three levels at different rates. Indeed, when reviewing the relevant literature one can see that the syntactic properties of let and let’s in the constructions at hand are actually described as a mixture of auxiliary and non-auxiliary-like syntactic properties, whose syntactic behaviour is often explained in terms of idiosyncratic construction-specific characteristics. One way of accounting for these properties is found in Seppänen (1977), who identifies let as a hybrid modal auxiliary with a mixture of features, characteristic of central and marginal modals. Seppänen points to the fact that, like a regular modal, let “occurs only in combination with a main verb, forming with it a complex predicate where the semantic contribution of let is the notion of volition” (Seppänen 1977: 517).3 Furthermore, like the modals, let is always followed by a bare infinitive form of the main verb. According to Seppänen, other shared characteristics include the absence of non-finite forms, the lack of inflection in the third person singular and the past tense, its use for negation and emphatic stress. However, unlike the modals, negation with do is possible (Don’t let’s do it vs. Let’s not do it), as is sometimes the case with the semi-modals ought to and used to. Yet, in order to explain differences in use between let in let’s constructions and these semi-modals, Seppänen has to resort to idiosyncratic properties. This is especially the case with regard to the use of let as the operator of the sentence in combination with do (Do let’s try it again vs. Didn’t they ought to like it?). Furthermore, in his analysis, he regards the NP following let as its subject, which forces him to conclude that another unique and idiosyncratic property of let in these constructions is that they require the subject to be in the
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accusative (objective) form when it is a pronoun, hence, us, me, him, her, them. The problem with Seppänen’s argumentation is that he is forced to attribute these properties to the idiosyncratic nature of let as a modal verb.4 If let is analysed as the imperative form of a full verb, the latter properties can be explained more prosaically. Treating let as the imperative of a full verb, however, is far from problemfree either. In one approach, put forward by Costa (1972), no distinction is made between the full lexical let and let as it occurs in let’s constructions. In the latter case, Costa still regards let as a straightforward imperative of a full lexical verb, i.e. ‘allow’. The effect of let as an imperative is described as “exhorting the second person to allow the desired event (…) to take place” (1972: 142).5 This view on the meaning of let, however, cannot account for the ambiguous meaning of Let us have a drink, described above, and seems to ignore the fact that in the contracted variant Let’s have a drink the interpretation ‘request for permission’ (similar to allow us) has all but disappeared.6 There are other distinctive features of let in let’s constructions which remain unexplained in Costa’s approach. One of the most obvious characteristics of let in these constructions is of course the fact that the accusative form of we, i.e. the pronoun us, can be, and most of the time is, contracted to ‘s. In all other types of imperatives (including those with a full lexical let) us cannot be contracted. Other features that distinguish the let’s construction from the imperative with the full lexical verb include (a) the occurrence of shall we instead of will you in tag questions, (b) the nonomissibility of let’s in ellipsis, (c) the difference in semantic scope in negative utterances and (d) the fact that let’s cannot occur with a subject. A full discussion of these features is to be found in Huddleston and Pullum (2002: 934-935). I will restrict myself to giving a few examples that illustrate these contrastive distinctions. (a) Let’s have another drink, shall we?
Let her have another drink, will you?
(b) Let’s go with her.
*Yes, do. *No, don’t Yes, let’s. No, let’s not. (Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 934)
(c) 1a. Don’t let’s go with her. 2a. Let’s not go with her.
1b. Don’t let her go with you. 2b. Let her not go with you. (Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 935)
(d) *You let’s go.
You let her go.
In (c) there is a clear difference in meaning between the ordinary imperatives (1b) and (2b): in (1b) let is inside the scope of the negation, so it is paraphrasable as ‘Don’t allow X to do Y’. In (2b) let is outside the scope of the negation: in this case the utterance can be paraphrased as ‘Allow X (not) to do Y’. All these distinctive properties clearly show that the interpretation of let as an imperative of the full lexical verb let (‘allow’), as proposed by Costa does not account for these differences.
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More recent views on let and let’s, set out by Quirk et al. (1985) and Biber et al. (1999) label let’s as a pragmatic particle. Quirk et al. (1985: 148), for example, say that it is a pragmatic particle with a quasi-modal status, “an unanalysed particle pronounced /lets/”. Along the same lines Biber et al. (1999: 1117) say that “in present-day English it is for practical purposes an invariant pragmatic particle introducing independent clauses in which the speaker makes a proposal for action by the speaker and the hearer”. According to Quirk et al., the particle status of let’s is also supported by the existence, in familiar AmE, of the pleonastic variant let’s us, let’s don’t and of the construction let’s you and me in which the addition of the second person pronoun indicates that ’s is no longer associated with us. Huddleston and Pullum (2002) make similar observations and point out existing differences between what they generally call dialects A and B of the English language. Dialect B is characterised as more lenient towards constructions such as Let’s you and I…, which are similar to the pleonastic variants given by Quirk et al. with regard to AmE. In this dialect these uses “would appear to be widely enough used to qualify as acceptable informal style in standard English” (Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 935). According to them, these constructions indicate that syntactically the specialisation of let has been taken a significant step further: the ’s in these constructions is not replaceable by us (…), and also because of the prosody, it is not plausible to treat the NP you and I as being in apposition to ‘s. It seems clear rather, that let and ‘s have fused syntactically as well as phonologically, and are no longer analysable as verb+object: they form a single word which functions as a marker of the first person inclusive imperative construction (Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 935).7 However, when talking about the less lenient dialect A (i.e. a dialect which does not have the pleonastic variants illustrated above), Huddleston and Pullum say that “there is no compelling reason to suggest that there has been a reanalysis of the syntactic structure” (and hence no reason to regard let’s as a pragmatic particle). In their opinion, the data are compatible with an analysis where let is still a catenative verb, used with an NP object (us or ‘s) and (except in ellipsis) a bare infinitival clause as second complement. In their view, then, the analysis of let’s as a pragmatic particle proposed by Quirk et al. (1985) and Biber et al. (1999) would then only apply to AmE and not (yet) to BrE. Davies (1986) holds a similar view in regarding let in let’s constructions grammatically as the imperative of the full verb let, with additional and exceptional features, the possibility of contracting let us to let’s being one of them. Syntactically, it still has the status of an imperative of a main verb, but “[t]o provide a plausible account of both the form and the interpretation of the let-construction, then, it seems necessary to acknowledge a certain lack of correspondence between the two” (Davies 1986: 250).
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None of the pleonastic variants could be attested in my analysis of the ICE-GB (which only comprises the British variant of the English language). Therefore, the observations made by Davies (1986) and Huddleston and Pullum (2002) and the distinctions that are made between AmE and BrE are also supported in this paper.8 It is indeed so that let in let’s constructions is undergoing a semantic bleaching process, which takes it further away from its original meaning of ‘allow’. At a syntactic level, there is reason to believe that this is happening at different rates in AmE and BrE. In AmE the loss of semantic meaning of let has led to a reanalysis of its syntax, thereby allowing the existence of constructions such as let’s us and let’s you and I, while in BrE let in let’s constructions still shares a number of syntactic properties with the lexical let in its fossilised syntax but is semantically moving away from it. It appears then that the syntactic properties have not kept up with semantic changes in BrE, while in AmE let’s is more and more used as a pragmatic particle introducing or announcing a joint activity of speaker and addressee. In the next section we will focus more deeply on the meaning of let’s constructions and their different pragmatic uses in British English. It will appear that this construction is used as a means to different ends, in which the illocutionary point of “joint action instigator” often serves as a starting point to reach other illocutionary forces and perlocutionary effects. 3.
Pragmatic functions of let’s utterances
This section comprises a summary and discussion of the different illocutionary forces and pragmatic functions of let’s constructions, as described in the literature. I will start with the most stereotypical function and move on to less frequent and more ambiguous functions which have been noticed fairly recently. This order of describing the different pragmatic functions coincides with a pragmatic movement from an ideational level of joint action instigation, to a more textual or interactional level and eventually to the use of let’s constructions at an interpersonal level. 3.1
Let’s utterances as proposals for joint action
As indicated above, let’s utterances normally have the directive illocutionary force of a proposal for joint action: the speaker commits herself to an action and seeks the addressee’s agreement. “For this reason, a verbal response is normally expected, indicating agreement or refusal” (Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 936). Compliance with the directive (i.e. the perlocutionary effect) generally involves joint action by the speaker and the hearer, possibly involving others as well. Recent studies (Hamblin 1985: 60, Davies 1986: 229, Halliday 1994: 87, Swan 1996: 316, Biber et al. 1999: 1117, Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 936) bring this aspect of joint action instigation to the fore: unlike second person singular imperative structures, the addressees or intended agents of let’s utterances include both the speaker and the hearer. Because of this joint nature of the proposed
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action, they could be regarded as essentially “collaborative” or even “convivial” (Leech 1983: 104) in kind, “as their illocutionary goal is indifferent to or coincides with the social goal” (ibid.). Huddleston and Pullum (2002), however, remark that the speaker’s attitude towards compliance “can range from strongly wanting it (Come on, let’s get going; the bus leaves in five minutes) to merely accepting it (Okay, let’s invite Kim as well, if that’s what you want)” (Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 936), which implies that differences in conversational or institutional power might overrule the convivial aspect of jointness which seems to be inherent in the meaning of let’s. From the analysis of the data in Section 4, it will also appear that the actual pragmatic effect of the utterance will indeed greatly depend on the interlocutors themselves and their interpretation or evaluation of each other’s power at that specific moment in the conversation. 3.2
Speaker and hearer-oriented uses of let’s utterances
The literature also mentions uses of let’s which move away from this idea of joint agency. Quirk et al. (1985: 830), for example, mention that “in very colloquial English, let’s is sometimes used for a first person singular imperative as well: Let’s give you a hand.”9 Biber et al. (1999: 1117) also refer to this use, saying “there is also a tendency veering towards a first person singular (exclusive) meaning”, which they equate with ‘Let me…’.10 Similarly, Huddleston and Pullum (2002: 936) refer to cases “where the action is in fact just carried out by just one (typically the speaker).” In an example such as Let’s open the window, it is possible that the actual aim is that of “securing your agreement to my opening it”, rather than a proposal to open the window together (ibid.). This shift in meaning is even more obvious in cases where the hearer cannot (appropriately) perform the action presented in the verb, but where the agreement and cooperation of the hearer are needed in order to carry it out successfully. This use of let’s would then explain why it is often found in a medical context, when a doctor or specialist is talking to a patient: Let’s have a look at your tongue (Biber et al. 1999: 1117) In these cases, the speaker is trying to find agreement with the hearer for an action that will be carried out by the speaker only. Although the hearer has a role to play in the process of having her throat examined, the kind of action that is expected is not the same as the one presented in the verb following let’s. The actual perlocutionary effect is to get the patient to open her mouth and not to have a look at her own throat together with the doctor. Rather than a genuine proposal for joint action, it is more a (self-)exhortative announcement of the next step in the examining process with the implication that the hearer will have to open her mouth at one stage. There is another tendency in the use of let’s utterances that moves in the opposite direction and merges with a second person singular imperative meaning, i.e. the hearer is the intended agent of the action presented in the let’s utterance. Biber et al. (1999) refer to this use as “a second quasi-imperative meaning”, as
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this use proposes an action which is clearly to be carried out by the hearer. This “crypto-directive” style (Biber et al. 1999: 1117), which aims to camouflage an authoritative speech act as a collaborative one, is used especially by adults when addressing children: You all have something to do for Ms.
Let’s utterances as ‘conversational imperatives’
In the literature, the uses of let’s utterances as action instigators (whether joint or not) are mostly illustrated by examples that involve a non-linguistic action (cf. the typical example Let’s go for a drink). It is presented as the means par excellence to make a proposal for the speaker, the hearer and possibly others to ‘do’ something together outside the linguistic boundaries of the ongoing conversation. De Rycker (1990: 229), however, remarks that let’s utterances can also have specific functions within the linguistic context of the ongoing interaction itself. He says that, as “conversational imperatives (…), they frequently serve no other function than managing part of the topical and structural development of the interaction itself and perform actions relevant to the talk exchange.” Their illocutionary functions have to do with “conversational activity” (Levinson 1983: 228): “speaking, to stop with speaking, paying attention, listening, and
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interactional operations such as turn-taking, holding or yielding the floor, interrupting, butting in.” In other words, the functions that let’s utterances perform cannot only be considered in the light of their purpose as illocutionary acts but also as conversational moves, i.e. acts that regulate the ongoing talk exchange itself by “initiating, responding, interrupting or redirecting” (Stubbs 1984: 149). This use is illustrated in the following corpus example, where the broadcaster uses the let’s utterance to steer the conversation in a new direction: (1)
B: in the Academy they taught them to use more pencil but in the College more rubber <,> A: Well let’s talk about Arnold Bax because the name’s already come up in our conversation uhm and uh he’s obviously a very important figure and both of you have recorded quite a good deal of music by Bax A: Where did he look for his sources of inspiration? (ICE-GB/S1B-032#90-92; broadcast discussions)
Other let’s utterances that work at the level of ongoing interaction are those which function as “pragmatic formatives of the commentary type” (Fraser 1987: 187) or as “prospective or retrospective metapragmatic comments” (Thomas 1985: 770). They signal “how the primary illocutionary act (performed by the utterance of which they are part) fits into the ongoing conversational structure” (Fraser 1987: 187). Some examples are Let’s say or Let’s face it. Their use as true suggestions for a joint activity of saying or considering something is secondary to their use as metalinguistic utterances that provide clues to the interpretation of the utterance as a whole. In the next section, we will have a closer look at the frequency of the uses mentioned above in the spoken component of the ICE-GB and investigate whether their description in the literature can account for all attested uses. Attention will be paid to the frequency of let’s utterances in different text categories, their different pragmatic functions and the relationships that can be established between these functions and the speakers who use them. A distinction will be made between conversational and non-conversational uses and between truly joint and speaker/hearer-oriented let’s utterances, and related to these, whether they are to be seen as negotiable proposals or as conversational moves. 4.
Let’s utterances in the spoken ICE-GB
4.1
Frequency of let’s utterances in the spoken component of the ICE-GB
In this study, I examined the use of let’s utterances in the spoken component of the ICE-GB corpus. The spoken component consists of 300 texts, hierarchically organised in different text categories, which are represented in Table 1. 164 instances of let’s utterances could be attested, unevenly spread across the different text categories.11 In the dialogues the frequency of let’s is 1/3000
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and in the monologues 1/5000 words.12 Moving further down to the text categories, one can trace more specific differences in frequency. Table 1. Text categories in the spoken ICE-GB (Figures in parentheses indicate the number of 2,000-word texts in each category) dialogue (180)
private (100) public (80)
monologue (100)
unscripted (70)
scripted (30) mixed (20)
face-to-face conversations (90) phone calls (10) classroom lessons (40) broadcast discussions (20) broadcast interviews (10) parliamentary debates (10) legal cross-examinations (10) business transactions (10) spontaneous. commentaries (20) unscripted speeches (30) demonstrations (10) legal presentations (10) broadcast talks (20) non-broadcast speeches (10) broadcast news (20)
7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0
tes tions ches calls tions talks iews aries ches tions tions ions sons tions s ba t v de enta spee one mina cast inter men spee ersa nstra scus m les nsac y s r e ta pr cast eleph -exa road ast com ted conv emo st di sroo s tra n b adc us crip ce t d ca las nes ss me legal road a s c usi ad cro rlia bro aneo un -to-f b al n-b pa bro e nt c no leg o fa sp
Figure 1. Distribution of let’s in the spoken categories of the ICE-GB (tokens per 10,000 words)
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Figure 1 shows the distribution of let’s utterances in the dialogue and monologue text categories. The differences in frequency of let’s utterances across the text categories are quite large. Let’s is most common in the dialogue text categories of business transactions, classroom lessons and broadcast discussions. Within the monologue text categories it is especially frequent in the demonstrations (in fact more frequent than in the face-to-face conversations) and in the unscripted speeches. In an attempt to explain these differences in frequency, I looked at the different functions of let’s utterances in the corpus and tried to establish relationships between the functions and the text categories in which they occurred.13 4.2
Pragmatic functions of let’s utterances in the ICE-GB
4.2.1 Joint, speaker or hearer-oriented agency I first investigated the use of let’s utterances in the corpus by using the distinction that is made in the literature between joint, speaker and hearer-oriented agency. The pie chart in Figure 2 shows the distribution of the intended agents of let’s utterances in the corpus.
38% 54%
joint agency intended agent ~hearer intended agent ~speaker
8%
Figure 2. Intended agents of let’s in the spoken ICE-GB As we can see, about half of the let’s utterances are proposals for joint action in which the hearer and the speaker are the intended agents of the proposed action. The following corpus example illustrates this use: (2)
A: Let ‘s have a good uh A: So let ‘s play Trivial Pursuit as well after or something B: Mm A: Shall we (ICE-GB/S1A-048#123-126; face-to-face conversations)
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Both speaker and hearer will be involved and actively participate in the proposed action. In 38% of the let’s utterances the intended agent of the action is the speaker. In most of these cases, the hearer neither gives nor has the opportunity to give a verbal response and is undergoing the action performed by the speaker. In (3) we have an example of this speaker-oriented use in which a woman addresses herself while trying to solve a slide feed problem. The use of let’s is similar to that of let me in this case: (3)
A: Think I have a slide feed problem <,,> A: Here let’s try the next one <,> (ICE-GB/S2A-029# 97-98; unscripted speeches)
Hearer-oriented utterances only comprise 8% of the cases. Example (4) illustrates this use: (4)
A: So you go up on O and come down on Ooo and see if we can get to it that way <,,> B: That was a bit That was certainly easier <,> A: Well let’s do it again only this time your little
The music teacher is using a let’s utterance to give instructions, but does not carry out the proposed action herself. 100% 90% 80% 70% 60%
intended agent= speaker
50%
intended agent =hearer
40%
intended agent= we
30% 20% 10% 0% DIALOGUE
MONOLOGUE
Figure 3. Intended agents in dialogue and monologue text categories Figure 3 shows the distribution of these three types in the monologue and dialogue text categories. A closer examination of these different sub-categories provides the picture shown in Table 2.
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Table 2. Intended agents of let’s in the subcorpora of the ICE-GB Text categories
Intended agent = we
face-to-face conversations telephone calls classroom lessons broadcast discussions broadcast interviews legal cross-examinations business transactions spontaneous commentaries unscripted speeches demonstrations broadcast talks
44 1 8 9 2 2 7 5 7 1 1
Intended agent = hearer 7 0 1 2 0 0 0 0 0 2 1
Intended agent = speaker 12 0 10 8 2 0 6 3 15 5 3
The table shows a higher concentration of speaker-oriented let’s utterances in unscripted speeches, demonstrations, classroom lessons and broadcast talks. Let’s utterances with joint agency are most frequent in face-to-face conversations, spontaneous commentaries, business transactions and broadcast discussions (although in these categories there is a fair number of speaker oriented let’s utterances as well). In order to find an explanation for these different frequencies in the various text categories, I analysed their pragmatic function and the background information on the speakers. The following sections deal with these parameters and the influence they have on the use of let’s utterances. 4.2.2 Conversational use of let’s Apart from distinguishing between the different kinds of agent, the analysis also focused on the pragmatic function as conversational and non-conversational imperatives. The first important observation is the high frequency of conversational let’s utterances in the ICE-GB. No less than 67% of joint and speaker-oriented let’s utterances consisted of process types that were aimed at influencing the conversational flow of the interaction. An example of this conversational use is shown in (5), where the let’s utterance is used by a university lecturer to structure the topical organisation of his talk: (5)
A: So we 've got the nerve is having a kind of trophic action on muscle but ma muscle actually also a a a acts in a trophic way towards the nerve A: But let ‘s just stick with the nerve affecting the muscle for the moment. (ICE-GB/S1B-009#159-160; classroom lessons)
The correspondence between speaker-oriented let’s utterances and its conversational uses was most obvious in the monologue text categories of unscripted speeches, demonstrations and broadcast talks. About 70% of the let’s
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utterances are speaker-oriented, 70% of which are used as conversational imperatives. Examples (6) and (7) exemplify their conversational use as “expository directives” (Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 931) in these text categories: (6)
A: So I said there was going to be a lot about Ravenna in this lecture A: And uh let’s just start by establishing the idea of the basilica plan uhm because of course many of the famous A: churches of Ravenna are built in this style. (ICE-GB/ S2A-060#44-46; demonstrations)
(7)
A: So it’s to our advantage that the Greenhouse Effect exists A: So let’s just backtrack for a second A: What I’ve talked about is uh the following (ICE-GB/S2A043#115-117; unscripted speeches)
Rather than being genuine proposals for a joint action to which a verbal response of agreement or disagreement is expected, they are more like announcements of a topical shift that round off the present topic and introduce the next step in the talk. Apart from structuring the speaker’s own talk, they are also aimed at engaging the active participation of the addressee in the speaker’s exposition, but do not really expect a verbal response from the audience. As conversational imperatives they are often used in combination with other utterance launchers such as well, right, OK, so or hesitation markers (uhm, hmm). This was the case in about 70% of the conversational imperatives. They typically mark the end of one particular topic, or introduce a kind of conclusive utterance that rounds off the topic and paves the way for a new one (cf. (6) and (7) above). A similar use of speaker-oriented let’s utterances can be attested in the dialogue categories. The first important observation that can be gleaned from the analysis is that only 5% of the speakers using speaker-oriented let’s utterances had less institutional or conversational power (they were interviewees, who used let’s in ‘let’s see’ as a hesitation device). The rest of the speakers using this type had the same or more institutional or conversational power. Institutionally and/or conversationally more powerful speakers include teachers, doctors, student counsellors, careers counsellors and professors, broadcasters, interviewers and journalists. 80% of the utterances introduced by speaker-oriented let’s consisted of process types that were directly aimed at influencing the conversational flow of the interaction, both with regard to topical management and turn-taking. Especially in broadcast discussions, broadcast interviews and classroom lessons, they were used by the more powerful speaker who creates the illusion of a joint and convivial interaction, but who is in fact skilfully using let’s as a way to steer the discourse and to decide which actions are to be taken (whether jointly or not) and when. These let’s utterances are actually performative in nature, as “utterance launchers” or “idiomatic overtures” (Biber et al. 1999: 1073); the speaker is announcing the next step to be taken in the interaction rather than presenting a genuine proposal for joint activity. Apart from “propelling the conversation in a
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new direction, or orienting the listener to the following utterance, especially in relation to what has preceded”, their role also consists in “providing the speaker with a planning respite, during which the rest of the utterance can be prepared for execution” (ibid.). In this way, the broadcaster’s use of let’s see as a hesitation marker in example (8) does not just represent a mental process of cognition, semantically speaking, but rather a conversational process of the organisational type: a linguistic means of bridging a possible gap during one’s contribution and hence a means of turn-holding and/or preventing another participant from claiming the turn. (8) B: But in fact you 've both recorded the Enigma Variations and both with the with the London Philharmonic Orchestra B: But uh let ‘s see B: Watch Which one are we going to have B: That 's the problem A: Have Jack 's it 's (ICE-GB/S1B-032#61-65; broadcast discussions) Table 3 shows the distribution of conversational and non-conversational uses of let’s in the dialogue text categories.14 Table 3. distribution of conversational and non-conversational uses of let’s in dialogue text categories Text categories business transactions broadcast interviews broadcast discussions classroom lessons legal cross-examinations telephone calls face-to-face conversations parliamentary debates
Conversational let’s 7 3 12 16 2 0 16 0
Non-conversational let’s 6 1 7 3 0 1 47 0
The conversational use of let’s prevails in classroom lessons, business transactions, broadcast discussions, broadcast interviews and legal crossexaminations. Let’s utterances used as conversational imperatives then seem to be part of the repertoire of chairmen, interviewers and teachers, generally speaking of interactionally more powerful speakers, who present the conversation as a joint enterprise, but actually try to control it by restricting the hearer’s influence to a minimum. Rather than giving the floor to the hearer and providing her with the opportunity for verbal agreement or disagreement, the speaker keeps the floor and starts carrying out the action immediately after announcing it. Apart from this use at a structural or topical level, conversational let’s utterances also function as “pragmatic formatives” in 10% of the cases. This means that they function as metalinguistic utterances, which signal “how the
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primary illocutionary act (performed by the utterance of which they are part) fits into the ongoing conversational structure” (Fraser 1987: 187). Their use is briefly illustrated in the following examples: (9)
A: And the bar for a start A: Right A: which is unlikely, let’s face it. B: So I said to him (ICE-GB/S1A-008# 284-287; face-to-face conversations)
(10) A: But I still believe that <,> what is A: I mean let ‘s say Charles Dickens is communicating through you A: It 's still <,> got to be through your through the medium of you and therefore the writer (ICE-GB/ S1B-026#235-237; broadcast discussion) (11) A: Well it 's not that wonderful a film really <,> A: let ‘s be honest A: I 'm sure we 'll find something B: No (ICE-GB/S1A-006# 167-169; face-to-face conversations) When used as a pragmatic formative, let’s face it can be seen in the first place as an indication or a signal that the speaker feels very strongly about the primary communicative act. According to De Rycker (1990: 403), it may also have a defensive side to it: “it expresses the speaker’s awareness that s/he is saying something that is either controversial or obvious, but which in each case may well lead to a potentially unfavourable reaction by the listener.” Let’s is used as a ‘connective’ and in this way it still retains some of its prototypical pragmatic meaning as an act of suggesting a desirable joint activity. Similarly, it can be argued that let’s say is an indication that part of what follows counts as “a hypothetical example, a rough guess or anything else about which the speaker is not entirely sure” (De Rycker 1990: 402). Of course it can also be used as a convenient hesitation marker, thereby allowing the speaker to take more time to formulate his or her thoughts. In this way let’s say can be both a conversational imperative and a pragmatic formative. Let’s be honest also gives indications as to how the utterance of which it is part should be interpreted: it seems to indicate that although the information in the proposition might be controversial, it is still something that the speaker supports. By using the connective let’s and appealing to the hearer’s sense of honesty, the speaker tries to repair common ground or at least indicates that s/he is aware of a possible discrepancy between the propositional attitudes of the partners in the conversation. On the whole, it appears that the function of let’s utterances is primarily interactional, when used as conversational imperatives. Especially in the case of stereotyped or formulaic uses taken from a stock of ready-made utterances, their illocutionary force as a proposal for joint action is fairly weak and secondary to their use as idiomatic overtures, hesitation markers and pragmatic formatives.
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Let’s utterances, however, were not used as conversational imperatives only. In the next section I will briefly comment on the non-conversational uses and pay particular attention to a number of special cases which are not really action-oriented but which seem to present evaluative statements or emotions. 4.2.3 Non-conversational uses of let’s utterances Non-conversational let’s utterances account for 33% of all attested utterances. Most of them were typical proposals for joint agency and occurred in face-to-face conversations between intimates. They exemplify the convivial nature of the proposed action often described in the literature (cf. example (2) above). Nonconversational speaker-oriented utterances were used as self-monitoring devices during the process of carrying out an action (cf. example (3) above). Used as selfaddressed imperatives, rather than managing the ongoing interaction, they are aimed at managing the speaker’s own actions. The attested cases of heareroriented let’s utterances (8%) were non-conversational in kind (cf. example (4) above). They were especially frequent in demonstrations where the audience were asked to perform a number of activities on a computer. In the text category of face-to-face conversations, they all occurred in one and the same interaction, where an institutionally more powerful informant gives instructions to a colleague who is also trying to solve a computer problem. As mentioned above, it is possible that the indirectness of the utterance can be perceived, not as a facemaintaining strategy, but rather as a signal of insincerity and condescension. However, there was no evidence in the linguistic output of the hearers in the corpus that shows that they regarded the use of let’s in these cases as insincerely over-polite. In the attested cases this was probably due to the fact that the instructions were given for the benefit of the hearer. Interestingly, not all hearer-oriented let’s utterances occurred in a ranksensitive context, where it was used by the more powerful speaker. There is one instance in the corpus where let’s is used between intimates, which exemplifies yet another pragmatic use. In the following example the let’s utterance is not primarily used as an action instigator but as an evaluation of the hearer’s behaviour: (12)
A: God you really know how to put someone down don't you B: Oh let’s not get touchy touchy <,,> A: Very difficult Moses when you 're around <,> (ICE-GB/S1A-038#253-255; face-to-face conversations)
In this example one can see that a negative evaluation of the hearer’s behaviour has been poured into a let’s utterance. Bearing in mind the fact that heareroriented let’s utterances are primarily used in rank-sensitive contexts (cf. above), one could see this as a conscious use of patronising language by the speaker in order to be deliberately offensive, ironic or sarcastic in criticising the hearer’s behaviour. From this position of assumed authority the speaker reprimands the
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hearer and monitors her behaviour in a way similar to parents reprimanding children. It appears that let’s utterances cannot only be used as typical action instigators, but also as reactive acts of (dis)agreeing performed in response to prior claims, affirmations, statements and similar assertive illocutions. Many formulaic and colloquial imperatives, such as let’s be real, come off it, don’t be stupid, apart from being directive utterances, are also – and maybe in the first place – retrospective evaluative comments about the addressee’s behaviour or statements. In a sense, they are assertions, expressions of the speaker’s disbelief, disapproval, accompanied by a directive dimension aimed at redirecting the addressee’s behaviour. Next to expressions of evaluation of the hearer’s behaviour (such as disapproval in example (12)), let’s was also used to express a more positive attitude. In example (13), the let’s utterance is not really being used as an action instigator, but rather as a genuine expression of positive attitude towards the hearer: (13)
A: Thanks a lot B: All right B: Let ‘s hope it works A: Yep (ICE-GB/S1A-078#185-187; face-to-face conversations)
Rather than acting as a request or proposal for joint action (Shall we hope it works?), it is an expression of (shared) concern, an expression of sympathy and empathy. In this way, then, it seems that let’s utterances cannot only be used as action instigators or as conversational imperatives, but also as expressions of emotion or approval. In these cases, their directiveness is less prominent. 5. Conclusion Apart from their typical function as a (genuine) proposal for joint action, let’s utterances have various other pragmatic uses. From the analysis it has become clear that, in the ICE-GB, their most frequent function is that of a conversational imperative, aimed at regulating the conversational flow of the interaction or the structure of the speaker’s own talk. This use is especially frequent when the let’s utterances are speaker-oriented or in cases of joint agency when they are used by the interactionally more powerful speaker. In such cases, their illocutionary force of proposal for joint action is secondary to their use as conversational managers. Other non-typical functions were attested in non-conversational uses of let’s utterances which were not really oriented towards joint action, but which aimed at presenting evaluative statements or feelings on the part of the speaker at an interpersonal level. Rather than being proposals for joint action, they can be seen as retrospective evaluations.
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Further research will require a more detailed pragmatic analysis of let’s utterances and a comparison with other let constructions (e.g. let me) and other imperative structures, such as look, listen, tell me and the way these relate to let’s utterances as conversational imperatives. Notes 1. The research reported on in this paper was made possible by the Research Fund of Flanders. 2. There are other more specialised uses of let’s utterances, which will be focused on in Sections 3 and 4. None of these uses, however, is completely compatible with the strict notion of request, as in allow. 3. Seppänen rightly remarks that in this way, let is both syntactically and semantically, close to the modal may, as used in wishes: May I (we) never see that day! (Seppänen 1977: 517). 4. Another argument Seppänen uses to support his subject interpretation of the following NP, is the existence of utterances such as (a) Let you and I cry quits (b) Let all these matters pass and we three sing a song which have the nominative form and can hence not be explained in the analysis of let as the imperative of a main verb. As an example of a parallel development he refers to Dutch, “where similarly both the accusative and the nominative are used with the verb laten: Laat me/ik voorzichtig zijn, Laat hem/hij maar komen, Laat ons gaan/even Laten we gaan. The parallelism with Dutch, however, is far from complete. In fact, the only instances where these rare examples of the nominative form after let are found in English, are restricted to cases where the NP consists of two co-ordinated NPs and where the NP is separated from the verb. According to Davies (1986), the nominative form in (a) “could be felt to result from the same sort of hypercorrection that is responsible for the now frequent use of forms like between you and I, or That’s for you and I to decide”, while (b) could be considered “to result from hypercorrection in reaction to use forms like us three even as subjects” (Davies 1986: 237). Apart from that, no examples of *Let we see or *Let I see can be attested in the English language, which, all in all, makes the argument of parallelism with the uses of laten in Dutch rather doubtful. 5. A similar view is taken by Ukaji (1978). With regard to let’s constructions, the meaning is described as one in which ‘the speaker “prays” the hearer to allow a group of persons among whom the speaker and the hearer are included to carry out a particular action’ (Ukaji 1978: 120).
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6. Davies (1979) errs in the other direction by assigning special status to all examples involving let, even those examples which are obviously instances of the imperative form of the lexical verb. 7. To support their argument Huddleston and Pullum refer to the occurrence of a negative construction used by some speakers of dialect B that provides evidence for the reanalysis: let’s don’t bother. Huddleston and Pullum (2002: 935) remark, though, that “this is much less common than the construction with an NP after let’s, and cannot be regarded as acceptable in standard English.” Still, according to Huddleston and Pullum (ibid.), “its syntactic interest is that it shows conclusively that let is no longer construed as a verb: a subjectless don’t could not appear in the complement of a catenative verb.” This, in fact corroborates what Quirk et al. say about the let’s don’t in AmE. They do not say, however, that it is not acceptable as standard English. 8. It is possible, of course, that some of these constructions do occur in certain dialects of English. However, from the fact that they do not occur in the ICEGB, we might tentatively conclude that they are not used widely enough to qualify as acceptable informal style in standard British English. 9. There are other uses of us with a first person reference in colloquial English. Instances such as Give us a hand, Tell us a story, Give us a kiss all feature uses of us with a first person singular reference. In spoken language us is often abbreviated to /s/, which makes its resemblance to this particular use of let’s even more striking. 10. Although Biber et al. (1999) say that the meaning of let’s is equivalent to let me in these cases, I tend to believe that this equivalence is not complete. It seems to me that there is a slight difference in illocutionary force and in the freedom given to the addressee to reject the proposal. Let me, just like let us, can still be used or interpreted in two ways: as a true request for permission from a person or as a (self-addressed) exhortative. As mentioned, the permissive interpretation of let’s has faded and an example like Let’s have a look at your throat can no longer be interpreted as a true request for permission the way Let me have a look at your throat can. Both utterances aim at getting the hearer’s agreement, but do so in a slightly different way. By playing with the requestive interpretation of the ambiguous let me, one can give the impression of actually looking for or asking for agreement, whereas when one uses the ‘convivial’ let’s – ranks being equal – agreement is taken for granted and can be taken as a starting-point to proceed with the proposed action. Consequently, one could say in a more accurate way that the meaning of ‘first person let’s’ is equivalent to the exhortative meaning of let me only. 11. All in all, the corpus contains 178 let’s utterances, 14 of which were found in the written part of the corpus. 12. The mixed category of broadcast news did not feature any let’s utterances. 13. Clearly, the fact that some text categories allow certain specific pragmatic uses more easily than others, is just one possible way of explaining these
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differences in frequency. Of course one should also bear in mind stylistic reasons, to name but one aspect in explaining differences between the text categories. In parliamentary debates or legal presentations, for example, which contained no instances of let’s, speakers might have chosen a less informal construction in order to comply with the formal nature of interaction that is taking place. 14. In the text categories where only a few let’s utterances were attested (e.g. telephone calls, broadcast talks, legal cross-examinations), it should be clear that the distribution of conversational and non-conversational uses is not to be taken as representative of the general use of let’s in these categories. Further research, including the pragmatic analysis of a larger amount of data, will be needed to corroborate the attested uses.
References Biber, D., S. Johansson, G. Leech, S. Conrad and E. Finegan (1999), T h e Longman grammar of spoken and written English. London: Longman. Costa, R.M. (1972), ‘Let’s solve let’s!’. Papers in Linguistics 5: 141-144. Davies, E.C. (1979), On the semantics of syntax: mood and condition in English. London: Croom Helm. Davies, E.E. (1986), The English imperative. London: Croom Helm. De Rycker, T. (1990), Imperative subtypes in conversational British English: an empirical investigation. Unpublished PhD dissertation. Department of Linguistics, University of Antwerp. Fraser, B. (1987), ‘Pragmatic formatives’, in: J. Verschueren and M. BertuccelliPapi (eds), The pragmatic perspective: Selected papers from the 1985 International Pragmatics Conference. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 179-194. Halliday, M.A.K. (1994), An introduction to functional grammar. London: Edward Arnold. Hamblin, C. (1987), Imperatives. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Huddleston, R. and G.K. Pullum (2002), The Cambridge grammar of the English language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leech, G. (1983), Principles of pragmatics. London: Longman. Levinson, S. (1983), Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Quirk, R., S. Greenbaum, G. Leech and J. Svartvik (1985), A comprehensive grammar of the English language. London: Longman. Seppänen, A. (1977), ‘The position of let in the English auxiliary system’. English Studies 58: 515-529. Stubbs, M. (1984), Discourse analysis: the sociolinguistic analysis of natural language. Oxford: Blackwell Swan, M. (1996), Practical English usage. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Thomas, J. (1985), ‘The language of power: towards a dynamic pragmatics’. Journal of Pragmatics 9: 765-783. Ukaji, M. (1978), Imperative sentences in early modern English. Tokyo: Kaitakusha.
Methodological problems in corpus-based historical pragmatics. The case of English directives Thomas Kohnen University of Cologne Abstract This paper gives a summary of some methodological problems a corpus-based diachronic analysis of speech acts has to face, with particular emphasis on the case of English directives. Among the issues discussed are the difficulties with a complete inventory of the different manifestations of directives in the history of English, the scarcity of historical data, problems of interpretation and the relationship between the number of the particular manifestations of directives found in a corpus and the 'underlying' total number of directives. In a second part the paper presents some illustrative results of corpus-based investigations tracing the history of English directives. 1.
Introduction
The study of the diachronic development of speech acts with the help of electronic corpora raises serious questions which challenge both the reliability of existing data collections and the results of the investigations which are based on them. Any attempt to write a corpus-based illocutionary history is faced with basic problems involving the methodology of historical pragmatics and the design and use of historical corpora. This paper aims to give a summary of some important problems which I encountered in my corpus-based research, illustrating them with several studies on the history of English directive speech acts. It falls into two parts. The first part addresses some basic methodological issues; the second part is devoted to some illustrative results of studies exploring aspects of the history of English directives. 2.
Methodological issues
One of the rather basic methodological problems a corpus-based diachronic study of directives is faced with is finding all the different manifestations or patterns associated with directive speech acts in the history of English. The research carried out in the fields of speech-act theory and pragmatics has made it sufficiently clear that with speech acts there is no predictable link between form and function. We may know that a directive speech act is an attempt by a speaker or writer to get the addressee to carry out an act (Searle 1969: 66; 1976: 11) and
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we may assume that this illocutionary function remains stable throughout the history of English. But we do not know in advance what linguistic form a speaker or writer may employ for his directive. We can only rely on the fact that people tend to use more or less fixed phrases or patterns in order to perform certain speech acts. Since corpus searches must be based on forms rather than functions, the study of a history of directives has to start with a selection of forms we would consider typical manifestations of directives in the different periods of the English language. What are the most important manifestations of directives in the history of English? The most straightforward examples which come to mind are explicit performatives (I order you to carry this message to the king), imperative sentences, constructions with let (let’s do it) and constructions involving the subjunctive, especially those with inverted word order (go we).1 Clearly, however, there are many other manifestations of directive speech acts. The number of possible candidates becomes even greater if we include those realisations which are sometimes called ‘indirect’, because they involve sentence types different from the imperative format.2 Some typical examples are declarative sentences with the second person pronoun plus a modal involving obligation (you must leave, you ought to do this etc.), declarative sentences with a first person pronoun plus a verb involving volition (I want you to do this, I would like you to do this etc.) and different kinds of interrogative manifestations (Can you open the door? Will you do the washing up? Why don’t you come in? – cf. Quirk et al. 1985: 1477-78). Quite clearly, this enumeration could be continued. It is difficult to give a comprehensive list of all the typical manifestations of directive speech acts for all periods of the English language. What does this mean for a corpus-based analysis of speech acts? Basically, there seem to be two kinds of procedure. First, since we are faced with an open, heterogeneous and highly variable set of forms we can restrict our analysis to an eclectic illustration of the speech act under consideration. That is, we look around in the periods of English and see what typical realisations we find, for example, showing some imperatives and inverted constructions in Middle English texts and some interrogative constructions in Early Modern texts, perhaps adding some intuitive judgments about changes which we assume to be typical. Secondly, we can base our analysis on a deliberate selection of typical patterns which we trace by way of a representative analysis throughout the history of English. For example, we could examine the development of imperatives, constructions with let or interrogative directives throughout the history of English. I call the first kind of procedure illustrative eclecticism, the second structured eclecticism. Given the fact that the research is doomed to be eclectic, I think corpus linguists should opt for structured eclecticism. Another methodological problem is difficulties of interpretation. Speech act assignment is in many cases a matter of interpretation which requires careful consideration of contextual knowledge. For example, we are liable to find imperative constructions which do not serve as directives, but as imprecations or
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wishes (Quirk et al. 1985: 831-832, Biber et al. 1999: 220). This problem, of course, becomes more serious with ‘indirect’ manifestations because their ‘indirectness’ is due to their openness to different speech-act assignments. These are difficulties with functional interpretation, which apply to any linguistic data, historical or contemporary. But in the history of English directives we also encounter difficulties which relate to semantic or syntactic changes. This often results in what I would call pragmatic false friends, constructions which, against a contemporary background, suggest a wrong pragmatic interpretation. I will present four examples. The first example is taken from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Here a young knight urgently needs to know what women desire most. (1)
“My leeve mooder,” quod this knyght, “certain I nam but deed but if that I kan seyn What thyng it is that wommen moost desire. Koude ye me wisse, I wolde wel quite youre hire.” (c 1395, Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The Wife of Bath's Tale’, 1005-1008)
Quite clearly, the meaning of the last line is not Could you please instruct me? I would certainly reward your efforts, that is, an indirect request, but rather If you could tell me (knew how to instruct me), I would reward your efforts. The difficulty of interpretation is here due to the fact that the inverted clause pattern (koude ye) could be interrogative or conditional in Middle English and that the verb cunne was still used as a full verb in this period. The second example is taken from an official letter by Henry V: (2)
we wol and charge you. fiat ye se and ordeyne †at hasty restitucion of †e forsaide goodes be maad and †at ye do compelle our saide sougettes to make restitucion abouesaid … (Helsinki Corpus, Letters, 1418/1419, Henry 5, 99)
The difficulty of interpretation is here due to the fact that willan had an additional speech-act meaning in Old English and Middle English. Thus the expression we wol must be taken as a performative phrase, where wol has the speech-act meaning of ‘order, command’. The speech-act meaning seems likely since wol is in a co-ordinate construction with another performative directive (charge). Thus we are not dealing with some kind of indirect directive along the lines of I would like you to … but with a performative expression. (3)
Ford: Blesse you sir. Fal.: And you sir: would you speake with me? (Helsinki Corpus, 1623 [1597], William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor, 46.C1)
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In the third example, which is from Shakespeare, Falstaff has already been informed that Ford wants to talk to him. Thus the utterance Would you speak with me? is not a request (Would you talk to me?) but rather a real question which serves to identify the man who wanted to talk to Falstaff (Did you want to talk to me?). In Modern English this interpretation would not be possible because would cannot be taken as referring to the past. (4)
But now my good masters since we must be gone And leaue you behinde vs, here all alone: Since at our last ending thus mery we bee, For Gammer Gurtons nedle sake, let vs haue a plaudytie. (Helsinki Corpus, 1575 [1552-63], William Stevenson, Gammer Gvrtons Nedle, 70)
The fourth example contains a construction with let us. It is found at the ending of Stevenson's play Gammer Gvrtons Nedle. Here the phrase let vs haue a plaudytie clearly is an invitation addressed to the audience to give applause, which should be paraphrased with ‘allow us / cause us to have some applause’. Thus, although this construction is an imperative, it cannot be considered a hortative or periphrastic imperative construction (cf. Rissanen 1999: 279). Rather it is a construction with the full verb let. This is quite disturbing against a contemporary background since we would like to rely on the assumption that constructions with let us are always periphrastic constructions. The discussion of the excerpts has shown that a corpus-based analysis which selects items on the basis of form must be extremely careful with the interpretation of the examples. Each individual item which we assume to be a manifestation of a directive speech act requires careful consideration if we want to avoid pragmatic false friends. The third methodological issue involves the relationship between the examples of particular manifestations of directives found in a corpus and the ‘underlying’ total number of directives. If we compare the different frequencies of selected manifestations in the periods of English, do the increasing or decreasing numbers only reflect an increase or decrease in the respective manifestations or do they suggest a general change in the use of directives as well? For example, if we find more directive performatives in Late Middle English letters than in Modern English ones, is this because people choose to use different means for expressing their requests in letters today or is it because they use fewer requests? In other words, would a decreasing frequency of performative directives point to an increase in alternative manifestations (e.g. imperatives, constructions with let, interrogative directives) or to a general, ‘underlying’ decrease of directives? I think this problem can only be tackled if we base our analysis on comparable text types or genres and if we assume a more or less stable functional profile for these text types or genres. For example, we could assume that religious instruction requires directive speech acts in the Middle Ages as well as today. Or we might assume that text types involving spoken
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interaction are liable to contain a stable amount of directives because, when people talk to each other (especially in an everyday setting), they are likely to perform requests. The fourth methodological problem to be mentioned here is how to deal with the lack of sufficient data. In the early periods of English the number of relevant examples (especially of indirect manifestations) found in a ‘classic’ corpus (like the Helsinki Corpus) tends to be fairly low. An analysis based on such numbers cannot be held to be valid. Among the options of dealing with this problem is extending the database by using large dictionary ‘corpora’ (e.g. MED or OED) or finding functional patterns in the restricted number of items at hand. Each approach has advantages as well as disadvantages. When studying constructions with let me (e.g. let me ask you to do this) I found that the Helsinki Corpus had only 14 relevant items in the Middle English section.3 In order to obtain more examples I searched all the quotations in the electronic version of the Middle English Dictionary. Here my search produced 231 relevant items. On the basis of these data one can show, for example, that in Middle English there are no combinations with let me plus an illocutionary verb (let me ask you, let me entreat you). I presume that such a result is much more reliable if based on the MED data rather than on the 14 items found in the Helsinki Corpus. On the other hand, with electronic ‘corpora’ like the MED we do not know the proportion of the individual text types and we cannot get regularised frequencies. When studying interrogative manifestations of directives which mention the addressee (Can you pass the salt? Would you do the washing up?) I found only 36 examples in the Helsinki Corpus. This number may seem very small but in the Early Modern English section these data showed an exceptional degree of distributional consistency. First, all instances (apart from one item) belong to spoken interaction, and the large majority of the items (85%) belong to two text types: plays and trials. If we focus on these two text types (containing 79,000 words out of the total number of 551,000 words), we can see a consistent increase of the items with a reasonably high frequency reaching 4.15 per 10,000 words at the end of the 17th century (see Table 1; for a detailed discussion of the data see Kohnen 2002). Table 1: Addressee-based directives in plays and trials in the Helsinki Corpus (tokens per 10,000 words) 1420-1500
1500-1570
1570-1640
1640-1710
0
2.26
3.45
4.15
So the scarcity of data may be balanced if we focus our attention on indvidual text types and their functional profiles. On the other hand, the concentration on
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individual text types or genres may raise doubts about the representativeness of the analysis. To sum up this methodological section, I would like to advocate the procedure which was called structured eclecticism. It makes up for the heterogeneity of the data by systematic selection, comprehensive diachronic statistical analysis and careful consideration of each item. In addition, it has been shown that a diachronic analysis of speech acts should be embedded in a reasonably stable functional profile of text types. This as well as the notorious lack of data call for more extensive text-type specific corpora for historical pragmatic studies. 3.
Aspects of a history of English directives
What is the outline of a history of directives in English? It seems best to start with a general consideration of the speech-act class of directives. Since a directive aims at an act to be performed by the addressee, it can be seen as a threat against the addressee's freedom of action and freedom from imposition, that is as a threat against what is usually called the addressee's negative face (Brown and Levinson 1987). It seems that in the history of English considerations of face have assumed increasing importance, changing the manifestations of directives more towards polite and ‘indirect’ realisations. This tendency can be illustrated by a decrease of ‘direct’ realisations of directives, for example performatives and imperatives, and by an increase of prototypical ‘indirect’ manifestations, for example interrogative directives and constructions with let. With regard to performatives, I found that the frequency of directive performatives in the Old English section of the Helsinki Corpus is seven times as high as that found in the LOB Corpus (4 vs. 0.55 per 10,000 words). In addition, the frequency of performative verbs referring to acts of ordering and commanding is far higher in the Old English section than in the LOB Corpus (1.5 vs. 0.07). And whereas the LOB Corpus shows a clear predominance of ‘suggest/advice verbs’, the Old English part of the Helsinki Corpus has none (for a detailed discussion see Kohnen 2000). So it seems that performatives, which at least today are a rather ‘direct’ and mostly face-threatening manifestation of directives, are significantly less common in contemporary (written) English than they were during the Anglo-Saxon period. If they are used today, they tend to be employed in rather ‘mild’ requests, like suggestions or advice. On the assumption that people perform as many directives in written English today as they did in Anglo-Saxon times we may infer that the performative option of directives has fallen out of favour and that other – possibly less face-threatening – means are employed instead. With regard to the imperative manifestation of directives it can be shown that the number of imperatives decreases from Middle English to Modern English. I looked at imperatives in the religious treatises in the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English (PPCME2, Kroch and Taylor 2000) and in the
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Brown Corpus and LOB Corpus. Religious treatises, both in their Late Medieval and their modern form, can be assumed to have a basic instructional function, which makes it likely for imperatives to be used there. Since I wanted to focus on instructional imperatives which directly serve the purpose of religious instruction associated with the text type, I excluded those sentences which appear in direct speech, that is imperatives contained in narrative sections, quotations from the Bible, etc. (see Figure 1).
5
4,5
4 3 1,9
2 1
0,6
0,8
0 1200-1375 1390-1450 PPCME2
LOB
BROWN
Figure 1: Imperatives (excluding direct speech) in the PPCME2, the LOB Corpus and the Brown Corpus (tokens per 1000 words). Figure 1 shows that the frequency of imperatives in the period 1200-1375 is fairly high (4.5). It goes down significantly in Late Middle English (1.9). But the frequency in the LOB Corpus (0.6) and in the Brown Corpus (0.83) is less than half of the Late Middle English figure.4 Since we may assume that all texts share the same basic function of religious instruction, the decrease in imperatives can be explained either by the hypothesis that religious instruction uses fewer directives today (and, for example, more representative speech acts instead) or by the hypothesis that imperatives no longer enjoy wide currency as a means of directives in religious instruction but are replaced by other manifestations, for example indirect directives. It is difficult to determine with certainty which hypothesis is correct, but there is some evidence which renders the second option more probable than the first one. Frequent constructions with let us and with modals point to the fact that directives are still being used in religious instruction. And, of course, a number of directives employing the imperative can still be found in the contemporary data. There is, however, a remarkable difference between most of these imperatives and the ‘typical’ imperatives in the Middle
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English religious instructions. Whereas the Middle English texts involve straightforward acts which are or should be part of the addressees’ everyday life (like “doing good deeds” or praying, see examples 5 and 6), the imperatives found in the modern texts typically denote mental acts which help the addressee to decode the text or to grasp the point of the text (see examples 7 and 8). (5)
... flerfore do flou fli-silf alle fle gode deedis wifl-oute deuocioun, fle whiche †ou didist bifore with deuocioun. (a 1396, Walter Hilton, Hilton's Eight Chapters on Perfection, PPCME2 - 4.23)
(6)
... and preie e hertly for hem, that God of his greet mercy eue to hem very knowing of scripturis, and meekenesse, and charite. (a 1397, John Purvey, Purvey's General Prologue to the Bible, PPCME2 – I, 49.2033)
(7)
What about religion and politics? They are not in two watertight compartments. Think of the number of laws that have just as much to do with a man’s soul as with his body. (LOB, D16, 11-13)
(8)
If the people had kept the Lord before them and observed His words through the former prophets, things would have been far otherwise. And what was His word now through Zechariah, but just what it had been through them. Take Isaiah’s first chapter as an example. He accused the people of moral corruption, whilst maintaining ceremonial exactitude. (LOB, D11, 39-44)
It is far less face-threatening to guide people through a text using imperatives than employing imperatives in requests which affect their everyday lives. So it seems here that considerations of politeness may explain some of the changes noted.5 Table 2: Indirect manifestations of directives in the Helsinki Corpus (tokens per 10,000 words) Speaker volition Interrogative
1420-1500 0.37 0.19
1500-1570 0.79 0.42
1570-1640 1.16 0.47
1640-1710 1.11 0.82
Since the data indicates that the frequency of more ‘direct’ and possibly facethreatening manifestations of directives decreases in the history of English, it makes sense to ask whether these forms are replaced by other, possibly more polite directives. To find a possible answer, it is instructive to look at the
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evolution of so-called indirect manifestations of directives. Table 2 shows the development of directives involving speaker volition (the type I would like you to do this) and of interrogative realisations referring to the addressee (Can you pass the salt?) in the Helsinki Corpus (for a detailed analysis, see Kohnen 2002). Although the frequency of the items found is rather low (but see the discussion in Section 1), the general picture of the development of the constructions is quite clear. Both constructions increase noticeably during the Early Modern English period, with some precursors occurring in Late Middle English. Interrogative manifestations develop more slowly in the data and one could claim that they are later in appearing. At least their increase during the Early Modern English period is slow and the frequency is clearly lower than that of the other construction. It is only towards the end of the Early Modern period that the frequencies of the two constructions converge. The result that is most relevant here is that the indirect manifestations do not become common until the Early Modern period. It is quite striking that this is just the time (the end of the Middle English period) when the imperative forms seem to recede. Another illustration of ‘indirect’ manifestations of directives are constructions with let me plus a (mostly directive) illocutionary verb: (9)
Sam. I pray you let mee intreat you: foure or five houres is not so much. Dan. Well, I will goe with you. (Helsinki Corpus, 1593, George Gifford, A Dialogue Concerning Witches – B2R)
(10)
Venat. Come my friend, Piscator, let me invite you along with us; I'll bear you charges this night, and you shall bear mine to morrow; for my intention is to accompany you a day or two in Fishing. (Helsinki Corpus, 1676, Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler – 212)
With this construction the speaker, instead of issuing a straightforward directive performative, asks permission for doing so. However, since this permission is never actually granted, the construction can be seen as a more or less conventionalised polite or indirect formula for performing a directive. Table 3 shows the development of this construction in the Helsinki Corpus. Although the number of items is again rather small, the general picture is quite clear.6 The construction appears during the 16th century and its frequency increases significantly during the Early Modern period. Here again it is the Early Modern period which witnesses the rise of an indirect directive. Table 3: Let me constructions including illocutionary verbs in the Helsinki Corpus (tokens per 100,000 words) 1420-1500 0
1500-1570 0.5
1570-1640 5.3
1640-1710 8.2
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4.
Conclusion
Although the research presented here is the result of what I called structured eclecticism and although corpus-based historical pragmatics faces several methodological problems, the general picture of the history of English directives is quite consistent. During the history of English directives become less explicit, less direct and less face-threatening. By contrast, the number of indirect manifestations increases. The important period for the evolution of indirect manifestations seems to be the Early Modern period, whereas the frequency of ‘direct’ manifestations seems to decrease after the Middle English period. The underlying motivation seems to be the growing importance of considerations of politeness. Notes 1. Cf. Fischer (1992: 248) and Rissanen (1999: 228-229, 279-280); for a survey of directives, see Quirk et al. (1985: 827-833). 2. See, for example, Searle (1976) and Levinson (1983: 263-276). 3. For information on the Helsinki Corpus, see Kytö (1996). 4. Text 9 from the Brown Corpus (“Organizing the local church”, 2056 words) was excluded from the analysis, since, as “instruction for instructors”, it is focused on organisational matters and does not contain religious instruction in its proper sense. 5. Biber et al. (1999: 222) say that in contemporary academic prose imperatives are used as a means of guiding the reader in interpreting the text.
References Biber, D., S. Johansson, G. Leech, S. Conrad, and E. Finegan (1999), Longman grammar of spoken and written English. London: Longman. Brown, P. and S.C. Levinson (1987), Politeness. Some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fischer, O. (1992), ‘Syntax’, in: N. Blake (ed.), The Cambridge history of the English language, Vol. II 1066-1476. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 207-408. Kohnen, T. (2000), ‘Explicit performatives in Old English: A corpus-based study of directives’. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 1 (2): 301-321. Kohnen, T. (2002), ‘Towards a history of English directives’, in: A. Fischer, G. Tottie and P. Schneider (eds), Text types and corpora. Studies in honour of Udo Fries. Tübingen: Gunter Narr. 165-175. Kroch, A.S. and A. Taylor (2000), The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English PPCME2.
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Kytö, M. (1996), Manual to the diachronic part of the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts. 3rd ed. Helsinki: University of Helsinki. Levinson, S.C. (1983), Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MED: Middle English Dictionary, electronic version, in: F. McSparran et al. (eds) (1999), The Middle English compendium. Ann Arbor, Mi: University of Michigan Press. OED: The Oxford English dictionary second edition on compact disc (1994), Version 1.13. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Quirk, R., S. Greenbaum, G. Leech and J. Svartvik (1985), A comprehensive grammar of the English language. London: Longman. Rissanen, M. (1999), ‘Syntax’, in: R. Lass (ed.), The Cambridge history of the English language, vol. III: 1476-1776. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 187-331. Searle, J.R. (1969), Speech acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Searle, J.R. (1976), ‘A classification of illocutionary acts’. Language in Society 5: 1-24.
Measure noun constructions: degrees of delexicalization and grammaticalization Lieselotte Brems University of Leuven Abstract In a narrow sense, the term ‘Measure Noun’ (MN) refers to such nouns as acre and kilo, which typically measure off a well-established and specific portion of the mass or entity specified in a following of-phrase, e.g. a kilo of apples. When used like this, the MN is generally considered to constitute the lexical head of the bi-nominal noun phrase. However, the notion of MN can be extended to include such expressions as a bunch of and heaps of, which, strictly speaking, do not designate a ‘measure’, but display a more nebulous potential for quantification. The structural status of MNs in this broader sense, then, is far from straightforward and most grammatical reference works of English are either hesitant or silent with regard to the issue. Two main analytical options seem to suggest themselves. Either the MN is interpreted as constituting the head of the NP, with the of-phrase as a qualifier of this head, or the MN is analysed as a modifier, more specifically a quantifier, of the head, which in this case is the noun in the of-phrase. Starting from the structural analyses of MN constructions offered by such linguists as Halliday and Langacker, my paper goes on to discuss a corpus study aimed at charting and elucidating the structural ambivalence observed in MN constructions. The framework eventually opted for is that of ‘grammaticalization’. The focus of the corpus study is ‘synchronic grammaticalization’ (Lehmann 1985). More specifically, it investigates the degree of grammaticalization of the various MNs looked at, viz. bunch(es) of, heap(s) of, pile(s) of and load(s) of. 1. Introduction: What’s in a name?1 ‘Measure Nouns’ (henceforth MNs) or ‘nouns of measurement’ in the strict sense are nouns such as acre, litre, pound, ounce, etc. that measure off a well-defined standard-like portion of the mass or entities specified in the of-phrase following the MN, as in an acre of wasteland.2 However, this paper extends the use of the term MN to include nouns which, strictly speaking, do not designate a ‘measure’, but display a more nebulous potential for quantification. More specifically, the MN expressions in this broader sense focused on in this study are bunch(es) of, heap(s) of, pile(s) of
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and load(s) of. The type of construction in which they are used is a bi-nominal noun phrase of the kind illustrated in the following set of examples. All examples in this paper are from the Cobuild corpus.3 (1)
The fox, unable to reach a bunch of grapes that hangs too high, decides that they were sour anyway
(2)
A jilted girlfriend got revenge on the boyfriend who dumped her by dumping a foot-high pile of manure in his bed.
(3)
We still have to move loads of furniture and other stuff.
(4)
The ‘surrogate mum’ to princes William and Harry shared heaps of fun with them at a fair yesterday while father Charles was otherwise engaged.
(5)
I would take up a pile of commonplace books like Lord David Cecil’s Library Looking Glass, John Julius Norwich’s Christmas Crackers, Rupert Hart-Davis’s A Beggar in Purple, etc.
(6)
Then I noticed, under a pile of other books on my nightstand, the worn journal my father had given me those weeks ago.
The central question with regard to MN constructions is the status of the MNs bunch, pile, loads and heaps within their respective NPs. Does the MN constitute the head noun, or does it function as a quantifier of the head noun in the ofphrase? Naturally, assessing the status of the MN within the bi-nominal NP has repercussions at clause level, most notably on the question of subject-finite concord whenever the MN-nominal occurs in subject position. The central question of the study is of a comparative nature and focuses on possible differences in the extent to which the various MNs have already come to function as a quantifier (Section 3). A quick glance at the above set of examples illustrates the specific rub of MN constructions. Sentences (1) and (2), and (6) are rather unproblematic: in (1), (2) and (6) the MN is the head noun, displaying the literal and collocationally restricted meaning of bunch and pile. This analysis is reinforced by the verb agreement between hangs and bunch in (1), under in (6) and the premodifier foothigh in (2), which stresses the fact that it is a literal pile taking up a certain space. In (4), on the other hand, the MN functions as a quantifier of the noun in the ofphrase (N2). The lexical ‘constellation’ specifics of heaps have bleached into a mere quantifier, which allows the MN to be used with an abstract noun like fun that surely cannot be made into actual heaps. Examples (3) and (5) are more problematic: do the furniture and stuff constitute actual loads or does the sentence simply mean ‘a large quantity of furniture and stuff’ without it necessarily being arranged in a literal load? Do the commonplace books in (5) together make up an actual pile or is it merely implied that the number of books could constitute a pile?
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Examples (3) and (5) are intermediate between examples such as (1) and (2), with the original and fully lexical meaning of the MN, on the one hand, and the grammatical quantifier meaning of (4) on the other. I will suggest that the developments observed in MN constructions are best looked at as a case of ongoing delexicalization and grammaticalization in MNs (Section 2.3). The by now more or less full-blown quantifiers a lot of and lots of can be considered historical precursors in these developments. Synchronic variation in verb agreement patterns is an important argument for claiming that the structural status of the MN is changing from head to quantifier. Wherever subject-finite concord is observable, analysis of data reveals consistent patterns. When the MN is head of the bi-nominal group it controls verb agreement (examples 7 to 9), when it functions as a quantifier, the finite agrees with N2 (examples 10 to 12). (7)
I can show you a van-load of weapons that was confiscated at the gate.
(8)
Three plane-loads of food have been ferried into the town in the past three weeks.
(9)
The fox, unable to reach a bunch of grapes that hangs too high, decides that they were sour anyway.
(10)
A bunch of drunken, braindead louts seem determined to disgrace our team.
(11)
But then, when I needed one, there were a load of excuses as to why I couldn’t borrow one.
(12)
They are threatening to kill off a bunch of select committees that have been around for a long time.
Pedagogical grammars and mainstream accounts like Kruisinga (1925), Jespersen (1970-74), Quirk et al. (1985) and Biber et al. (1999) often bring up MN expressions with regard to the perceived fluctuation in verb agreement. They rarely incorporate the idea of a diachronic shift in structural status of MNs in explaining the variation in concord. Most grammars invariably assign head status to MNs in MN constructions. When the verb agrees in number with the MN, strict grammatical concord is said to be satisfied. Sentences in which the finite does not agree in number with the MN are explained in terms of conflicting concord principles. In those cases notional concord is said to overrule strict grammatical concord, i.e. in sentences such as (10) to (12), the MN is still considered to be the head of the nominal group, but it is the idea of number of the MN that determines the number of the verb. Alternatively, the principle of proximity or attraction is invoked, which states that whatever element of structure most closely precedes the finite controls the number of the verb. Both notional concord and proximity concord are invoked in an ad hoc fashion, to explain away ‘incongruent’ verb agreement.
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The possibility of N2 actually constituting the head in at least some cases is not systematically considered, just like the status of the MN and N2 as such is not systematically questioned (Jespersen 1970-74: 179; Kruisinga 1925: 306; Quirk et al. 1985: 264; Biber et al. 1999: 184-185). I would like to argue that in all MN constructions grammatical concord holds between the head and the verb, depending on whether the MN or N2 is the head. As hinted at in discussing examples (1) to (6), I will also argue that the most adequate way of seeking order in the perceived chaos is by bringing in the perspective of grammaticalization (cf. Lehmann 1985 and Hopper and Traugott 1993). I will argue more extensively for this approach in Section 2.3. The following sections will first survey two relevant descriptive accounts of MN constructions. Section 2.1 discusses Halliday’s analysis of what he calls “‘measure’ nominals” (Halliday 1985: 173) and Section 2.2 sums up some of Langacker’s (1991) pertinent insights into MNs. Section 2.3 presents the framework eventually adopted in this paper, viz. grammaticalization. Section 3 then reports on the most important findings of a corpus study of MNs which I carried out based on data from the Cobuild Corpus, The Bank of English. The focus of this study is a comparison of the extent to which heap(s) of, pile(s) of, load(s) of and bunch(es) of have already become grammaticalized. 2.
Theoretical-descriptive starting point
2.1 Halliday’s account of Measure Noun constructions Halliday (1985: 173) deals with MN constructions in a section following his exposé in favour of a twofold analysis of the nominal group on the ideational level, i.e. the level of lexicogrammatical organization concerned with the representation of experience. Within the ideational level Halliday distinguishes between two ‘layers’ of analysis, one in terms of constituency and the other in terms of dependency. The constituency layer offers an analysis of the nominal group as a multivariate structure, i.e. as constituting a constellation of distinct functional slots which in some way characterize the Thing of the nominal group, which itself designates a class of entities and establishes the semantic core of the nominal group, as shown in Table 1. Table 1. Experiential structure of the nominal group Deictic Numerative
Epithet1
Epithet2
Classifier Thing
Qualifier
those
splendid
old
electric
with pantographs
two
trains
The dependency layer, on the other hand, analyses the nominal group as a univariate structure, viz. in terms of the recursive head-modifier relationship displayed by the nominal group, as shown in Table 2.
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Table 2. Logical structure of the nominal group (head-modifier) γ
Premodifier β
Head α
Postmodifier β γ
electric
trains
with
those
pantographs
In the default case the Thing of the experiential layer and the logical Head coincide. However, there are a few types of nominal group where Head and Thing do not coincide and “those involving a measure of something (…) [i.e.] ‘measure’ nominals” (Halliday 1985: 173) are an example of such a discrepancy between Head and Thing. Halliday goes on to analyse so-called “‘measure’ expressions” (id.: 169) in the following way: In the logical structure, the measure word (pack, slice, yard) is Head, with the of phrase as Postmodifier. The Thing, however, is not the measure word but the thing being measured: here cards, bread, cloth. The measure expression functions as a complex Numerative. (Halliday 1985: 173) This ‘dual’ analysis can be visualised by the box diagram for a pack of cards shown in Table 3. Table 3. Twofold analysis of the nominal group; discrepancy Head/Thing (Halliday 1985: 173) A
pack
of
Numerative Modifier Head
Postmodifier
cards Thing
Experiential structure Logical structure
Halliday comments further that [i]t is not that one [analysis] is right and the other wrong; but that in order to get an adequate account of the nominal group, […] we need to interpret it from both these points of view at once. [Italics LB] (Halliday 1985: 172-173). This comment seems to imply a certain flexibility in the interpretation of MN constructions. However, it does not allow head status to shift from the ‘measure’ noun to the noun designating the matter being measured. This makes it hard to see how diachronic variation in the status of the MN, which is reflected so clearly in (synchronically) distinct subject-finite concord, can be captured. What is unhelpful about the proposed dual analysis is that Numerative and Head status of the MN are divided over two simultaneous levels of analysis, thus
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suggesting that in each use the MN is always both. Against this, the description of MN constructions proposed in this article will involve two synchronically distinct analyses, with the second one being treated as a (diachronic) re-analysis of the first: A lot A heap
of land of paper
Head
Postmodifier
→
Lots of Heaps of
paper people
Quantifier
Head
Langacker’s discussion of MNs, reviewed in the following section, does bring in the diachronic perspective and is compatible with the framework that I will adopt in the present corpus study, viz. grammaticalization studies. 2.2 Langacker: the diachronic angle Langacker (1991) turns to the issue of MNs in his general discussion of the function of quantification in the NP. What is interesting about his observations is that they immediately address the question of MNs from a diachronic angle, i.e. MNs as an emergent means of quantification. Langacker’s observations pertain to bi-nominal MN phrases such as a bunch of carrots, a bucket of water and a lot of sharks. He observes that “the nouns which appear as heads constitute a diverse and open-ended class.” [italics LB] (Langacker 1991: 88). MNs are by default attributed head status, despite the ambivalent semantics of appear. He continues by remarking that [s]ome of these nouns still have an interpretation in which they designate a physical, spatially-continuous entity that either serves as a container for some portion of the mass (bucket, cup, barrel, crate, jar, tub, vat, keg, box) or else is constituted of some such portion (bunch, pile, heap, loaf, sprig, head, stack, flock, herd). [italics LB] (Langacker 1991: 88) In addition, most of these nouns have developed a more figurative sense. Such metonymic extensions are possible because the above MNs all incorporate “a conception of their typical size, which is part of their encyclopedic characterization.” In the extended senses the physical entity designated by the MNs has become secondary to the size specification provided by the noun: “For instance, a bathtub may contain a bucket of water without there being any bucket in it – it is only implied that the water would fill a bucket were it placed in one” (Langacker 1991: 88). Or in other words (Langacker 1991: 88-89), “The notion of a discrete physical object has faded, leaving behind the conception of a schematically characterized mass (the mass that, in the original sense, either fills
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or constitutes the object).” When a noun is interpreted in this way, it can, according to Langacker, be regarded as a quantifier. He thus notices a diachronic process of bleaching of lexical meaning in certain MNs which may eventually lead to a reassessment of the structural status of the MN, viz. from head to quantifier. As we will see in the following section, such observations can be easily rephrased by using grammaticalization terminology. Langacker then concludes his discussion of MNs by stating: A further step in this evolutionary sequence would be for the second noun to be reanalyzed as the head, leaving the remainder as a complex quantifier: [[a lot of]QNT [sharks]N]NML. I leave open the question of whether this reanalysis has actually occurred.” (Id.: 89) The aim of the corpus study reported on in this paper is to provide some answers to both proposed re-analyses, viz. has N1 shifted from head to quantifier and N2 from postmodifier to head? In conclusion to Langacker’s account, we can say that it is interesting that he notes a diachronic shift with regard to the structural status of MN from head to quantifier, instead of the mere synchronic ambivalence proposed in mainstream grammars or the simultaneous layers in Halliday’s analysis. Langacker also suggests that this grammatical re-analysis is paralleled by lexical extension and desemanticization of the MN. He therefore does accommodate the dynamic aspect of MN constructions by working with two distinct diachronic stages in the structural development of MN constructions. 2.3 Grammaticalization: diachronic and synchronic The framework which seems most suitable for tackling the specific developments encountered in MN constructions is that of grammaticalization theory, which not only does justice to these developments but also explains them. Grammaticalization itself has been defined in several ways (e.g. Haspelmath 1989, Fischer 1999 and Bybee 2000), but its essence is captured by Lehmann’s (1985) definition, which is appropriately general and consists of a number of interesting parameters. Lehmann also distinguishes between diachronic and synchronic grammaticalization, a distinction that will prove useful for this corpus study. Lehmann defines both types of grammaticalization as follows: Under the diachronic aspect, grammaticalization is a process which turns lexemes into grammatical formatives and makes grammatical formatives still more grammatical (cf. Kurylowicz, 1965: 52). From a synchronic point of view, grammaticalization provides a principle according to which subcategories of a given grammatical category may be ordered. (Lehmann 1985: 303)
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The diachronic interpretation of grammaticalization nicely captures the developments and fluctuation encountered in MN expressions. Looked at in synchronic slices, they often appear to hover indecisively between the class of quantifiers and head nouns as a consequence of a gradual move from lexical head to quantifier. The synchronic interpretation of grammaticalization, then, can account for the fact that not all MNs have come to function as a quantifier to the same extent, i.e. there are individual differences with respect to the degree of their respective grammaticalization. It also invites us to draw up a scale of grammaticalization along which the various MNs looked at are positioned. Lehmann proposes six parameters which define grammaticalization: attrition, paradigmaticization, obligatorification, condensation, coalescence and fixation. The first three pertain to paradigmatic aspects, the last three to syntagmatic aspects of the grammaticalizing item or string of items. Of these parameters, two clearly apply to MN constructions, viz. coalescence and semantic attrition. It is these two I will focus on in this article. Coalescence is a syntactic criterion and concerns an increase in bondedness or syntactic cohesion of the elements that are in the process of grammaticalizing, i.e. what were formerly individually autonomous signs become more dependent on each other to the extent that they are increasingly interpreted as together constituting one “chunk”, which as a whole expresses a (grammatical) meaning (cf. Bybee 2000: 27). The other relevant parameter, semantic attrition, is often referred to as delexicalization or loss of lexical content, and is commonly mentioned in grammaticalization studies as a symptom of grammaticalization processes.4 However, as Kurtböke (2001) correctly points out, one should be careful not to use ‘delexicalization’ as a mere synonym for ‘grammaticalization’. Both concepts will be operationalized for the present corpus study in the following way. Delexicalization will be identified in terms of a gradual broadening of collocational scatter or a loosening of the collocational requirements imposed by the MN via such semantico-pragmatic processes as metaphorization, metonymization, analogy, etc. Grammaticalization, on the other hand, will be restricted to the actual grammatical re-analysis of a MN as a quantifier. In this particular study, delexicalization processes typically precede the re-interpretation of the MN as a quantifier. Delexicalization semantically paves the way, so to speak, for grammaticalization (Kurtböke 2001). To this extent, these grammaticalization processes can be said to be largely semanticallydriven (cf. Traugott 1988). In addition phonetic and pragmatic factors come into play. Nevertheless, both concepts tend to remain intertwined because, in many cases, lexical and grammatical status are difficult to tease apart. 3.
Corpus study of MN expressions
For this corpus study heap(s) of, pile(s) of, bunch(es) of and load(s) of were extracted from the Cobuild Corpus, The Bank of English. In each case the plural
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and singular variants of the MNs were regarded as distinct expressions. The corpus data were analyzed as either head or quantifier, or vague. The last category subsumes those MN uses which activate both head and quantifier features. Typically, it contains expressive stretches of discourse in which both the lexical meaning and the quantificational potential of the MN are exploited. On the basis of these quantified data, differences in the degree of (synchronic) grammaticalization between the various MNs can be studied, which will be the main focus in the discussion of the corpus results. The relative frequencies of quantifier, head or vague uses of the various MNs examined are represented in the following tables, which also contain examples of the respective categories. Adjectives or nouns premodifying MN or N2 are underlined, as well as verbs or other elements of structure that serve as important clues for either head or quantifier status.
Bunch of
Tokens
%
Examples
27
11.4
(13) All stopped a moment when Linda, in clothes of mourning, bearing a little bunch of roses, comes through the draped doorway into the kitchen.
Quantifier
209
88.6
(14) The ideologies might be different, but you’re all a bunch of lying, treacherous bastards when it comes down to it. (15) Traditional advertising pictures are a bunch of lies. (16) Russia and America were just a bunch of enthusiastic and very fit guys who ran around for 80 minutes without much method.
Total
236
100
Tokens
%
Head
Bunches of Head
Quantifier /vague Total
Examples
47
97.9
(17) Just after 5pm two bunches of flowers were delivered with a card saying simply: ‘to the neighbour next door’.
1
2.1
(18) I had to listen to those two bunches of spoiled, pampered brats whinge their brains out about which is the hardest done by.
48
100
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Heap of
Tokens
%
Examples
Head
58
55.2
(19) “My first impression was not that it was an earthquake,” said Heinz Hermanns, standing by a heap of bricks that had fallen from his 100-year-old house.
Quantifier
41
39.1
(20) They went through my bags, searched me and asked me a heap of questions.
6
5.7
(21) That deadly, winking snuggling chromiumplated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavoured, mincing, ice-covered heap of motherlove [said about Liberace] (22) The British have forged a fine tradition of gardening and cannot afford to sit on their wellclipped laurels. Striding past the compost heap of nostalgia, comes Christopher Lloyd. (23) He test-fired a dozen of Hellfire missiles at a fleet of old Saudi school buses, reducing the vehicles to a heap of springs and blackened chassis.
105
100
Tokens
%
Vague
Total
Heaps of
Examples
Head
29
32.2
(24) Pulham, scion of the Portland cement family, experimented and perfected in the 1840s the art of using liquid cement poured over heaps of clinker to make rock formations
Quantifier
59
65. 6
(25) What’s interesting is how many sexual researchers and observers were driven by selfinterest? Heaps of them at least. (26) The graphics are very polished, with pitch detail, markings and the like to add heaps of atmosphere.
Vague
2
2.2
(27) Many other viruses are highly malignant reducing the priceless words of your PhD thesis to amorphous heaps of molten letters.
Total
90
100
Measure noun constructions Pile of
Tokens
259 %
Examples
176
88.4
(28) A jilted girlfriend got revenge on the boyfriend who dumped her by dumping a foot-high pile o f manure in his bed.
6
3.1
(29) I can just see a whole pile of the boys walking out after the final and saying bye bye. (30) It [i.e. a performance] was the biggest pile of want ever.
Vague
17
8.5
(31) 6 CAMMY MURRAY: Recovered well after a nervous start and put in a pile of strong defensive work. (‘(paper)work’-metonymy; here more or less ‘Quantifier’)) (32) If you go and have a look next door there’s a great pile of work that builds up. (‘paperwork’ metonymy; leans more towards the ‘Head’ category here)
Total
199
100
Head
Quantifier
Piles of
%
Examples
159
93
(33) There was no memory of summer but the little sad piles of hay that rotted in the fields.
Quantifier
8
4.7
(34) Mike Atherton has been warned he must score piles of runs for Lancashire to keep his England test place.
Vague
4
2.3
(35) Leshan emphasizes a remark by G.B. Shaw that Lourdes is the most blasphemous place on the face of earth: mountains of wheelchairs and piles of crutches exist, “but not a single wooden leg, glass eye, toupe[e]!”. (36) The real fun begins when you start receiving piles of property details. (paperwork-metonymy)
171
100
Head
Total
Tokens
The percentages indicated in the tables immediately point out that there are differences between the various MNs in terms of their degree of grammaticalization or quantifier potential. In order to represent visually the degrees to which the MNs have grammaticalized, they are set out on a scale of synchronic grammaticalization in Figure 1 (see Section 2.3). The percentages for lot of and lots of were also obtained through analysis of Cobuild data. They are included in the cline as precursors in the present MN-developments.
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Load of
Tokens
%
Examples
33
19.3
(37) TODAY flew in a helicopter-load of supplies to the service station.
132
77.2
(38) I just think that’s a load of nonsense. (39) When our image first went out of control, we played to a load of skinheads. (40) What are you going to write about when you get success and a load of money?
6
3.5
(41) I always go to Sainsbury’s and I always go to the Cake Place and buy a load of cakes. (’trolleyload’/’lots of’)
171
100
Tokens
%
Examples
15
7.2
(42) Six plane-loads of food are also being flown today to the city of Baidoa.
Quantifier
193
92.8
(43) Around Christmas time I was in the British home Stores and I tried on loads and loads of dresses. (44) I’ve applied for loads of jobs including one in a flowershop, but they wanted a woman. (45) You’ve got loads of people that you can have conversation with, but not many people that you can have communication with. (46) It has tons of variety, smart graphics and loads of action.
Total
208
100
Head Quantifier
Vague
Total
Loads of Head
bunches of pile of piles of
heaps of heap of
bunch of load of
loads of
lot of lots of
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ 4.7% 0% 3.0%
77.2% 41.0%
50%
65.6%
2.1%
Figure 1. Scale of synchronic grammaticalization
92.8% 88.6%
±100% 99.8%
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Loads of, bunch of, load of and heaps of have all grammaticalized strongly, while piles of, pile of and bunches of have hardly grammaticalized at all. Two main factors seem to play a part in these observed differences in degree of grammaticalization, viz. dissimilarity in the degree of delexicalization and collocational broadening, and differences in expressive value of the MNs, which also involves a phonetic factor. Considering the fact that the grammaticalization processes of MNs are largely semantically driven (Section 2.3), it seems only natural that differences in grammaticalization level can be explained by differences in the preliminary delexicalization processes. Differences in quantifier potential between the semantically related heap and pile, for example, have to be put down to differences in delexicalization potential between the two MNs. These differences are dependent on certain lexico-semantic properties inherent in the concepts of pile and heap, which are resistant and conducive to semantic generalization respectively. The blocking factor in pile is the feature of verticality and constructional solidity it calls up. These semantic features are, so to speak, too specific to bleach into a mere ‘quantity’ meaning. The concept of heap on the other hand is in itself more vague and simply profiles an undifferentiated mass, from which it is much easier to detach a mere quantifier meaning. The lack of delexicalization potential in pile is matched by a very restricted collocational extension, mainly limited to prototypically stackable concrete nouns like rubble, paper, bricks etc. Heap(s) of, on the other hand, has loosened its collocational requirements systematically. In addition to the prototypically stackable nouns it combines with when used as head, it has extended to concrete nouns irrespective of their semantics, to human nouns (e.g. (25)) and abstract nouns (e.g (26)). Heaps of has hence developed a systematic quantifier use which is more or less devoid of its original lexical semantics. The non-head/quantifier uses of pile of and piles of distinguished in the tables above are all restricted to very specific contexts, as in (34), highly expressive stretches of discourse, as in (30) and (35), or dependent on metonymy, as in (31) and (36) for example. Compare the following two MN nominals, which alternatively have heaps and piles combined with the same set of nouns; the collocational restrictions on the quantifier use of piles of are immediately obvious: piles of stones/paper/people heaps of stones/paper/people Piles of evokes a vertical, layered constellation with all three nouns, which renders the combination piles of people highly marked. By contrast, with heaps a mere quantifier reading is at least as unmarked as a literal interpretation for all three nouns; in the case of people the quantifier reading is the most natural one. Bunch of is another MN of which the high level of grammaticalization can be explained by a process of extensive collocational broadening. As opposed to
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pile or heap, the delexicalization process of bunch has a readily identifiable first stage in which it designates a very specific cluster-like constellation with an accordingly restricted set of collocates in the N2 slot, e.g. grapes, flowers, carrots. Gradually, the specific ‘cluster’ meaning starts to bleach and the collocational scatter broadens to include concrete nouns beyond that limited set, as well as abstract nouns and human nouns, which are in fact the predominant N2 type when bunch functions as a quantifier. The following table represents the various extensions. +Inanimate plural count noun
(47) There’s now a whole bunch of studies from different cities that show the same thing. (48) Traditional advertising pictures are a bunch of lies.
+Uncount noun
(49) Ned wanted to give me a bunch of suits. (50) Trouble was, the funds were able to neatly hide all but the most conspicuous of their charges in a bunch of legalese. (51) We started in May and did a bunch of practising.
+Human/animate plural count noun
(52) I spent a bunch of time, when I was visiting the county, talking to his neighbours. (53) Who said Americans were a jingoistic bunch o f rednecks who know or care nothing about what happens beyond their shores? (54) Deng was pictured taking a dip with a bunch of his beaming buddies at a summer resort in the north of the country. (55) Russia and America were just a bunch of enthusiastic and very fit guys who ran around for 80 minutes without much method. (56) We guarantee the noble young lord will complain about having to spend time with such a boring bunch of geriatrics.
Bunch of, just like loads of and heaps of, also illustrates the expressivity and affective values grammaticalizing MNs often develop, at times leading to new patterns of collocational consolidation. Especially when used with human nouns, bunch of goes beyond merely quantifying N2 and also qualifies it, usually negatively. This qualitative function can be reinforced by the addition of qualitative adjectives premodifying the MN, as in (53) and (56). The negative qualification expressed by bunch is best described as negative semantic prosody, as defined by Sinclair (1992) and Bublitz (1996): a negative, or occasionally positive, semantic aura spreading from node to
Measure noun constructions
263
collocate. Bunch radiates “a specific halo”, it “prospects ahead and ‘sets the scene’ (Sinclair 1992: 8) for a particular type of subsequent item” (Bublitz 1996: 11). This strong predictive power with regard to N2 can create new collocational requirements and idiom-like patterns of collocational consolidation, as in (48), (50), (53) and (56), both with human nouns and abstract nouns. It is only with regard to nouns such as guys, lads, kids, etc. that bunch of radiates a positive semantic prosody. In such expressions as a bunch of guys/lads/etc. there is the additional suggestion of bondedness, of a close-knit group of amicable people. This can be seen as a metaphorical revival of the original ‘cluster’ semantics. The specific qualitative meaning of bunch of brings us to the second important factor motivating the grammaticalization of MNs, viz. the expressive value they can acquire. As a means of quantification heaps of and loads of are very hyperbolic in nature, which can be stressed by repeating them as in (43). Differences in expressive value might also explain why the plural versions of heap, pile and load have grammaticalized more strongly than the singular variants. The plurality in terms of grammatical number adds to the hyperbolic meaning it expresses as a quantifier. In addition, the intrinsic ‘mass’ meaning of plural nouns (Langacker 1991) likewise enlarges the magnitude already expressed by the MN. Phonetically, these plurals contain a vowel that can easily be lengthened, producing a similar effect of exaggerating the quantity of N2. In this respect, the extensive grammaticalization of loads of might be enhanced by the graphemic and phonetic resemblance to lots of, with the added bonus of a strongly prolongable diphthong in front of a voiced consonant. In the case of bunch, on the other hand, it is precisely the other way round: the plural form displays a near-exclusive head use, while it is the singular form which has a prevailing quantifier use. The resistance of bunches to grammaticalize into a quantifier might be due to prosodic features which do not lend themselves well to expressive use, such as the extra syllable the plural morpheme gives rise to (p. c. Halliday). Grammaticalizing MNs, with their typical blend of lexical and grammatical potential, thus satisfy the language user’s needs for a quantifier as well as the desire to be expressive. 4.
Conclusion
The assessment of the structural status of MNs in MN constructions is complex because of the subtle and often intricate interdependence of the MN’s lexical and grammatical status. The observed structural fluctuation involves many more dimensions than suggested by traditional descriptions. Lehmann’s parameters for grammaticalization proved essential to impose some order on what appears as intractable material. Grammaticalization, both the diachronic and synchronic interpretation, allows one to reveal the patterns in empirical data. Grammaticalization of MNs seems to involve two main motivating factors, which typically interlock. Firstly, there is delexicalization and collocational broadening of the MN. In addition there is a pragmatic factor, viz. the hyperbolic expressiveness MNs cater for as
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quantifiers. Differences in the degree of grammaticalization are matched by differences in the extent to which these two factors have come into play in the various MNs. Not only is there a synchronic dissimilarity in the extent to which the various MNs have grammaticalized; each of the MNs individually displays a layering (cf. Hopper and Traugott 1993) of lexical head uses and grammatical quantifier uses, as well as a considerable number of ‘transitional’ uses. Some contextualized examples proved to be irreducible ‘blends’ (Bolinger 1961) of quantifier and head status. Our main descriptive research question has thus been confirmed: bunch(es) of, heap(s) of pile(s) of and load(s) of have developed a quantifier use comparable to that of regular quantifiers. However, they still retain the possibility of appearing as the lexical head noun of a nominal group. The MNs looked at thus do constitute an emergent means of quantification (cf. Langacker 1991). The observed structural fluctuation and layering phenomena suggest that they are still very much quantifiers on the move. A certain amount of lexicality is bound to cling to all MN quantifiers to some extent. For pile in particular such lexical persistence (Hopper and Traugott 1993) is at present very strong, whereas heaps of has already developed a systematic quantifier use which is more or less oblivious to its original lexico-semantics. Still, even when MNs have become highly grammaticalized, their lexical semantics can still be exploited, alluded to or revived in various ways, e.g. They employ lorry-loads of insincere flattery. Again the strong interpersonal motivation behind MNs as a means of quantification comes to the fore, as well as the importance of casual, informal registers. Notes 1. I would like to thank all people at the 2nd Workshop of the Systemic Functional Research Community (FWO - Fund for Scientific Research Flanders – grant n° WO.018.00N) in Leuven, 21-24 November 2001, as well as those at ICAME 2002 for their much appreciated comments on earlier versions of this paper. 2. These are just two of the many names they are commonly labelled with. Others are ‘quantifying nouns’ in Biber et al. (1999) and ‘NP-like quantifiers’ in Akmajian and Lehrer (1976). 3. All examples are extracted from the Cobuild Corpus, The Bank of English, and reproduced here with the kind permission of HarperCollins. 4. This concept is alternatively referred to as ‘semantic attrition’, ‘desemanticization’ and ‘demotivation’ (Lehmann 1985:307).
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References Akmajian, A. and A. Lehrer (1976), ‘NP-like quantifiers and the problem of determining the head of an NP’, Linguistic Analysis 2: 395-413. Biber, D., S. Johansson, G. Leech, S. Conrad and E. Finegan (1999), Longman grammar of spoken and written English. London: Longman. Bolinger, D.L. (1961), ‘Syntactic blends and other matters’, Language 37: 366381. Bublitz, W. (1996), ‘Semantic prosody and cohesive company: “somewhat predictable”’, Leuvense Bijdragen 85: 1-32. Bybee, J. (2000), ‘Cognitive processes in grammaticalization’, to appear in M. Tomasello (ed.), The new psychology of language, volume 2. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum. Fischer, O. (1999), ‘Grammaticalization: Unidirectional, nonreversible? The case of to before the infinitive in English’, Views 7: 5-24. Halliday, M.A.K. (1985), An introduction to functional grammar. London: Arnold. Haspelmath, M. (1989), ‘From purposive to infinitive - A universal path of grammaticalization’, Folia Linguistica Historica 10: 287-310. Hopper, P. and E. C. Traugott (1993), Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press . Jespersen, O. (1970-74), A modern English grammar on historical principles. 7 vols. London: Allen and Unwin; Copenhagen: Enjar Minksgaard. Kruisinga, E. (1925), A handbook of present-day English, 7th ed. Utrecht: Kemink en Zoon. Kurylowicz, J. (1965), ‘The evolution of grammatical categories’, Diogenes 51: 55-71. Kurtböke, P. (2001), ‘YAP- and OL- as delexical nominalising devices in diaspora Turkish’. Paper delivered at the University of Leuven, March 15, 2001. Langacker, R.W. (1991), Foundations of cognitive grammar. Volume 2: Descriptive application. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Lehmann, C. (1985), ‘Grammaticalization: synchronic variation and diachronic change’, Lingua e Stile 20: 303-318. Quirk, R., S. Greenbaum, G. Leech and J. Svartvik (1985), A comprehensive grammar of the English language. London & New York: Longman. Sinclair, J. (1992), Corpus, concordance, collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Traugott, E. C. (1988), ‘Pragmatic strengthening and grammaticalization’, Proceedings of the 14th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. 406-416.
Yourself: a general-purpose emphatic-reflexive? Göran Kjellmer Göteborg University Abstract In general, the reference of English personal pronouns has been relatively stable over the centuries: I (and its forerunners) can normally be taken to refer to the first person singular, and so on. If this is the general picture, it is necessary to add some qualifications, most of them of a minor kind. For instance, I is sometimes used to refer to the second person singular (“I shouldn’t disturb him at this time of night”), we is sometimes used with reference to the first person singular, the “authorial” and the “royal we” (“We are not amused”), to the second person singular (“How are we today?”) and with general reference (“We should not underestimate the defence of honour”), and they can also be used with general reference (“They say that ill weeds grow apace”). However, you and its reflexive-emphatic correspondence yourself stand out in this respect and differ from their pronominal cousins, both in that their referential changes have been more generally remarkable over the centuries, and in that such changes are still in progress. This paper will attempt to chart some of those changes in modern English with the help of large modern corpora. 1.
Introduction
As speakers of English we tend to look upon the pronominal system as something more or less established and invariable, if indeed we bother to think about it at all. But there are occasions when this happy mood is broken. When an English professor addressing his seminar audience says (1)
You can see for yourself that ...
and when an English boy accused of repeating himself replies (2)
I ain’t repeating yourself
one may well receive a jolt. Our traditional grammars would have us expect the professor to say “see for yourselves” and the boy to say “repeating myself”. A natural question then is if such linguistic events are due to accidental slips, and hence of no great interest, or if something is happening to the use of yourself. I
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would suggest that among the bewildering mass of uses that yourself can be put to an interesting pattern can be seen to emerge. 2.
Development of you
In order to look into the matter of yourself we shall use material from the CobuildDirect and the BNC corpora. It is indeed one of the great advantages of corpora that they can provide us with material that has not yet become established as mainstream varieties. But before discussing yourself, let us first consider very briefly the development of the closely related pronoun you. You, starting out as an object form of the Old English second person plural personal pronoun ºÈ, came in late Middle English and Early Modern English times to be used as a plural subject form and, about the same time, as a singular pronoun, used both as a subject and an object form (OED You I-II). In Early Modern English a secondary use developed, “Denoting any hearer or reader; hence as an indef. pers. pron.: One, any one” (OED You III:6). From Early Modern English times onwards you can thus be used in the same way as today, in the plural and singular and with general reference. Modern examples, from the Cobuild Corpus, are: 2nd pl. (OED you I): (3) I can see great things for you, kids, I think your troubles are over. (Cobuild: usbooks/09. Text: B9000001423) (4)
The great thing about meeting someone through an agency is that you find a lot about them the first time you meet. (Cobuild: ukmags/03. Text: N0000000375)
2nd sg. (OED you II): (5) `Honk all you like, baby. I hope it makes you happy, you little redneck.” (Cobuild: usbooks/09. Text: B9000000418) Generic (OED you III:6): (6) Where they lived in it was in near Christchurch as you sort of you had to go you know maybe five miles before you saw anyone and in winter they were just cut off anyway. So they never saw a soul. (Cobuild: ukspok/04. Text: S9000000254) Out of the generic use there has developed a more specific use where you mostly, but not always, means ‘I’ or ‘we’ (and which is not in the OED; cf. Quirk et al. 1985:354):
Yourself: a general-purpose emphatic-reflexive?
269
Generic > specific: (7) When I made the booking I explained that the trip was for shopping, but the tickets arrived with a booklet listing that particular weekend as a public holiday in France. Now Going Places wants £90 to change the date.
`There’s another one in the back as well Mr Giggins added: `For all the world it looked as though there were people asleep in the car although when you looked again you realised they had been shot ) (you = ‘I/we’) (Cobuild: times/10. Text: N2000951208
(9)
but I shouldn’t think it’s probably all that much different
(10)
Balancing the lust for a story against the demands of self-preservation, conquering your own fear and crawling that extra exclusive maggotinfested mile before remembering you were a mother with responsibilities back home. Home. It was time to call her husband. Her nervousness, for which she had no explanation - or, at least, none she could remember came flooding back. (you = ‘she’) (Cobuild: ukbooks/08. Text: B0000001117)
(10) is probably an example of free indirect speech. 3.
History of yourself
As for yourself, its early history is partly dependent on that of you, as could be expected. The Middle English plural ºe ºou selve(n) became ºour(e) self(e) in the early part of the fourteenth century, and like you the latter form came to be used with singular reference in late Middle English and Early Modern English (OED yourself II, “originally as a honorific plural”). “And then towards the end of the fifteenth century the present s-plural ourselves, yourselves came into existence and eventually became the standard forms” (Wright and Wright 1924: §323; see also Visser 1962-73 I §455). “The forms with -selves are [...] the normal plural usage by the middle of the sixteenth century” (Barber 1997: 159). So the form yourselves gradually becomes the standard one for use in the plural. If yourself, on the other hand, was thus originally a plural form, as in
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(11)
All the wise how it was ye wetyn your selfe. (c1400: OED Yourself I†1: “obsolete”)
its standard modern use is as a singular reflexive form (OED Yourself II: 6), as in (12)
Now you never thought of yourself as a fan. You were a journalist covering sports. (Cobuild: npr/07. Text: S2000901019)
or as a singular emphatic form (OED Yourself II: 3), as in (13)
Vu: You used to molest other kids yourself?
This, then, is the traditional view of modern you and yourself/yourselves, as presented in the standard grammars: you is the second person singular and plural personal pronoun, yourself is the second person singular and yourselves the second person plural reflexive pronoun (Quirk et al. 1985: 346, Biber et al. 1999: 328). But in order to understand the occurrence of examples like (1) and (2), I suggest we follow an admittedly hypothetical line of development of modern yourself. Such a development would imply an ongoing extension of its semantic range, and consequently an increasing lack of precision. 4.
Development of modern yourself
Let us start with the standard use of yourself, where it refers to a singular addressee: (14)
it’s exciting for a young man like yourself ... (Cobuild: npr/07. Text: S2000911214)
As we saw, you can refer to one or several addressees, and frequently it is difficult or impossible for the listener or reader to decide which is meant.2 The same thing then applies to yourself. The number indeterminacy of you spills over on to yourself by analogy, so that the latter can be used in situations where the speaker may have a plural addressee in mind. In cases like the following, there could be one addressee or several: (15)
Treat yourself to a Maltese odyssey (Cobuild: today/11. Text: N6000940101)
Yourself: a general-purpose emphatic-reflexive?
271
(16)
Before buying a single share of stock, force yourself to answer one question: are you reasonably sure that you can keep your money invested for 7 to 10 years? (Cobuild: usbooks/09. Text: B9000000404)
(17)
If you have just spent £329,000 on a red Ferrari F50 then why not treat yourself to the perfect number plate? (Cobuild: times/10. Text: N2000960217)
How then are we to know whether, and how often, yourself in fact refers to a number of addressees? It is difficult to answer that question as, just in the case of you, the speaker or writer may not always have made a distinction between singular and plural but may be addressing himself indifferently to an audience of one or several. The context is often of little or no help. However, by an indirect route we might get an idea of the size of the phenomenon. The reflexives myself, himself, herself, itself have plural correspondences, ourselves and themselves. If we assume that the relation between reflexive singulars and plurals is very approximately constant throughout the system, we can investigate the matter in a corpus like Cobuild and draw our conclusions. The figures are shown in Table 1. Table 1. Reflexive singulars and plurals in the CobuildDirect corpus Formally singular myself 7311 himself 14815 herself 5525 itself 7894 yourself 6758
Formally plural ourselves 2798 themselves 10636 yourselves
289
% formally plural 27.7% 27.4% 4.1%
The discrepancy between 27-28% and 4% suggests that a great number of the yourself instances have plural reference. When yourself can be interpreted as referring to plural addressees, as in (15) - (17), one further step in its development follows naturally, viz. that when yourself unambiguously refers to plurals, and plurals only. This step constitutes a break with traditional descriptions of the word; it is not described in our standard grammars. Sentence (1) is one example, and some further examples follow. (18)
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Francie announced suddenly appearing brightly. “Our resident antiques expert will be having his break now, for twenty minutes only. Until resumption, please avail yourself of the fairground’s refreshments at reasonable prices ...” The queue groaned. (Cobuild: ukbooks/08. Text: B0000000010)
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(19)
Well can you sort that out amongst yourself and then after you’ve done that then present it to the February sales meeting (BNC: JN6 142)
(20)
If come Valentine’s Day you girls found yourself still manless after deploying every known method to hook that rare breed of muscle, there was only one place to be. (Cobuild: ukmags/03. Text: N0000000722)
(21)
Coffees are ordered. Do you all consider yourself to be Botards? (Cobuild: ukmags/03. Text: N0000000686)
(22)
I have some good news for those of you who didn’t manage to pull yourself together enough to get tickets to Creamfields (Cobuild: sunnow/17. Text: N9119980502)
(23)
Prologue Oedipus: My children, generations of the living In the line of Kadmos, nursed at his ancient hearth: Why have you strewn yourself before these altars In supplication, with your boughs and garlands? (Cobuild: usbooks/09. Text: B9000001423)
(24)
Make sure you’re in different groups. Okay. --One, two, three, so we separate yourself into different groups. (BNC: KPV 514)
One can see the process in operation whereby yourself is supplanting yourselves in examples like the following, where the speaker is hesitating between the two forms and deciding on yourself : (25)
So what subjects did you take then at er
As suggested above, analogy with you is probably at work here. There is also a slim chance that a few instances of plural yourself, labelled by the OED as obsolete,3 are a deliberate continuation of the Middle English plural and hence imitative of Middle English usage. This may be the case in an example like (23), where the tone is solemn and somewhat archaic. Examples like (18) - (24) above, where yourself is used with direct reference to several addressees, are frequent enough in the corpora. (It is hardly possible to give statistics, because yourself is a very frequent word,4 and evidence of the number of addressees, if it occurs at all, may occur anywhere in the
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273
context, often at some distance from yourself.) On the other hand, a further step in the development of the word, where it is still plural but no longer limited to the second person, is not recorded as frequently. This step could be represented by cases like (26)
When I went to that stress management course we were told to use physical resources like deep breathing and actually making yourself sit down and making yourself go floppy. and let every muscle let it relax. (BNC: KBF 8025)
(27)
Fiona Me and, did you see me and Sarah [at the show] ... Jessica No. No, cos we were sitting down down by yourself (BNC: KBL 2998)
(28)
We have to think yourself ! (BNC: KE0 859 )
This usage is clearly colloquial and scarcely acceptable in the standard language. The shifts in the usage of yourself that we have seen so far represent a widening of its sphere of application, from reference to second person singular to reference to second person singular and plural, and from there, in addition, to reference to other plurals. It has, in other words, become more general in its application. By a slightly different route it concurrently acquires a generic sense, as we shall now see. When yourself, in the wake of you, was used to refer to singular and plural addressees indifferently, the semantic distinction between what might be called specific addressing, where you means e.g. ‘you, Benjamin’ (“You should avail yourself of this opportunity”) and general addressing, where you means ‘one’ (“When you are young, without a job, ... it is your passions that often define you”) became blurred, particularly in general contexts. Ever since late Middle English times English has lacked a distinctive generic pronoun, corresponding to French on and German man,5 but you (and one) have come to fill that place. Consequently yourself, too, could be used in a generic sense, as in the following examples: (29)
Knowing how to present yourself # can really make or break you,” Charmaine said. (Cobuild: oznews/01. Text: N5000950205)
(30)
The role demands a lot of things. It demands subjecting yourself to complete vulnerability. (Cobuild: today/11. Text: N6000950602)
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(31)
Janet Parsons knows what it is to find yourself a victim of crime. Her husband, Leslie was killed at the wheel of his lorry by two joyriders racing each other. (BNC: K1K 3765)
(32)
The general sense of not being quite yourself (BNC: BLW 1117)
This very clear step towards generality is also shown by the fact that yourself in this sense can refer back to generic one: (33)
There’s a danger that in a science course one concentrates purely on how and why nature works, or in an engineering course one concerns yourself only with how to apply and harness phenomena, not to understand sufficiently the nature of the phenomena and what are the inherent limitations. (BNC: KRW 36)
(34)
one is to do it yourself (Cobuild: ukbooks/08. Text: B0000000774)
One step in the development of yourself remains to be discussed. As we saw in (7)-(10), you is sometimes used in a generic sense although, paradoxically, it has specific reference. This can at least initially be due to modesty on the part of the speaker and/or on a wish not to take personal responsibility for the matter presented, as you mostly stands for I or we. In the same way, yourself can then be used in a seemingly general way but with clear reference to one or more persons, mostly I or we: (35)
I’d have loosened my tie, but they had taken it away along with my wallet, gun, belt and shoelaces. I wondered how easy it would be to hang yourself with your shoelaces. (BNC: GVL 1718)
The general phrasing refers to the speaker’s specific problem, but both the general and the specific meaning of yourself are part of the full meaning of the sentence. The relevant part means both ‘to hang oneself with one’s shoelaces’ and ‘to hang myself with my shoelaces’. This type of usage can be seen as a transition to the final stage, that where the reference of yourself is exclusively specific (and not always I or we, as in (39)). Some examples are: (36)
Peter Kevin --Peter
Look, you’ve been repeating yourself again. Yeah, so are you. I di-- , I ain’t repeating yourself.
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Kevin Did, you did. You did! Peter I ain’t repeating yourself. (BNC: K SP 256) (37)
I know I, er in the past when I’ve felt myself going off to sleep in those situations, I’ve been pinching myself and, and really making yourself do something rather than just sitting there doing nothing, - - - we’ve read and heard about people that have gone to sleep on motorways haven’t they? (BNC: KBX 687)
(38)
Ten-year-old Trevor Kachel, of Belgrave Road, said: `I like boxing because it means I can defend yourself if you ever needed to. (BNC: K52 6141)
(39)
Pete’s gone down to the shop and got yourself a bottle whisky. (BNC: KCT 7304)
As the contexts make clear, these sentences do not mean ‘... repeating you’, ‘... making you’, etc., and they could not mean ‘... repeating oneself ‘, ‘... making oneself’, etc. – yourself is clearly specific here.6 The different types of usage that have been presented above could of course be described as related in several different ways, none of which is necessarily the “correct” one. If they are set out as suggested here, the stages in the development of yourself can be seen as implicational in Figure 1: This means, for instance, that those who use yourself to refer to the second person plural (d) will also use it to refer to the second person singular and plural indifferently (c), but not necessarily to other plurals (e). 5.
Conclusions
As we have seen, yourself has changed a good deal through the ages, with striking results in some variety or varieties of the language. We need not assume, however, that the development of yourself in the standard language will inevitably follow suit. This is one line of development among several, in its later phases very much a minority option. Nevertheless, it is an interesting option in that it represents the phenomenon of “pattern neatening”, to borrow a phrase from Jean Aitchison (1991). From being distributionally and semantically quite different from its corresponding personal pronoun you – deviating in number as well as type of reference – yourself has become a close reflexive-pronoun copy of it by getting rid of constraining features in its later stages of development. In those stages it would appear justifiable to regard yourself as a general-purpose emphatic-reflexive pronoun.
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Reference to 2nd plur (Ye weten your selfe)
Reference to 2nd sing (A young man like yourself)
Ref. to 2nd sing/plur (Treat yourself to a Volvo)
Ref. to 2nd plur (Separate yourself into groups)
Generic (The sense of not being quite yourself)
Ref. to other plurals (We have to think yourself)
Explicit ref. to gen. one (One concerns yourself with ...)
Ref. to any subject (I can defend yourself)
Figure 1. Types of usage with yourself Notes 1. There is occasional ambiguity between the reflexive and the emphatic use, as in You gave yourself to the poor, meaning either ‘You dedicated yourself to the poor’ or ‘You yourself gave to the poor’. 2. “... it is not always clear in present-day English whether the second person pronoun refers to one or more people” (Biber et al. 1999: 330). 3. “Yourself I. In plural sense: now replaced by yourselves.” 4. There are 6758 occurrences of yourself in Cobuild and 10587 in the BNC.
Yourself: a general-purpose emphatic-reflexive?
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5. Old English man with that meaning developed into Middle English me and became obsolete in late Middle English times. 6. A case like “I shouldn’t worry yourself, Dolly,” said Carrie, with apparent innocence (BNC HHC 240) is probably different, in that “I shouldn’t do that” is often used to mean ‘You shouldn’t do that’; “I shouldn’t worry yourself” then means ‘You shouldn’t worry yourself’.
References Aitchison, J. (1991), Language change: progress or decay. 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press. Aston, G., and L. Burnard (1998), The BNC handbook. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Barber, C. (1996), Early Modern English. 2nd ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Biber, D., S. Johansson, G. Leech, S. Conrad and E. Finegan (1999), Longman grammar of spoken and written English. Harlow: Longman. BNC = British National Corpus, see Aston and Burnard (1998). CobuildDirect Corpus, cf. Sinclair (1987). OED = Simpson, J. A., and E. S. C. Weiner (eds) (1989), The Oxford English dictionary, 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon. Quirk, R., S. Greenbaum, G. Leech and J. Svartvik (1985), A comprehensive grammar of the English language. London & New York: Longman. Sinclair, J. M. (ed.) (1987), Looking up. An account of the COBUILD project in lexical computing. London and Glasgow: Collins. Visser, F. Th. (1962-73). An historical syntax of the English language I-III. Leiden: Brill. Wright, J., and E. M. Wright (1924), An elementary historical new English grammar. London, etc.: Oxford University Press.
Aspects of spoken vocabulary development in the Polytechnic of Wales Corpus of Children’s English Clive Souter University of Leeds Abstract The Polytechnic of Wales Corpus was collected in the late 1970s for the study of syntactic and semantic development of native English-speaking children aged between six and twelve. This paper demonstrates that interesting lexical information can be gleaned from this corpus for EFL instructors and curriculum designers, even though the size of the corpus (61,000 words) makes it too small for dictionary development. The Corpus was organised to permit researchers to observe changes across age groups, and differences between the sexes and between children of different socio-economic backgrounds. Five investigations illustrate: • rate of vocabulary growth with age in this Corpus; • the extent to which vocabulary is sex-specific; • differences between sexes in the use of affirmatives and negatives, and in the use of male and female personal pronouns; • the extent to which vocabulary size is related to socio-economic class; • persistence of errors in applying regular verb endings to irregular verbs. The Corpus does show active vocabulary size increasing with age, at a rate of only around 50 words per year (in the limited activities used to elicit speech from the children). Surprisingly, around half of the words used by each of the sexes are limited to that sex. Boys make more use of positive expressions, whereas girls make greater use of negatives. Both sexes use he far more than she. There is no clear evidence that social class differences influence vocabulary size. Errors caused by applying regular verb endings to irregular verbs seem to diminish in children between ages six and eight, and have disappeared by age ten. Although it is clear that data sparsity influences these results, they are still useful (and thought-provoking) to curriculum developers and coursebook designers in EFL, as well as researchers in sociolinguistics of child language. 1.
Introduction
In this paper, I present some investigations into the development of children’s English spoken vocabulary between the ages of 6 and 12. I focus particularly on the differences in vocabulary between the ages 6, 8, 10 and 12, between the two sexes, and between socio-economic classes, since the corpus material has been organised to permit this.
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The motivation for such a study came from my belief that, until recently, the Polytechnic of Wales (POW) Corpus has never been used for vocabulary study. (It was originally collected for the study of children’s syntactic and semantic development.) This omission can perhaps be explained by the small size of the corpus: only 61,000 words. Lexicographers building dictionaries of adult vocabulary have had access to far larger English corpora, such as LOB and Brown, and more recently the British National Corpus and the COBUILD/Bank of English. For dictionary-building purposes, clearly the POW corpus is nothing like large enough, and may have been overlooked for this reason alone. However, it does have great value for researchers into child language development, TEFL syllabus designers and course-book authors. The POW Corpus is unique in containing children’s spoken language, organised clearly by age, sex and class, and in being richly syntactically annotated. I hope to show that there are some interesting features to be uncovered even in such a small corpus, by modern standards. Such features should hopefully catch the attention of the designers of school syllabi for English language learning. In many EU countries, there is pressure on the education system to introduce foreign language learning earlier in the curriculum, at primary rather than secondary school age. This is not without difficulty: there are few primary school teachers trained to teach foreign languages. Space needs to be found in the curriculum and working week of primary schools. An appropriate syllabus needs to be designed to engage younger learners. Finally, the impact on the secondary curriculum needs to be addressed, particularly if some children have been introduced to a foreign language already, but others haven’t. For this reason, a team at the Freie Universität Berlin in Germany led by Dieter Mindt has also recently been using the POW Corpus to assess which vocabulary and grammatical items should be introduced to younger German learners of English, and in what order. A paper describing their work was also presented by Norbert Schlüter at the ICAME conference in May 2002 in Göteborg, Sweden. 2.
Special value of spoken corpora for learners and teachers
Developers of language teaching materials and courses are increasingly making use of corpus evidence. Such corpora may typically consist of native speaker material, which is of course seen as the learner’s target, but may still contain errors. Additionally, corpus collections have been made of non-native learners’ language, such as for the ICLE project (Granger 1993, 1998) and ISLE project (Menzel et al 2000, Atwell et al 2003), in which learner errors may be found. From the aspect of young learners of English, native speaker spoken corpora such as the POW corpus are particularly useful in that they can provide • • •
pronunciation examples intonation and prosody examples awareness of accents
Aspects of vocabulary development • • • • •
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indications of lexical range including expressions and colloquialisms grammar of speech (false starts, ellipsis, repetitions, unfinished elements, interruptions) discourse and dialogue patterns production, lexical and grammatical errors/rarities in speech relationships between and frequency of these
This paper will deal primarily with lexical variations between types of speaker, and illustrate some of the lexical errors produced by younger native speakers of English. 3.
The Polytechnic of Wales Corpus of Children’s Spoken English
The POW Corpus was collected by Robin Fawcett and Mick Perkins, between 1978-9, for the purpose of studying development of syntax and semantics in children aged between 6 and 12. The corpus was carefully balanced for age, sex and socio-economic class. In total, there were 96 child informants, subdivided by age (within 3 months of 6, 8, 10 and 12 years old), sex (B, G) and class (A, B, C, or D). Such a division resulted in 32 homogeneous groups of 3 children. Each group was recorded in a play session (PS) performing a lego building task, and each child was interviewed (I) separately by the same adult to discuss favourite games, TV programmes etc. The recordings were then transcribed orthographically, and annotated prosodically and published in four volumes (Fawcett and Perkins 1980). A machine-readable version of the corpus was produced in 1980 with full syntactic analysis for each utterance, using Fawcett’s Systemic Functional Grammar (Fawcett 1981), but which omitted the prosodic annotation, and separated the speech of each individual child into one text file. For example, the file 6ABICJ contains the speech of a six-year-old, social class A boy in the interview situation, whose initials are CJ. The corresponding utterances during the play session for this individual are in the file 6ABPSCJ (but not those of his playmates). This is beneficial for our present purpose, but does make analysis of dialogue difficult. The original machine-readable version contains around 65,000 words, but the corpus is now more commonly distributed as the Edited Polytechnic of Wales Corpus (EPOW: O’Donoghue 1991). EPOW contains only 60,784 word-forms (3,730 word-types), because the texts have been edited for typographical errors which led to part-of-speech categories wrongly being counted as words for example. This total corresponds to around 11,000 utterances. The corpus was initially collected and used for the study of the linguistic development of older children (Perkins 1983). It was later used for the machine learning of probabilistic models of lexis and grammar for computer parsing programs (O’Donoghue 1993, Weerasinghe 1994, Souter 1989, 1996).
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4.
Investigations
Three investigations are presented here into vocabulary range by age, across the sexes, and by socio-economic class. We then investigate errors in use of irregular verbs, and the extent to which speakers develop their use of syntactically ambiguous words. a) Vocabulary size and rate of growth We can use the corpus to investigate how children’s vocabulary expands with age. Taking the part-of-speech tagged version of the EPOW corpus as our data source, we can extract the number of unique word + word-tag pairs for each age group. This is achieved using standard unix operating system commands on the text files of the corpus, once they have been verticalised with only one word + word-tag per line. For instance, the unix command cat 6* | sort +0 -1 | uniq | wc produces the output 1821 (lines
3642 79093 strings characters)
and shows that there are 1,821 unique word + wordtag pairs used by the entire group of six-year-olds. Extracting the same for the older children gives us an indicative growth rate over each two year span of around 6% (Table 1). Note that we are not talking about growth rates and vocabulary sizes for individuals here, but of the combined vocabulary of 24 children in each age group. It does however give us some indication of the typical upper bound for word + word-tag pairs used by children. The number of unique word-forms is somewhat lower: the number of unique words in the corpus is 3,730, compared with 4,618 unique word + word-tag pairs. Table 1. Tagged EPOW Corpus: types by age Types Growth (%) Tokens
6 1821 14120
8 1938 6.4 14718
10 2006 3.5 15368
12 2162 7.8 16528
All 4618 60784
From intuition, we may expect that vocabulary size should grow with age for older children. We might also expect that the corpus had been carefully controlled so that there were equal numbers of word-forms in each age cohort, but this was not the case. As can be seen from the third row of Table 1, there are more tokens in each cohort as the ages increase.
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2500 2000 Age 6 Age 8 Age 10 Age 12
Types
1500 1000 500
00
0
0 16
00
14
00
0
0 12
00
00
10
80
00
60
00
40
2
00
0
0
Tokens
Figure 1. Unique word-wordtag pairs by age In order to discover if there is a genuine growth in vocabulary with age, we can plot a learning curve for each age group, which shows how many unique word + word-tag pairs are found as we read through the corpus data (Figure 1). This has the effect of normalising for uneven sample sizes. Until the data supply for six-year-olds runs out at just over 14,000 wordforms, we can see that the twelve-year-olds consistently have a greater vocabulary range than any younger group. The ten-year-olds only show a markedly higher range once we have seen at least half of the data. The eight- and six-year-olds appear not to differ greatly in vocabulary range. Rather surprisingly, for much of the learning curve shown in Figure 1, the six-year-olds exceed the eight-year-olds slightly in vocabulary range.
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These figures for vocabulary range obviously need to be carefully interpreted. They reflect the limited contexts in which the data were collected (lego-building and conversations with an adult about games, films and TV), but they are better than nothing as pointers towards active vocabulary. For greater detail, Appendix 1 shows the 100 most frequent word + wordtag pairs for each age group. These data reveal the pronoun I to be the most common word across all age groups in the corpus, and a fairly consistent ranking of other personal pronouns across the age ranges. Interestingly, he is around twice as frequent as she across all age groups. Of the words used to express affirmation and negation, we see a fairly consistent ranking for the word no. The use of yes is quite consistent among six-ten year olds, but drops significantly among twelveyear-olds. The use of yeah instead of yes is a growing trend across all the age groups, and increases quite sharply among twelve-year-olds, as use of yes decreases. b) Vocabulary differences by sex and age Using similar unix commands, we can easily separate the data by sex and age. Table 2 shows the range of word + word-tag pairs used by boys and girls. Although the overall total for the corpus for each sex is almost the same, this parity is only maintained in the subcorpus for eight- and ten-year-olds. Six-yearold boys appear to have a significantly smaller vocabulary than six-year-old girls, whereas the reverse is the case for twelve-year-olds, at least to judge from the POW corpus. Table 2. Tagged EPOW Corpus: word-wordtag types by sex and age Boys Girls Total
6 1099 1265 1821
8 1252 1250 1938
10 1319 1319 2006
12 1454 1342 2162
Total 3054 3044 4618
What is interesting to observe here, and which is made more obvious in Table 3, is the number of word types being used only by boys, or only by girls. Table 3. Raw EPOW Corpus: word types Girls 2487
Boys 2491
6 1508
8 1614
10 1670
12 1760
All 3730
There are 3,730 unique words (word types) being used in the corpus as a whole. Table 3 columns 1 and 2 show how many of these are used specifically by just the boys or just the girls. Columns 3-6 show how many types are used by the sixyear-olds (of either sex), eight-year-olds, ten-year-olds, and twelve-year-olds, respectively. Columns 3-6 are indicative of fairly steady vocabulary growth in children aged between six and twelve.
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Boys use 2,491 words and girls 2,487, which are remarkably similar totals. However, only around 1,240 of the words in the corpus are being used by both sexes, and the other half is specific to the speaker’s sex. We might perhaps expect that the overlap between sexes would increase if we had a larger corpus, or if the speakers were adult, but perhaps this distribution is demonstrating a genuine socio-linguistic phenomenon as well. We can explore the words used only by boys or only by girls by deleting those used by both from an alphabetically sorted lexicon extracted from the corpus. Appendix 2 contains such words (beginning with A) extracted from the corpus. An obvious area of difference is in the use of proper nouns. Male names are prominent in the boys only list, and female names in the girls only list. The corpus also displays stereotypical examples for favourite toys, careers, games etc for each sex. Beyond this, we have to speculate as to whether the appearance of a word in one column or the other is due to data sparsity, or whether it really is indicative of a difference between the sexes. There is evidence for both, I would argue. Data sparsity is evidenced by the occurrence of amusement twice in boys’ speech (but not in girls’), and amusements once in girls’ speech (but not in boys’). Boys talk about aeroplane, aircraft, air-force and airport, whereas only air stewardess and air hostess feature on the girls’ side. Boys talk about antennas and airholes, action men and astronauts, whereas girls talk about animal magic, all creatures great and small, and Alice in Wonderland. Clearly, in a list such as Appendix 2, many of the items occur only once in the corpus. If we instead consider the most frequent words used by boys and girls, can we see any differences? Appendix 3 contains the 100 most frequent word + word-tag pairs in the boys’ and girls’ sub-corpus. If we consider the most common words which express affirmation or negation, we can see a clear difference between the sexes. In the POW Corpus, words like yes and no are labelled with the part of speech F (formula). Given that the corpus contains equal quantities of text spoken by each sex, boys tend overall to use more positives than girls do, whereas girls use more negative words, as illustrated in Table 4. There are, of course, other ways of expressing affirmation and negation, but these are the ones found most frequently in the corpus. (The use of no as a quantifier has been omitted from the table.) Either this reflects a general trend between the sexes in children’s spoken language, or it is an artifact of the tasks performed in corpus collection. Perhaps Lego building elicits more positive responses from boys, and more negative responses from girls. Perhaps being interviewed by a friendly male adult has an impact.
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Table 4. Occurrence of some affirmatives and negatives by sex Item (part of speech) YEAH (F) YES (F) YEH (F) TOTAL NO (F) NOT (N) DON’T (ON) CAN’T (OMN) HAVEN’T (OXN) TOTAL
Boys 561 136 52 749
Girls 336 214 41 591
274 130 188 59 75 726
311 174 223 102 79 889
In line with the data for all the children, regardless of sex, the personal pronoun he occurs far more frequently than she. One might expect this in the boys’ language (239 instances of he against only 56 instances of she), but even the girls use he (178 occurrences) more frequently than she (123 occurrences). c) Track differences in social background The corpus also allows us to look for possible differences by socio-economic class, which is expressed from A (highest) to D (lowest) in the corpus filenames, and was judged by parental occupation information collected when the corpus was compiled. Table 5 displays the word + word-form types by class and age. Table 5. Tagged EPOW Corpus: types by social class and age ClassA ClassB ClassC ClassD
6 846 852 761 546
8 806 699 813 871
10 983 923 789 702
12 979 938 786 890
Few clear patterns are evident. Vocabulary range is not always highest for the class A children, although it is for the ten- and twelve-year-olds. For eight-yearolds, it is the class D children who have the widest vocabulary. Given the judgmental approach to allocation of socio-economic class labels, it is perhaps not worth exploring this area any further. d) Genuine learners’ errors (not typographical or transcription errors) Running a spelling checker on the Edited POW Corpus, and ignoring the many proper nouns, we can find some examples of native learner errors, such as regular
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past tense forms for irregular verbs. Table 6 shows alphabetically which errors of this kind are found in the corpus, and the source file in each case. One six-yearold girl is the source of many of these. There are only 11 such errors among the six-year-olds. Eight-year-olds have produced only four, and thereafter it appears that these children have learned to use the irregular forms correctly. Table 6. Past form errors of irregular verbs in POW Word amn’t blowed bringed comed digged drawed keeped rided runned shooted throwed weared
Source 6cg (6cgihb) 8cb 6cg x 2 6cg 6cg 8db 6cg 6cg 6cg x 2 6ag 6bg 8db x 2
e) Lexical ambiguity One of the reasons for using the tagged POW corpus in these investigations was to discover whether there was an increase in the range of syntactic uses of a word with age, between the ages 6-12. Do children of these ages know how to use the word cut as a noun, verb, and adjective? Table 7 shows the number of lexically ambiguous word types used by each age group, as a percentage of the total number of types of word + word-tag pairs. This proportion remains remarkably static across the four age groups. Perhaps children have already learned all such syntactic differences before the age of six, but I would think that unlikely. More probably, the corpus elicitation tasks were too constrained to demonstrate this feature adequately. Table 7. Tagged EPOW Corpus: ambiguous type Word types Ambiguous types (% by age group)
6 1508 204 (13.52)
8 1614 214 (13.25)
10 1670 211 (12.6)
12 1760 238 (13.52)
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5.
Conclusions
The five investigations have hopefully illustrated some of the possibilities for discovery of distinguishing features of children’s vocabulary development. Whilst in some areas it is clear that the data are too sparse (to inform the compilation of a children’s dictionary, for example), there are others which are more promising and perhaps disturbing, from the point of view of syllabus and course material designers. The POW corpus evidence suggests that many of the words we use between the ages of 6-12 are not regularly used by the opposite sex in similar contexts. This feature is worth a good deal more investigation. Growth in vocabulary with age has also been demonstrated, although perhaps not at a rate of increase we might expect. It would be interesting to compare the vocabulary of children aged 6-12 with that of adults in the better known corpora, but the limited tasks for speech collection used in the POW Corpus would confound a straightforward comparison. For syllabus and coursebook designers, there are also some warnings to be made with respect to the Welsh dialect features of the POW Corpus. Although the collectors sought to minimise Welsh language influence in the data, there are some dialectal features which show through quite strongly. Two of these are the disproportionately high occurrence of tag questions (including the use of isn’t it without person agreement with the main clause verb), and the use of Welsh dialect locative adverbs by-here and by-there, instead of here and there, which becomes more prevalent in the older age groups. Further warnings should be made regarding the domain-based lexis. The most frequent common nouns in POW are house, door, man, window and car, because of the Lego-building task which the children were set. From the point of view of syntactic structures, the POW corpus illustrates just how ‘ill-behaved’ speech can be, especially when uttered by children. Around 30% of the constituents in the parsed corpus are lacking a grammatical head, mainly because of ellipsis or interruption, so there is a wide range of grammatical structures not typically found in written corpora. The POW Corpus is a small corpus for lexical work, but it still reveals some interesting comparative and quantitative linguistic features of children of different ages and across the sexes. It is almost unique as a lexico-grammatical resource for children’s spoken language. I have not tried to show all such features, by any means, but I hope to have demonstrated that it is worth exploring, particularly if you have an interest in learning and teaching language.
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References Atwell, E., P. Howarth and C. Souter (2003), ‘The ISLE Corpus: Italian and German spoken learners’ English’, ICAME Journal 27: 5-18. Fawcett, R.P. (1981), ‘Some proposals for systemic syntax’. Journal of the Midlands Association for Linguistic Studies (MALS), 1.2, 2.1, 2.2 (197476). Re-issued with light amendments, 1981, Department of Behavioural and Communication Studies, Polytechnic of Wales. Fawcett, R.P. and M. Perkins (1980), Child language transcripts 6-12 (with a preface, in 4 volumes). Department of Behavioural and Communication Studies, Polytechnic of Wales. Granger, S. (1993), ‘The International Corpus of Learner English’, in: J. Aarts, P. de Haan and N. Oostdijk (eds), English language corpora: design, analysis and exploitation. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 57-69. Granger, S. (ed.) (1998), Learner English on computer. London and New York: Addison Wesley Longman. Menzel, W., E. Atwell, P. Bonaventura, D. Herron, P. Howarth, R. Morton and C. Souter (2000), ‘The ISLE Corpus of non-native spoken English’, in: M. Gavrilidou, G. Carrayannis, S. Markantionadou, S. Piperidis and G. Stainhaouer (eds), Proceedings of LREC2000: Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, vol. 2, 957-964. European Language Resources Association. O'Donoghue, T.F. (1991), ‘Taking a parsed corpus to the cleaners: the EPOW corpus’, ICAME Journal 15: 55-62. O'Donoghue, T.F. (1993), Reversing the process of generation in Systemic Grammar. Ph.D. thesis. School of Computer Studies, Leeds University. Perkins, M.R. (1983), Modal expressions in English. London: Frances Pinter. Souter, C. (1989), ‘The COMMUNAL Project: Extracting a grammar from the Polytechnic of Wales corpus’, ICAME Journal 13: 20-27. Souter, C. (1996), A corpus-trained parser for systemic-functional syntax. Ph.D. Thesis. School of Computing, University of Leeds. Weerasinghe, A.R. (1994), Probabilistic parsing in Systemic Functional Grammar. Ph.D. thesis. School of Computing Mathematics, University of Wales College of Cardiff.
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Appendix 1: 100 most frequent word-wordtag pairs by age in POW Age 6 Frq
Age 8
Type
Tag Frq
Age 10
Type
Tag
Frq
Age 12
Type
Tag Frq
Type
Tag
762 I
HP
641 I
HP
644 I
HP
632 I
HP
507 THE
DD
597 THE
DD
556 THE
DD
590 THE
DD
489 A
DQ
451 A
DQ
431 A
DQ
530 A
DQ
389 AND
&
411 AND
&
426 IT
HP
403 IT
HP
336 YOU
HP
368 IT
HP
391 AND
&
359 AND
&
328 IT
HP
348 WE
HP
381 YOU
HP
342 'S
OM
254 'S
OM
281 'S
OM
296 'S
OM
337 WE
HP
196 GOT
M
262 YOU
HP
264 WE
HP
333 THAT
DD
191 THAT
DD
262 THAT
DD
234 THAT
DD
327 YEAH
F
168 WE
HP
192 YEAH
F
230 YEAH
F
319 YOU
HP
155 THEY
HP
170 NO
F
155 THEY
HP
191 GOT
M
151 IN
P
163 GOT
M
149 TO
I
171 PUT
M
148 YEAH
F
143 THEY
HP
147 NO
F
166 IN
P
134 MY
DD
123 PUT
M
141 GOT
M
158 NO
F
132 TO
I
113 TO
I
131 THERE
STH
157 THEY
HP
129 HE
HP
113 IN
P
124 IN
P
145 DON'T
ON
110 NO
F
110 YES
F
122 THIS
DD
141 ONE
HP
107 CAN
OM
108 THIS
DD
119 OF
VO
129 TO
I
100 YES
F
104 ON
P
109 PUT
M
112 OF
VO
98 ON
P
103 THERE
AX
106 THERE
AX
111 THERE
AX
92 LOOK
M
103 MY
DD
104 YES
F
108 HAVE
M
90 'M
OX
101 HE
HP
104 HE
HP
107 ON
AX
84 TWO
DQ
100 CAN
OM
98 DO
M
106 THIS
DD
84 OF
VO
98 'LL
OM
96 ONE
HP
104 NOT
N
83 ONE
HP
97 LOOK
M
96 LOOK
M
102 KNOW
M
82 DON'T
ON
91 DON'T
ON
93 DON'T
ON
100 THERE
STH
80 MAKE
M
91 DO
M
87 ALL
DQ
93 BE
M
79 PUT
M
90 BE
M
86 'LL
OM
87 CAN
OM
79 ON
AX
89 'VE
OX
84 BE
M
85 ON
P
78 THERE
AX
88 HOUSE
H
83 THEM
HP
85 'LL
OM
77 GO
M
87 MAKE
M
81 HAVE
M
83 HE
HP
76 SHE
HP
85 THERE
STH
79 ON
P
81 NOW
AX
76 HAVE
M
85 OF
VO
79 CAN
OM
81 GO
M
75 KNOW
M
81 ONE
HP
76 IF
B
80 THEM
HP
71 WITH
P
79 ALL
DQ
75 MY
DD
78 WHAT
HWH
69 GET
M
78 GO
M
72 KNOW
M
76 LIKE
P
68 IS
OM
76 HAVE
M
71 WAS
OM
75 HOUSE
H
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68 'S
OX
73 ON
AX
71 UP
AX
73 GET
M
67 THERE
STH
71 KNOW
M
70 NOT
N
71 ALL
DQ
67 IF
B
70 WHAT
HWH
70 'VE
OX
66 WITH
P
66 NOT
N
68 THEM
HP
70 'S
OX
66 'VE
OX
64 THEM
HP
68 IF
B
67 NOW
AX
64 LOOK
M
62 SOME
DQ
67 'S
OX
67 MAKE
M
63 OUT
AX
61 THIS
DD
64 NOT
N
64 HOUSE
H
63 LIKE
M
60 HERE
AX
57 IS
OM
59 LITTLE
AX
62 THESE
DD
59 MAN
H
56 LIKE
P
58 WHAT
HWH
62 HERE
AX
58 DO
M
55 WITH
P
58 GO
M
61 IS
OM
57 TO
P
55 NOW
AX
58 GET
M
61 BY-THERE
AX
56 UP
AX
55 'M
OX
57 ON
AX
59 LITTLE
AX
56 DOOR
H
51 WAS
OM
57 IS
OM
58 ROOF
H
55 WHAT
HWH
51 PLAY
M
57 GOOD
AX
58 IF
B
55 BUT
&
50 AND-THEN
&
56 HERE
AX
58 DO
M
54 HOUSE
H
46 HAVE-TO
XM
55 WITH
P
57 WAS
OM
53 'VE
OX
46 AN'
&
54 LIKE
P
56 UP
AX
51 ME
HP
45 THINK
M
54 LIKE
M
55 ONES
HP
51 BE
M
45 SHE
HP
53 THESE
DD
55 FOR
P
50 ALL
DQ
45 GET
M
53 BUT
&
54 JUST
AI
49 AND-THEN
&
45 FOR
P
53 AND-THEN &
51 GOING-TO
X
48 WAS
OM
45 COULD
OM
51 DOOR
H
51 BUILD
M
48 DO
O
44 WHERE
AXWH
51 BY-THERE
AX
50 SOME
DQ
47 JUST
AI
43 BUT
&
48 WHEN
B
50 HAVEN'T
OXN
46 ONE
DQ
42 OUT
AX
48 THINK
M
49 TO
P
46 FOR
P
42 DOOR
H
47 WINDOWS
H
48 CAN'T
OMN
46 COME
M
41 UP
AX
47 JUST
AI
48 'S
OX
45 WANT
M
40 CAN'T
OMN
46 FOR
P
47 BUT
&
45 'LL
OM
39 TO
P
45 ONE
DQ
45 MAKE
M
44 LITTLE
AX
38 LIKE
M
43 IN
AX
44 HAVE-TO
XM
44 GOOD
AX
37 WHEN
B
43 'RE
OM
44 GOT-TO
XM
43 HAVEN'T
OXN
37 NEED
M
42 WINDOW
H
43 WANT
M
42 CAR
H
37 DO
O
42 NEED
M
43 RED
AX
41 NEED
M
36 LITTLE
AX
41 TO
P
42 ONE
DQ
40 CAN'T
OMN
36 GOT-TO
XM
41 ROOF
H
42 OFF
AX
37 LIKE
M
36 BUS-STOP
H
40 SOME
DQ
41 MY
DD
37 GOING-TO
X
35 TWO
DQ
40 DO
O
40 PLAY
M
36 THINGS
H
35 SOME
DQ
39 GOING-TO
X
40 NEED
M
36 PLAY
M
35 LEGO
HN
38 HAVE-TO
XM
39 SHE
HP
36 MINE
HP
35 IN
AX
37 YEH
F
39 OR
&
35 WAS
OX
35 BIG
AX
37 BECAUSE
B
39 IN
AX
292
Clive Souter
35 NOW
AX
34 ROOF
H
36 SO
&
39 'RE
OX
35 AT
P
34 JUST
AI
34 WENT
M
39 'D
OM
34 WHEELS
H
34 GOING-TO
X
34 PLAY
M
37 THINGS
H
33 MAKING
M
33 RIGHT
AF
34 OUT
AX
37 DO
O
33 HAVE
OX
33 HERE
AX
34 BUILD
M
37 AN'
&
33 HAD
M
33 HAVEN'T
OXN
34 BRICKS
H
36 YES
F
33 BUS
H
33 BY-THERE
AX
33 ONES
HP
36 TWO
DQ
32 HIM
HP
32 THESE
DD
33 CAN'T
OMN
36 ME
HP
31 WHEN
B
32 GARAGE
H
32 YOU-KNOW AF
36 GOOD
AX
30 OUT
AX
31 ONE
DQ
32 ME
HP
35 WINDOW
H
30 COS
B
31 GOOD
AX
32 'D
OM
35 THEN
AX
30 BACK
AX
31 AT
PM
31 CAR
H
34 WHITE
AX
28 WHAT
F
30 THEN
AX
31 ARE
OM
34 WENT
M
28 WENT
M
30 DOWN
AX
31 'RE
OX
34 SEE
M
28 ARE
OM
29 WENT
M
30 WANT
M
34 COULD
OM
27 WINDOWS
H
29 OFF
AX
30 TWO
DQ
34 BIG
AX
27 IN
AX
29 ME
HP
30 THING
H
33 DOOR
H
26 WINDOW
H
28 GOING
M
30 REALLY
AL
31 WHERE
AXWH
26 GOTTA
XM
28 DOING
M
30 'M
OX
31 RIGHT
FR
26 DOWN
AX
27 THING
H
29 WOULD
OM
31 LOOK
AF
26 BECAUSE
B
26 COS
B
29 VERY
T
30 COME
M
26 ANOTHER
DQ
25 SAID
M
28 HAVEN'T
OXN
29 SO
&
Appendix 2: Sex-specific words in POW Boys’ only talk Freq
Word Type
Girls’ only talk Freq
Word Type
4
A-LEVEL
1
A'
2
A-LITTLE
1
A-HUNDRED-AND-ONE-DALMATIANS
1
ABANDONED
1
A-LADDERS
2
ABOVE
1
A...
4
ACTION-MAN
2
ABROAD
1
ADDING
1
ACCOUNTANT
1
ADRIAN
1
ACHING
2
ADVENTURE-BOOKS
1
ACROBATICS
1
ADVERT
1
ACTUALLY
1
ADVERTS
1
ADDED
3
AEROPLANES
1
ADJUST
1
AFRICANS
1
AFFORD
1
AGREE
1
AFTERWARDS
Aspects of vocabulary development
293
1
AIR-FORCES
2
AGES
1
AIRCRAFT
1
AHEAD
1
AIRHOLE
1
AHEAD-OF
1
AIRPORT
3
AIR-HOSTESS
1
AL
1
AIR-STEWARDESS
1
ALARM
6
ALEX
1
ALF
1
ALICE-IN-WONDERLAND
1
ALFRED-HITCHCOCK
3
ALIVE
1
ALL-OF-A-SUDDEN
1
ALL-ABOARD
1
ALL-THE-WAY
1
ALL-CREATURES-GREAT-AND-SMALL
1
ALL-TOGETHER
1
ALL-RIGHT-THEN
2
ALMOST
2
ALLEY
1
ALRIGHT-ALRIGHT
1
ALONE
2
AMUSEMENT
1
ALRIGHT-THEN
2
AMUSING
1
ALTOGETHER
2
ANDERSON
1
AM...
1
ANDRE
1
AMN'T
3
ANGRY
1
AMOUNT
1
ANIMAL-SNAP
1
AMUSEMENTS
1
ANTENNA
1
AN-ALL
1
ANY-MORE
1
AND'
1
ANY-WHERE
1
AND-FILEY
4
ANYMORE
3
ANDREA
1
ANYONE
2
ANGELS
2
ANYWHERE
1
ANGLES
2
APART-FROM
1
ANIMAL-MAGIC
1
APPLE
1
ANY-HOW
1
ARBEE
1
ANY-RATE
1
ARCADE
1
ANY-WAY
1
AREA
1
ANYHOW
2
ARGENTINA
2
ARCHES
1
ARGUED
1
ARGUE
1
ARROW
1
AROUNDS
2
ARROWS
1
ARRESTED
2
ART
1
AS-FAR-AS
2
ARTIST
1
AS-IF
2
AS-WELL-AS
2
AS-LONG-AS
1
ASTRONAUT
1
AS-SOON-AS
2
ASTRONOMY
1
ASKED
1
AT-FIRST
1
ASLEEP
1
AT-LAST
2
ASSEMBLY
294
Clive Souter 1
ATH-LYMPICS
1
ATTACHED
1
ATTACK
1
ATTENTION
2
ATTACKING
1
AVE
1
AWKWARD
1
AW-MAMMY
Appendix 3: 100 most frequent word-wordtag pairs by sex in POW Boys Type
Frq
Tag
Frq
Girls Type
Tag
1190
I
HP
1489
I
HP
1186
THE
DD
1064
THE
DD
942
A
DQ
959
A
DQ
800
IT
HP
801
AND
&
749
AND
&
727
YOU
HP
571
YOU
HP
725
IT
HP
571
'S
OM
602
'S
OM
565
WE
HP
552
WE
HP
561
YEAH
F
477
THAT
DD
543
THAT
DD
361
THEY
HP
354
GOT
M
337
GOT
M
288
IN
P
336
YEAH
F
274
NO
F
311
NO
F
249
THEY
HP
282
TO
I
241
TO
I
266
IN
P
240
PUT
M
242
PUT
M
239
HE
HP
232
THERE
AX
212
OF
VO
227
THERE
STH
209
THIS
DD
223
DON'T
ON
193
ON
AX
214
YES
F
190
ONE
HP
211
ONE
HP
188
DON'T
ON
202
MY
DD
179
CAN
OM
200
LOOK
M
173
ON
P
197
HAVE
M
167
'LL
OM
194
CAN
OM
166
THERE
AX
193
ON
P
156
THERE
STH
188
THIS
DD
151
MY
DD
188
OF
VO
149
LOOK
M
180
KNOW
M
149
DO
M
178
HE
HP
148
BE
M
174
NOT
N
Aspects of vocabulary development
295
146
MAKE
M
170
BE
M
144
HAVE
M
163
GO
M
143
HOUSE
H
159
THEM
HP
140
KNOW
M
156
DO
M
140
'VE
OX
150
ALL
DQ
138
IF
B
147
'LL
OM
137
WHAT
HWH
138
WITH
P
137
ALL
DQ
138
HOUSE
H
136
YES
F
138
'VE
OX
136
THEM
HP
133
MAKE
M
136
GET
M
131
IF
B
131
GO
M
129
IS
OM
130
NOT
N
127
NOW
AX
127
'S
OX
127
LIKE
M
118
UP
AX
126
'S
OX
114
IS
OM
124
WHAT
HWH
111
NOW
AX
123
WAS
OM
109
WITH
P
123
SHE
HP
104
WAS
OM
123
ON
AX
102
NEED
M
120
LITTLE
AX
96
TWO
DQ
118
LIKE
P
96
FOR
P
117
HERE
AX
94
HERE
AX
114
BUT
&
92
LIKE
P
109
GET
M
92
JUST
AI
106
UP
AX
91
TO
P
106
SOME
DQ
91
'M
OX
105
'M
OX
90
BY-THERE
AX
102
CAN'T
OMN
88
HAVE-TO
XM
101
DO
O
87
ONE
DQ
98
DOOR
H
86
GOOD
AX
96
FOR
P
86
AND-THEN
&
95
TO
P
84
DOOR
H
92
ME
HP
84
BUT
&
91
THESE
DD
81
THESE
DD
91
AND-THEN
&
81
SOME
DQ
90
JUST
AI
80
OUT
AX
89
TWO
DQ
80
GOING-TO
X
89
OUT
AX
78
LITTLE
AX
88
IN
AX
78
CAR
H
84
PLAY
M
77
PLAY
M
82
ONES
HP
296
Clive Souter 75
HAVEN'T
OXN
82
GOOD
AX
74
ROOF
H
81
GOING-TO
X
67
WANT
M
80
BY-THERE
AX
66
WHERE
AXWH
79
THINK
M
66
OFF
AX
79
HAVEN'T
OXN
66
COULD
OM
78
ROOF
H
65
LIKE
M
77
WHEN
B
65
BIG
AX
77
ONE
DQ
61
GOT-TO
XM
77
'RE
OM
61
GARAGE
H
75
WINDOWS
H
61
DO
O
74
WENT
M
60
WHEN
B
67
COME
M
60
BUILD
M
66
COS
B
59
MAN
H
65
ARE
OM
59
CAN'T
OMN
64
WANT
M
58
COME
M
64
THINGS
H
57
THING
H
64
MAN
H
56
THINGS
H
64
HAVE-TO
XM
56
SHE
HP
64
'D
OM
56
ME
HP
63
WINDOW
H
56
IN
AX
62
AN'
&
55
WINDOW
H
61
BECAUSE
B
54
AT
P
59
OR
&
53
HIM
HP
58
WHERE
AXWH
52
YEH
F
58
NEED
M
52
THEN
AX
57
PEOPLE
H
51
WENT
M
57
GOT-TO
XM
51
RIGHT
AF
57
BUILD
M
Demonstrative reference as a cohesive device in advanced learner writing: a corpus-based study Roumiana Blagoeva Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski Abstract This paper discusses the under/overuse of different types of demonstrative reference and their role for the achievement of cohesion in argumentative essays written by advanced Bulgarian learners of English. The use of pro-forms and their place within the total framework of text-forming relations are examined in both native and non-native writing. A comparative approach to the study of learner language is adopted for the investigation of differences between learner and native English writing. These differences shed light on L1- induced and universal features of learner discourse. The analysis is based on data drawn from the Bulgarian component of the International Corpus of Learner English (BUCICLE), the LOCNESS corpus of native learner writing, a sub-corpus of the BNC, and a corpus of Bulgarian nonlearner writing. The frequency of occurrence, the distribution of demonstratives, and their function as reference items in the four corpora are compared and examples of their use are discussed. Explanations of the phenomena observed are sought in several directions: L1 interference, strategies of teaching/learning, avoidance of certain discourse patterns, and the nature of the text type. The differences between learner and native speaker English in the frequency and distribution of demonstratives might not directly obstruct communication but it is an indication that there is still much to be done in the development of language skills even at an advanced level of foreign language acquisition. The adoption of a corpus-based approach to the study of learner language can reveal problematic areas in the foreign language and can enable language researchers and language teaching professionals to diagnose the true needs of learners and make appropriate choices of teaching materials and methods. 1.
Introduction
Interlanguage studies in Bulgaria developed in the early 1980s as a result of the growing awareness that it was hardly possible to achieve effectiveness in foreign language acquisition (FLA) and improvement of foreign language teaching (FLT) without knowledge of the learners’ needs and the peculiarities of their foreign
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Roumiana Blagoeva
language production. Course designers, textbook authors and teachers concentrated their efforts, on the one hand, on cross-language comparisons which helped to generate predictions about the areas of learning difficulty in the target language, and, on the other hand, on analysing learners’ errors and the factors that cause them. Such studies placed too much emphasis on “errors” detectable on the phrase and sentence levels, and they paid little attention to the inability of learners to create a unified whole of the sentences that they produced. This led to the assumption that as long as students stick to the rules of grammar and the appropriate use of words they would be able to communicate successfully in the foreign language. Yet, it was perceived by both teachers and learners that even at a high level of FLA where very few errors occur there is still much difference between learner and native-speaker production. In recent years the collection of electronic learner-language corpora has led to a shift of priorities in the study of learner production mainly in two directions. First, by providing larger stretches of discourse a corpus enables language teaching professionals and language researchers to study not only isolated sentences and their structure but also the ways these sentences are organised and utilised by text producers in realistic conditions for the purposes of communication. Second, electronic learner corpora and corpus linguistics have provided the necessary material and tools to turn the focus of attention from erroneous structures to language patterns that might consist of acceptable units of language but used in unnatural combinations. With the help of corpus data it is now possible to reveal and analyse quantitative as well as qualitative differences between learner and native speaker production. These differences seem to be a major cause of the artificiality of learners’ interlanguage and they indicate the real areas of difficulties in the acquisition of a foreign language. 2.
Aims of the study
This paper is part of a wider study of grammatical cohesive devices in argumentative essays written by advanced Bulgarian learners of English which aims at establishing how Bulgarian learners of English use the resources available in the foreign language to achieve effective communication. It deals with the under/overuse of the demonstratives this, that and their plural variants these, those, both in their functions as determiner (modifier) and pronoun (head), and their use as cohesive ties in written advanced learner discourse. 3.
The corpora
A learner corpus is very different from a native corpus because of the nature of the material collected. A native corpus contains data from a natural language and can be used on its own for the investigation of characteristic features of this language. A learner corpus presents evidence of an interlanguage; and an
Demonstrative reference as a cohesive device
299
interlanguage, regardless of its stages of development, can only be an approximation to the natural language that is the target aimed at in the process of FLT. Therefore, any learner corpus would be of little value on its own, but it can be a useful tool for investigating a particular interlanguage when compared to a relevant native corpus. The choice of the native-speaker corpus is dependent on the aims of FLT. If the final goal of FLT/FLA is to achieve an ability to use the target language as it is used by native speakers for the fulfilment of certain reallife tasks, then a study of interlanguage will, firstly, need a suitable sample of the foreign language to compare with the learners’ production. Secondly, a learner language is always characterised by some degree of L1 interference and, thirdly, it could be influenced by the nature of the text type that learners have to produce. Therefore, their language should be evaluated against a target norm representing a similar text type. For all these reasons, comparisons with relevant data that take into consideration these aspects of learner production are indispensable for a comprehensive description and investigation of any feature a learner corpus might display. In view of the peculiarities of learner corpora mentioned above, the present analysis is based on comparisons of data drawn from four electronic corpora of about 200,000 words each. Corpus 1 is a learner corpus of argumentative essays written by Bulgarian university students of English language and literature, compiled within the framework of the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) project, namely the Bulgarian sub-Corpus of the International Corpus of Learner English (BUCICLE). The ICLE project was launched at the University of Louvain in 1990. From the very beginning strict design criteria were adopted and variables such as age, sex, native language background, level of foreign language education, and the type and length of texts to be included were carefully controlled. Each of the research teams from the participating countries was to assemble a computerized collection of 200,000 words of learner English. At present the ICLE corpus contains approximately 2 million words of argumentative writing from university students of English from 11 different language backgrounds and is an important resource for analysing features of written interlanguage grammar, lexis and discourse (for further details, see Granger, Dagneaux and Meunier 2002). Corpus 2 is the British component of the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNESS) containing argumentative essays by native-speaker university students. Corpus 3 is a sub-corpus of the BNC consisting of non-fiction texts from the domains of Applied Science, Social Science and World Affairs, as this is the target norm Bulgarian students are expected to master. Corpus 4 is a collection of texts written in Bulgarian and taken from domains comparable to those of the BNC sub-corpus.
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4.
Theoretical framework
Before discussing the results it is necessary to mention some similarities and differences between the demonstratives and their role as cohesive devices in English and Bulgarian. As far as textual relations are concerned demonstratives in English and Bulgarian behave in a similar way. First, in both languages demonstratives can function as determiners in noun phrases, or as pronouns, i.e. as whole noun phrases. Second, in both languages their basic deictic function is to indicate definiteness and proximity: ‘near’ and ‘remote’ (or ‘not near’) from the point of view of the speaker. Third, in both languages they indicate that information about their meaning, their referent, is to be retrieved from elsewhere: either from the communicative situation thus relating exophorically to entities in the world outside the text, or from the text itself where they refer endophorically to preceding or following items expressing anaphoric or cataphoric reference respectively. They refer to the location of some thing (person or object) in space or time that is participating in the process. Finally, in both languages they have distinct singular and plural forms (for Bulgarian, see Maslov 1982: 309-310; Krastev 1992: 77-78; Pashov 1994: 95; Andreichin et al. 1998: 239; for English, see Quirk and Greenbaum 1973: 107; Halliday 1985: 160, 292; Leech and Svartvik 1994: 267; Lyons 1977: 647). Two major dissimilarities, however, exist between demonstratives in English and Bulgarian. The first one arises from the different expressions of gender and the inflectional character of Bulgarian. This accounts for the larger number of Bulgarian forms corresponding to the singular forms this and that. Another important difference comes from the distinction between registers made in Bulgarian, which leads to the existence of stylistically marked forms of the demonstratives. These differences and similarities are summarised in Table 1. Table 1. The English demonstratives and their Bulgarian equivalents ENGLISH
BULGARIAN Gender
Formal/Neutral
Stylistically marked
Near Remote
Participants
(colloquial/poetic)
Sing
this
Pl.
these
Sing
that
Pl.
those
masc. tozi/toja fem. tazi/taja neuter tova tezi/tija masc. onzi/onja fem. onazi/onaja neuter onova onezi/onija
toz taz tuj tez onaz onuj onez
One important feature of the demonstratives in English compared with the demonstratives in Bulgarian that makes them both similar and different should be
Demonstrative reference as a cohesive device
301
noted here, namely that with extended reference and with reference to a ‘fact’ only singular forms can be used. In English ‘the use of demonstratives to refer to extended text, including text as fact […] applies only to the singular forms “this” and “that” used without a following noun’ (Halliday and Hasan 1976: 66). ‘Whereas extended reference differs from usual instances of reference only in extent – the referent is more than just a person or object, it is a process or sequence of processes (grammatically, a clause or string of clauses not just a single nominal) – text reference differs in kind: the referent is not being taken at its face-value but is being transmuted into a fact or report’ (Halliday and Hasan 1976: 52). In Bulgarian, as Krastev (1992:78) notes, the singular form tova (near), but not onova (remote), has a special place in the system and is one of the most frequent and most economical words in the language. Only the demonstrative tova can replace any word, combination of words, phrases and even whole stretches of text. Thus in Bulgarian only one form of the singular demonstratives performs the functions of extended reference and reference to fact, which in English are shared between the two singular forms. 5.
Comparisons and observations
Using WordSmith Tools (Scott 1997), frequency lists and concordances were produced for all the investigated items in each of the four corpora. The raw data were then examined to exclude all examples that were irrelevant to the present study, namely cases where that was used as a conjunction or relative pronoun, and whenever it was used as an adverb in front of an adjective to express the degree of a quality. The total number of tokens that were extracted from the corpora after these first searches is shown in Table 2. Table 2. Frequency of occurrence of the demonstratives in the four corpora Near
singular plural Remote singular plural Total
Corpus 1 1167 325 412 209 2113
Corpus 2 1552 297 160 161 2170
Corpus 3 656 146 263 128 1193
Corpus 4 1600 182 76 28 1886
Most often a first step in a quantitative study of any language feature is to look at the number of occurrences of the items examined, which can give a preliminary idea of the spread of the feature through entire collections of texts. So when examining the cohesive function of demonstratives it seems reasonable to start with a comparison of the total number of tokens found in the corpora. A first glance at the figures in Table 2 shows a striking similarity between the frequencies of this/these and that/those in Corpus 1 and Corpus 2. Moreover, the
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frequencies are nearly twice as high as that in Corpus 3 (the BNC) and slightly higher than that in Corpus 4 (the Bulgarian language corpus). However, these data could be misleading and could bring us to the rash conclusion that there is no over- or underuse of demonstratives by the Bulgarian learners of English. Instead, it may be that the use of demonstratives is determined by the different text types represented in the learner and non-learner corpora, as their number is greater in the argumentative essays than in the BNC sub-corpus and the Bulgarian language corpus, both of which consist of other types of non-fiction texts. However, if we make a distinction between ‘near’ and ‘remote’ types of demonstratives and look at each of these types separately, the picture changes, as shown in Tables 3 and 4. Table 3. ‘Near’ types of demonstratives Near Sing. + pl.
Corpus 1 1492
Corpus 2 1849
Corpus 3 802
Corpus 4 1782
Corpus 3 391
Corpus 4 104
Table 4. ‘Remote’ types of demonstratives Remote Sing. + pl.
Corpus 1 621
Corpus 2 321
The distinction between proximity and non-proximity is expressed differently in the learner and non-learner material. Demonstratives referring to near persons and objects are slightly underused by Bulgarian learners when compared to British students and this is compensated for by a clear overuse of demonstratives referring to remote persons and objects. This tendency for Bulgarian learners to use that/those occurs in spite of the very low frequency of occurrence of their Bulgarian equivalents. So far mere statistical comparisons of the data suggest that native language interference as a factor determining learner production plays an insignificant role in the use of English demonstratives by the Bulgarian learners. However, looking carefully at the examples extracted from the corpora, we can observe that the Bulgarian learner writing shows a much wider variety of patterns than the LOCNESS and the BNC material. The question is how this difference could be explained. Two very typical patterns that have some relevance to cohesion in that they determine the use of demonstratives in endophoric (textual) reference were observed in the BUCICLE. The first involves a demonstrative functioning as determiner, as in: (1)
I know a little boy, for example, whose father is a scientist. This nine-year old boy reads only Science Fiction and I can never persuade him to read a fairy tale or fable or a folk tale. He is not interested even in books about famous adventurers, about sailors and pirates, books which I read with
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great interest and pleasure when I was his age. That boy reads only about robots, machines, spacecraft, numbers. I agree that Science Fiction somehow stirs children's imagination but it creates a world controlled by machines, rather than one controlled by human beings. Probably the science fiction stories will be the fairy tales of the new era. (BUCICLE) The other typical group of examples observed involves the use of demonstratives to refer to extended text, including text as ‘fact’. In English this function applies only to the singular forms this and that used without a following noun (see Halliday and Hasan 1976: 66) as in: (2)
Sinclair's, at all events, is the work of a Modernist, and is unlikely to be that of an occultist. This makes it, in a sense, compatible with Hawksmoor. But Hawksmoor is a different beast. (BNC)
(3)
It fulfilled none of my expectations and seemed to be merely trying to make me laugh at the fact that it had left me standing there grasping at nothing. And that was all there was to it. By contrast, here is a comment by an anthropologist who went to see the work of Mark Rothko. (BNC)
In English the choice of this or that to refer to something that has been said before is ‘clearly related to that of “near (the speaker)” versus “not near”; “what I have just mentioned” is, textually speaking, “near me” whereas “what you have just mentioned” is not’ (Halliday and Hasan 1976: 60). At the same time ‘the notion of proximity has various interpretations; and in such cases there is no very clearly felt distinction between this and that’ (Halliday and Hasan 1976: 61). In Bulgarian the demonstrative tova (singular, neuter, near), which according to most traditional Bulgarian grammars (Krastev 1992; Pashov 1994; Andreichin et al. 1998) expresses the idea of “near in time and space”, has a very wide spectrum of uses and has a special place in the system of Bulgarian demonstratives. As mentioned above in Section 4, apart from its use as pronoun or determiner to refer to any singular neuter object or person, it is the only demonstrative that can convey extended reference relations in a text. Here the distinction near/remote is lost and the reference of tova is derived from the immediate context in or outside the textual world irrespective of the idea of proximity. Thus in this particular function its use coincides with both this and that in English and we may expect a great overuse of this by Bulgarian learners. The functions of onova (singular, neuter, remote) are always either Head or Modifier so it can never be used in extended reference and reference to fact; and as the data demonstrate (Table 6) it is rare in Bulgarian. Yet, this infrequent use of onova does not cause an underuse of its English equivalent that by the Bulgarian learners. On the contrary, Table 2 shows a clear overuse of that in Corpus 1 in comparison with Corpora 2 and 3. It is true that the total number of singular forms is nearly the same in the learner material, the native-speaker
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student writing and the Bulgarian language corpus, as shown in Table 5 and this at first glance may blur some differences. Table 5. Frequency of singular forms Singular Remote + Near
Corpus 1 1579
Corpus 2 1712
Corpus 3 918
Corpus 4 1676
However, the number of singular demonstratives used by the Bulgarian learners is unevenly distributed between this and that, with a predominance of near over remote, with the result that the total frequency of this and that in Corpus 1 (1579) approaches that of tova in Corpus 4 (Table 6). Table 6. Frequency of singular forms in BUCICLE and the Bulgarian language corpus Singular Near Remote Total
Corpus 1 1167 412 1579
Corpus 4 1600 76 1676
One possible reason could be the fact that most teaching materials used in Bulgaria overlook the distinction between the English counterparts of tova and onova and learners are left with the impression that it is unimportant and that both this and that, having a very wide range of referents, could be used indiscriminately to point to any word, phrase or longer stretch of text. The lower frequency of singular forms in Corpus 3 than in the other corpora could be attributed to the differences between the text types involved. One could argue that since the distinction near/remote in the use of the singular forms is not as clear-cut in English as in Bulgarian, the interchangeability of this and that is permissible and might not lead to serious communication breakdowns. Still, it is my view that it could interfere with a receiver’s comprehension of a text and could contribute to the production of unclear textual references by learners of English. In the following example the choice of this or that would only slightly change the point of view of the writer: (4)
[…] no-one is to be thought superior to another despite the differences of race, social status, nationality and so on and every person is to be treated objectively by the law and social institutions. And though that is being continuously officially stated and re-stated often the talk about equality remains just an euphemism to hide the cruel reality. It is obvious that some people are more equal than others. [BUCICLE]
That is probably preferred because the fact it refers to in the preceding sentence is not explicitly linked to the personal feelings of the writer; it is perceived rather as
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“being officially stated” by a third party. In such cases this could easily substitute for that and make the whole statement more involved. But sometimes this tendency goes too far and in their desire to vary their style and avoid repetition learners use this and that as absolute synonyms. Consider the following examples from BUCICLE: (5)
[…] my opinion is that dreaming and imagination are still part of our society. Even if it weren’t so, I do not see what the problem is. The world is changing, developing all the time and if it does not need these, it gets rid of them as something useless, that is just the way it goes. And if someone cannot live without dreams they either adapt to the new conditions or keep dreams in their souls which is a question of personal choice.
In (5) it is unclear why the referents of these (dreaming and imagination) are perceived as being closer to the writer of the passage than the fact that is referred to by means of that. The idea of proximity is even more confused in (6) where one and the same fact is referred to by both this and that in the same sentence: (6)
But is it really so, or it is just another old-dated "fairy tale" we are taught to believe in and which is so trivial that we have learned it by heart. We fight for freedom, we strive for equality, we talk about democracy and having equal rights, but that is just an illusion, with which our minds are washed away and we are all blind, because we believe in this. Human beings are not equal. Inequality is determined by history. History is the reflection of our lives.
6.
Conclusions
The observations of the data presented in this paper demonstrate: (1) an overuse of demonstratives in argumentative writing by both Bulgarian learners of English and native-speaker students; (2) a tendency for Bulgarian learners to use that/those in spite of the very low frequency of occurrence of their Bulgarian equivalents; (3) a similar frequency of this/these in Bulgarian learner writing and English native-speaker student writing; (4) a similar frequency of this/these and their Bulgarian equivalents. These findings shed light on some aspects of Bulgarian learner discourse that are still unexplored and need further investigation. At this stage of the study some of the similarities between the production of Bulgarian learners and native speaker students might point to an influence on learner production by the nature of the text type. A task-based learner corpus requiring students to produce one particular text type might not reveal features of other text types. Yet, an academic essay gives students freedom to write what they want, and more importantly what they can, on a variety of topics, and in this sense a corpus of this kind can tell the researcher a lot about learners’ abilities to produce coherent texts in any real-life
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context. It can allow us to draw meaningful conclusions about how aware, or rather unaware, learners are of certain discourse features. One indisputable reason for the deviations in the use of demonstratives by Bulgarian learners from the native speaker “target norm” is native language interference. The differences that exist between the systems of demonstratives in English and Bulgarian reflect affect learner production even at an advanced stage of foreign language acquisition. It is also my contention that there exists a strategy of communication common to many advanced second language learners, namely that at a certain stage of FLA they feel confident enough to communicate in the foreign language and ‘stop learning’ in the sense that they tend to stick to language patterns that have become fossilised at an earlier stage of learning and continue to learn at a slower pace, mostly by adding vocabulary. The main concern of such learners are the ‘real’ errors they make at the level of vocabulary and syntax and it never occurs to them that there could be other aspects of the foreign language that are to be mastered. If at a certain stage of FLA learners are made aware that there is a tendency for them to resort to a restricted range of language patterns, they would probably be encouraged to learn alternative ways of expression and a more targetlike way of producing coherent texts. Naturally, further corpus-based research in this area is likely to enhance our understanding and intuitive evaluation of learner production and point to effective ways of bringing their interlanguage closer to the kind of language used by native speakers of English. This can be done through the development of teaching materials and methods that focus attention not only on grammar rules but also on discourse features.
References Andreichin, L. et al. (1998), Gramatika na saˇvremennija baˇlgarski knijoven ezik. Morfologija. Č a s t paˇrva. [Grammar of the Contemporary Bulgarian language. Morphology. Part one]. Abagar Publishing. BNC World Edition, December 2000, SARA Version 0.98. Published by the Humanities Computing Unit of Oxford University on behalf of the BNC Consortium. Granger, S., E. Dagneaux and F. Meunier (eds) (2002), International Corpus of Learner English. Version 1.1. Handbook & CD-ROM. Louvain-la-Neuve: Presses Universitaires de Louvain. Halliday, M.A.K. (1985), An introduction to functional grammar. London and New York: Edward Arnold. Halliday, M.A.K. and R. Hasan (1976), Cohesion in English. London and New York: Longman. Krastev, B. (1992), Gramatika za vsichki [Grammar for all]. Sofia: Nauka i izkustvo.
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Leech, G. and J. Svartvik (1994), A communicative grammar of English. London and New York: Longman. Lyons, J. (1977), Semantics, Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maslov, J.S (1982), Gramatika na baˇ lgarskija ezik [Grammar of the Bulgarian language]. Sofia: Nauka i izkustvo. Pashov, P. (1994), Prakti č eska baˇlgarska gramatika [Practical Bulgarian grammar]. Sofia: Prosveta. Quirk, R. and S. Greenbaum (1973) A university grammar of English. Longman. Scott, M. (1997), Wordsmith tools. version 2. Oxford: Oxford University.
Translations as semantic mirrors: from parallel corpus to wordnet1 Helge Dyvik University of Bergen Abstract The paper reports from the project ‘From Parallel Corpus to Wordnet’ at the University of Bergen (2001–2004), which explores a method for deriving wordnet relations such as synonymy and hyponymy from data extracted from parallel corpora. Assumptions behind the method are that semantically closely related words ought to have strongly overlapping sets of translations, and words with wide meanings ought to have a larger number of translations than words with narrow meanings. Furthermore, if a word a is a hyponym of a word b (such as tasty of good, for example), then the possible translations of a ought to be a subset of the possible translations of b. Based on assumptions like these a set of definitions are formulated, defining semantic concepts like, e.g., ‘synonymy’, ‘hyponymy’, ‘ambiguity’ and ‘semantic field’ in translational terms. The definitions are implemented in a computer program which takes words with their sets of translations from the corpus as input and performs the following calculations: (1) On the basis of the input different senses of each word are identified. (2) The senses are grouped in semantic fields based on overlapping sets of translations, such overlap being assumed to indicate semantic relatedness. (3) On the basis of the structure of a semantic field a set of features is assigned to each individual sense in it, coding its relations to other senses in the field. (4) Based on intersections and inclusions among these feature sets a semilattice is calculated with the senses as nodes. According to our hypothesis, hyponymy/hyperonymy, near-synonymy and other semantic relations among the senses now appear through dominance and other relations among the nodes in the semilattice. Thus, the semilattice is supposed to contain some of the semantic information we want to represent in wordnets. (5) In accordance with this assumption, thesaurus-like entries for words are generated from the information in the semilattice. In the project these assumptions are tested against data from the EnglishNorwegian Parallel Corpus ENPC (Johansson 1997).
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1.
Introduction
1.1
Translations as semantic data
Parallel corpora, in which original texts are aligned with their translations into another language, are a rich source of semantic information. Translations come about when translators evaluate the degree of interpretational equivalence between linguistic expressions in specific contexts. In many ways such evaluations, made without any theoretical concerns in mind, seem more reliable as sources of semantic information than the careful paraphrases of the semanticist or the meaning descriptions of the lexicographer. Assuming that this is the case, can we then retrieve some of the semantic properties of expressions by going ‘backwards’ from the network of translational relations in situated texts? Can we reconstruct semantic properties from the translational properties manifested in a parallel corpus? The idea that semantic information can be gleaned from multilingual data has been explored by others. Resnik and Yarowsky (1997), discussing word sense disambiguation, suggest that in distinguishing between senses it may be fruitful to restrict attention to such distinctions as are lexicalised differently in other languages. Nancy Ide has explored the connections between semantics and translation in several papers; in Ide et al. (2002) the authors study versions of the same novel in seven languages and attempt to identify subsenses of words by considering how the translations of a given word cluster in the six other texts. 1.2
Wordnets and thesauri
The output of the method presented here is a structure containing some of the information which we find in wordnets. A wordnet is a semantically structured lexical database. The Princeton WordNet (Fellbaum 1998), which has been built manually, distinguishes between the senses of words and groups senses across words into ‘synsets’ according to near-synonymy. Pointers between such synsets express semantic relations like hypero- and hyponymy, antonymy, and holo- and meronymy. Wordnets for various European languages were developed within the project Eurowordnet (http://www.illc.uva.nl/EuroWordNet/). Wordnets are important resources for many applications within language technology. They can be used in meaning-based information retrieval (searching for concepts rather that specific word forms), in logical inference (if a document mentions dogs, a wordnet allows the inference that it is about animals), in word sense disambiguation (providing the search space of alternative meanings), etc. A related kind of semantic resource is the thesaurus. As an example we may consider the entry for the adjective conspicuous in the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Thesaurus (http://www.m-w.com/home.htm), where two senses are distinguished, each with its own sets of synonyms, antonyms etc.:
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Entry Word: conspicuous Function: adjective Text: 1 Synonyms CLEAR 5, apparent, distinct, evident, manifest, obvious, open-and-shut, openhanded, patent, plain 2 Synonyms NOTICEABLE, arresting, arrestive, marked, outstanding, pointed, prominent, remarkable, salient, striking Related Word celebrated, eminent, illustrious; showy Contrasted Words common, everyday, ordinary; covert, secret; concealed, hidden Antonyms inconspicuous
We may compare this with the thesaurus-like entry for conspicuous below, which has been generated automatically from parallel corpus data by the method to be described in this paper: conspicuous Sense 1 (Norwegian: avstikkende.) Sense 2 Hyperonyms: great, hard, large. Subsense (i) (Norwegian: synlig, tydelig.) Near-synonyms: clear, conclusive, definite, distinct, distinctive, obvious, plain, substantial, unmistakable, vivid. Hyponyms: apparent, evident, pervasive, visible. Subsense (ii) (Norwegian: fremtredende, kraftig, sterk, stor.) Near-synonyms: outstanding, primary. Subsense (iii) (Norwegian: oppsiktsvekkende.) Near-synonyms: amazing, spectacular, startling, surprising, unusual.
Antonyms and contrasted words are not included in the latter entry, since the method only allows the derivation of relations of semantic similarity (synonymy, hyperonymy and hyponymy) from the parallel corpus data. The entry displays a major division into two senses (of which the first one in this case has no information associated with it apart from a Norwegian translation), and furthermore a division into subsenses within the more informative second sense. ‘Sense 1’ in this example is probably a spurious consequence of sparsity of data in the corpus. A better example of a major division into senses – although even there we would have liked sense 1 to have been merged with sense 4 – is provided by the following automatically derived entry for the Norwegian noun rett, which is contrastively ambiguous between a number of senses, among which we find ‘course in a meal’ and ‘court of law’. Some of the related words listed in this entry are surprising, while most of them are to the point: rett N Sense 1 (English: course.) Sense 2 (English: court, justification.)
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Helge Dyvik Near-synonyms: argument, begrunnelse, berettigelse, domstolsbehandling, gård, gårdsplass, plass, sak, ting. Sense 3 Subsense (i) (English: option.) Hyponyms: tilbud. Subsense (ii) (English: rightN.) Hyponyms: adgang, rettighet. Subsense (iii) (English: order.) Near-synonyms: bestemmelse, klasse, krav, lov, løsning, måte, orden, regel, regelverk, stand, system, vedtak. Sense 4 (English: dish, food, supper.) Near-synonyms: aftens, aftensmat, fat, føde, gryte, kar, kopp, kosthold, kveldsmat, lunsj, mat, matvare, middag, måltid, næring, skål, tallerken.
1.3
Semantic lattices
The thesaurus entries above are generated from semantic lattices, which in their turn are derived automatically from the translational data. Figure 1 below is an example of such a lattice, representing the semantic field associated with sense 4 of ‘rett’ in the entry above (labelled rettN2 in the lattice):
Figure 1. A semantic lattice According to the hypothesis behind the method, senses on dominating nodes are hyperonyms of senses on dominated nodes. Thus, a sense of mat ‘food’ dominates senses of rett ‘dish’, middag ‘dinner’, måltid ‘meal’, lunsj ‘lunch’, kveldsmat ‘supper’, aftensmat ‘supper’, and aftens ‘supper’, all of which are plausible hyponyms of mat. Less convincingly, lunsj also dominates aftensmat. Formally the lattice expresses inclusion and overlap relations among sets of translationally derived features, as described in section 2.3 below.
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The parallel corpus
The English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus (ENPC), from which the above results are derived, comprises approximately 2.6 million words, originals and translations included. The corpus contains fiction as well as non-fiction and English originals translated into Norwegian as well as the other way around. The corpus is aligned at sentence level (Johansson et al. 1996), while it is a part of our present project to align the ENPC at word level, in order to be able to extract the sets of translations of a given word automatically. Our present data has been derived from the sentence-aligned corpus, however, which means that the translational data for each word in our data set has been extracted manually. For example, searching for the Norwegian word form bemerkelsesverdig returns the sentences containing bemerkelsesverdig coupled with the corresponding English sentences in the parallel text (translation or original). Based on a set of heuristic criteria to decide whether a word can be said to ‘correspond’ to a given word in the translation or not, the set of translations of bemerkelsesverdig is extracted by the human analyser: (bemerkelsesverdig (amazing notable remarkable spectacular surprising))
Sets of such lemmas with their associated sets of translations from the corpus constitute the input to the procedure deriving semantic lattices and thesaurus entries, by principles which we now proceed to describe. 2.
‘Semantic mirrors’
2.1
Separation of senses
We assume that contrastive ambiguity, such as the ambiguity between the two unrelated senses of the English noun bank – ‘money institution’ and ‘riverside’ – tends to be a historically accidental and idiosyncratic property of individual words. That is, we don't expect to find instances of the same contrastive ambiguity replicated by other words in the language or by words in other languages. Furthermore, we don't expect words with unrelated meanings to share translations into another language, except in cases where the shared word is contrastively ambiguous between the two meanings. By the first assumption there should then be at most one such shared word. Given these assumptions contrastive ambiguity should be discoverable in the patterns of translational relations. We may consider the Norwegian noun tak, contrastively ambiguous between the meanings ‘roof’ and ‘grip’. Figure 2 shows the first t-image of tak in the right-hand box, and the first t-images of each of those English words again in the left-hand box. We refer to the last-mentioned set of sets as the inverse t-image of tak.
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Figure 2. The first and inverse t-images of tak. The point worth noticing is that the images of roof and ceiling overlap in hvelving in addition to tak, while the images of grip and hold overlap in grep in addition to tak. This indicates that roof and ceiling are semantically related, and similarly grip and hold, while no overlap (apart from tak) unites grip/hold and roof/ceiling. Grip/hold and roof/ceiling hence seem to represent unrelated meanings, and the conclusion is that tak is ambiguous.
Figure 3. The second t-image of tak
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The overlap patterns are necessarily preserved within the first t-image of tak when we make our third movement and find all the first t-images in English of the words in the inverse t-image, as shown in Figure 3. We refer to this set of sets as the second t-image of tak. As shown in Figure 3, the second t-image can be divided into three clusters or groups of sets, each group being held together by overlap relations (we only consider overlaps in the restriction of the second t-image to the members of the first t-image). On the basis of these groups the first t-image of tak can be partitioned into the three ‘sense partitions’ shown in Figure 4.
Figure 4. The sense partitions of tak's first t-image By this method the main senses of lemmas are individuated. The limited size of the corpus is a source of error: a translation t of a occurring only once in the corpus, or only occurring translationally related to a, will give rise to a separate sense partition only containing t, and hence give rise to a potentially spurious sense of a (cf. the doubtful ‘sense 1’ of the examples conspicuous and rett in Section 1.2). A larger corpus might display more alternative translations of t, and thereby include t in one of the other sense partitions. A frequency filter excluding hapax legomena from consideration might reduce this problem. 2.2
Semantic fields
Once senses are individuated in the manner described, they can be grouped into semantic fields. Traditionally, a semantic field is a set of senses that are directly or indirectly related to each other by a relation of semantic closeness. In our translational approach, the semantic fields are isolated on the basis of overlaps among the first t-images of the senses. Since we treat translational correspondence as a symmetric relation (disregarding the direction of translation), we get paired semantic fields in the two languages involved, each field assigning a subset structure to the other. Figure 5 gives a rough illustration of the principle (arrows indicate the t-image of each sense – for simplicity, the indicated sets are just suggested and in no way reflect the corpus data accurately).
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Figure 5. Paired semantic fields (simplified illustration) The subset structure of a semantic field, assigned by its partner field in the other language, contains rich information about the semantic relations among its members. For example, senses with a wide meaning (such as good) will in general have a larger number of alternative translations than words with a narrower meaning (such as tasty). The number of translations is of course directly reflected in the number of subsets of which the sense is a member. Thus the senses at the ‘peaks’ in the semantic fields will have the widest meanings. We may illustrate this by means of a constructed and artificially simple example. Assume that we find the translational pattern illustrated in Figure 6, where hingst ‘stallion’ is found translated into animal, horse and stallion, while dyr ‘animal’ is translated into animal, horse, stallion, mare and dog, etc.
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Figure 6. A constructed example Since animal1 is translationally related to every member of the Norwegian field, animal1 becomes the ‘peak’ of the English field, being a member of all the subsets, with horse1 ranked immediately below it, etc. By symmetry, the Norwegian field gets a corresponding subset structure (cf. Figure 7). 2.3
Feature assignment
The next step is to encode, for each sense, its position within the semantic field, along with its translational relations to the members of the other field. This is done by means of feature sets, automatically derived from the set structure. In accordance with traditional semantic componential analysis, the intention is that wide senses should have few features, while more specific senses should have more features, some of which are inherited from wider, superordinate senses. This is achieved by starting from the ‘tops’ in two paired fields – i.e. the sense pair which is both translationally interrelated and whose members belong to the largest number of subsets – which in Figure 7 gives us the pair dyr1 and animal1. A feature [dyr1|animal1] is constructed from this pair and assigned to both its members dyr1 and animal1. Then the feature is inherited (non-transitively) by ‘lower’ senses according to the following principle: all senses in the first t-image of animal1 and ranked lower than dyr1 (i.e. belonging to fewer subsets than dyr1) inherit the feature, and conversely, all senses in the first t-image of dyr1 and ranked lower than animal1 inherit the feature. Then the procedure moves to the next highest, translationally interrelated, peaks hest1 and horse1, constructs a feature from that pair, and assigns it according to the same principle. The result is shown in Figure 7.
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Figure 7. Feature assignment in semantic fields The feature sets in Figure 7 define a lattice based on inclusion relations among them, as shown in Figure 8.
Figure 8. Lattices defined by the feature sets In Figure 8 the daughters of a node N have supersets of the feature set associated with N. In this constructed example the lattices evidently also reflect hyperonym / hyponym relations among the senses.
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The lattices in Figure 8 are simple trees, while actual derived lattices tend to be more complex. In the first place, senses may inherit features from more than one ‘peak’ in the semantic field, which gives rise to multiple mothers in the lattice. In the second place, nodes may have intersecting feature sets without either of the sets including the other, so that there is no mother/daughter relationship between the nodes in question. When no actual sense is associated with the intersection, x-nodes (cf. Figure 1) are introduced, carrying the intersection of the feature sets of their daughters. Thus the x-nodes can intuitively be seen as ‘virtual hyperonyms’ of their daughters. It is the presence of x-nodes which guarantees that the structure is a semilattice (i.e. all nodes with intersecting feature sets are guaranteed to be dominated by a node carrying the intersection). In the semilattice, two senses are assumed to be more closely related the more of their features they share, i.e. the shorter the distance is to their common dominating node. Returning now to the actual corpus-based lattice in Figure 1, it is defined by the feature sets on the nodes according to the principles just described. For instance, mat2 is associated with the singleton feature set {[mat2|supper3]}, kveldsmat1 with {[mat2|supper3], [kveldsmat1|meal1]}, and aftensmat2 with {[mat2|supper3], [kveldsmat1|meal1], [lunsj2|meal1], [aftensmat2]}. In Figure 1, x-nodes with only one feature (such as x1) are displayed with the feature beside them. Derivation of thesaurus entries Derivation of thesaurus entries involves determining subsenses, hyperonyms, near-synonyms and hyponyms of each sense on the basis of the information in the semilattices. The semilattices are in some cases extremely complex, showing intricate networks of connections between the word senses. Much of this complexity should probably be considered as ‘noise’ resulting from accidental biases and gaps in the corpus. In the transition to a wordnet database or a thesaurus we therefore want to abstract away from much detail in the lattices, and this can obviously be done in more than one way. We presently use two parameters to regulate the generation of thesaurus entries: OverlapThreshold and SynsetLimit. The value of the parameter OverlapThreshold decides the granularity of the division into subsenses in the thesaurus entry. This does not concern the division into main senses described above (tak1, tak2, tak3 etc.) – those senses usually end up in different semantic fields and hence in different lattices. Division into subsenses is a further subdivision of each sense into related shades of meaning. We assume that there is no final and universal answer to the question of how many related subsenses a word sense has (cf. Kilgarriff 1997). By means of the parameter OverlapThreshold we may attune that kind of semantic granularity to our purposes.
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We may illustrate the procedure by means of an example: the adjective sweet. Figure 9 shows a small sublattice of the large lattice including the sense sweet1.
Figure 9: A sublattice containing sweet1 Sweet1 is also dominated by several nodes outside this sublattice; size limitations prevent displaying a more complete graph. The node sweet1 is associated with the following feature set: {[god3|good1], [fin2|nice2], [pen1|gentle3], [vakker1|soft2], [snill1|pleasant1], [deilig1|splendid3], [frisk4|sweet1], [blid3|sweet1]}. Finding hyperonyms, near-synonyms and hyponyms of sweet1 now first involves considering which other senses in the lattice share features with sweet1. The features in question are assigned to the following senses in the complete semilattice (we will refer to the sets of senses as the denotations of the features): [god3|good1]: (able1 accurate1 adept1 adequate2 affectionate1 all_right2 amiable2 appropriate5 attractive4 beautiful2 beneficial1 benign3 bright2 burning3 charming2 clean1 clear1 close3 comfortable2 comforting3 competent2 confident2 correct1 cozy2 cute1 decent2 delicious1 delightful2 detailed3 dishy1 easy1 efficient2 elegant3 excellent2 fair2 fancy1 favourable1 fine1 firmA1 first-class3 first-rate2 fit3 fortunate1 fresh3 friendly2 full2 genuine2 good1 handsome2 happy3 healthy2 high3 hot2 joyful2 kind1 kindly1 long3 lovely2 lucky2 magnificent3 marvellous1 neat2 nice2 okay1 peaceful1 perfect3 placid2 pleasant1 pleased2 pleasing1 pleasurable1 plentiful1 plenty1 polite2 positive1 pretty2 proficient1 quite_certain1 real2 reassuring2 respectable3 right2 ripe1 safe2 satisfactory1 satisfying1 secure2 sizeable1 smart2 smooth3 soft2 solid2 sound2 spectacular2 steady1 strong3 successful2 suited1 superb2 superior5 sure1 sweet1 talented2 thorough1 tidy1 well2 whole2 wholesome1 wonderful3 worthy2)
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[fin2|nice2]: (attractive4 beautiful2 breathtaking2 charming2 comfortable2 cute1 delicate3 dishy1 easy1 elegant3 enchanting1 excellent2 fancy1 fine1 first-class3 gentle3 glorious4 graceful2 handsome2 impressive2 lovely2 magnificent3 marvellous1 neat2 nice2 okay1 perfect3 pleasurable1 polite2 pretty2 pure2 slight3 smart2 soft2 splendid3 sweet1 thin2 wonderful3) [pen1|gentle3]: (attractive4 beautiful2 charming2 clean1 cute1 dishy1 elegant3 enchanting1 fancy1 fine1 first-class3 formal1 gentle3 graceful2 handsome2 lovely2 neat2 pleasant1 polite2 pretty2 soft2 sweet1 tidy1) [vakker1|soft2]: (attractive4 charming2 cute1 delightful2 dishy1 enchanting1 fair2 fancy1 graceful2 handsome2 lovely2 magnificent3 mild2 ornate2 pleasant1 pleasurable1 pretty2 soft2 sweet1) [snill1|pleasant1]: (all_right2 amiable2 benign3 friendly2 good-humoured1 good-natured3 jolly1 kind1 kindly1 mild3 pleasant1 pleasing1 polite2 smiling2 sweet1) [deilig1|splendid3]: (beautiful2 charming2 cute1 enchanting1 delicious1 delightful2 pleasureable1 splendid3 sweet1) [frisk4|sweet1]: (all_right2 brisk5 eager2 fit3 fresh3 healthy2 new1 pert2 sweet1 well2) [blid3|sweet1]: (amiable2 blithe3 cheerful4 cheery1 good-humoured1 good-natured3 jolly1 kind1 kindly1 merry1 mild3 smiling2 sweet1)
The most general features, [god3|good1], [fin2|nice2] and [pen1|gentle3], denote a large number of senses each – especially [god3|good1]. This reflects the fact that they are constructed from wide senses such as god3 and good1. As a result, many of the senses carrying those features are not sufficiently close to sweet1 to be called ‘near-synonyms’. Therefore we do not want to consider all the senses sharing such general features as near-synonyms of each other. The value of the parameter SynsetLimit defines the maximal size which the set denoted by a feature can have in order to be included among the near-synonyms. With SynsetLimit = 20, the sets of senses denoted by [god3|good1], [fin2|nice2] and [pen1|gentle3] are not included among the near-synonyms of sweet1 (unless they are denoted by other features as well). On the other hand, good1, nice2 and gentle3 – the English senses from which the wide features were constructed – are recorded as hyperonyms of sweet1. Intuitively, the features represent different ‘aspects’ of the sense sweet1, and the question now is whether those ‘aspects’ are sufficiently different from each other to be considered different subsenses. Their distinctness can be measured in terms of the degree of overlap among the sets of senses they denote. If the set of features denote strongly overlapping sets of senses, the favoured conclusion is that there is no division into subsenses. On the other hand, the less the denotations of the features overlap, the more a division into subsenses is
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motivated. The degree of overlap in a set of sets can be measured as a value between 0 and 1, with 0 indicating no overlap and 1 full overlap (full overlap meaning that for each set s, every set either includes s or is included in s). In calculating the degree of overlap among feature denotations we disregard the sense sweet1 itself, since it is necessarily a member of all the feature denotations. The value of the parameter OverlapThreshold is a number between 0 and 1. A feature belongs to subsense n if the overlap between its denotation and the denotation of at least one other feature in subsense n is equal to or greater than OverlapThreshold. Hence, the higher the OverlapThreshold, the more subsenses tend to be distinguished. The two last features in the set above are constructed from sweet1 itself, and we assume that senses sharing this feature are hyponyms of sweet1: they have inherited the feature from sweet1 and must have been ranked lower in the semantic field. Setting the parameter values at SynsetLimit = 20 and OverlapThreshold = 0.05, we consequently generate the following entry for sweet: OverlapThreshold = 0.05: sweet
Hyperonyms: gentle, good, nice. Subsense (i) (Norwegian: frisk.) Hyponyms: all_right, brisk, crisp, eager, fit, fresh, healthy, new, pert, well. Subsense (ii) (Norwegian: blid, deilig, fin, god, pen, snill, søt, vakker.) Near-synonyms: amiable, amused, attractive, beautiful, benign, blithe, charming, cheerful, cheery, cute, delicious, delightful, dishy, easygoing, enchanting, fair, fancy, friendly, good-humoured, good-natured, graceful, handsome, jolly, kind, kindly, lovely, magnificent, merry, mild, ornate, picturesque, pleasant, pleasing, pleasurable, polite, pretty, smiling, soft. Hyponyms: all_right.
Subsense (ii) includes near-synonyms referring to personal character (e.g. amiable) as well as synonyms referring to appearance (e.g. beautiful). Raising the OverlapThreshold to 0.1 leads to the separation of those two kinds of nearsynonyms: OverlapThreshold = 0.1: sweet
Hyperonyms: gentle, good, nice. Subsense (i) (Norwegian: frisk.) Hyponyms: all_right, brisk, crisp, eager, fit, fresh, healthy, new, pert, well. Subsense (ii) (Norwegian: deilig, fin, god, pen, søt, vakker.) Near-synonyms: attractive, beautiful, charming, cute, delicious, delightful, dishy, enchanting, fair, fancy, graceful, handsome, lovely, magnificent,
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ornate, picturesque, pleasant, pleasurable, pretty, soft. Subsense (iii) (Norwegian: blid, snill.) Near-synonyms: amiable, amused, benign, blithe, cheerful, cheery, easygoing, friendly, good-humoured, good-natured, jolly, kind, kindly, merry, mild, pleasant, pleasing, polite, smiling. Hyponyms: all_right.
3.
Conclusion
We have given an illustration of the method employed in the project ‘From Parallel Corpus to Wordnet’. The method is implemented in a computer program taking words with their sets of translations from the parallel corpus as input and returning semantic lattices and thesaurus entries as output. The presentation has been based on examples of the results obtained on the basis of manually extracted data from the parallel corpus ENPC. The examples have only served as illustrations and have not been subjected to a critical analysis in this paper. An important task within the project is the evaluation of the results, part of which involves comparisons with existing sources like the Princeton Wordnet and Merriam-Webster's Thesaurus. Another task is the alignment of the corpus ENPC at word level, which will make it possible to extract lemmas with their sets of translations automatically. Based on our results so far we feel able to conclude that the method merits further exploration. Notes 1. The analyses in this paper are based on corpus data resulting from work by Martha Thunes, Gunn Inger Lyse and the author. The software producing the semantic analyses has been developed by the author and reimplemented and improved by Paul Meurer. I am grateful to Martha Thunes for useful comments on an earlier version of this article. References Aijmer, K., B. Altenberg, and M. Johansson (eds.). 1996. Languages in contrast. Papers from a symposium on text-based cross-linguistic studies in Lund, 4-5 March 1994, 73-85. Lund: Lund University Press. Diab, M. and P. Resnik (2002): An Unsupervised Method for Word Sense Tagging using Parallel Corpora. 40th Anniversary Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-02), Philadelphia, July, 2002. Dyvik, H. (1998a): A translational basis for semantics. In: Stig Johansson and Signe Oksefjell (eds.) 1998. 51-86.
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Dyvik, H. (1998b): Translations as semantic mirrors. In Proceedings of Workshop W13: Multilinguality in the lexicon II. 24.44, Brighton, UK. The 13th biennial European Conference on Artyificial Intelligence ECAI 98. Fellbaum, C. (ed.) (1998), WordNet. An electronic lexical database. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Grefenstette, G. (1994): Explorations in Automatic Thesaurus Discovery, Boston/Dordrecht/London: Kluwer. Hearst, M. A. (1998): Automated Discovery of WordNet Relations. In Fellbaum (1998). 131 - 151. Ide, N. (1999): Word sense disambiguation using cross-lingual information. In: Proceedings of ACH-ALLC '99 International Humanities Computing Conference, Charlottesville, Virginia. http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu /ach-allc.99/proceedings Ide, N. (1999): Parallel translations as sense discriminators. In: SIGLEX99: Standardizing Lexical Resources, ACL99 Workshop, College Park, Maryland. 52-61. Ide, N., T. Erjavec and D. Tufis (2002), ‘Sense discrimination with parallel corpora. Proceedings of ACL'02 Workshop on Word Sense Disambiguation: Recent Successes and Future Directions, Philadelphia, 54-60. Johansson, S. (1997), ‘Using the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus – a corpus for contrastive analysis and translation studies’, in: B. LewandowskaTomaszczyk and P.J. Melia (eds), Practical applications in language corpora. Lodz: Lodz University. 282-296. Johansson, S., J. Ebeling, and K. Hofland (1996), ‘Coding and aligning the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus’, in: K. Aijmer, B. Altenberg and M. Johansson (eds), Languages in contrast. Papers from a symposium on textbased cross-linguistic studies in Lund, 4-5 March 1994. Lund: Lund University Press. 87-112. Johansson, S. and S. Oksefjell (eds.) (1998): Corpora and Crosslinguistic Research: Theory, Method, and Case Studies. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Kilgarriff, A. (1997), ‘I don't believe in word senses’, Computers and the Humanities 31 (2): 91-113. Resnik, P.S. and D. Yarowsky (1997), ‘A perspective on word sense disambiguation methods and their evaluation’. Position paper presented at the ACL SIGLEX Workshop on Tagging Text with Lexical Semantics: Why, What, and How?, held April 4-5, 1997 in Washington, D.C., USA in conjunction with ANLP-97. Turcato, D. (1998): Automatically Creating Bilingual Lexicons for Machine Translation from Bilingual Text. In: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING-98) and of the 36th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL98), Montreal.
Physical contact verbs in English and Swedish from the perspective of crosslinguistic lexicology Åke Viberg Uppsala University Abstract The major English physical contact verbs strike, hit and beat are compared with their primary Swedish translation equivalent slå on the basis of data from the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus. The analysis is carried out within two theoretical frameworks concerning the underlying conceptual representation and the linguistic cues that can be used for word sense identification. In addition to a rather detailed account of points of contrast in the fairly extensive patterns of polysemy that are characteristic of the verbs, an attempt is made to provide a general characterisation in contrastive terms. In comparison with the English verbs, the conceptual representation of slå is grounded more firmly in sensorimotor experience and the fact that hitting prototypically is a hand action. As in other languages such as Chinese, the main verb of hitting in Swedish has extended senses that refer to other types of hand actions. With respect to word sense identification, the semantic classification of the subject and object is a prominent cue for the distinction between the major meanings of the main physical contact verbs but to various degrees in English and Swedish. Several examples are also given of cases where linguistic cues are not sufficient and disambiguation must be based on topical or pragmatic information. 1.
Introduction
This paper will present a contrastive lexical analysis of the major English physical contact verbs strike, hit and beat in comparison to the Swedish verb slå which is the closest equivalent to all three English verbs. The semantic analysis is based on an earlier paper on the verbs of physical contact in Swedish (Viberg 1999). The verb slå has a complex pattern of polysemy and many extended meanings which require a wide range of translations in English. The rich polysemy tends to be characteristic of verbs with the same prototypical meaning across a wide range of languages (for Chinese, see Gao 2001). The comparison of Swedish and English that will be presented in this paper is based on the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus, ESPC (Aijmer et al. 1996, Altenberg and Aijmer 2000), which contains original text samples in English and Swedish together with their translations. The text samples represent both fiction and non-fiction and the total number of words from each source language is about
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half a million. The corpus will be used for contrastive purposes, whereas matters such as translation problems or the general characteristics of translated texts will not be dealt with (see Johansson 1998 on the various uses of parallel corpora). The aim of the present paper is primarily to present a systematic contrastive account of the data but the general theoretical significance will be briefly indicated within two frameworks. The first concerns the conceptual representation of lexical items accounting for the patterns of polysemy and their cognitive motivations. This will be oriented towards cognitive semantics and in particular prototype theory (Taylor 1989). Another important cognitive semantic idea is the notion of embodiment which implies that our concepts to a large extent are shaped by our bodies and brains (Lakoff and Johnson 1999). In particular, bodily movement will be shown to play an important role for the conceptual representation of the main verbs of physical contact. The second framework concerns the contextual representation of lexical items and the process of word sense identification accounting for the interaction between word meaning and cues in the linguistic context in the disambiguation process and in the choice of translation equivalents. According to Miller and Leacock (2000), each meaning of a word must be associated with a contextual representation, which can be either local or topical. Experimental work has shown that people can identify various meanings of a polysemous word with a relatively high degree of success if they are presented with a window of ±2 words of context, but local context is not always enough. Local cues turned out to be very precise when they occurred “but all too often they simply did not occur” (op. cit. p. 156). Miller and Leacock also give an account of the use of topical context which refers to the general topic of a text or conversation. Topical context has been tested with various statistical classifiers run on computers. In one such experiment, only the words occurring in the same sentence as the target word were presented (in random order). With three or more senses to distinguish of words such as line and serve the statistical classifiers reached close to 75% correctness. Human subjects who were presented with lists of words co-occurring with line in reverse alphabetical order only managed to identify the correct sense a little better than the statistical classifiers, which justified the conclusion that the result obtained with the classifiers was close to the ceiling for what can be achieved with topical context alone. Table 1 shows the most frequent Swedish equivalents of strike, hit, beat and knock. Due to the relatively limited number of occurrences, originals and translations in each language have been pooled together, which is not ideal, but a separate account would be difficult to grasp. (Originals and translations are separately coded in the underlying analysis of the data.) The row named Total English verbs shows the total number of occurrences of the four verbs in the ESPC. The following rows show the most frequent Swedish equivalents. It turns out that the most frequent translation equivalent of all these verbs except knock is the verb slå which is clearly the dominant physical contact verb in Swedish. The two verbs strike and hit share the verbs drabba ‘affect negatively’ and träffa in the sense ‘hit a target’ as the second and third most frequent equivalents, whereas
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beat and knock only share the verb slå. As for knock, the verb knacka serves as the major equivalent when the verb refers to knocking on a door, otherwise slå is the major equivalent. The rightmost column shows the total number of occurrences of the Swedish verbs in the corpus. Table 1. Major Swedish equivalents of strike, hit, beat, and knock Total English verbs Swedish equivalents: slå ’strike, hit, beat’ drabba ’affect negatively’ träffa ’hit a target’ knacka ’knock (on a door)’
strike 134
hit 115
beat 67
knock 64
63 11 9
39 19 11
29
14
35
Total Swedish verbs 754 182 325 60
Table 1 rather clearly reflects the fact that the semantic field of physical contact verbs has one central member in Swedish, the verb slå, which is the major equivalent of the three verbs strike, hit and beat in English. In percentage terms, slå accounts for between 47% (strike) and 33% (hit) of the equivalents of these three verbs. On the other hand, these verbs account only for a small proportion of the English equivalents of slå. Together they account only for 18% of the equivalents of slå. In spite of this, at least strike and hit are usually experienced as the closest equivalents of slå by Swedes who know English; this is probably due to the fact that these two verbs account for close to half (47%) of the equivalents of slå in its prototypical meaning as a physical contact verb. In addition, as many as 29 other English verbs which can be regarded as physical contact verbs are used as equivalents of slå (e.g. bang, pound, punch, slam, slap). As will be shown below, there are also many English equivalents which belong to other semantic fields than physical contact due to the extensive patterns of polysemy which characterize slå. The next section provides an analysis of the most frequent meanings of the major English physical contact verbs. This is followed by an account of the extensive pattern of polysemy of Swedish slå and how it is reflected in the English equivalents. 2.
English physical contact verbs
In Table 2, an attempt is made to show the relationships between the major senses of strike, hit and beat as they are reflected in the ESPC. Unfortunately, the number of occurrences is rather limited but it is still possible to sketch the basic semantic relationships. The frequencies (F) given for each verb in the last three columns refer to the total number of occurrences with a certain meaning and typical subject and include some cases where the major Swedish equivalent is not used.
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Table 2. Main senses of strike and hit and beat with their major Swedish equivalents Semantic fields
Typical subject
PHYSICAL CONTACT Bodily action Human Physical event Mechanical devices: car, vehicle clock Natural forces: lightning wind, rain, waves Projectiles: bullet, anything moving with force Sense impressions: light ABSTRACT MEANINGS Defeat Human
Major Swedish equivalent slå köra på ‘drive on’ slå slå slå
F hit
F beat
35
40
26
2 4 11 5
träffa ‘hit a target’
4
träffa
4
slå (besegra ‘defeat’, överträffa ‘surpass’) drabba ‘afflict’
Negative experience
Natural disaster, disease, economic crisis
Mental event
Thought,proposition: slå ‘it struck me that-S’ Various other cases
Total (above) Total (corpus)
F strike
27
0
13
14
27
0
34 2 106 134
96 115
46 67
The verbs strike, hit and beat can all be used about a human being moving the arm and bringing the hand (or something held in the hand) into contact with something in order to have an impact on it. This use as a bodily action verb can be taken as prototypical. When the object is also a human being which is frequently the case the intention is usually antagonistic: to hurt (or even to kill) or
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defeat the other human, not just to touch in a friendly way (cf. pat, stroke, caress). It is hard to find any clear semantic contrast between strike and hit in this use, whereas beat is frequentative and generally indicates a more intensive effect. The dominant Swedish equivalent of this use is slå. Equivalents clearly expressing the intention are also used, in particular as equivalents of beat (e.g. misshandla ‘batter’, klå upp ‘beat up, thrash’, ge stryk ‘give a beating, lick’). The verbs can also be used with various classes of inanimate subjects to describe various types of physical events (i.e. events which can be experienced with our senses). In this case, there are several clear contrasts between hit, strike and beat. Since the database is so limited, it is useful to compare the patterns in the ESPC with the large BNC corpus. Table 3 shows which nouns are salient as subjects according to Kilgarriff’s WASPBENCH , a tool which shows which collocates appear with more than chance frequency together with a certain target word according to a statistical formula producing a salience index (Kilgarriff and Tugwell 2002; see also the demo at http://www.itri.bton.ac.uk/peopleindex.html). The columns marked F show the frequency of the noun as subject of the verb and the columns marked Sal. show the salience index. The subjects are ordered in descending frequency according to this index. The type of subject is also important for the choice of Swedish translation. In particular, projectiles such as bullets influence the choice of Swedish translations in the direction of träffa ‘hit a target’. When used as a physical contact verb, träffa focuses the moment when contact occurs, whereas slå (see below) prototypically describes a complete bodily action (stretching of arm followed by contact between hand and target):1 (1)
A building contractor called Peter Kemp had been standing next to him and he said Martin dropped the gun at the moment the bullet struck him. (RR)
En byggnadsentreprenör vid namn Peter Kemp hade stått bredvid honom och han hade sagt att Martin tappade vapnet i samma ögonblick som kulan träffade honom.
As can be observed in Table 3, bullet appears as one of the most salient subjects both of strike and hit and it is reasonable to regard it as a prototypical projectile. (Among the salient subjects of hit, there are further examples: ball, shot, bomb, missile, shell, pellet. Hit is the dominant alternative when the subject is a projectile even in the ESPC according to Table 2.) However, not only nouns that are lexically marked as projectiles favour the choice of träffa in Swedish. Any concrete object that forcefully moves through the air can be interpreted as a projectile: (2)
[…] when another crust came flying out the shed door and hit the side of the seagull's head. (RDO)
[…] när ännu en brödkant kom flygande ur skjulet och träffade huvudet på måsen från sidan.
332 (3)
Åke Viberg Hade hon kommit bara lite tidigare kunde hon ha träffats i huvudet av istappen (MG)
If she had come out just a little earlier, the icicle might have hit her.
Textually salient subjects such as bullet can serve as prototypical subjects of träffa in the sense that is relevant here but the limits of the range of subjects that serve as cues to the choice of Swedish equivalent are set by semantic and pragmatic factors. The verb träffa is also the preferred Swedish equivalent when the subject refers to a human who sets a projectile such as a bullet in motion. In this case, the projectile may be implied and left unexpressed: (4)
Mannen började springa och Kollberg sköt igen och den här gången träffade han honom i knävecket. (SW)
The man started running, and Kollberg shot again and this time hit him in the knee.
(5)
We try to aim as close as possible without actually hitting them. (MA)
Vi försöker sikta så nära som möjligt utan att verkligen träffa dem.
The verbs meaning ’shoot’ and ’aim’, respectively, which form part of the topical context, serve as the major cues to the choice of Swedish equivalent of hit. The typical and most frequent object of strike, hit and beat in the ESPC is a human being when the verbs appear in their prototypical use as bodily action verbs. This is, however, only a tendency, whereas it is more or less a requirement of Swedish slå (see below). There are a number of more abstract uses where these verbs have an object which refers to a human experiencer. In prototypical uses such as Harry struck/hit/beat Peter, there is usually an implication that the agent wants to dominate or defeat the object. This implication tends to be strongest with beat and this may be the reason why beat is used when only the abstract sense ‘defeat’ is present. The most frequent Swedish equivalent is slå but even more abstract verbs such as besegra ‘defeat’ can be used: (6)
He was quick and good at tic-tactoe and checkers, and cunning and aggressive; he easily beat me. (OS)
Han var snabb och duktig i luffarschack och damspel, och listig och offensiv; han slog mig utan besvär.
(7)
I was better at maths and science and practical things; you only had to show him a lathe in the metal workshop for him to pretend he had a fainting fit; but when he wanted to beat me, he beat me. (JB)
Jag var bättre i matte och naturvetenskap och praktiska övningsämnen; man behövde bara visa honom en revolversvarv på metallslöjden för att han skulle låtsas svimma; men när han ville besegra mig så gjorde han det.
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Table 3. Salient subject collocates of strike, hit and beat according to Kilgarriff’s WASPBENCH strike F Total 7149 BNC subject 4417 lightning 65 disaster 52 clock 80 thought 95 bullet 21 tragedy 17 contrast 14 blow 13 similarity 11 bargain 10 thing 74 lightening 4 band 22 cyclone 6 it 511 fact 28 burglar 13 deal 15 jinx 4 raider 7 thief 11 earthquake 6 right 26 sun 19 plague 6
Sal.
hit
F 9777
Sal.
beat
F 7552
Sal.
0.6 24.6 22.7 22.0 19.7 14.5 14.2 12.5 12.2 12.1 11.8 11.3 10.9 10.4 10.4 9.9 9.4 9.2 9.2 9.1 9.0 9.0 8.7 8.5 8.3 8.2
subject smash recession bullet car ball shot bomb missile squall downturn blast drought shell wave cyclone chart loss hurricane blow crisis pellet slowdown kick depression header
6106 33 99 45 90 42 23 24 14 7 7 11 8 13 27 5 11 21 7 9 14 6 4 8 8 7
0.7 24.0 23.7 19.3 14.0 13.7 12.3 12.0 11.9 11.4 11.3 10.9 10.6 10.6 10.3 9.9 9.6 9.3 9.2 9.0 8.8 8.7 8.6 8.3 8.3 8.2
subject heart drum pulse side stick England sun team wing rain keeper gang whites United Surrey goal man they Liverpool Rangers
3987 198 15 19 50 11 27 31 52 15 20 7 10 7 9 4 13 67 368 6 5
0.5 27.5 14.7 13.0 12.1 11.3 11.1 11.0 10.8 10.1 9.4 8.3 8.1 7.9 7.4 7.1 7.1 7.1 6.9 6.8 6.8
These two examples also illustrate how the meaning and the choice of translation in certain cases can be identified only pragmatically by the wider discourse context. When both the subject and object are human, the meaning ‘beat physically’ is possible but ruled out by the fact that a game such as tic-tac-toe has been mentioned earlier as in the first example. On many occasions, the cues are even more indirect, for example when they reflect the general topic of conversation such as sports. The meaning ‘defeat’, however, is also represented in the list of salient subjects of beat in Table 3. Many of the subjects are (parts of) names of teams (England, United, Surrey, Liverpool, Rangers). In addition, there is the noun team itself and a relatively large proportion of the examples of they
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also refer to teams. Most of the examples of the salient subject side also belong here (e.g. Skem boss Dave Maloney, who watched his side beat Glossop 2-1 on Saturday). A prominent class of subjects that appear with hit and strike but not with beat are nouns referring to events with negative effects for humans such as natural disasters, economic crises, wars and diseases. Several of the salient subjects in Table 3 are of this semantic type (strike: disaster, tragedy, cyclone, earthquake, plague; hit: recession, downturn, drought, cyclone, loss, hurricane, crisis, slowdown, depression). The object typically refers to human groups and institutions of various types. The dominant Swedish equivalent in this case is drabba which basically means ‘affect negatively’: (8)
When a severe drought struck the land towards the end of his reign […] (KAR)
Mot slutet av Ahabs styre, när en svår torka drabbade landet […]
Since the negative consequences of the event for humans is in focus, the verb very often appears in the passive, which places the human experiencer in subject position: (9)
Därtill drabbades landet av lågkonjunktur med åtföljande penningknapphet och politisk oro. (KF)
In addition, the country was hit by a depression, resulting in political unrest.
There are a number of alternative Swedish equivalents such as hemsöka ‘afflict’ and the evaluatively neutral inträffa ‘occur’ but these are not very frequent: (10)
In 1665 yet another plague hit the capital (SUG)
1665 hemsöktes London av ännu en pest
(11)
I slutet av 1870-talet inträffade en mycket svår lågkonjunktur med en lång rad svenska konkurser som följd. (TR)
Sweden was hit by a very deep recession at the end of the 1870s, resulting in a large number of Swedish bankruptcies.
A peculiar fact about the use of hit in this meaning is that around 50% of the occurrences in the ESPC have the passive form. (The passive forms are not as prominent – 3 out of 14 – with strike used with the same meaning but this will not be discussed in detail due to the relatively small number of examples.) One reason for this is the general tendency of human arguments to be realized as subject. At the same time, the frequent use of the passive form serves as an indication that hit is being used as a psychological predicate rather than a physical action verb. A comparison with Swedish drabba is interesting. There are 182 occurrences of drabba in the ESPC corpus, 103 (62%) of which are passive. Besides hit and strike, its English correspondences are verbs which have a basic
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meaning close to ‘affect (negatively)’ such as affect (23 examples), afflict (12) and befall (5). The most frequent equivalent is actually the verb suffer (from) (33), which takes a human Experiencer as subject in an active sentence: (12)
Men Joe var för tidigt född och hade drabbats [Passive] av syrebrist under förlossningen. (SCO)
But Joe was born too early and had suffered from lack of oxygen during his birth.
Negative events of the type just described are in principle observable with our senses, even if the psychological reaction of the Experiencer is in focus. The subject can also refer to a purely mental event. A clear case is when the noun thought is used as subject. (13)
Den första tanken slog mig när jag vaknade nästa morgon och tände ljuset. (RJ)
That thought struck me the following morning when I woke up and switched on the light.
In the ESPC, only strike is used with this meaning (the sudden appearance of a thought). The dominant equivalent in Swedish is slå. In both languages, this meaning is usually tied to the construction it + Verb +NP +that-S (or wh-S): (14)
I know that at one stage it struck me how utterly out of place I was in that cathedral. (BR)
Jag vet att det vid ett tillfälle slog mig hur ytterligt malplacerad jag var i den där katedralen.
The use of strike with a mental meaning is also reflected in the list of salient subjects in Table 3. The noun thought appears close to the top. Among the other salient subjects, the nouns thing and fact tend to serve as the abstract head of sentential complements (e.g. The first thing that struck me about Dana's poems was his incredibly tiny script and I was struck by the fact that there were no spokes) and the salience of it as a subject of strike is no doubt due to expressions of the type it struck me that-S. The verb strike (often in combination with as) can also be used to describe how something appears to a human Experiencer. In this case, the Swedish equivalent slå cannot be used as an equivalent and various mental verbs are preferred instead, such as te sig or tyckas ‘appear’: (15) Det enda som tycktes honom avvik- The only thing that struck him as ande var ett litet krucifix som satt på being odd was a little crucifix on väggen intill dörren till pentryt. (HM) the wall by the kitchen door. Another alternative is to use a mental verb where the Experiencer appears as subject, such as uppleva ‘experience’:
336
(16)
Åke Viberg
Yes, I think that 's how she struck me. (JB)
Ja. Det var väl ungefär så jag upplevde henne.
To sum up, an important cue for word sense identification and for the choice of Swedish translation of strike and hit is the semantic class of the subject. However, there is a wide range of other linguistic cues some of which will be dealt with in the following account of slå, but as will become evident these cues are not as prominent as for the Swedish verb. There are also cases where only the wider discourse context or general pragmatic factors are decisive. With respect to the conceptual representation, the Bodily action component of strike, hit and beat is less prominent than in Swedish as will be demonstrated in the next section. 3.
Swedish physical contact verbs
In Swedish, there is one nuclear physical contact verb slå which has a much higher frequency than any other verb in the field. The meaning of Swedish slå is analyzed in greater detail in Viberg (1999). In brief, slå in its prototypical use as a physical contact verb involves Intentional action, Body movement, primarily with the arm and hand, which results in contact between the hand and some (optionally specified) part of the body of some other human being, as in the following corpus example: Mor slog far i ansiktet (IB) ‘Mother struck father in the face’. The various aspects of the meaning of slå can be related to a number of experiential levels as outlined in Table 4. Table 4. Aspects of the meaning of slå Experiential level Cognitive Sensorimotor Spatial perception
Concept Intentionality Limb movement Motion through the air to target
Prototype Intentional Arm + hand Target: other human
Mechanical reasoning
Force directed towards target
Strong force
Effects: Psychological effect Biological effect Physical effect
Defeating, hurting Killing Setting target in motion Breaking target Producing sound (Producing artefact)
Affected object: Human Human, animal Physical object
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At the cognitive level, slå refers to an intentional action by a human agent in the prototypical case. This is reflected in the fact that 70% of the grammatical subjects of slå refer to a human, which is higher than for strike (41%) and hit (48%) but relatively similar to beat (72%) in the ESPC corpus. Only in a few cases is slå unintentional when the subject is human as when it refers to hurting oneself. In this meaning the verb is reflexive (slå sig) or has one of the subject’s body parts as its object: (17)
I fallet slog han huvudet i en nyuppslagen såpkagge […] (KE2)
He hit his head on a freshlyopened barrel of cleaning soap […]
As mentioned in the introduction, cognitive linguists such as Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1999) have stressed the importance of bodily movement and perception for concept formation. More specifically, Bailey (1997) presents a computational model of motor control and word learning using verbs of hand action as an example. Bailey also refers to the fact that brain imaging studies (Damasio and Tranel 1993) indicate that there is an “intimate connection between language and the sensorimotor areas of the brain: verbs activate motor control regions, while nouns do not” (Bailey 1997: 12). At the sensorimotor level, slå refers to a limb movement, in the prototypical case with arm and hand. Usually, this part of the meaning is not explicitly marked. Only occasionally is the bodily motion specified in greater detail as in the following example: (18)
Min femåriga arm som med all kraft lyfter handen för att slå tillbaka. (MS)
and my five-year-old arm raising my hand to hit back with all its might.
The use of the body part as subject in this rather exceptional use also backgrounds the cognitive level conceptualizing the hitting as an uncontrolled event. Hitting can be experienced both from within as a sensorimotor activity and from outside as motion through space. The similarity between the visual perception of the fist moving through the air and a projectile moving through the air and hitting its target links examples like Harry hit Peter and A bullet hit Peter in English. This example also shows that languages exploit potential links differently in polysemy. As described earlier, Swedish would use slå in the first case (Harry slog Peter) and träffa (Kulan träffade Peter) in the second. The verb träffa, however, is not completely ruled out when referring to bodily action in examples such as Harry träffade Peter med ett välriktat slag ‘Harry hit Peter with a well-aimed blow’. What motivates the use of träffa in this example is that the trajectory of the fist and in particular the exact location of its end-point is focused. Examples where the meaning of slå is based primarily on spatial perception will be presented later in this section. One characteristic of Swedish slå is that the direct object is usually also human unless there is a verbal particle (see below). When it is non-human, the target of the contact is usually realized by a formally more marked form as a
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prepositional phrase (often på ‘on’ or i ‘in’) as in the following examples. The direct object in the English examples is not possible as an alternative in Swedish examples of this type: (19)
Vi började slå på flaskan för att hjälpa honom. (RJ)
We started to hit the bottle to help him.
(20)
She hit the blackboard. (RDO)
Hon slog på svarta tavlan.
There is a strong implication that the contact has a clear effect or impact on the object. This distinguishes hitting from touching. When the object is human, the effect is usually psychological. The agent’s intention to hurt or defeat the other human is part of the prototypical meaning of slå. Swedish slå can also be used when the result is death. The object in this case refers to a human or an animal (cf. the meaning of the English cognate slay) but in this case slå is usually combined with the particle ihjäl (etymologically ‘into Hel’, the kingdom of the dead in Old Norse mythology). Slå ihjäl is in most of the cases translated by kill which is unmarked for manner, but the more direct equivalent beat to death also occurs: (21)
Han kunde slå ihjäl mig utan att blinka. (SG)
He'd kill me without giving it a second thought.
(22)
Klappar det på porten är hans första impuls att gripa yxan och rusa ut och slå ihjäl. (IU)
A knock at the door? His first impulse is to seize an axe, rush out and beat his visitor to death.
As in many of the other cases where slå is combined with a particle, the particle signals the result, whereas the verb primarily contributes a manner component. A sentence such as Peter slog ihjäl ormen can be paraphrased as ‘Peter killed the snake (by hitting it)’. However, slå without a particle has the conventional meaning ‘kill’ when the subject refers to a bear: Björnen slog ett lamm ‘The bear got a lamb’. The verb slå is associated with an extensive pattern of polysemy. The relationships between a number of the most basic meanings are shown in Figure 1 (see Viberg 1999 for discussion) and the major English equivalents tied to various meanings are shown in Table 5. In Figure 1, the prototype is shown in the box in the middle. Above the prototype, a number of uses are displayed where some part of the prototypical meaning is focused. A relatively frequent use, focuses on the limb movement without any resulting contact. The typical English equivalent is a motion verb: (23)
Pastor Tureson slog uppgivet ut med händerna. (HM)
Pastor Tureson threw up his hands in acknowledgment.
(24)
Zablonsky spread his hands. (FF)
Zablonsky slog ut med händerna.
Physical contact verbs in English and Swedish Table 5. Major meanings of slå with their major English correspondences Semantic field
Freq. Major English correspondences
Physical contact
130
Body movement
35
Motion verbs: throw, fling, wave …
Postural
46
sit (down) (27), take a seat
Settlement
37
settle (27)
Kill (slå ihjäl)
17
kill (13), beat to death, swat (a mosquito)
Defeat
20
beat (5), defeat (2), repulse (2), suppress (2)
Fighting (slåss)
45
fight (25), struggle (3)
Subject-centered motion
19
fight one’s way (3), set (3), push (2)
strike (27), hit (33), beat (8)
Object-centered motion: liquid
8
pour (6), cast
Disconnection (slå sönder/av)
38
break (9), smash (4), cut, demolish, destroy
Joining (slå samman, ihop)
15
merge (8), join (2)
Open/close
69
open (28), close (10), slam (8)
Look up (slå upp)
10
look up (6)
Dialling
11
dial (10)
Switch on/off (slå på/av)
17
switch on/off (7), turn on/off (5)
Non-human subject Physical object
10
Natural forces: lightning
12
strike (10)
Natural forces: rain, waves
13
bang, batter, beat, crash, hammer…
Sound source
16
strike (clock), slam (door)
Heart, pulse
10
beat (6), thump (2)
Impersonal construction: ‘it struck me that-S’
31
strike (13), occur to (7), come to (4), cross s.o.’s mind (2)
slå fast
11
establish (2), specify, state…
slå vakt om
13
protect (5), safeguard (5)
Mental meanings
Total (above)
633
Total (corpus)
754
339
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(25)
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Hon for upp och sprang runt i köket, slog armarna runt kroppen, och hulkade och snyftade. (AP)
She leapt up and ran round the kitchen, flinging her arms round her body, sobbing and sniffing.
The verbs strike, hit and beat only have a few uses where limb movement is focused, as in the following example: (26)
Han hade börjat skaka av köld och slog armarna om sig själv. (KE)
He had begun shaking with cold, so he kept beating his arms round his chest […]
Examples such as Per slog ut med armarna ’Per spread his arms’, where slå describes limb movement, serve as a model for the conventionalized use of slå to describe the motion of petals in expressions like Blommorna slog ut ‘The flowers came out’. In the corpus, there is one example which shows that similar extensions are productive to some extent: (27)
Stockholmarna märker det ofta först när främmande flaggor slår ut på Norrbro. (GAPG)
Stockholmers usually become aware of a state visit only when foreign flags fold out along Norrbro bridge.
An example like this one is based on the spatial perception of a movement that looks like a certain type of arm movement (perhaps via the conventionalized extension describing flowers coming out). There is no direct connection to the sensorimotor experience in this example. The result of defeating someone can also be focused. In English, this is possible only with beat. In the following example, the discourse context makes it clear that the physical part of the meaning of slå and beat should be suppressed: (28)
Genom en rad glänsande aktioner slog Karl XII ryssarna vid Narva år 1700 och polackerna vid Klissow år 1702. (AA)
In a series of brilliant actions Charles XII beat the Russians at Narva in 1700 and the Poles at Kliszow in 1702.
According to the interpretation presented in this paper, the intention to ’defeat’ or ‘hurt’ is part of the prototypical meaning of slå. The meaning ‘defeat’ is thus rather a case of focusing (and strengthening) rather than some kind of metaphor. In addition to the regular passive forms of slå, there are irregular forms associated with the meaning ‘fight’. Basically, the vowel is shortened which is reflected in writing in slåss used in the infinitive and present tense. (The regular passive present form is slås. In the past tense, the difference in vowel length is not reflected in the written form, slogs.) Slåss is usually treated as a separate
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341
Focusing: Stationary motion Blommorna slog ut The flowers came out
Bodily motion Per slog ut med armarna Per spread his arms
Prototype:
Social interaction 2: Competition Per slog Pål i schack Per beat Pål at chess
PHYSICAL CONTACT Per slog Pål i magen Per hit Pål in the stomach
Social interaction 1: Fighting Per och Pål slogs Per and Pål were fighting
Resultative strengthening:
Objectcentered motion Per slog bollen över nät. Per hit the ball over the net.
Disconnection Per slog gräset. Per cut the grass.
Sound source Det slog i dörrarna. The doors slammed.
Organic life Björnen slog ett får. The bear got a lamb.
Postural Per slog sig ner i soffan. Per sat down in the sofa.
Metaphor:
Specialized meanings: Open/close Per slog upp boken. Per opened the book.
Motion: Liquid Per slog upp en grogg. Per poured a drink.
Per slog upp ett ord. Per looked up a word.
Figure 1. Major meanings of slå
Symbolic Klockan slog 12. The clock struck 12.
Per slog ihjäl tiden. Per killed time.
Settlement Per slog sig ner i Finland. Per settled in Finland.
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lemma in Swedish, but from a semantic point of view slåss is closely associated with the prototypical meaning of slå. Basically, it refers to a fight with the fists (Pojkarna slåss ‘The boys are fighting’) but it is often extended to a fight with other physical means and can be extended into abstract domains as evident from the second example below: (29)
Somliga söp och slogs så det var inte klokt. (SW)
Some of them used to drink and fight like you wouldn't believe.
(30)
Kanske slåss dom mot tystnaden, men mera troligt är att dom följer med den tystnad dom upptäckt. (SC)
They may struggle with the silence but more often they coexist with the silence they have discovered.
The most frequent equivalent of slåss is fight but other alternatives such as struggle, compete, contend, contest, vie and scramble for also occur. In the construction slå sig ner (slå + Reflexive + ‘down’), slå functions semantically as a postural verb. The dominant English equivalent is sit down as in the following example: (31)
Dag slog sig ner på golvet bredvid Ludde. (MG)
Dag sat down on the floor beside Ludde.
Even if the use of slå is completely conventionalized in this construction, which is characteristic of Swedish postural verbs (sätta sig ner ‘sit down’, lägga sig ner ‘lie down’, ställa sig upp ‘stand up’), there is a close semantic relationship with the prototypical meaning of slå. To sit down also involves a kind of limb movement which, even in this case, results in physical contact between the body and a seat or something serving as a seat (such as the floor in the example above). This aspect of the meaning is backgrounded in the use of slå as a postural verb but is more prominent in examples with various types of animals that can fly (birds, insects): (32)
A fly alighted on his lower lip […] (BO)
En fluga slog sig ner på hans underläpp […]
The use of slå as a postural verb also serves as a point of departure for an extension which is characteristic of postural verbs in many languages, namely to settle permanently in a place: (33)
Svenska och finska nybyggare slog sig ner i kolonin, som kallades Nya Sverige. (AA)
Swedes and Finns settled in the colony which received the name of New Sweden.
Hitting a physical object can have various physical effects such as setting the object in motion, breaking it, producing a new object or producing a sound. Such
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343
meanings are based on mechanical reasoning and the transmission of force (Michotte 1963, Leslie 1994). There are a number of uses of slå where a certain physical effect has been conventionalized and become part of the meaning through a process referred to as resultative strengthening in Viberg (1999). There is often a complex interaction between the verb slå, various verbal particles that can be combined with the verb and the semantic class of various objects. One example is the use of slå to express separation into parts or disconnection, for example by breaking or cutting (Viberg 1985). The verb slå in combination with the particle sönder ‘asunder, apart’ is conventionally used to refer to breaking a physical object by hitting it or (in a more extended meaning) by accidentally dropping it. The most frequent equivalent of slå sönder is break as in the following example: (34)
Natalie not caring about the way she makes Jane break plates matters; (FW)
Att Natalie inte bryr sig om ifall hon får Jane att slå sönder tallrikar har också betydelse […]
In the expression slå sönder, slå rather expresses the manner (break by hitting) whereas the result is expressed by the particle. However, with direct objects referring to hay, grass and other plants, the result ‘cut’ has beeen lexicalized as in the following example (the instrument ‘scythe’ is also understood): (35)
Vem är det som slagit ert hö, sa främlingen. (SC)
"Who mows your hay?" asked the stranger.
The verb slå can also be used in phrases with the meaning ‘cause to form a unit’ but in that case a verbal particle such as samman ‘together’ or ihop (etymol. ‘in’ + ‘heap’) must be used. Even if it is possible to interpret combinations such as slå ihop or slå samman concretely involving the striking of two objects against one another, all occurrences in the ESPC have a more abstract meaning. The most frequent equivalent is merge but join also occurs in a couple of examples: (36)
Produktionen vid Esswells enhet i Toscana slås nu samman med verksamheten vid fabriken i Lucca. (ASSI)
Production at Esswell's unit in Tuscany will now be merged with operations at the plant in Lucca.
A type of resultative strengthening that is rather marginal in modern Swedish but presumably more frequent in pre-industrial cultures is hitting as a method of production. The expression slå mynt ‘produce coins by hitting metal’ refers to an obsolete way of producing coins: (37)
I denna stad hade kungen sin gård, och i Sigtuna slogs också de äldsta daterbara mynten i landet. (AA)
The King had his residence in that town, and the oldest dated coins were minted there.
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Interestingly, the expression slå mynt av (lit. ‘strike coins out of’) has primarily survived in modern Swedish in a metaphorical sense ‘to produce a benefit for oneself’, i.e. to take advantage of a certain situation: (38)
"You'll pay for this," Con said, already seeing opportunities for cashing in on this young fool's misfortune. (JC)
"Det här ska du få betala för", sa Con, som redan hade insett att det gick att slå mynt av den unge klåparens misslyckade försök.
The verb slå can also be used in the sense ‘set in motion by hitting’ as in the example Per slog bollen över nät ‘Per hit the ball over the net’. There is also a more extended use of slå as a motion verb where the object is a liquid. The most frequent equivalent of slå in this use is pour: (39)
Det fick dra ett tag innan gästgiverskan slog på en skvätt mjölk och lät den koka in. (KE2)
When they 'd soaked it all up, the innkeeper's wife poured in some milk and let it all putter.
In examples like this one, slå no longer refers to hitting but to a movement with the arm and hand that is partly similar: ‘to move liquid by tilting a container held in the hand’. (There is also a verb hälla ‘pour’ in Swedish which has this as it basic meaning.) There are several other uses more or less closely linked to the prototypical meaning where slå refers to some specialized kind of movement with the arm and hand. One such hand action that is loosely associated with the prototypical motion of arm and hand are the expressions slå på/slå av referring to the turning of a switch on or off. The two major equivalents are turn on/off or switch on/off: (40)
[han] slog på sina varningsblinkers […] (JG)
[he] turned on his emergency blinkers […]
(41)
Kunde det vara så lyckligt att någon helt enkelt hade slagit ifrån huvudbrytaren? (LG)
With a bit of luck it might just be that someone had simply turned off the main switch!
A rather frequent use of slå refers to opening and closing, which is basically a hand action that resembles the prototypical act of striking. In this use, slå is combined with the particle upp ‘open’ (basically: ‘up’) and its opposites igen, ihop, samman referring to various closed states: (42)
Han tog ut en dyrbar och vackert ornamenterad pärm och slog upp den framför sig på skrivbordet. (HM)
He took out an expensive and beautifully decorated portfolio and opened it before him on the desk.
Physical contact verbs in English and Swedish (43)
345
Jag lade ifrån mig pennan eller slog I put my pen down or closed my ihop boken. (AP) book.
The most frequent equivalents are open and close. When the object refers to books and other physical objects consisting of pages joined together (newspapers, journals, menues, etc.), slå + particle refers to opening and closing in a neutral way. There is, however, another large group of objects referring to doors, windows and other barriers that can be moved to allow passage (such as ‘lid’). In this case, the use of slå + particle indicates that the action is carried out briskly and forcefully. In addition to the neutral use of the verb open alone, there are various equivalents that mirror the manner component: (44)
När dörren ut till hallen ånyo slogs [Passive] upp (KOB)
When the door from the exhibition hall opened again
(45)
Plötsligt slogs dörren upp (LH)
Then the door flew open
(46)
I detta nu slogs dörren upp (ARP)
Then the door crashed open
(47)
Djupt inne i mitt medvetande slogs dörrar upp (GT)
Deep in my consciousness doors were thrown open
The expression slå igen dörren usually implies that the door was closed so forcefully that a loud noise was produced, and this is mirrored by the frequent equivalent slam the door: (48)
"När går ni av skiftet i kväll?" frågade han i samma ögonblick som en av dem slog igen bildörren. (JG)
"When do you get off your shift?" he asked the one in the back as she slammed the car door.
The use of slå upp and slå igen to refer to opening and closing is so wellestablished that it can be further extended to uses where hand action is not involved. Slå upp can be used about the opening of the eyes: (49)
Eriksson slog upp ögonen. (SC)
Eriksson opened his eyes.
Both slå upp and slå igen can be used with nouns meaning ‘door’ (or movable barrier in general) as subject. In examples like the following, there is no clear implication that a human was involved: (50)
The glass door slammed. (RR)
Glasdörren slog igen.
Another use expressing a hand action loosely associated with striking is when slå refers to the dialling of a telephone number. In this case, the direct object is usually numret ‘the number’ or siffrorna ‘the numbers’ and the dominant equivalent is dial:
346 (51)
Åke Viberg Hon låste upp bilen och slog numret till kontoret i Ystad på biltelefonen. (HM2)
She unlocked the car and dialed the number of the Ystad office on the car phone.
This is also an interesting example illustrating the cues that can be used for sense identification and the choice of translation. The major cue in this case is the semantic class of the object, which in addition to nouns meaning ‘number’ can be any combination of digits which can serve as a telephone number: Peter slog 112 ‘Peter dialled 112’. Another example which has been discussed above is the class of objects that can appear when slå refers to mowing or cutting ‘hay’ and related objects. In Swedish, slå can be combined with a large number of particles. But even in these cases the semantic class of the object is an important cue. The combination slå upp, for example, is related to different senses and translations depending on the semantic class of the object. The meaning ‘open’ appears when the object refers to (1) ‘door’ or other movable barrier, (2) ‘book’ or other printed matter consisting of pages joined together or (3) ‘eyes’. The meaning ‘pour’ appears when the object refers to a liquid, especially a drink or beverage: (52)
Han slår upp vattnet och lägger i några citronklyftor. (MS)
He pours out the water and puts a few slices of lemon in each glass.
The combination slå upp can also refer to the finding of information by opening a book or other printed matter. This meaning is metonymically related to the meaning ‘open’ which is transformed into a manner component (‘find information by turning the pages in a book’). The usual English equivalent in this case is look up: (53)
I looked up the name Gahan. (SG)
Jag slog upp namnet Gahan.
Typical objects in this case are words which refer to verbal or numerical information such as ‘name’ and ‘telephone number’ but in principle any word used metalinguistically could appear as object: Peter slog upp skiftnyckel (i sin ordbok) ‘Peter looked up wrench (in his dictionary)’. In print, (single) quotes are often used to signal that a word is used metalinguistically but in speech topical or situational cues must be used. In comparison with strike and hit, the semantic class of the subject plays a less prominent role for the interpretation of slå since human subjects dominate so strongly. Inanimate physical objects do occur as subjects but only to a certain extent. Natural forces occur as subjects of slå to approximately the same extent as with the English verbs. When the subject refers to lightning, the equivalent is always strike but when it refers to rain and waves or fire and smoke, a wide range of physical contact verbs are used (bang, batter, beat, crash, hammer, smack) in addition to a few motion verbs (gush, sprout, sweep). Usually, various fine-
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347
grained aspects of the manner component, especially forcefulness, are incorporated into the meaning of the verb used as translation: (54)
Regnbyarna slog mot vindrutan. (HM2)
Rain squalls hammered against the windshield.
(55)
Grått regn slår mot glas. (PCJ)
Grey rain batters the glass.
The verb slå can also be used as a mental verb and take a proposition or a mental noun such as tanke ‘thought’ as subject. (The uses of slå with a mental subject are treated together with other mental uses in Table 5.) A sentential subject is usually extraposed and introduced by a dummy subject (det ‘it’) as in the English construction ‘it struck me that-S’ (Swed. det slog mig att-S): (56)
Efteråt slog det mig att det kanske inte går att drömma att man dör. (BL)
Later it struck me that it is perhaps not possible to dream that you die.
There are 31 occurrences of slå in this construction. The most frequent English equivalent is strike but there are several other alternatives such as occur to, come to, cross s.o.’s mind: (57)
Det slog mig att det var mycket länge sedan jag känt mig generad. (LH)
It occurred to me it had been quite a while since l'd felt embarrassment.
(58)
Det slår mig att han antagligen inte alls hör till kongressen. (MS)
The thought crosses my mind that he probably does n't have anything to do with the convention.
(59)
And this, it suddenly came to her, might well be the wages of sin. (FW)
Och detta, slog det henne plötsligt, skulle mycket väl kunna vara syndastraffet.
Mental nouns such as tanke ‘thought, idea’ can be used as subjects when the object is human: (60)
Tanken slog mig att Pekka kanske hade seglat iväg med MacDuffs kvinna (BL)
It came to my mind that Pekka had perhaps sailed away with MacDuff's woman
Usually, a passive alternative is used as in the following Swedish example: (61)
A thought suddenly struck her. (RR)
Plötsligt slogs hon av en tanke.
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The verb slå also appears in a number of phrasal combinations with a mental meaning, where the subject is a human agent. The active suppression of a thought can be described with the phrase slå bort tanken (lit. ‘strike the thought away’). This metaphorical expression is used literally about chasing away disturbing insects such as mosquitos (slå bort myggen) with sweeping motions of arm and hand. (62)
Övervägde ett ögonblick att äta frukost men slog bort tanken. (SW)
For a moment he considered having breakfast, but he dismissed the thought.
There are two phrasal combinations with slå that are relatively frequent in the ESPC, especially in the non-fiction texts, viz. slå fast and slå vakt om. The phrase slå fast means literally ‘fasten by hitting’. As a mental metaphor it refers to forming a decision that one sticks to. A number of different equivalents are used, such as establish, specify, state: (63)
Jag tycker också att man här borde ha tagit chansen att slå fast att parlamentets ordförande skall utses på fem år […] (ESJO)
In my view, we should have used this opportunity to establish that the President of Parliament should be elected for five years […]
The phrasal combination slå vakt om (lit. ’strike guard of’) is not transparent in present-day Swedish. The most frequent equivalents are safeguard and protect: (64)
Det är friheten som vi skall slå vakt It is the freedom we should om, inte regleringen. (ECED) safeguard, not the rules.
(65)
Det är inte så konstigt att vi lundabor envist slår vakt om vår stads särdrag och om dess lagomhet. (LI)
It is not surprising that we citizens of Lund stubbornly protect our town's special qualities and its moderation.
To sum up, the Swedish verb slå has an extensive pattern of polysemy comprising a number of senses that are motivated at various experiential levels presented above in Table 4. Among these, the sensorimotor level plays a conspicuous part since many extended meanings are motivated by the fact that slå is a hand action verb. A similar motivation is found for several of the meaning extensions of another frequent and polysemous hand action verb in Swedish, namely dra ‘pull’ (Viberg 1996). There are also many extended meanings that can be regarded as cases of resultative strengthening.
Physical contact verbs in English and Swedish 4.
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Conclusion
The present paper is relatively data-oriented and an account has been given of a rather large number of cases where English and Swedish contrast. However, an attempt has also been made to characterize the contrasts between the two languages in general terms based on two different frameworks. With respect to the conceptual representation, Swedish slå is grounded more firmly in sensorimotor experience of limb movement than strike, hit and beat, even if sensorimotor experience plays an important role also for the conceptualization of the English verbs. At a general level, the extensions of the major verb of hitting to other types of hand action probably represent a universal tendency. The polysemy of the Chinese equivalent d_ ‘hit’ is to a great extent motivated by the fact that the prototypical meaning refers to hand action according to Gao (2001). However, a comparison at a more detailed level with Swedish slå shows that there appears to be great variation with respect to the specific hand actions (out of the many potential ones) that are conventionally associated with the verb whose prototypical meaning is ‘hit’. With respect to the process of word sense identification, there is also a general tendency. In both English and Swedish, there are many types of linguistic disambiguation cues. It appears, however, that the major equivalents of strike and hit can be identified with the help of the semantic class of the subject, whereas the semantic class of the subject is helpful in fewer cases in Swedish due to the relative dominance of human subjects of slå. The semantic class of the object, on the other hand, is utilized as a cue to distinguish a rather great number of senses of slå and appears to be more important for slå than it is for hit, strike and beat. The relative importance of various types of cues varies a great deal within a language depending on the type of lexical item. The major meanings of Swedish få ‘get; may’ such as Possession, Modal, Causative can be identified with the help of the syntactic frame (or construction), whereas the subtle but important contrast between the two modal meanings Permission and Obligation are identified primarily with the help of pragmatic factors (Viberg 2002). The semantic class of the subject and object referred to in this paper can be compared to the notion of local context (Miller and Leacock 2000. See the introduction). To a large extent it will be available within such a narrow window as ±2 words and is local in that sense. The concept of argument structure of which subject and object form a central part is, however, different from simple cooccurrence. In a lexical study, it appears to be justified to provide the more structured information even if it is still an open question excatly how this information is used by human or machine. As has been exemplified several times in this paper, topical and pragmatic information will be needed in many cases to reach the correct interpretation. The comparison of Swedish and English has turned up many differences in semantic structure in spite of the fact that the two languages are rather closely related. As a matter of fact, most of the verbs treated in this paper have cognates in the other language: slå – slay, strike - stryka ‘stroke’, hit – hitta ‘find (a
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concrete object)’. However, on each point where a contrast is found, it remains an open question whether Swedish or English exhibits a language-specific pattern, and on points where the languages are similar, it is an open question whether this reflects a universal tendency or is due to the close genetic relatedness of Swedish and English. To answer this type of questions, more languages must be brought into the comparison. Some data of this type have already been analyzed in a restricted pilot corpus consisting of translations of Swedish originals into four other languages. A simple example is presented in Table 6. Table 6. Translations of Swedish originals into four other European languages Swedish Mor slog far i ansiktet (IB)
English She struck him in the face Det slog It struck him honom att hon that she knew visste allting everything om honom. about him (KE) Åke slog upp Åke flung dörren. (KE) open the door. Han slog He poured halva bägarn out half a full (MF) beaker
German Mutter schlug Vater ins Gesicht Ihm ging durch den Kopf, daß sie alles über ihn wußte Åke riß die Tür auf. Er goß den Becher halbvoll
French Finnish Mère a frappé Äiti löi isää père au visage kasvoihin L'idée le frappa qu'elle savait tout de lui.
Johan tajusi että Gudrun tiesi hänestä kaiken
Åke ouvrit la porte. Il remplit le gobelet à moitié
Åke avasi oven. Hän kaatoi puolillaan olevan maljan täyteen
As can be seen the extension of slå into the mental domain (it struck him that-S) has a parallel in French in addition to English, whereas the extension to meanings such as opening and pouring appear to be language-specific characteristics of Swedish in spite of the fact that they represent natural extensions from the prototypical conceptual representation of Swedish slå. To be able to say what is universal, languages that are genetically and geographically more distant from Swedish must be taken into consideration, but as already mentioned certain types of extension such as the extension from hitting to various other hand actions have parallels in non-European languages such as Chinese. Note 1. In the following corpus examples the original text is placed first. For an explanation of the text codes, see http://www.englund.lu.se/research/corpus/corpus/webtexts.html.
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References Aijmer, K., B. Altenberg and M. Johansson (1996), ‘Text-based contrastive studies in English. Presentation of a project’, in: K. Aijmer, B. Altenberg and M. Johansson (eds), Languages in contrast. Papers from a symposium on text-based cross-linguistic studies. Lund: Lund University Press. 73-85. Altenberg, B. and K. Aijmer (2000), ‘The English-Swedish Parallel Corpus: A resource for contrastive research and translation studies’, in: C. Mair and M. Hundt (eds), Corpus linguistics and linguistic theory. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi. 15-33. Bailey, D.R. (1997), When Push comes to Shove: A computational model of the role of motor control in the acquisition of action verbs. PhD dissertation, Computer Science Division, EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley. Damasio, A.R. and D. Tranel (1993), ‘Nouns and verbs are retrieved with differently distributed neural systems’. Proceedings of The National Academy of Sciences 90, 4757-4760. Gao, Hong (2001), The physical foundation of the patterning of physical action verbs. A study of Chinese verbs. [Travaux de l’institut de linguistique de Lund XLI]. PhD dissertation, Department of Linguistics, University of Lund. Johansson, S. (1998), ‘On the role of corpora in cross-linguistic research’, in: S. Johansson and S. Oksefjell (eds), Corpora and cross-linguistic research. Theory, method, and case studies. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 3-24. Killgarriff, A. and D. Tugwell (2002), ‘Sketching words’, in: M.-H. Corréard (ed.), Lexicography and natural language processing. A festschrift in honour of B.T.S. Atkins, 125-137. Distribution: EURALEX – http://www.ims. uni-stuttgart.de/euralex/ Lakoff, G. and M. Johnson (1980), Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, G. and M. Johnson (1999), Philosophy in the flesh. The embodied mind and its challenge to western thought. New York: Basic Books. Leslie, A. (1994), ‘ToMM, ToBY, and agency: Core architecture and domain specificity’, in: L. Hirschfeld and S. Gelman (eds), Mapping the mind. Domain specificity in cognition and culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Michotte, A. (1963), The perception of causality. London: Methuen. (Original in French 1946.) Miller, G.A. and C. Leacock (2000), ‘Lexical representations for sentence processing’, in: Y. Ravin and C. Leacock (eds), Polysemy. Theoretical and computational approaches. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 152-160. Taylor, J. (1989), Linguistic categorization: prototypes in linguistic theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Viberg, Å. (1985), ’Hel och trasig. En skiss av några verbala semantiska fält i svenskan’, in: Svenskans beskrivning 15: 529-554. Göteborg: Göteborgs universitet. Viberg, Å. (1996), ‘The meanings of Swedish dra ‘pull’: a case study of lexical polysemy’. EURALEX'96. Proceedings. Part I, 293-308. Department of Swedish, University of Göteborg. Viberg, Å. (1999), ‘Polysemy and differentiation in the lexicon. Verbs of physical contact in Swedish’, in: J. Allwood and P. Gärdenfors (eds), Cognitive semantics. Meaning and cognition. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 87-129. Viberg, Å. (2002), ‘Polysemy and disambiguation cues across languages. The case of Swedish få and English get’, in: B. Altenberg and S. Granger (eds), Lexis in contrast. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 119-150.
Exploring theme contrastively: the choice of model Anna-Lena Fredriksson Göteborg University Abstract The aims of this paper are to discuss different approaches to the notion of theme and to show how parallel corpora can successfully be used for cross-linguistic analyses of theme.1 The realisation of theme is language-specific which can be problematic for contrastive studies of thematic structures. In this paper, I start by describing theme in English following Systemic Functional Grammar (Halliday 1994) and discuss questions concerning the delimitation of the theme from the rheme in English, which is relevant also for monolingual and cross-linguistic studies. In a brief overview of various approaches to theme in other languages, monolingual as well as cross-linguistic, I then demonstrate that the positions taken to theme differ and the original approach, which is English-based, may have to be modified to suit other languages simply because different languages have different ways of realising this function. 1.
Introduction
Parallel corpora offer great possibilities for contrastive text analysis.2 In recent years studies have covered a variety of features in the languages involved and often combined a syntactic and a textual feature. Studies have for example focussed on the thematic uses of non-referential there in English-Finnish texts (Mauranen 1999), sentence openings and textual progression (English-Swedish) (Svensson 2000), connectors and sentence openings (English-Swedish) (Altenberg 1998), word order and thematic structure in English and Norwegian (Hasselgård 1998, 2000), and thematic development in English-German texts (Ventola 1995). To my knowledge, Ghadessy and Gao (2001), investigating English and Chinese, is the only purely quantitative study of thematic development in parallel texts. The usefulness of this kind of research for translators and translator training as well as for machine translation is often stressed. The present paper originates in problems that I have encountered in my ongoing thesis work on passives from a corpus-based contrastive EnglishSwedish perspective. It is well-known that the passive is a multifunctional structure that provides a useful way of omitting the agentive subject where it can be ignored, or of postponing an agentive subject by making it the agent in cases where we want to give it end focus. At the same time, it gives thematic status to
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the affected entity (cf. Svartvik 1966, Granger 1983, Quirk et al. 1985: 1390f., Péry-Woodley 1991, Teleman et al. 1999: 4: 379ff. among others). Such operations facilitate a smooth development of the text. Its important role in text organisation gives rise to the question of how passive sentences in original texts are treated by translators. To what extent is the thematic structure preserved or altered in translation? Baker points out that “[r]endering a passive structure by an active structure, or conversely an active structure by a passive structure in translation can affect the amount of information given in the clause, the linear arrangement of semantic elements such as agent and affected entity, and the focus of the message” (1992: 106). But how can we compare thematic structure across languages? Due to the simple fact that language systems and their realisations differ, difficulties often arise when we want to study text structure across languages. We can assume that in all languages the clause has some kind of text-related organisation, and we can acknowledge theme and rheme as basic notions for the organisation of the message presented in clauses. However, the realisation of these notions may be specific to each language (e.g. Fries 1995a: 15). Even in English and Swedish, which are both SVO languages, it is sometimes difficult to determine which elements are to be considered thematic. Consider (1): (1)
(a) EO: Recently, some £2 billion has been invested in the area; (SUG1)3 (b) ST: Nyligen har ca 2 miljarder pund investerats i Docklands; Lit: Recently has approximately £2 billion invested-PAST-PASS in Docklands.
In the Swedish translation (1b) the finite operator precedes the subject. The inversion occurs because Swedish, like many other Germanic languages, is a verb-second (V2) language which requires the verb to occupy second position in declarative main clauses. Consequently, each time a non-subject occurs in initial position, subject-predicate inversion takes place. Such a typological difference may influence the choice of model for a thematic analysis. In cross-language research we need descriptions of the way languages organise the clause thematically and syntactically, and from there we may proceed to finding a model of analysis that fits the languages compared. The present paper discusses the theme-rheme system within Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) (Halliday 1967, 1994) which provides a much used model for thematic analysis in English. Despite the fact that SFG has a strong orientation towards English which is a potential problem for using it in other languages, the theory has had considerable influence on translation theorists and on translation studies of various kinds (cf. Hatim and Mason 1990, 1997, Baker 1992, House 1997, Steiner 2001, Teich 2001), and it has been applied to a variety of languages. The main focus of this paper is on cross-linguistic descriptions of the theme-rheme structure. How has the theme been interpreted, defined, and delimited from the rheme in various languages? Can the notion of theme be modified for contrastive purposes? I will show that studies of this kind need to be
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corpus-based, and that parallel corpora prove useful for describing the themerheme structure both monolingually and contrastively. The paper is organised as follows. Section 2 gives a presentation of the concept theme in English following Halliday (1994) and also discusses how far into the clause the theme reaches. Section 3 contains a brief overview of some approaches to theme in other languages, and Section 4 discusses different models used in cross-linguistic theme-rheme analysis. Concluding remarks are given in Section 5. 2.
Theme in English
As explained above, SFG identifies two textual units in the clause in English: the theme and the rheme, which appear in the clause in that order.4 The theme can be described positionally and functionally. Basically, the theme can be identified by its initial position in the clause. Functionally, Halliday defines the theme as “[t]he element which serves as the point of departure of the message; it is that with which the clause is concerned” (1994: 37). In other words, “[i]t is the element the speaker selects for ‘grounding’ what he is going to say” (Halliday 1994: 34). Although thematic structure and information structure (Given–New) are separate notions in SFG, there is a strong correlation between them, and we may say that the theme typically contains information that is contextually or otherwise retrievable (‘given information’) (Halliday 1994: 299). The rheme, on the other hand, consists of that which the speaker says about the theme. In terms of newsworthiness, the rheme typically has a higher degree of newsworthiness than the theme. The notion of theme is connected with the mood system in that the choice of theme depends on the choice of mood. For example, in the unmarked case in declaratives, the theme is conflated with the subject as in (2): (2)
EO: We [Exp-Th/Pa] had never seen builders work like this. Everything [ExpTh/Pa] was done on the double: scaffolding [Exp-Th/Pa] was erected and a ramp of planks [Exp-Th/Pa] was built before the sun was fully up, the kitchen window and sink [Exp-Th/Pa] disappeared minutes later [...] (PM1)5
Every unit given in bold in (2) is an unmarked theme. The concept of markedness can be understood as a scale on which an unmarked theme is the option representing the most typical choice in terms of probability and frequency of usage. An unmarked theme is placed at one end of the scale and the further we move away from the unmarked option(s), the more marked the choice is. According to Halliday, the most marked theme of a declarative clause functions as complement as in (my emphasis and notation) A bag-pudding [Exp-Th/Pa] the King did make (Halliday 1994: 44). At an intermediate position we find clauseinitial circumstantial adjuncts (adverbial groups and prepositional phrases) which make up the entire theme:
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(3)
EO: A few months later (RL1)
[Exp-Th/C]
Henry was called in to Detroit again […]
The themes we have seen so far are all experiential themes denoting participants or circumstantial phenomena. This theme type belongs within the experiential metafunction which constitutes one of the three metafunctions of language according to Halliday. The other two are the interpersonal metafunction and the textual metafunction, both of which may also contribute to forming a theme. According to Halliday (1994: 52ff.), the theme always includes one and only one experiential element, which is called the topical theme, but this item may be preceded by one or several textual and/or interpersonal elements resulting in a multiple theme. Figure 1 illustrates an extended multiple theme in English with subtypes of the textual and interpersonal components. well
but
continuative structural textual Theme
then
Ann
surely wouldn’t the best idea be to join the group conjunctive vocative modal finite topical interpersonal experiential Rheme
Figure 1. Extended multiple theme (Halliday 1994: 55). What are the principles behind this stacking of thematic items? First, some textual and interpersonal elements (e.g. connectors, modal adjuncts, and relative pronouns) regularly take clause-initial position, and because of this their thematic status is “somewhat attenuated” (Halliday 1994: 52). Second, their overall function can be regarded as orienting (cf. Gómez-González 1998: 83, Mauranen 1993) and as a consequence it is difficult to say that they express what the clause ‘is about’. Therefore, when such elements occur in initial position, they do not exhaust the thematic potential of the clause but allow a referential element to be part of the theme. According to Halliday, the unmarked order of components within the structure of a multiple theme is textual < interpersonal < experiential/topical. While the experiential element typically comes last in the theme and constitutes topical theme, the order of the textual and interpersonal components may be switched. Finally, everything that follows the topical theme constitutes the rheme. Example (4) illustrates a multiple theme of a more modest length than that in Figure 1: (4)
EO: Unfortunately [Int-Th/Mo], part two of the lecture (Why The Earth Is Becoming Flatter) [Exp-Th/Pa] was interrupted by a crack of another burst pipe, and [Txt-Th/St] my education [Exp-Th/Pa] was put aside for some virtuoso work with the blow-lamp. (PM1)
Here the modal adjunct Unfortunately is an interpersonal theme which precedes the topical/experiential theme part two of the lecture (Why The Earth Is Becoming
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Flatter) which is also the subject. Further, the conjunction and is a textual theme preceding the topical my education. As we have seen, multiple themes come in slightly different shapes, which opens the question of where the transition between theme and rheme takes place.6 Matthiessen suggests that the boundary of the theme be moved. Consider (5) (adapted from Matthiessen 1992: 51): (5)
A. ‘Do you mean we’re overdressed?’ said the charming father of the Family. B. ‘[Place:] In England, [Time:] at this moment, [Purpose:] for this occasion, [Participant:] we would be quite over-dressed.
The beginning of (5B) has a number of experiential adjuncts, of which, in Halliday’s approach, only the the first element, Place, counts as theme since it is the first experiential element and thereby topical theme. However, according to Matthiessen this is a complex theme consisting of three circumstantial elements and a participant, and all of them are important for the the thematic perspective. There is a continuum in that “the thematic prominence of the clause gradually decreases as the clause unfolds” (Matthiessen 1992: 51). We may then ask whether there is a clear cut-off point between theme and rheme. If there is, where is it best placed (cf. also Fries 1995a: 14)? As we have seen, Halliday argues that there is always one, and only one, experiential element in the theme, and the theme ends after this element.7 However, several researchers have suggested a modification of the theme to include more than one experiential element. Downing (1991) argues that initial circumstantial elements such as temporal and spatial adverbials do not always express what the clause is about, and should therefore not receive the status of topical themes. Thus, in (6) the second experiential element, i.e. Freud, is part of the theme as well: (6)
Towards the end of his life [Exp-Th/C], Freud was not a great man… (Downing 1991: 127).
[Exp-Th/Pa]
concluded that he
Downing’s approach is used also by Svensson (2000) in a corpus-based contrastive study on sentence openings in Swedish and English. While Halliday allows topical themes to be preceded but not followed by textual and/or interpersonal elements, Gómez-Gonzáles (1998, 2001), working with spoken data from the Lancaster/IBM Spoken English Corpus, allows topical themes to be both preceded and followed by such elements (Gómez-Gonzáles 1998: 85). The structure in which this may occur is called Extended multiple Theme. Example (7), which is an instance of this type of theme, has an experiental theme which is followed by a modal adjunct as interpersonal theme (Gómez-Gonzáles 1998: 85):8
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(7)
This of course was not because the government failed in its supposed duty as provider but largely because energy prices rose considerably in relation to other prices
Further, just as there may be more than one textual and/or interpersonal item in a multiple theme, an Extended multiple Theme may contain not only one but several experiential elements, marked or unmarked, resulting in complex topical themes. It is important to consider the significance of the theme in the overall development of the text. A number of studies (e.g. Francis 1989, Fries 1983) have shown that the theme plays an important role in the organisation of discourse, or as Halliday puts it, “[t]he choice of Theme, clause by clause, is what carries forward the development of the text as a whole” (1994: 336). As shown by Daneš (1974) the thematic progression (or method of development, Fries 1983) of a piece of text tends to follow certain identifiable patterns. Thus, this discourse perspective supports Matthiessen’s (1992) proposal for an extension of theme. Consider (8) from Matthiessen (1992: 51): (8)
Autumn passed and winter [passed], and in the spring the Boy went out to play in the wood. While he was playing, two rabbits crept out from the bracken and peeped at him.
The third theme in (8), in the spring, is a circumstantial temporal theme. In contrast to the first two themes, it does not also serve as subject. Instead it is followed by the subject the Boy which is not thematic according to Halliday. Matthiessen argues that “[y]et the Subject still seems to have some thematic value: it introduces the Boy as theme, which is then retained as theme in the subsequent clause (while he was playing) …” (1992: 52). Hence, this subject is relevant for the thematic development of the text. Rose (2001: 126f.) argues along similar lines emphasising that circumstances and participants contribute in different ways to the thematic progression of a text: circumstances to the staging of sequences and participants to creating identity chains, and both should be identified as theme. A theme may of course refer to any element in a previous clause, regardless of whether this element occurs in the theme or in the rheme. This is also shown by the various thematic patterns discussed by Daneš. Still, attested examples supporting Matthiessen’s and Rose’s point are not hard to find. The following examples (9–10) from the ESPC may serve as illustration: (9)
EO: The Pope himself probably survived only because he isolated himself from everybody else in his huge palace. I suppose isolation was a very natural impulse. Everywhere in Europe [Exp-Th/C] people [Exp-Th/Pa] resorted to it, whether [Txt-Th/St] they [Exp-Th/Pa] were noblemen or priests or intellectuals or ordinary peasants. (ABR1)
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The topical theme of the subclause (they) has the same referent as the second theme of the main clause (people), and following Matthiessen the latter is part of a complex theme, whereas Halliday has it as part of the rheme. Example (10) starts with a multiple theme consisting of one interpersonal and one experiential component. Here we find the first mention of the participant I in this stretch of text. The next sentence has a complex experiential theme in the first clause (The next morning and I) and I is taken up as theme both in the subclause and in the subsequent sentences: (10)
EO: With regret [Int-Th/Mo] I [Exp-Th/Pa] put the diary into my other trouser pocket. The next morning [Exp-Th/C] I [Exp-Th/Pa] supposed, I [Exp-Th/Pa] would have to telephone his office with the dire news. I [Exp-Th/Pa] couldn't forewarn anyone as I [Exp-Th/Pa] didn't know the names, let alone the phone numbers, of the people who worked for him. I [Exp-Th/Pa] knew only that he had no partners, as he had said several times that the only way he could run his business was by himself. (DF1)
As we have seen, the proposals for a change in the linear extension of theme in the clause seem to be justified. It should however be kept in mind that the various interpretations of theme we have looked at so far are based on English. When we turn to other languages it becomes obvious that the SFG approach sometimes creates problems. This is reflected in the different approaches to theme presented in monolingual and contrastive studies. 3.
Theme in other languages
Again, a safe starting point seems to be to assume that in all languages the clause has some kind of text-related organisation. The concept of theme is thought of as a language universal, meaning that there is always one unit expressing what the clause is concerned with (or ‘is about’), and one unit, the rheme, saying something about the other unit. The realisation of the theme, however, is language-specific: in English it is realised by initial position, whereas in Japanese for example, it is expressed by the postposition particle –wa (Halliday 1994: 36f.; see also Rose 2001). Basically then, theme can be viewed from at least two different angles: from its functional definition and from its realisation. In their account of theme in Danish, Andersen et al. (2001) find that both the ‘aboutness’ aspect and the position aspect apply to Danish in the same way as they apply to English. In other words, theme represents the point of departure of the clause as message and all theme types occur in clause-initial position. However, the Danish system of theme differs radically from the English system in at least one respect: no distinction is made between topical and interpersonal theme since it is found that a theme may consist of interpersonal information only. Consider the following examples taken from Andersen et al. (2001: 175f.):
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(11) (a)
Han [Exp-Th/Pa] kommer måske. Lit: He comes maybe. ‘Maybe he is coming.’ (b) Måske [Int-Th/Mo] kommer han. Lit: Maybe comes he. ‘Maybe he is coming.’ (c) Kommer [Exp-Th/Pr] han? Lit: Comes he? ‘Is he coming?’ (d) Vil [Int-Th/Fi] han komme? Lit: Will he come? ‘Is he coming?’
Being experiential in meaning, the themes in examples (11a) and (11c) are analogous with English themes. The difference between (11a) and (11b) is that the latter has a fronted modal adjunct which is interpersonal in meaning, and in contrast to any English model, this element can and does make up the whole theme. A further contrast here is that the subject is placed in postverbal position in accordance with the V2 constraint. Example (11d) is another instance in which the theme, here the finite operator, is “primarily interpersonal” and forms the entire theme (Andersen et al. 2001: 177). A multiple theme in Danish may encompass textual items followed by an interpersonal or experiential item. Andersen et al. follow the initial position criterion and describe how theme is realised in Danish in different clause types, but do not further discuss the functional definition. Steiner and Ramm (1995) offer an account of theme in German, also a V2 language, in which they establish a close connection between theme and the traditional notion of Vorfeld in German grammar, and as a consequence “there is no stipulation that there is always an ideational element in the theme” (1995: 62). They find that a simple theme may consist of a constituent from either the textual, the interpersonal, or the experiential metafunction. The theme in (12) can be either textual (trotzdem), or interpersonal (vielleicht) (1995: 81): (12)
Trotzdem [Txt-Th/Cj]/vielleicht [Int-Th/Mo] haben wir eine grosse Aufgabe. Lit: Nevertheless/possibly have we a big task. ‘Nevertheless/possibly we have a big task.’
However, it is doubtful whether we can say that textual and interpersonal items such as trotzdem and vielleicht, and the interpersonal måske in Danish, express what the clause “is about”, or “that with which the clause is concerned” in Halliday’s (1994: 37) wording. Rather, they only serve an orienting function (Gómez-González 1998: 83, Mauranen 1993). 4.
Theme from a contrastive perspective
There is no doubt that a parallel corpus may provide data for modelling a way of analysing theme-rheme structures contrastively. The data obtained often reveal both the strengths and the weaknesses of the model one is using. Since thematic structure is clearly discourse-related, it is crucial that the model is tested on
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corpus texts. If our model is constructed and tested on intuition or a theoretical basis only, we run the risk of discovering that it cannot account for a number of phenomena that occur in natural language. In my own case, the starting point was Halliday’s model, which I applied to Swedish in order to find out whether it could be used for a contrastive analysis of the passive. However, the V2 requirement in Swedish gives rise to a different distribution of elements in cases with a fronted non-subject, and it was not clear how this could best be dealt with: (13) (a)
EO: Surely [Int-Th/Mo] I [Exp-Th/Pa] 'd been freed from those painful memories long ago. (ABR1) (b) ST: Visst [Int-Th/Mo] hade jag [Exp-Th/Pa] för länge sedan blivit befriad från de där plågsamma minnena. Lit: Surely had I for long ago become freed from those painful memories.
Example (13b) shows that the second thematic element of the English text in (13a) has been postponed to post-auxiliary position. The question is then: where does the theme end and the rheme begin? As we have seen, Andersen et al. (2001), as well as Steiner and Ramm (1995), interpret only the interpersonal modal adjunct as theme in cases like (13b). In many other situations English and Swedish behave in similar ways, but still the English model is not ideal for an English-Swedish contrastive analysis. Clearly, a model developed for one language is not necessarily applicable to another one. A number of researchers have in fact pointed to the difficulties of finding models that can be used for contrastive analyses and in the remainder of this section we will look at a few corpus-based alternative solutions that modify the English definition of theme. Mauranen (1999), who has investigated English and Finnish on the basis of a parallel corpus, suggests a model consisting of an ‘orienting theme’ realised by fronted material, e.g. connectors and adverbials, and a ‘topical theme’ realised by nominal groups (Finnish) and a subject (English) (Mauranen 1999: 72): (14) (a) In our culture there is no such moment. (b) Omassa kulttuurissamme tällaista hetkeä ei ole. Lit: own in-our-culture this-kind moment not exists. In this model, the cut-off point between the theme and the rheme is placed before the verb, and the rheme hence contains the verb plus optional constituents. Despite the fact that English and Finnish are typologically different in many ways, a cross-linguistic comparison of thematic structure is possible (see also Mauranen 1993). English and Norwegian (and Swedish) are more closely related than English and Finnish. Nevertheless, Hasselgård (1998, 2000) observes difficulties in applying the SFG model of theme for comparing English and Norwegian, and has used different definitions of theme. The crucial point is again the V2
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constraint requiring the finite verb to occur in second position. The basic definition in Hasselgård (1998) includes in the theme the initial part of the sentence up to and including the first experiential constituent. However, since the finite verb is by default the second constituent, each time a non-subject occurs in initial position a choice is made to “regard this finite verb as a structural theme [a subtype of textual theme], so that in cases where the fronted non-subject is a conjunct or a disjunct adverbial, the theme will include the first experiential element after the finite verb” (1998: 148). This is seen as analogous with the thematic structure of polar interrogatives in Halliday which have a two-part (i.e. a multiple) theme consisting of the finite verb followed by the subject (Halliday 1994: 46): Is anybody at home? and Can you find me an acre of land? However, an objection can be raised against this identification of theme, since it may result in clauses consisting of only a theme and no rheme, as in (15): (15) (a)
SO: Förmodligen [Int-Th/Mo] går [Txt-Th/Str] vi (BL1) Lit: Probably go we under. (b) ET: Must expect we will go under.
[Exp-Th/Pa]
under
[Txt-Th/Str].
The process in (15a) consists of the phrasal verb gå under ‘go under’ which is to be treated as a lexical unit, and the theme hence extends over the whole clause. An alternative approach is to disregard word order differences between the languages and adhere to the strict Hallidayan definition taking the first experiential element as the topical theme (Hasselgård 2000). The data, taken from the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus, show clearly the differences in the structure of themes that this approach results in. Consider (16) and (17) from Hasselgård (2000: 15): (16) (a) Of course [Int-Th/Mo] I [Exp-Th/Pa] would return. (b) Selvfølgelig [Int-Th/Mo] skulle [Int-Th/Fi] jag [Exp-Th/Pa] vende tilbake. Lit: Of course would I return. (17) (a) But [Txt-Th/Str] first [Txt-Th/Cj] I [Exp-Th/Pa] needed this brief withdrawal. (b) M e n [Txt-Th/Str] f ø r s t [Txt-Th/Cj] trengte [Exp-Th/Pr] jeg denne kortvarige ensomheten. Lit: But first needed I this brief withdrawal. The result is a higher frequency of processes (finite/predicator) as experiential/topical theme in Norwegian than in English as a consequence of the V2 constraint. English, on the other hand, more often has a participant subject in the first experiential slot. For practical purposes, this model of theme might be very useful, since it needs no modifications. The analyst only has to keep track of the changes that occur within multiple themes across the languages. What may be considered a disadvantage of this approach is connected with the relation between information structure and thematic structure. We may
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assume that the subject typically conveys Given information and the predicator typically New information, and that the unmarked order of these components is Given before New. Moreover, in the unmarked case, “a speaker will choose the Theme from within what is Given and locate the focus, the climax of the New, somewhere within the rheme” (Halliday 1994: 299). Having a process/verb typically conveying New information in thematic position is therefore counterintuitive. New information in the theme does indeed occur (cf. Fries 1983, 1995b), but is seen as a marked alternative in English. On the other hand, as Hasselgård points out, word order is not open to speaker choice in this case but is governed by syntactic rules, and the subject-predicator inversion is not likely to have any major consequences on the overall thematic structure or information structure of a text. An approach similar to that of Hasselgård (2000) is taken by McCabe (1999) in a contrastive analysis of thematic patterns in English and Spanish history texts. She counts as thematic everything up to and including the first experiential element encountered in the clause. As in English, theme in Spanish is realised by clause-initial position. Because VSO word order is permitted in Spanish, an unmarked theme can also be realised by a process, creating a pattern of theme that is different from English. Teich (2001) draws partly on Steiner and Ramm’s account of theme in German (see Section 3) in her corpus-based English-German analysis. The English theme is analysed according to the original SFG model, but, due to the V2 constraint in German, the German theme is equated with ‘Vorfeld’ which incorporates anything which comes before the finite verb. Hence, only elements occurring before the finite verb are seen as thematic. Excluding the finite auxiliary from the theme when it occurs before the first experiential element (as in (19b)) deviates from the Hallidayan model. These definitions result in themes as in (18) and (19) (Teich 2001: 202): (18) (a) But [Txt-Th/St] he [Exp-Th/Pa] couldn’t say so. (b) Aber [Txt-Th/St] er [Exp-Th/Pa] konnte nicht nein sagen Lit: But he could not no say. (19) (a) Nonetheless [Txt-Th/Cj] he [Exp-Th/Pa] couldn’t say so. (b) Trotzdem [Txt-Th/Cj] konnte er nicht nein sagen. Lit: Nonetheless could he not no say. The results show different theme patterns in English and German. In (19b) a textual adjunct forms the entire theme, whereas in English (19a) there is a multiple theme with a textual adjunct and a subject. In contrast to some other contrastive approaches discussed here, Teich, like McCabe, does not attempt to find one model that fits both languages, but chooses to use two different interpretations of theme. Since theme in German is realised differently from theme in English, two different definitions are used.
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Finally, I will suggest yet another approach to cross-linguistic analysis of thematic structure that seems useful for English-Swedish comparisons. It has been my aim to find a model of analysis that works reasonably well for both languages. For this reason, the Danish and the German approaches were abandoned since they are not suitable for an analysis of English. Further, I find it important to consider theme in a wider perspective that captures its role in chunks of discourse larger than the clause or sentence (e.g. Fries 1983, Martin 1992, Halliday 1994: 61). The model I propose takes Halliday (1994) as a point of departure, but, following Matthiessen among others, includes in the theme all preverbal elements in English. Let us consider again Matthissen’s example (1992: 52): (20)
Autumn [Exp-Th/Pa] passed and [Txt-Th/St] winter [Exp-Th/Pa] [passed], and [TxtTh/St] in the spring [Exp-Th/C] the boy [Exp-Th/Pa] went out to play in the wood. While [Txt-Th/St] h e [Exp-Th/Pa] was playing, two rabbits crept out from the bracken and peeped at him. [my notations and emphasis added]
This example, as well as (9) and (10), repeated here as (21) and (22), show that not only clauses or sentences in isolation, but also the context has to be taken into account when deciding on the theme-rheme transition point. (21)
The Pope himself probably survived only because he isolated himself from everybody else in his huge palace. I suppose isolation was a very natural impulse. Everywhere in Europe [Exp-Th/C] people [Exp-Th/Pa] resorted to it, whether [Txt-Th/St] they [Exp-Th/Pa] were noblemen or priests or intellectuals or ordinary peasants. (ABR1)
(22)
With regret [Int-Th/Mo] I [Exp-Th/Pa] put the diary into my other trouser pocket. The next morning [Exp-Th/C] I [Exp-Th/Pa] supposed, I [Exp-Th/Pa] would have to telephone his office with the dire news. I [Exp-Th/Pa] couldn't forewarn anyone as I [Exp-Th/Pa] didn't know the names, let alone the phone numbers, of the people who worked for him. I [Exp-Th/Pa] knew only that he had no partners, as he had said several times that the only way he could run his business was by himself. (DF1)
An extended theme which includes all preverbal elements thus allows not only one but several experiential elements in the theme. So how does this work in Swedish? Altenberg observes that in translations from English into Swedish, the components of an English multiple theme “have to be split up and spread out beyond the finite verb” due to the V2 constraint in Swedish (1998: 138). The Swedish translation of (20) reads as follows:
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Hösten [Exp-Th/Pa] gick och [Txt-Th/St] vintern [Exp-Th/Pa] [gick], och [Txt-Th/St] på våren [Exp-Th/C] gick pojken [Exp-Th/Pa] ut för att leka i skogen. Medan [TxtTh/St] han [Exp-Th/Pa] lekte kröp två kaniner fram ur ormbunken och kikade på honom. Lit: Autumn passed and winter [passed], and in the-spring went the-boy out to play in the-wood. While he played crept two rabbits out of thebracket and peeped at him.
Comparing the English text in (20) with (23), we can see that the distribution of themes differs. Consider the long multiple theme in (20), and in the spring the boy, which is split into two chunks when translated into Swedish. A preliminary term for this type of theme is split theme (cf. Hasselgård 2000: 24). A split theme (in a declarative clause) can be defined as including all elements preceding the finite verb plus the postverbal subject. Preverbal elements may be any combination of textual, interpersonal, and experiential elements occurring in this position. There is always an experiential element in the theme. Examples (24) – (26) illustrate the definition of theme suggested here. First, (24) has subjects in initial position which are simple unmarked themes: (24) (a) EO: Neighbourhood boys [Exp-Th/Pa] were called up […] (RF1) (b) ST: Pojkar från stadsdelen [Exp-Th/Pa] blev inkallade […] Lit: Boys from the neighbourhood were called-up […] The languages behave in similar ways in such structures. Let us now look at some multiple themes involving textual, interpersonal, and experiential elements: (25) (a)
EO: Nevertheless [Txt-Th/Cj] he [Exp-Th/Pa] loved her dearly, and [Txt-Th/St] over the week past [Exp-Th/C] he [Exp-Th/Pa] had come to love her even more [...]. (RDA1) (b) ST: Inte desto mindre [Txt-Th/Cj] älskade han [Exp-Th/Pa] henne djupt, och [Txt-Th/St] under den vecka som gått [Exp-Th/C] hade han [Exp-Th/Pa] kommit att älska henne ännu mer […]. Lit: Nevertheless, loved he her dearly, and over the week past had he come to love her even more […].
(26) (a)
SO: "Frankly [Int-Th/Mo], I [Exp-Th/Pa] 'm assuming somebody killed him." (SG1) (b) ET: "Uppriktigt sagt [Int-Th/Mo] är jag [Exp-Th/Pa] övertygad om att någon dödade honom."
In (25), there are two experiential themes in both English and Swedish. In other words, all types of theme components, not only textual and interpersonal ones, may be stacked and they do not necessarily occur in any typical order (Halliday 1994: 53). The English multiple themes in (25a) comprise the elements Textual < Experiential in the first clause, and Textual < Experiential < Experiential in the
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second clause. In Swedish, on the other hand, we have split themes. In the first clause the theme is made up of the components Textual < non-thematic element < Experiential, and in the second clause we find the elements Textual < Experiential < non-thematic element < Experiential. The initial conjunctive adjunct and time adverbial trigger inversion of the subject and the finite operator, and the same holds for the modal adjunct in (26a). Since there may be more than one experiential item in a theme it is not possible to determine whether one element is ‘more topical’ than another. Consequently, the concept ‘topical theme’ has no function in this approach. Circumstances and participants acting as theme may simply be referred to as ‘circumstantial theme’ and ‘participant theme’ (Rose 2001: 127). The model proposed here developed out of a need. There simply did not seem to be a well-functioning model to compare theme in English and Swedish. The main advantage of this approach is that it is operational and suits the purposes of my study. A second advantage is that there is an underlying discourse basis that is larger than the clause - the role of an item in the surrounding context was taken into consideration in determining the transition point between theme and rheme. We cannot neglect the fact that themes contribute to the method of development of a text, which is why we need to take a global view of the notion of theme (cf. Baker 1992: 129). 5.
Concluding remarks
The main purpose of this paper has been to discuss contrastive theme analysis on the basis of parallel corpora. It has been shown that the theme-rheme definition in SFG may serve as the basis for an analysis of a number of languages both monolingually and contrastively, but it is also clear that the original approach has to be modified when used to analyse languages other than English. It has been claimed that a parallel corpus can be used for trying out a suitable method for analysing thematic structure cross-linguistically. A parallel corpus reveals the ways in which system differences between languages create differences in the realisation of thematic structure. A parallel corpus is then a valuable tool for testing existing models and for constructing new ones. Notes 1. This work was carried out with funding from the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation. I am grateful to Karin Aijmer and Bengt Altenberg for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of this paper, and to Joe Trotta for proofreading. Any remaining flaws are mine. 2. There is a great deal of terminological confusion concerning the labels ‘parallel corpus’, ‘comparable corpus’, and ‘translation corpus’ which are used for different types of monolingual, bilingual, and multilingual corpora
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4.
5. 6.
7.
8.
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(cf. Baker 1993: 248, 1995: 228ff., Johansson 1998: 4f., McEnery and Wilson 1995: 57f.). In this paper, the expression ‘parallel corpus’ is thought of as an umbrella term covering both ‘translation corpus’ (original texts and their translations), and ‘comparable corpus’ (original texts in different languages or original and translated texts in the same language). Such texts are comparable in terms of for example genre and domain. A majority of the examples in this paper were taken from the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus (ESPC) which consists of original texts in English and Swedish together with their respective translation into the other language. The corpus is described in detail at http://www.englund.lu.se/research/corpus/index.phtml. The code in parenthesis shows that the example was taken from the ESPC, and refers to the text from which the example was extracted (see Corpus texts). ‘EO’ refers to English original text, ‘ST’ to Swedish translated text. Further on, ‘SO’ refers to Swedish original text and ‘ET’ to English translated text. A word-for-word translation of the Swedish sentences is provided. There are a number of approaches to the concepts that SFG calls theme and rheme. The reader is referred to e.g. Goméz-González (2001) who provides an extensive overview. See the Appendix for an explanation of the abbreviated theme types within square brackets. Themes are marked in bold type. Within the concept of ‘communicative dynamism’ in the Prague School theory of Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP) a division is made between the theme and the ‘non-theme’ in which the non-theme consists of the ‘transition’ and the ‘rheme’. “The transition consists of elements performing the linking function. The TMEs [the temporal and modal exponents of the finite verb] are the transitional element [sic] par exellence: They carry the lowest degree of CD [communicative dynamism] within the non-theme and are the transition proper. The highest degree of CD, on the other hand, is carried by the rheme proper (Firbas 1986: 54, italics in the original). As pointed out by Rose (2001: 126), Halliday (1994: 66) does refer to a participant following a circumstantial theme as a ‘displaced theme’ and explains that it is “a topical element which would be unmarked Theme (in the ensuing clause) if the existing marked topical Theme was reworded as a dependent clause”. In this and other examples taken from sources other than the ESPC I have sometimes removed any original notation and added my own.
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Corpus texts Brink, A. (1984), The wall of the plague. London: Fontana Paperbacks. (ABR1) Davies, R. (1985), What’s bred in the bone. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. (RDA1) Ferguson, R. (1991), Henry Miller: a life. London: Hutchinson. (RF1) Francis, D. (1989), Straight. London: Michael Joseph. (DF1) Grafton, S. (1990), ‘D’ is for deadbeat. London: Pan Books. (SG1) Lacey, R. (1986), Ford. The man and the machine. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. (RL1) Larsson, B. (1992), Den keltiska ringen. Stockholm: Albert Bonniers. (BL1) Mayle, P. (1989), A year in Provence. London: Hamish Hamilton. (PM1) References Altenberg, B. (1998), ‘Connectors and sentence openings in English and Swedish’, in: S. Johansson and S. Oksefjell (eds), Corpora and crosslinguistic research. Theory, method, and case studies. Amsterdam & Atlanta, GA: Rodopi. 115-143. Andersen, T., U. Helm Petersen and F. Smedegaard (2001), Sproget som ressource. Dansk systemisk funktionel lingvistik i teori og praksis. Odense: Odense Universitetforlag. Baker, M. (1992), In other words. A coursebook on translation. London & New York: Routledge. Baker, M. (1995), ‘Corpora in translation studies. An overview and some suggestions for future research’, Target 7: 223-243. Daneš F. (1974), ‘Functional sentence perspective and the organization of the text’, in: F. Dane_ (ed.), Papers on functional sentence perspective. The Hague: Mouton. 106-128. Downing, A. (1991), ‘An alternative approach to theme: A systemic-functional perspective’. Word 40: 119-43. Firbas, J. (1986), ‘On the dynamics of written communication in the light of the theory of Functional Sentence Perspective’, in: C.R. Cooper and S. Greenbaum (eds), Studying writing: Linguistic approaches. Beverly Hills, Ca: Sage Publications. 40-71. Francis, G. (1989), ‘Thematic selection and distribution in written discourse’. Word 40: 201-221. Fries, P.H. (1983), ‘On the status of theme in English: Arguments from discourse’, in: J.S. Petöfi and E. Sözer (eds), Micro and macro connexity of texts. Hamburg: Helmut Buske Verlag. Fries, P.H. (1995a), ‘A personal view of theme’, in: M. Ghadessy (ed), Thematic development in English texts. London & New York: Pinter. 1-19.
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Fries, P.H. (1995b), ‘Patterns of information in initial position in English’, in: P.H. Fries and M. Gregory (eds), Discourse in society: Systemic functional perspectives. Meaning and choice in language: Studies for Michael Halliday. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex. 47-66. Ghadessy, M. and Y. Gao (2001), ‘Small corpora and translation. Comparing thematic organization in two languages’, in: M. Ghadessy, A. Henry and R.L. Roseberry (eds), Small corpus studies and ELT: Theory and practice. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 335-359. Gómez-González, M.Á. (1998), ‘A corpus-based analysis of extended multiple themes in PresE’, International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 3: 81-113. Gómez-González, M.Á. (2001), The theme-topic interface: Evidence from English. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Granger, S. (1983), The be + past participle construction in spoken English with special emphasis on the passive. Amsterdam: North-Holland. Halliday, M.A.K. (1967), ‘Notes on transitivity and theme in English. Part 2’, Journal of Linguistics 3: 199-244. Halliday, M.A.K. (1994), An introduction to functional grammar. 2nd ed. London: Edward Arnold. Hasselgård, H. (1998), ‘Thematic structure in translation between English and Norwegian’, in: S. Johansson and S. Oksefjell (eds), Corpora and crosslinguistic research. Theory, method, and case studies. Amsterdam & Atlanta, GA: Rodopi. 145-167. Hasselgård, H. (2000), ‘English multiple themes in translation’, in: A. Klinge (ed.), Copenhagen studies in language: Contrastive studies in syntax. Copenhagen: Samfundslitteratur. 11-38. Hatim, B. and I. Mason (1990), Discourse and the translator. London & New York: Longman. Hatim, B. and I. Mason (1997), The translator as communicator. London & New York: Routledge. House, J. (1997), Translation quality assessment. A model revisited. Tübingen: Gunter Narr. Johansson, S. (1998), ‘On the role of corpora in cross-linguistic research’, in: S. Johansson and S. Oksefjell (eds), Corpora and cross-linguistic research. Theory, method, and case studies. Amsterdam & Atlanta, GA: Rodopi. 324. Matthiessen, C. (1992), ‘Interpreting the textual metafunction’. In M. Davies and L. Ravelli (eds), Advances in systemic linguistics: Recent theory and practice. London: Pinter. 37-81. Martin, J.R. (1992), ‘Theme, method of development and existentiality: the price of reply’. At http://homepage.mac.com/asfla/articles.htm. Also in Occasional Papers in Systemic Linguistics 6: 147-184. Mauranen, A. (1993), Cultural differences in academic rhetoric. A textlinguistic study. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Mauranen, A. (1999), ‘What sort of theme is there’, Languages in Contrast 2: 5787.
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McCabe, A.M. (1999), Theme and thematic patterns in Spanish and English history texts, vol. I. PhD thesis, Aston University. McEnery, T. and A. Wilson (1996), Corpus linguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Péry-Woodley, M.-P. (1991), ‘French and English passives in the construction of text’, Journal of French Language Studies 1: 55-70. Quirk, R., S. Greenbaum, G. Leech, and J. Svartvik (1985), A comprehensive grammar of the English language. London: Longman. Rose, D. (2001), ‘Some variations in theme across languages’, Functions of language 8: 109-145. Steiner, E. (2001), ‘Intralingual and interlingual versions of a text – how specific is the notion of translation’, in: E. Steiner and C. Yallop (eds), Exploring translation and multilingual text production: Beyond content. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 161-190. Steiner, E. and W. Ramm (1995), ‘On Theme as a grammatical notion for German’, Functions of Language 2: 57-93. Svartvik, J. (1966), On voice in the English verb. The Hague & Paris: Mouton. Svensson, M. (2000), ‘Sentence openings and textual progression in English and Swedish’, in: C. Mair and M. Hundt (eds), Corpus linguistics and linguistic theory. Papers from the Twentieth International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora (ICAME 20), Freiburg im Bresnau 1999. Amsterdam & Atlanta, GA: Rodopi. 355-370. Teich, E. (2001), ‘Towards a model for the description of cross-linguistic divergence and commonality in translation’, in: E. Steiner and C. Yallop (eds), Exploring translation and multilingual text production: Beyond content. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 191-227. Teleman, U., S. Hellberg and E. Andersson (1999), Svenska Akademiens grammatik, 1-4. Stockholm: Norstedts. Ventola, E. (1995), ‘Thematic development and translation’, in: M. Ghadessy (ed.), Thematic development in English texts. London & New York: Pinter. 85-104.
Appendix: Abbreviations Exp-Th/Pa Exp-Th/C Exp-Th/Pr
experiential theme/participant experiential theme/circumstance experiential theme/process
Int-Th/Mo Int-Th/Fi
interpersonal theme/modal interpersonal theme/finite
Txt-Th/St Txt-Th/Ct Txt-Th/Cj
textual theme/structural textual theme/continuative textual theme/conjunctive
Welcoming children, pets and guests: towards functional equivalence in the languages of ‘Agriturismo’ and ‘Farmhouse Holidays’1 Elena Tognini Bonelli, Università degli Studi di Siena Elena Manca, Università degli Studi di Lecce Abstract This paper takes a contextual and functional view of translation equivalence; it aims to define a `wider’ notion of equivalence built on a network of collocates rather than on single items. Thus, given an initial ‘node’ N in L1, the identification of a translation equivalent in L2 will proceed through several stages of contextualisation relating each item to its environment and identifying its collocational profile both in L1 and in L2. Furthermore, it will be shown that systematic enlargement of the unit of meaning in terms of patterns of cooccurrence helps to define a typology of the extra-linguistic features associated with it. 1.
Introduction
This paper aims to interpret the concept of translation equivalence in terms of linguistic shifts between two different socio-cultural contexts. We start from the assumption that the process of translation has to be seen primarily as a statement of meaning and that to translate means (1) to identify a specific function together with its formal realisations in L1, (2) to compare it with another set (function + formal realisation), or other sets, in L2 and finally, in the light of the previous stage, (3) to attempt to encode the given function into a chosen formal realisation in the target language. Whereas the first two steps can be seen as linguistic and descriptive – it is in fact a matter of comparing formal linguistic features across languages – the third step is strategic, and it involves the input of a translator, his/her awareness of the extra-linguistic features, such as the ultimate purpose of the translation, and his/her ability to negotiate a chosen meaning across languages (Tognini Bonelli 1996a). This paper will only consider the first two steps in translation and will concentrate on identifying a chosen function by describing its formal realisations in English, on the one hand, and comparing it with the way that particular meaning is encoded in Italian, on the other. We shall consider in what way the formal realisations of that meaning may differ or whether they are indeed comparable across the two languages. We shall try to demonstrate that these
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differences and/or correspondences can reveal cultural and typological facets and that these have to be reckoned with in the process of translation. 2.
The corpora
Our data is derived from a set of two comparable corpora (Teubert 1996) in English and Italian in the fields of ‘Agriturismo’ in Italy and ‘Farmhouse Holidays’ in the U.K. Perhaps the easiest way to characterise the common denominator between these two fields is to say that they offer their customers a relaxing holiday in the countryside and with it a number of country activities related to life on the farm. So, guests are often invited to engage in walking, hiking, riding, fishing, birdwatching, swimming, etc. and are encouraged to enjoy the proximity and contact with farm animals. One can expect a comparable typology in terms of the offer and in the way this offer is put across, although, of course, allowances have to be made for differences, due to geographical location, national habits and preferences and, in general, for the specific requirements of the two different markets.2 In spite of these differences, we assume that certain more general concepts will have a fairly straightforward equivalent in terms of their linguistic realisations. We will henceforth refer to our two corpora as the ‘Agriturist’ corpus in Italian and the ‘Farmhols’ corpus in English. We have assembled these corpora from web pages and the Agriturist corpus now provisionally contains 115,000 words while the Farmhols one stands at 203,000 words. They can be considered comparable in that the language they represent has a similar function and aims to sell a similar product. 3.
Translating context and function: methodology and assumptions
As a first step we consulted the frequency list for the Farmhols corpus and identified the word welcome as a particularly frequent one, as Table 1 shows. A series of interviews with the owners of different www pages for farmhouse holidays confirmed the centrality of the word which repeatedly appeared in definitions such as this one: A Farmhouse holiday can mean different things. It depends on the accommodation etc. The one thing they should all have in common is a warm and friendly welcome and the peace and beauty of the countryside. (…) Other holidays are like what we provide, selfcatering, with the farmer welcoming you to wander on his farm if you wish and also to buy good local food. (…) People coming here always comment on the peace and beauty and the warmth of the welcome. (J. Rider, 2000, personal communication)
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Having chosen the word welcome, we faced the first difficulty in identifying a straight-forward equivalence pair. We posited as a prima facie translation equivalent (TE) in Italian the word benvenuto, which exists both as an adjective and as an exclamation, but this word had no comparable frequency in the Agriturist corpus, as Table 1 shows.3 Table 1. Frequencies of welcome and benvenuto FARMHOLS CORPUS
AGRITURIST CORPUS
Welcome 324 instances
Benvenuto/a/i/e 4 instances
The difference in frequency was so marked that we had to ask ourselves why the concept of ‘welcoming’ people which appears to be equally central in both the fields of Agriturismo and Farmhouse Holidays could be realized so differently in its formal realizations. In spite of our initial assumptions we had to face up to the problem of non-equivalence. In this context non-equivalence goes beyond the absence of a match between L1 and L2. Sometimes when we compare languages we recognise nonequivalence when there is no match to a certain word: take for instance the English word hangover which needs to be paraphrased in Italian because there is no direct equivalent. Sometimes a justification for this phenomenon is possible in cultural terms. In our case the mismatch occurs when a word like welcome, which is prominent in terms of frequency in L1, appears only very rarely in L2. The problem we have to consider, then, is how to identify an equivalent function given that this may be realised in different ways at the formal level. The other possibility is that, of course, for some reason, whether cultural or ideological, the word might not have a direct equivalent. In order to ascertain whether indeed the concept of ‘welcoming’ is so dramatically absent in the Italian of Agriturismo or whether it is simply expressed differently, we adopted a different approach and decided to address the issue of translating a word starting from the context in which it is most frequently embedded. We will explain in the sections that follow our assumptions and our methodology. The view we take is that equivalence should not, and often cannot, be established at simple word level; when indeed a certain type of equivalence exists, this should be established at the wider level of ‘functionally complete units of meaning’ (Tognini Bonelli 1996a/b, 2001). Our aim here is to show how a systematic contextual and co-textual analysis of the data can help the translator to identify this ‘wider’ notion of equivalence built on a network of collocates rather than on single items. This enlargement of the issue is specially necessary when
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we face the problem of non-equivalence at word level outlined above. However, we also recommend it as a more generally applicable method because it allows the analyst a privileged position for observing and reconciling the contextual patterning and the overall function of the translation unit. Our method brings us, therefore, to question the traditional distinction between item and environment, in favour of a model of meaning and translating that takes as central the phenomenon of co-selection and sees the context as an integral part of the text. Co-selection has been widely discussed in relation to meaning and lexicography (see Sinclair 1987, 1991 and later) and such statements as the following ones by Tognini Bonelli (2001: 128) can now be taken more or less for granted: • • •
That many textual meanings arise from the co-selection of more than one word. That habitual co-selection tends to specialise the function of one or more of the words concerned. That co-selection is largely covert and subliminal, which increases its importance in communication.
The importance of contextual information for identifying meanings across languages is elaborated by Sinclair and his associates in a collection of papers on corpus-to-corpus translation equivalence (Sinclair et al. 1996). In his preface to this work, Sinclair states that in many cases, when there is no TE for a chosen word, “translation can only be achieved by first of all combining the word with one or more others; the whole phrase will then equate with a word or phrase in the other language” (Sinclair 1996: 175). He proposes: A system of describing the shared meanings of languages in terms of the actual verbal contexts in which each instance is found. The attraction of the description is the way in which each instance is assumed to be carrying in its immediate environment sufficient differential information to indicate which of several possible meanings is the relevant one, and in the case of translation, what is the appropriate phraseology. (Sinclair 1996: 174) This paper aims to take this work on co-selection (see also Francis 1993, Partington 1998) one step further and considers the implications of its centrality in translation with particular attention to methodology. In the process of establishing equivalence, we will also observe how a systematic enlargement of the unit of meaning in terms of patterns of cooccurrence can help to define a typology of the extra-linguistic features associated with it: the type of product offered and also the specific ways in which it is offered. We will examine differences which are not only due to the different geographical provenance of the text but also to cultural diversity.
Welcoming children, pets and guests 4.
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Procedure
Our initial word in L1 is welcome – which, for lack of space, will be discussed here only in its adjectival function. The choice of this word is supported by the fact that the word welcome is very prominent in the Farmhols Corpus. A simple word-frequency list reveals immediately that welcome is almost top of the list of lexical words. However, as we mentioned, there is no direct equivalent to it in the Agriturist corpus – this in spite of the existence of a prima facie equivalent such as benvenuto. Tables 2 and 3 illustrate the frequencies of welcome in the two corpora. Table 2. Frequencies of welcome in the Farmhols Corpus WELCOME (324 instances) Adjective 147 (46%)
Exclamation 104 (32%)
Noun 57 (17%)
Verb 15 (5%)
Table 3. Frequencies of benvenuto in the Agriturist Corpus BENVENUTO/A/I/E (4 instances) Adjective (benvenuti) 1
Exclamation (benvenuti) 3
The mismatch between the frequencies is very clear and, because of this, we shall try to identify TEs in L2 going through several stages of contextualisation and relating each item to its environment. We shall identify the collocational profile of each item both in L1 and in L2 and establish the possible correspondences between larger units. So, at first, by analysing the concordance to the initial node in the Farmhols corpus we shall locate the node’s most frequent collocates. For each of the collocates we shall posit a prima facie translation equivalent (TE1, TE2, TE3, etc.): each of these will be investigated in its own right as a node in the Agriturist Corpus and it is within their collocational range that we shall try to locate an equivalent to welcome. Our methodological steps are outlined in Figure 1.
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Collocate1/L1 (children)
TE
Node/L (welcome)
TE1/L2 (bambini)
Collocate2/L1 (pets/dogs)
TE2/L2 (animali)
Collocate3/L1 (visitors /guests)
TE3/L2 (ospiti)
Figure 1. Methodological steps for identifying translation equivalence Starting therefore with the most prominent English collocates of welcome – children, pets/dogs and visitors/guests – as the node, we shall consider their prima-facie TEs in Italian. This will be done with the help of dictionaries or basing oneself on transator’s experience and intuition. However it is important to understand that the evidence from the corpus can be invaluable even at this stage: a frequency list of the Agriturist corpus will show immediately that, in terms of usage, the equivalent for dogs (given the absence of an equivalent concept to pet in Italian) is not cani but the superordinate animali. The next step will see us turning to the Italian TEs of these words and repeat the same procedure. We shall therefore consider what type of collocational patterning is associated with each of the terms bambini, animali and ospiti. Our aim here is to locate, within their collocational range, the patterns belonging to, or denoting, the same semantic field as ‘welcome’ or, on the other hand, note their absence. 4.1
Children and bambini
The first step in contextualisation will consider the word welcome as a unit taken together with its most frequent collocate, children. A quick examination of the concordance shows quite clearly two points (a few citations are reported in Table 4). First, the close association between children and pets or dogs; we have not enough data to discuss this in detail, but it certainly should be noted because it seems rather unusual to find them in the same category. Second, that when children do not share this association with pets, there is always some kind of restriction or limitation to their presence in the farm, whether it be some age restriction (over 10 .., over 5 ..) or the fact that no discount is available, for example.
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Table 4. children + welcome number of units used available. single occupancy. kind. Pets and residential caravans. with fireplace. heating. Dogs and
Children Children Children children Children Children children
over 10 welcome Ample off road parking over 5 welcome, baby sitting available are welcome but we cannot offer discounts are welcome. Children will find the and pets welcome. We are members of and pets are welcome - Baby sitting welcome. Costwolds Main page
The specific age restriction is confirmed by other citations in the same corpus where the noun children is not combined with the adjectival use of welcome, as shown in Table 5. Table 5. Children + age limitations Sorry no Pets No smokers twin bedroom for sensible to leave them in the car. number of units used Dining Room Non-smoking. No
Children children Children Children children
over 16 welcomed over the age of seven. over 7 accepted. Most over 10 welcomed under the age of 8.
We should remember that this type of ‘holiday on the farm’ in the U.K. is often centred around domestic animals and their young and part of the fun offered is to observe them in their own farm environment. The type of conditioned welcome that we see in the instances above, rather than qualifying a warm and friendly reception, seems to function as damage limitation when a face-threatening situation, such as a restriction on the offer, arises. It also reflects well the situational and cultural context in Britain where the children are not always welcomed even in places such as farmhouses, where the presence of farm animals and pets would seem to be an incentive for their presence. In three instances we find children associated with discount offers (see Table 6), but these are fairly rare (2.9%), if compared – as we shall see in Table 7 – with the Agriturist corpus. Table 6. Children + discounts (2.9%) there are always good reductions for children. Leave the highways and We have reduced rates for children sharing with their parents per night with discounts for children. In addition, we also
Let us now proceed to the second step in contextualisation, that is examining the patterns of co-selection associated with our prima facie TE of children, viz. bambini, in the Agriturist Corpus. Table 7 gives some examples. Table 7. Bambini + discounts (25%) -RIDUZIONI: SCONTI E AGEVOLAZIONI agevolazioni: Gratis con tariffe speciali per Supplementi e riduzioni:
Bambini Bambini bambini bambini bambini
0-2 anni: -70%; Bambini 2-12 anni: 30% fino a 3 anni gratis; Sconto ed fino a 2 anni; Sconto 30% pensione fino a 10 anni 2/10 anni sconto 35% -
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The patterning shown in the citations in Table 7 is very typical. Bambini are never associated with expressions of welcome or denoting an explicit permission to stay in the Agriturismo. However, they regularly seem to be connected with the semantic field of discounts identified by words such as riduzione, sconti e agevolazioni, gratis and gratuito, which, if only implicitly pointing to the welcome, they certainly show it in tangible and concrete terms. In Table 6 we reported the only three instances of this type in the Farmhols Corpus. In the Agriturist corpus this is the most typical pattern associated with bambini. As in the Farmhols Corpus bambini are associated with some age limitations (fino a 3 anni .., da 2 a 6 anni .., 2/10 anni..), but these only refer to the discounts and the reductions offered and not to the actual acceptance of bambini in the Agriturismo. To sum up this section, we can say that the contextual analysis of the data in the two languages has shown no match for the word welcome in the context of children. This is true not only in terms of a similar grammatical pattern - we had started from the lack of correspondence welcome/benvenuto - but also with other lexical or grammatical patterns that might have realised a similar function. Can we then ask ourselves whether this absence of welcome in the Italian of Agriturismo means that children are not really welcomed in Italian Agriturismo while they are in British farmhouses? We maintain that the analysis should always be extended to the context and the overall function of the unit. So, considering the data we have analysed, perhaps the best answer would be to remind ourselves again of a citation from the Farmhols Corpus where the welcome cannot certainly be taken as encouragement, “Sorry no pets No smokers Children over 16 welcomed …” and to conclude that the English welcome, when applied to children, may not necessarily convey the warmth and the friendliness that we associate with it; a qualified welcome is perhaps to be interpreted as discouragement to those excluded by the qualification. On the other hand, the fact that no explicit welcome is stated in relation to bambini should also be interpreted in the context of the regular statements about discounts and reductions made available to children, and these should be taken as encouragement for the presence of children in the Italian Agriturismo. It seems to be taken for granted that children are welcome. 4.2
Pets, dogs and animali
Pets and dogs are the recipients of the welcome in 20% of the instances in the Farmhols corpus. In half of these occurrences, however, this welcome is accompanied by a limitation on the offer, as was the case with children. As one can see in Table 8 below, this conditioned welcome is realised here by a variety of expressions ranging from provided, providing and but to by arrangement and on
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payment of. We also find some adjectives such as well-controlled and w e l l behaved that also signal a limitation on the welcome. Table 8: Pets and dogs + welcome and bread oven. baby bedding is supplied. mountain-bike routes. Your breakfast. Well behaved farm-out buildings. year round. Well behaved tranquil. Well controlled high chair can be hired. breakfast. Well behaved
Pets Pets pets pets Dogs pets dogs Dogs pets
are are are are are are are are are
welcome by prior arrangement. welcome but must be kept under control welcome provided they are under control welcome in the house or kenneling is welcome provided they are kept strictly welcome and short breaks are available. welcome. Pheasant Cottage; Partridge welcome on payment of a small fee welcome in the house
These restrictions are perhaps more understandable than the limitations we observed with children because dogs are always perceived as potential dangers on British farms where they often tend to harass sheep or cattle. Let us now consider the prima facie equivalent of pets and dogs in the Agriturist corpus. The word pet/s, with its implication of personal closeness and affection, has no correspondence in Italian and a quick scan at the frequency list from the Agriturist corpus identifies the more general term animali as a potential equivalent. The term animali occurs 65 times in the corpus of Italian, but only 23 instances refer to pets rather than to farm animals. Let us consider some citations in Table 9. Table 9. Animali + ammettere/accettare Accettano. della prenotazione (solo sala ristoro), ammessi sconto 15%. Ammessi prezzo ridotto. Sono ammessi una scuola di parapendio. normalmente in dotazione. Gli Sono ammessi animali? Si, gli consumo di gas. Non si accettano Siamo aperti tutto l'anno, Aperto tutto l'anno. Si accettano
Animali: Ammessi i cani ANIMALI: ammessi previo accordo animali, angolo lettura, telefono e fax animali di piccola taglia. animali di piccola taglia. Animali non ammessi animali non son ammessi. animali sono ammessi con pagamento di animali. Tutta la biancheria è animali si accettano previo accordo. animali domestici.
In the co-text of this word, we notice immediately two possible equivalents to the English welcome: the two verbs ammettere ‘admit’ and accettare ‘accept’ in their different inflected forms, always either in the passive, as sono ammessi, or in the impersonal, as si accettano. It is interesting to note that limitations to the presence of animali in the Agriturist corpus exist, although they are perhaps slightly different from the ones we found in the Farmhols corpus. Here, we notice for instance the size, di piccola taglia ‘of a small size’, which was not mentioned in the English context or the fact that there should be ‘prior agreement’, previo accordo, which seems to be more prominent in the Agriturist
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corpus; in the Farmhols corpus the issue seemed to be more that pets should be well-behaved or kept under control. From the point of view of the translation equivalence the result is quite satisfactory because, while we could not find a one-to-one equivalent for welcome in general, we were able to locate a perfectly good equivalent for the English pair welcome-pets in the Italian accettare/ammettere-animali. At the level of functionally complete units of meaning, the pragmatic dimension of the unit is realised by the expressions of limitation associated with it both in English and in Italian. This suggests that the use of welcome in this context in English is just a euphemism for ‘accepted’. 4.3
Guests, visitors and ospiti
The patterning associated with welcome in the context of guests and visitors differs from both the patterning with children and pets; here we consistently find the structure Vb-BE + welcome + to-inf. as in Our visitors are welcome to explore the farm. The concordance in Table 10 groups together some citations for visitors, guests and also the pronoun you which addresses the potential visitor or guest in the text from the web pages. We note here that the structure in which welcome is embedded has a different impact on the meaning: if with children and pets the welcome conveys the meaning of permission and implies that they are ‘allowed’ to join in the farmhouse holiday, subject to certain specific conditions; with visitors and guests we find a straight invitation to take advantage of all the leisurely activities offered by the farmhouse. Table 10. Guests/visitors + welcome to and Kilburn. Our visitors are welcome Caebetran Farm. Visitors are welcome bottle fed. All visitors are welcome Visitors are welcome Guests are welcome Guests are welcome and cattle. Guests are welcome close by. Our guests are welcome and cattle. Guests are welcome and bathroom. Guests are welcome where you would be most welcome guests to relax in or you are welcome you will be welcome
to to to to to to to to to to to to to
explore the farm to discover see the cattle and sheep join in the farming activities stroll around the farm. We regret bring their own dogs, if they relax in our victorian lounge roam the farm with its fish the 1/4 mile river bank, roam the farm with its pretty use the garden and fields for join in the family, or sit in the garden. come carol singing
Let us now consider the Italian equivalent of guests and visitors, that is ospiti. Again, we note the absence of the typical TE of welcome as suggested by traditional reference books, the fully lexical benvenuto/i. Some examples are given in Table 11.
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Table 11. Ospiti + potere ampi spazi a disposizione degli amici forno a legna può essere utilizzato dagli può essere raccolta personalmente dagli di produzione biologica, ove gli Nella fattoria Poggio Oliveto gli in bicicletta. Esternamente gli Vi è la possibilità per gli e nel mese di dicembre i nostri er vacanze tranquille e rilassanti. Gli ediate vicinanze di Poggio Paradiso gli
ospiti che potranno raccogliere la ospiti per attività di svago ospiti, che possono anche assistere ospiti possono raccogliere prodotti ospiti possono visitare le colture ospiti possono godere della piscina, ospiti di partecipare alle attività ospiti possono visitare il frantoio ospiti potranno godere di una piscina ospiti potranno fruire di attrezzature
In the concordance in Table 11 it is pretty clear that the equivalent of the English structure Vb-BE + welcome + to-inf is conveyed in Italian by the modal potere ‘to be able to’ in its inflected forms. Here we have the example of a fully lexical word such as welcome in L1 that has primarily a grammatical realisation in L2. The phrase vi è la possibilità di (‘there is the possibility to’) carries the same modal meaning but in a lexicalised form. In spite of this lexical status it belongs under the same umbrella of modality that in traditional linguistics is usually understood as ‘Grammar’. This is a potential trap for translators because the lexical choice implicitly carries more weight and as such may become a more ‘visible’, and therefore preferred, option when translating. We can certainly say that it is the purely lexical meaning that tends to be the focus of traditional reference books, so welcome is translated as benvenuto, and no guidance is given about the likely use of the modal potere. In this case a translation corpus could help us to identify the favourite choices of translators, to verify for instance if the grammatical translation of welcome is indeed used and if so, if it is used appropriately. The noun ospiti shows a frequent association with another expression, also related to modality: a disposizione di. Let us consider some examples in Table 12. Table 12. Ospiti + a disposizione. Toscano, 2 piscine a antico forno a legna a inoltre a privati ospiti. A barbecue agriturismo mette a te all'Oppio mette a A senese. A appartamenti
disposizione degli ospiti con una stupenda vista su disposizione degli ospiti. disposizione degli ospiti vi sono tre laghetti disposizione degli ospiti c'è anche un grande disposizione disposizione disposizione disposizione
degli degli degli degli
ospiti quattro camere doppie, due ospiti tre appartamenti, mentre ospiti, ampia piscina aperta ospiti ci sono 3 confortevoli
One thing to notice which, for lack of space, is only mentioned in passing here, is the fact that the phrase a disposizione degli ospiti in the Agriturist corpus is mainly associated with the type of accommodation offered (eg. quattro camere doppie ‘four double rooms’), while welcome + to-inf. is connected with the
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different leisure activities offered by the farmhouse holiday package. This points to the specificity of the semantic preference within similar units of meaning and to the fact that collocational restriction is based on semantic criteria. It is certainly something that should be investigated further, especially in view of the impact it can have on the translation process at the level of appropriateness. 5.
The typology of the offer
The data discussed in the sections above show that while the single word denoting welcome cannot be translated satisfactorily in Italian, each of the collocational pairs welcome-children, welcome-pets and welcome-guests has an appropriate TE (even if this is 0-equivalence in the case of children) that conveys welcome either in terms of permission or in terms of invitation. By enlarging the translation unit to encompass the more systematic patterning associated with the initial collocation pair, a typology of the offer specific to each type of guest emerges. We have seen how certain guests (children and pets in the Farmhols corpus, animali in the Agriturist corpus) invited the presence of restrictions while others (bambini and ospiti in the Agriturist corpus, guests in the Farmhols corpus) did not. The type of restrictions, we have seen, were not the same in the two languages and reflected cultural and ideological preferences; so while the presence of children was restricted in terms of age in the Farmhols corpus, in the Agriturist corpus the only qualification was on the type of discount accorded. With pets the restrictions demanded that they should be under control and that they should be well-behaved in the Farmhols corpus while the parallel term animali in the Agriturist corpus seemed to invite restrictions on size rather than behaviour, and that specific arrangements for their presence should be made in advance. The typology of the offer for children included a large safe area, explorer trails, ample space as well as some specific facilities like cots, highchair and child minding. The equivalent offer for bambini in the Agriturist corpus showed predominantly the semantic area of children games and game-parks with words such as giochi per bambini, spazi attrezzati per bambini, piscina rotonda per bambini. 6.
Conclusion
This paper started off exploring the notion of translation equivalence at word level between two items which had similar grammatical, lexical and even morphological realizations in English and Italian. The assumption of equivalence appeared very plausible because the concept in question, the idea of ‘welcome’ in the field of eco-tourism and farmhouse-style accommodation is central both in English and in Italian. It seemed therefore likely that there would be a fairly straight-forward match between welcome in English and its Italian counterpart
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benvenuto. The radical mismatch in frequency of occurrence between the two words was a surprise and we set out to explore and explain it and to see if we could find ways in which a translator could cope with it. Our initial assumption defined meaning as ‘function in context’, and this led us to take the context in which a word is embedded as the primary focus of the translating activity. The traditional distinction between item and environment was reinterpreted here in the belief that a systematic contextual analysis could help us to identify a wider type of equivalence where ‘functionally complete units of meaning’ are compared across languages. The enlargement of the unit of translation shed light on some contextual features that proved significant not only in comparative terms, but also for the identification of a suitable TE. Using Firthian terminology, we could say that starting from the immediate verbal cotext we went on to address a wider “context of situation” and ended up identifying elements that were related to an even wider “context of culture”. Our notion of translation equivalence was similarly enlarged to encompass some cultural and typological facets that are not usually considered as relevant to the translation process in itself. In actual fact these elements proved determining in the choice of a TE. Perhaps the basic message that comes across from our study is that the notion of an ‘abstract’ translation equivalence does not hold and that ‘functional translation equivalence’ has to be sought. This is even more true when the translation in question has a specific purpose, in our case addressing a specific audience and selling a specific product. From a methodological point of view, in this paper we proposed a method of translation that differs rather radically from the traditional ways. We took as our starting point the recurrent patterns of co-selection of a word and from them proceeded to search for an adequate TE. The procedure we proposed for the comparison of units across languages goes through a three-stage process (1) from the original word we aim to translate to the range of collocates that most characteristically accompanies it, (2) from each collocate to a prima-facie TE in L2, (3) from each TE to the collocational range that most characteristically accompanies it in L2. This was done with a view to locating the lexical and grammatical patterns that more characteristically encode the function of our original node word. In practical terms this means identifying and comparing syntagmatic units that share certain contextual features with the view of identifying a similar function. The units which constitute the ‘currency’ for this process are above all ‘multi-word’ in that a specific function appears always to require more than one single item for unambiguous identification. The problem, of course, is that our conventional notion of translation equivalence does not take fully into account the contextual circumstances and usually searches for correspondences at word level. Here we showed that if we cannot find a satisfactory one-to-one TE for the adjective welcome, for instance, functional equivalence can be established at the level of the wider units welcome+children, welcome+pets and welcome+guests. This study has also attempted to show that it must not be taken for granted that the TE of what appears as a well-formed syntagmatic unit in L1 will be easily
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retrieved in L2. So, although both welcome and children can be individually translated in Italian, this does not mean that the unit of meaning in which they are combined can be translated. The upshot of our discussion is that any translating activity should start by considering very carefully the context in which a certain word or expression is embedded and the one into which it is going to be transferred. While we cannot maintain that welcome in general language is always to be translated as accettare or potere, we can certainly say that welcome should be translated with some form of the verb accettare when it applies to ‘pets’ and with some form of the verb potere when it applies to ‘guests’ in the specific restricted language of Farmhouse Holidays in the U.K. That is if we want our translation to ‘sound’ natural and avoid the unmistakable ring of ‘translationese’ (Gellerstam 1986). Corpus evidence gives us a privileged start by allowing us to examine simultaneously the syntagmatic and paradigmatic dimensions of meaning. We have tried to show that it is only by comparing possible TEs in the presence of their syntagmatic patterning and their paradigmatic associations in the two languages that it is possible to identify functional equivalence. This study has not specifically focused on the typology of the offer in Italian Agriturismo and British Farm-house holidays. However, in the course of our observations, it was apparent that some very interesting insights can be gained from a close look at the data from a typological perspective. In this context we only want to point to the possibility of identifying the parameters of this offer in a systematic way. We believe that anybody wanting to advertise their offer in a foreign language should be aware of the comparable offer available to their target customers, not only in terms of linguistic realisations but also in terms of the facilities they advertise. This will be the focus of further research in the future. Notes 1. A first version of the work reported here was presented at the A.I.A. conference in Catania in September 2001 (published in Textus XV, no. 2, 2002). This version, presented at ICAME 2002 (Göteborg) greatly benefited from the careful and stimulating comments of the editors of this volume, Karin Aijmer and Bengt Altenberg, as well as the discussion and the questions that followed the presentation. 2. See for instance the importance of ‘genuine food’ and the pleasures linked to a traditional country cuisine which is central in the Agriturist offer in Italy and has no real equivalent in the Farmhols Corpus. 3. The word welcome, as well as an adjective and an exclamation, is also used as a verb (see Manca 2001). In this study we will only consider the adjectival function in some detail.
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References Francis, G. (1993), ‘A corpus-driven approach to grammar. Principles, methods and examples’, in: M. Baker, G. Francis and E. Tognini Bonelli (eds), Text and technology: in honour of John Sinclair. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins, 137-156. Gellerstam, M. (1986), ‘Translationese in Swedish novels translated from English’, in: L. Wollin and H. Lindquist (eds), Translation studies in Scandinavia. Lund: CWK Gleerup, 88-95. Manca, E. (2001), Il Linguaggio delle Farmhouse Holidays e quello dell'Agriturismo messi a confronto: realizzazioni linguistiche e tipologia dell'offerta. Tesi di Laurea in Inglese, Università degli Studi di Lecce. Partington, A. (1998), Patterns and meanings. Using corpora for English language research and teaching. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins. Sinclair, J. (1987), ‘The Nature of the evidence’, in: J. Sinclair (ed.), Looking up: an account of the COBUILD project in lexical computing. London: Collins, 150-159. Sinclair, J. (1991), Corpus, concordance, collocation. Oxford: O.U.P. Sinclair, J. (1996), ‘Corpus to corpus: a study of translation equivalence’, in: Sinclair et al. (eds), 171-196. Sinclair, J., J. Payne and C. Pérez Hernández (eds) (1996), Corpus to corpus: A study of translation equivalence, International Journal of Lexicography, Special Issue, 9 (3). Teubert, W. (1996), ‘Comparable or parallel corpora?’, in: Sinclair et al. (eds), 238-264. Tognini Bonelli, E. (1996a), ‘Towards translation equivalence from a corpus linguistics perspective’, in: Sinclair et al. (eds), 197-217. Tognini Bonelli, E. (1996b), Corpus theory and practice. Birmingham: T.W.C. Tognini Bonelli, E. (2001), Corpus linguistics at work. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Using WebCorp in the classroom for building specialized dictionaries Natalie Kübler University Paris 7 – Denis Diderot Abstract In this paper, we present an experiment that was carried out to use finite corpora and WebCorp in the classroom with a pedagogical objective that was different from language teaching. The use of WebCorp and corpora was embedded within the wider framework of teaching students how to approach machine translation by building a customised dictionary with the aid of available tools and resources. The issue of exploiting finite corpora and the Web as a corpus was raised in this framework and will be discussed here. Although there is no simple and definite answer, the experiment led students to investigate the Web as a source of information and tobetter understand the issues involved in corpus building and corpus use. 1.
Introduction
In this paper, we present an experiment that was carried out using finite corpora and WebCorp in the classroom with objectives that were different from mere language teaching (see section 2.1). Corpus-based, or corpus-driven teaching as Johns (1988) termed it, can be adapted to using the Web as a corpus; in this context, WebCorp can be a useful tool for language teachers and students. Our purpose was however slightly different. Although WebCorp was tested in a pedagogical situation, its use was embedded within the wider framework of teaching students how to extract lexical and syntactic information to build customised dictionaries for machine translation (MT) in languages for specific purposes (LSPs). In the light of this specific context, we shall tackle the issue of finite corpus use as opposed (or not) to WebCorp use. The first part of this paper presents the pedagogic and scientific context of the experiment. Some details must be given about the project in which the experiment took place, since it has an impact on the type of results that were expected from the WebCorp search. In the second part, the resources and tools that were used are described. In the third part, samples of the results obtained with WebCorp and with the finite corpora will be presented and explained. We will show how WebCorp can be used to complement and update search for linguistic information in finite
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corpora. This part will also discuss the benefits of using WebCorp parallel to querying finite corpora. The conclusion will deal with future prospects and enhancement requirements for WebCorp. 2.
Experiment context
The experiment took place in a postgraduate syllabus called ‘Language Industry and Specialised Translation’.1 This syllabus is oriented towards computermediated translation. Students have courses in four specific areas, namely • • • •
translation: theory and practice; linguistics: syntax, corpus linguistics, terminology; cultural studies; technology: database management systems, HTML, XML, translation memory, localisation tools, and machine translation.
This translation training is semi-professional since students spend every other week on work placement with a private company. WebCorp was used in an introductory course to corpus linguistics and its application to translation and terminology. As the best way of training students is to place them in real-life situations, they had to take part in translation projects in the subject area of computer science. Part of the projects consisted in building customised dictionaries for machine translation. Students were first shown how to manually extract terms (Pearson 1998), to use term extraction software, and to extract lexical and syntactic information in the source and target languages from comparable and parallel corpora. They then practised extracting linguistic information from the Web using WebCorp. The two approaches were applied to dictionary building. 2.1
Pedagogical objectives
The objectives of this project involved not only teaching the students the various skills which will be described below, but also considering the limits of finite corpus use versus ‘Web as a corpus’ use. This approach is very profitable to young people who are computer-literate, and for whom the Web is regarded as the fount of all knowledge. Comparison helps them find the advantages and disadvantages of the two approaches; it is also aimed at showing them that information extracted from the Web must be carefully examined and not be taken for granted. This also raised the issues at stake in corpus-building as opposed to using texts collected without specific criteria, or using the Web. Below are listed the kinds of competence students should have acquired at the end of the course; they should be able to:
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• use a machine translation (MT) system and add appropriate bilingual dictionaries to improve translation results; • use available term extraction tools, which do not require particular computing skills; • use available resources, such as Web-based bilingual glossaries, self-made or Web-based finite corpora and the Web as a corpus; • proofread translation results to produce a professional translation; • analyse the system’s translation ‘errors’ from a linguistic point of view, in order to grasp the very delicate linguistic issues that are at stake in MT. This will show students how important the human factor is, whatever tools and resources are available for each part and step of the translation process. The whole range of competences was included in the translation project that will be described below. The workflow of translating documents with customised machine translation in which corpus use is predominant is fully described in Kübler (2002). 2.2
Project description
The projects in which WebCorp was used and tested consist in translating texts in the computer science area, using a customisable machine translation system. Some texts to be translated from English into French were dictionary definitions, extracted from a Web-based computing dictionary;2 the other type of texts were some of the Linux HOWTOs that have not yet been translated. The Linux HOWTOs are the ‘user manuals’ of the Linux operating system; they have been translated into several languages by the various Linux communities.3 The French Linux community is quite active and has translated most HOWTOs. However, as new HOWTOs, or updates of previous ones, are regularly released, there are still some documents that remain to be translated. Our students thus had to translate some of the most recent HOWTOs. The machine translation system that was used was Systran, and more precisely Systranet which is Systran’s customisable on-line translation system. It allows users to create their own (bilingual or multilingual) term bases to improve translation results; this feature can give quite good results in specialized translation. Students had to create their own customised dictionaries, in order to test them with Systranet. To create term bases (or customized dictionaries) from scratch, the first step involved automatically extracting term candidates from the English text to be translated and then finding their French equivalents. The first dictionary would then be used to translate the text. Systranet offers the possibility of aligning the source and target text, and, in the aligned target text, of highlighting unknown terms in red and the user’s dictionary terms in green. These features make it possible for the user to add to the dictionary all the words that are not recognized by Systran’s home dictionaries. The second step is more demanding in terms of linguistic work:
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students compare source and target texts to complement and modify the dictionary until no more dictionary change can improve the translation result. When the dictionary is “saturated”, i.e. no more change can be made to improve the translation result, the final translation of the text is achieved; the result will then be proofread and post-edited to correct the translation errors that could not be solved by modifying the dictionary. Finite corpora and the Web as a corpus are key elements in the process of building and correcting dictionaries, and of proofreading the final translation result. After extracting term candidates from the source texts, students must decide which candidates are actual terms. Corpus query must then be applied to answer this question. Parallel corpora are then necessary to help find the French equivalents for the terms. Corpus use is not only essential to finding terms and their equivalents, it is also often the only possible means of finding syntactic information for the terms, especially for verbs and adjectives; verbs and adjectives are in fact not always considered terms, and little linguistic information about these classes can therefore be retrieved. Finite corpora are not the only resources that are essential to creating customised dictionaries; it will be shown later how the Web as a corpus can complete and update the information extracted from finite corpora. 3.
Tools and resources
This section describes the tools and resources that were used to fulfil the assignments in the project. The two most important resources for the tasks under consideration in this paper are WebCorp and the finite corpora that were used. 3.1
WebCorp
WebCorp is a tool developed in a project that was set up at the Research and Development Unit for English Studies at the University of Liverpool. Its objectives were to investigatethe usability of the Web as a linguistic resource. The project also had to identify and address problems of retrieval and analysis. It allows the user to type in a request for linguistic information that is processed and fed into the selected Web search engines. The search engine returns a list of URLs that WebCorp accesses directly; it then returns concordances or collocates for the query. We will show below how it can be used to retrieve useful linguistic information to create bilingual term bases in LSPs. A detailed description of WebCorp has been given by Renouf (2003) and Kehoe and Renouf (2002).
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Corpora
The finite corpora that were available for the students were first developed at the Laboratoire de Linguistique Informatique at the University of Paris 13. They have been augmented and enhanced at the University Denis Diderot Paris 7 for several years. These corpora, parallel and comparable, are accessible via a Web-based interface,4 in which a concordancer allows visitors to use perl-like regular expressions, as described in Foucou and Kübler (2000). The following corpora were used by the students: a) The parallel English-French HOWTO corpus, that has been used for several years at Paris 7. It is made of the Linux HOWTOs (‘user manual’ files of the Linux operating system), which were originally written in English. The HOWTOs have been translated into several languages, including French. The source language and target language texts were aligned at section level. The size of the parallel corpora is approximately 500,000 words each. It is possible to ask for concordances and then have an aligned view of the section in which the term or expression occurs. Concordances with regular expressions are very useful for extracting refined linguistic information about terms. Furthermore, by looking at the equivalent section in French, it is possible to find the French equivalents of the term or expression. b) Smaller comparable corpora in English and French representing subdomains of computing (less than 100,000 words), such as artificial intelligence, peripherals, computer games, digital cameras, etc. were also made available to the students. This led us to develop a methodology for querying comparable corpora to extract French equivalents of an English term. c) Our students used an experimental version of WebCorp that gives access to additional features, such as regular expressions and domain filtering. This was particularly useful as the students were working in a specific subject area, namely computer science. 3.3
Tool: machine translation
Apart from WebCorp and the university-developed Web-based interface for corpus query, the other tools that were used can be found on the market, as for example Systranet5 and Terminology Extractor.6 Systranet is an on-line machine translation system, developed by Systran. It gives access to Systran’s over 35 language pairs and allows users to translate either a text file, or a formatted file, or a Web page. Users can create their own customised dictionaries and compile these into the system to help them translate specialised texts. Users can work in a network of translators, each member of a group having access to the other members’ dictionaries. The interface we used
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was adapted to specific pedagogical needs, allowing the teacher to create the groups and to have access to all the students’ dictionaries, as well as partially to the logs of the sessions. The most interesting feature of our project, apart from the translation engine as such, was the possibility for the user to create and compile customised dictionaries. Dictionaries contain more than just a correspondence between a source word (in this case in English) and a target word (in French), since users can enter what is called ‘advanced’ linguistic information in these. The information can be divided into several levels: part-of-speech information: basic part-of-speech information can be attached to the entries, such as verb, noun, proper noun, adjective, and ‘sentence’, which deals with adverbs, adverbial phrases, or whole idioms, such as your mileage may vary. syntactic information, such as the governed prepositions for nouns, verbs, and adjectives, or direct objects for verbs. A verb which governs a preposition is shown in example (1). (1)
access (verb)(noprep)=accéder (verb)(prep:à)
semantic information, such as the conceptual class of the possible direct object of a verb, as shown in example (2). In this example, the coding for the verb runindicates that the direct object must belong to the semantic class [OS], which means all terms sorted under the ‘operating system’ class. Below the verb, the noun Unix is marked as belonging to the [OS] class. This means Unix can be the direct object of run. (2)
to run (verb)(context:OS) Unix (noun) (SEMCAT:OS)
morphological information, such as the plural form of a noun in any language, the gender of a noun in French, or altering the number in the target or source language. Example (3) shows how the gender of cache can be altered to masculine. In general French, the noun cache(‘hiding place’) is feminine, whereas in computer science French, it is masculine and means ‘cache’. (3)
cache (noun) = cache (noun) (masculine)
The term URL takes a plural in –s in English, i.e. URLs, whereas in French, it is invariable; this type of information can be coded in the dictionary, as is shown in example (4). (4)
URL (noun) (plural:URLs) = URL (noun) (plural:URL)
translational information, such as ‘DNT’, which means that the string must not be translated, i.e. it must remain as it is in the translation process. This feature is quite useful in computer science, as there are command names for example that are never translated, such as the Unix command cd, or mkd.
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Figure 1 shows a dictionary sample, in which various types of coding are presented. ‘AT&T’ (company name) auto-dial (noun)=numérotation automatique (noun) automatic number identification (noun)=identification de l’appelant (noun) based (adjective)(noprep)=architecturé (adjective)(prep:autour) basic language constructs (noun) (plural)=base de construction du langage (noun) (singular) to log in (verb)=se loger (verb) to introduce (verb) (context:extensions)=introduire to carry (verb)(context:digital data)=transmettre (verb) Figure 1. Dictionary sample 3.4
Tool: term extraction
To extract term candidates from the source texts, a very simple and user-friendly tool was applied, viz. Terminology Extractor. This tool works for English and French and gives several types of results. First, it extracts all the words that are recognised by its dictionaries, plus all the non-words, i.e. words that are not in the dictionaries. The non-word feature is interesting, as it usually gives a list of very specialised words which are not in general dictionaries. Then it extracts in a window of two to ten words all the sequences that appear at least twice in the text. This feature allowed the students to have a list of term candidates among which they could choose the actual terms with the help of the various corpora and WebCorp. Debian Permedia RedHat RgbPath ServerFlags ServerLayour XkbLayout Solaris UI USB WindowMaker
Netscape Dennis Dialogs Howto README XkbModel KDE LeftOf ModulePath
accelerate XFCE Corel FAQs Microdoft Linux RealAudio ISA GUI IRQs NFS
Figure 2. Results of the non-word extraction from a HOWTO document. Apart from Dennis and accelerate, all the words are terms or product names in the computer science area.
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A sample of the term extraction results is given in Figures 2 and 3. Figure 2 contains the results of the non-word extraction, and Figure 3 the results of the ‘collocation’extraction. They show that an important linguistic job must be done on the results to obtain an actual list of terms (single and compound). Internet Gateway 3 IP aliasing 3 ISA { card cards } 3 latest version 3 DHCP Server 15 Linux gateway 3 modules file 3 Scripts / ifcfg 3 server will start 3 { Network networking }{ Card Cards }12
{ Looking look } at the Network 3 name server 4 Network { Device devices } 4 Linux computer 3 IP { addresses address } 16 Linux box 16 card on the Linux box 4 DNS { Server servers } 17 interface configuration file 3
Figure 3. Results of a collocation extraction from a HOWTO document. The words in bold are actual terms. 3.5
Other information sources
Finite corpora and the Web as a corpus were the main resources used in the project. There were also secondary sources, such as on-line glossaries, or on-line term bases. These were presented to the students to help them understand why data-driven information is essential to this type of work, and why dictionaries and glossaries are not always satisfactory. Figure 4 shows the type of information that can be accessed in a Web-based bilingual term base. The search for the translation of the English word buffer yielded the translation mémoire-tampon, and three synonyms and translations of these, but no syntactic or phraseological information. There were no compounds of the word buffer, although it is very common in computer science English. ENGLISH Buffer Syn. buffer storage buffer memory intermediate memory
FRENCH mémoire tampon n. f. Syn. tampon n. m. mémoire intermédiaire n. f zone tampon n. f.
Figure 4. The term buffer and its French translations in Le Grand Dictionnaire Terminologique.
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Using finite corpora and WebCorp
Taking our experiment in the classroom into account, we want to show how the use of finite corpora and WebCorp is neither contradictory nor incompatible. Available finite corpora, such as the HOWTO corpus and the smaller ones in subdomains of computing, can give the user a lot of information. But as computing is a very quickly changing domain, new terms are coined all the time, which means that available corpora tend to become insufficient or slightly obsolete, even though they can be regularly updated. In the subject area of computer science, most neologisms can be found on the Web. So being able to query the Web as a non-finite corpus is a fruitful way of obtaining missing information. Taking the above-mentioned example of buffer, we will describe and discuss this. 4.1.
Buffer in the HOWTOs
As shown in Figure 4, the term buffer is translated into mémoire tampon in French. However, Le Grand Dictionnaire Terminologique did not mention any compound for this term. Looking for buffer in the HOWTO corpus produces several multi-word units. Looking at the aligned section in French allowed us to find French equivalents of these, as shown in Figure 5. buffer cache (noun) buffer memory management (noun) buffer store (noun) DRAM write buffer (noun) frame-buffer (noun)
mémoire cache (noun) gestion de la mémoire tampon (noun) zone tampon (noun) buffer d’écriture DRAM (noun) tampon de trame (noun)
Figure 5. Multi-word units for buffer and their French equivalents. The problem is that the HOWTO translators have not always translated the whole text, or they may have modified sentences in such a way that some words just disappear. As a result, some compounds can be found, but not all, and not always their French equivalents. This indicates the limitation of finite corpora. New terms that were created after the collection of the corpus, or translations that have been radically modified, cannot be found in a finite corpus. Term bases are generally not complete enough. Because of this, the information must be looked for on the Web. As not only lexical information but also phraseological and translational information is necessary, a tool that makes it possible to extract concordances from the Web is likely to be appropriate. The next sub-sections deal with examples of Web search, using WebCorp, and demonstrate how the necessary information can be found.
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4.2.
WebCorp: searching for French equivalents
As the Web is not an aligned corpus, heuristics must be applied to find the French equivalents for English words. One possibility consisted in searching for an English term on a French Web-site. In the current state of WebCorp, the only way of doing that was to look for URLs in the French domain, i.e. ending in .fr. In French, computer scientists often use the English term for a given concept. Some translators therefore use the English term and often give its French equivalent in parentheses at the beginning of the document and then no more. Others use the French term, but add the English word in parentheses. This permitted us to find translations and also more terms, as illustrated in Figure 6, which shows a concordance for buffer extracted with WebCorp. These concordance lines yield two multi-word units in English, viz. buffer overflow and heap buffer overflow, and their equivalents in French. me des débordements de buffer (tampon en français). Pour com/advisories/bufero.html . Writing buffer overflow exploits – a tutorial for de NOP . débordement de buffer dans le tas (heap buffer overflow) (buffer overflow) . débordement de buffer sous windows (et oui ;-)) --[ Figure 6. Concordance for buffer. Not all searches provide the reader with the English source term in parentheses. In the case of dial-in line, for example, only part of the term is translated into French, and no indication of the source term is given. Figure 7 shows an occurrence of ligne de dial-in, in which only part of the term is translated. However, other occurrences of dial-in in French text show that this is the correct way of using it in French. Monter un serveur PPP/POP dial-in Par Hassan Ali AVERTISSEMENT : a avec une des lignes de dial-in PPP et son adresse IP assigner dynamiquement aux utilisateurs du dial-in PPP. Ceci, bien sûr pouvez assignez vos clients de dial-in : # Secrets for authentication using PAP Doe appelle l’aide de l’adaptateur dial-in de Windows 95 qui est Figure 7. Dial-in in French documents. 4.3.
WebCorp: searching for linguistic information: to run
As mentioned above, creating a customised dictionary for machine translation does not only require extracting lexical information from corpora, complemented by using the Web as a corpus. Phraseological information is also essential and must be inserted in the dictionary. This type of information is also important during the proofreading and post-editing process of the translation.
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Terms of a domain have specific meanings that are usually unknown in general English. In computer science, the verb to run has a meaning that differs greatly from its ordinary meanings in English. Not surprisingly, the French translation of the verb in computer science French has nothing to do with its general meaning translation. When to run means ‘to walk quickly’, its French equivalent is courir; to run used in the computing world is translated by tourner, lancer or exécuter, which have nothing in common with courir. To run in computer science can be followed by a direct object and then either by the preposition on or by the preposition under, usually depending on the type of argument that is used. Example (5) shows instances of the syntactic structure: (5)
You can run a program under an operating system You can run a program on a platform + OS
An argument that appears after the preposition under can also be used after on, but the opposite is quite rare. Building a customised dictionary means listing, as exhaustively as possible, the different verb arguments that can occur in the different positions in a sentence. Finite corpora can produce a quite exhaustive answer, which needs to be complemented and updated by using the Web as a corpus. Figure 8 shows how the expression ‘run * * on’, which uses two wildcards instead of words before the preposition on, can give significant results on the arguments that can fill the syntactic positions. These arguments could not be found in the HOWTO corpus, nor in the smaller finite corpora harm is done if you run cvs init on an already set-up repository. containing all you need to run Tcl/Tk on a Macintosh. tcl8.0p2.tar nd showed that it can run equally well on a Sharp or Alcatel telephone you will be able to run PETSc ONLY on one processor. Also, you will ith my favorites tools, and run the binary on a real ST. If the Figure 8. Arguments of the verb to run Another useful feature offered by WebCorp is the collocate function; it gives the most frequent collocates of the sequence. Frequent collocates of the verb to run, for example, are Debian, Alpha and messages, the first two being product names in computer science. As WebCorp is limited in the number of sites that can be opened, it is possible to filter out the collocates and discard the URLs in which they occur. It can be done by using the ‘exclude’ feature (using the ‘-’ sign, as in search engines). This allows WebCorp to extract concordances from other URLs, which then provide more linguistic information. The same operation can be applied to extract linguistic information about the French equivalent of the verb, i.e. tourner. As shown in Figure 9, the first pass is not always conclusive, since there are occurrences that have nothing to do with computer science. The sequence ‘tourn* * * sur’ will find all the words
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beginning with tourn, followed by two words, followed by the preposition sur (‘on’). First pass without filter apart from «.fr » and «computers»: état de conservation : Ce denier tournois est frappé japonais. . n’a pas renoncé à tourner son film sur le sterling bruce subspace sun open : tournoi de golf sur d’éternité: quatre poules blanches tournant en rond sur une place de village et Figure 9. Occurrences of tourn without any WebCorp filtering. In the second pass, a filtering option can be employed, to include keywords of computer science, such as programme, système, Linux and machine, and to exclude words, such as film, napoleon or poule, for example. This makes the search result much more consistent with the subject, as shown in Figure 10. fonctionner avec Windows, il peut tourner ou pas sur des cartes vidéo ou de type Unix qui peut tourner entre autres sur PC. Il est installé par des ordinateurs distants Pour faire tourner un programme sur une machine distante dont l’adresse texte ASCII par un module tournant sous Windows (sur PC) et devrait bientôt Figure 10. Occurrences of tourn using filters. 4.4.
Discussion
These few examples show occurrences of terms and their phraseological contexts that could not be found in the finite corpora on computer science. Studying terminology and phraseology for practical purposes raises issues that are different from describing the language as such. Describing languages for specific purposes means working in well-defined subject areas, which does not need huge corpora as in the study of general language (if there is such a thing as ‘general language’). A few hundred thousand words, sometimes less than a hundred thousand words are enough to describe the characteristics of a language for specific purposes. However, applying this type of description for practical purposes, such as creating a dictionary that will be integrated into a machine translation system, raises the issue of exhaustiveness. Machine translation needs human input to achieve satisfactory translation results. In this case, a small, specialised corpus is not enough. Moreover, the issue of up-to-date information arises. WebCorp, as a tool enabling the user to make daily updates, is ideal for complementing and updating the information extracted from time-bound specialised finite corpora. However, using finite corpora presents some advantages over WebCorp that will be difficult for a concordancer using the Web as a corpus to overcome. Finite corpora have the significant advantage of presenting controlled and balanced information. The texts collected in a corpus have been selected in
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preference to other candidates. Using the Web as a corpus implies that one has no control over the content of the documents that are extracted. The huge quantity of documents is also a problem. 5.
Conclusion
While, in our case, finite corpora were used as the basis for the creation of customised dictionaries, WebCorp provided us with more complete and up-todate linguistic information. In the classroom situation, students were faced with those issues, i.e. finding information in finite corpora, discovering they needed more, and using WebCorp instead of collecting a bigger corpus in the domain. Students learned how to use heuristics to find appropriate information using WebCorp; this also led them to note the advantages of WebCorp over classical search engines, namely the availability of concordances, collocates, regular expressions, and the possibility of limiting and filtering the linguistic information. WebCorp still needs some improvements, such as refining language identification, and domain filters. Linguistic information extracted with WebCorp would be more accurate if domain filters could be used to restrict the search to one domain. Refined regular expressions would allow users to extract more accurate phraseological information. As these improvements are integrated into the next release of WebCorp, the next step will be to test them and see if the results are significantly improved. Notes 1. The French DESS (Diplôme d’Etudes Scientifiques Spécialisées) which is equivalent to the second year of a ‘vocational’ M.A. 2. FOLDOC: Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing. 3. Linux is a Unix type operating system that is freely available to the community. 4. http://wall.jussieu.fr 5. http://www.systranet.com 6. http://www.chamblon.com
References Foucou P.-Y. and N. Kübler (2000), ‘A Web-based environment for teaching technical English’, in: L. Burnard and T. McEnery (eds) Rethinking language pedagogy: papers from the third international conference on language and teaching. Frankfurt am Main:Peter Lang. 65-73.
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Johns, T. (1988), ‘Whence and whither classroom concordancing?’, in: T. Bongaerts, P. de Haan, S. Lobbe and H. Wekker (eds), Computer applications in language learning. Dordrecht: Foris. 9-27. Kehoe, A. and A. Renouf (2002), ‘Webcorp: Applying the Web to linguistics and linguistics to the Web’, in: Proceedings of the WWW 2002 Conference, Honolulu, Hawaii, 7-11 May 2002. Kübler, N. (2002), ‘Creating a term base to customize an MT system: Reusability of resources and tools from the translator’s point of view’, in: E. Yuste (ed.), Proceedings of the Language Resources for Translation Work and Research. Workshop of the LREC Conference. Las Palmas de Gran Canarias: ELRA. 44-48. Pearson, J. (1998), Terms in context. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Renouf, A.J. (2003), ‘WebCorp: providing a renewable energy source for corpus linguistics’, in: S. Granger and S. Petch-Tyson (eds), Extending the scope of corpus-based research: new applications, new challenges. Amsterdam & Atlanta: Rodopi. 39-58.
The accidental corpus: some issues in extracting linguistic information from the Web Antoinette Renouf, Andrew Kehoe, David Mezquiriz University of Liverpool Abstract The Web is a text store which can potentially supplement traditional corpora as a source of up-to-date linguistic data. The WebCorp project investigates this potential, and in its second year tackles some residual problems inherent in the nature of Web text, thereby refining its retrieval and analysis tool for the facilitation of corpus linguistic study. 1.
Introduction
The Web is a vast, growing store of text-based information which in principle could meet many of the linguist’s needs for evidence of authentic written language use. Rare, topical, new and changing words and word uses that are not captured in existing finite corpora can often be found in Web-based text. However, the nature of the Web as a random accumulation of heterogeneous texts, many being less conventionally text-like, poses problems for the corpus linguist who tries to access it through existing search engines. The WebCorp project (Renouf 2003; Kehoe and Renouf 2002) was set up at the University of Liverpool in December 2000, with the objectives of investigating the usability of the Web as a linguistic resource, and of identifying and addressing some of the problems of retrieval and analysis that it presents. A WebCorp tool has been developed to demonstrate a set of search functions to users, with a facility for gathering feedback, and this system has been iteratively enriched according to a project design and in response to user comments. In this paper we begin with a brief exposition of the structure and basic linguistic retrieval functions of the WebCorp tool, before moving on to outline some of the issues we have encountered in interacting with the Web, some solutions that we have devised, and other measures that we envisage taking to enhance the performance of Web linguistic access, retrieval and analysis.
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The WebCorp system
2.1 Structure of WebCorp tool Several approaches could be taken to extracting linguistic data from the Web and processing it online. The WebCorp system has adopted a straightforward approach, as shown in Figure 1. WebCorp has six basic stages of operation. It first registers the user’s request for linguistic information. Then it translates the request and feeds it to a search engine. The search engine locates ‘relevant’ texts, returning a list of URLs to WebCorp, which accesses these directly, processes the associated texts in memory, and then returns concordance results to the user interface.
Search Engine 2 3 4
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Web Texts
1 6 User Interface
Figure 1. WebCorp operational diagram A linguistic extraction system needs a GUI (Graphical User Interface) that displays its functions clearly and offers a range of options to accommodate the anticipated needs of different users. WebCorp currently runs two versions of the GUI. The publicly accessible interface offers a reduced number of the options and variables displayed in the advanced GUI. The advanced GUI in its latest version is being tested by ICAME members, and currently looks as in Figure 2.
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Figure 2. The WebCorp GUI 2.2 Sample retrieval results from WebCorp As mentioned, traditional corpora of present-day language are not large enough to contain rarer usage; nor do they capture the latest coinages, due to the time required for their creation, and with neologisms flowing into the language on a
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daily basis. The neologism Enronomics was not found in existing corpora in May 2002. It is derived from Enron, a US company that in early 2002 was discovered to have conducted large-scale financial malpractice. The name now carries connotations of the particular kinds of shady business dealing and poor management style involved, and is used to characterise companies and practices exhibiting similar qualities. Contexts for this neologism could already be extracted from the Web by WebCorp in May 2002. They indicated that the root form Enron was extremely productive, already appearing in a range of derived forms. In the sample output for Enronomics in Figure 3, we also find Enronyms, Enronitis, Enronify, Enronethics, Enronizing, enronish, Enronitize and enronomy. In addition, we note that Enronomics is probably modelled on Reaganomics, as is Clintonomics. • • • • • • • • • • • • •
attack Bush’e economic policies with the term “Enronomics” (a phrase that originated to Believe He Knows About the Economy? Enronomics = Contributors Get Richer corporate malfeasance. Recently spotted Enronyms: Enronitis, Enronify, Enronomics laid bare by what rivals call ‘Enronomics’ – the political fable of the Enron corporation slogan and neutralize the Enronomics accusations, may I coin the term “Enronethics” Team Bush - talk of “Enronomics”, or Enronizing” Social Security and Medicare believing their press, watch out. It’s Enronomics, folks. The rich seducing the poor to be enronish and to practice Enronomics. “We’ve seen ugly, enronish sights before The Looting of America: Reagonomics, Clintonomics and Enronomics Strategy”) . Enronomics Explained (deliberately driving the country into spent two weeks talking about Bush’s “Enronomics” and “Enronizing” Social Security. It blows the lid off Bush’s Enronomics, and his plan to Enronitize Social Security hardest hit by the Bush trickle down enronomics. Now it looks like the Bush enronomy
Figure 3. WebCorp output for search term Enronomics – Domain: .uk or .com Alternatively, one might wish to check the neologistic status of a word through a Web search. In an article on ‘Health Obsessions’ in the Observer of 14.04.02, the vogue term medicalisation is presented in inverted commas as though a neologism. Though there is no consistent meta-information for date on the Web to support the chronological extraction of word occurrences, WebCorp can
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retrieve at least some in-text dates indicating that the word is not new, but has been used as early as 1974, as shown in Figure 4. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.
legislation shifted from criminalisation to medicalisation of drug use the causes and effects of the medicalisation of abortion, focusing on the law decriminalisation and legalisation. Medicalisation: prohibited drugs on prescription (1991) medicalisation a more effective way of controlling deviance than legal punishment The psychologisation/ medicalisation of school education A political sociology of lifestyle pharmaceuticals and medicalisation the medicalisation and psychologisation of PMS is done to market over-medicalisation of women’s normal physical processes (e.g. menopause); Crawford R (1980) : Healthism and the medicalisation of everyday life RSI exemplifies the medicalisation of work behaviour. Spillane, 2000 medicalise, and therefore pathologise, difference. The medicalisation in maternity care Scott (1988) discusses the usefulness of the medicalisation of childbirth BMJ 2002. 324: Education and debate. Has the medicalisation of childbirth gone too far? palliative medicine and the medicalisation of death, European Journal of Cancer Care medicalisation of life’s normal processes: ageing, sexuality, unhappiness, and death in 1974, when I wrote Medical Nemesis, I could speak about the “medicalisation” of death only the very rich…can avoid the medicalisation of the end of life (Illich, 1976). Seymour JE. Revisiting medicalisation and "natural" death. Soc Sci Med 1999; 49: 691-704
Figure 4. WebCorp output for search term medicalisation Figure 4 also includes evidence of the vogue use of medicalisation to mean ‘treat medically a natural condition as if it were a disease’, in the context of words such as ageing, childbirth, everyday life, death, and psychologisation, as well as more established uses. In the context of abortion or drugs, medicalisation is used to mean ‘decriminalisation’; while in the context of terminal conditions, it can also mean ‘treating with medicine’, collocating with such words as palliative. The rarity of inverted commas here indicates that the word is no longer considered to be a new coinage, the one use (in 16) being to indicate the novelty of its status back in 1974.
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During the development phase, we have established many of the needs of users via our feedback mechanism. These have led us to face a number of retrieval and processing issues, which we shall outline below, together with solutions that we have found. The major areas of concern are: • • • • •
scope (recall in IR terms) speed, both of access to, and retrieval of, Web text the state of Web search engines and Web text the types and formats of linguistic information required refinement/relevance (precision in IR terms)
3.1 Scope All things being equal, it seems a good idea to maximise the scope of Web search in order to garner as many examples as possible. However, a Web search is limited to the scope of indexing of the various search engines. A report (Bergman 2001) stated that the foremost search engine, Google, had indexed 2 billion Web pages, but estimated that it only searched 10% of the ‘Deep Web’. The use of multiple search engines – currently Google, AltaVista, Metacrawler, FAST, Northern Light and SearchEngine.com – is a remedy that we have applied to increase coverage. 3.2 Speed Any Web language retrieval system will be subject to speed constraints. These are imposed by each agent in the loop, including local server, university resources and Web traffic. An arrangement which allows direct access to the Web via the index built by one of the search engines is likely to increase speed. In the case of WebCorp, this improvement is achieved by linking into SearchEngine.com, a major UK-based system. Speedier processing can also be achieved through the parallelisation of the downloading and processing of Web pages. Neither measure brings huge benefits, however; a new order of processing power is required, of the scale envisaged for the post-Internet era of distributed computing. 3.3 The state of the Web 3.3.1 Handling search engines Search engines require careful monitoring since they are constantly changing: opening up, closing down, amalgamating, adding new functionality, and imposing new restrictions.
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A problem in their current functioning that has consequences for corpus linguists is the fact that they each access different pages, and different pages each time. Thus the linguistic sample is not constant. The ephemeral nature of the Web introduces a further dimension into the equation of comparability, the impossibility of describing more than one phenomenon simultaneously in the same body of data. The only solution, which means relatively little in linguistic terms (as we shall explain later in relation to textual data) is to save the particular download with its given time and date. 3.3.2 Handling Web pages The Web page is in a state of disorder from every point of view that concerns linguistic processing. To begin with the basic unit of word, even the boundary between words, is erratic. Then, spelling is variable and presents a problem analogous with that which has preoccupied generations of historical linguists. Punctuation is haphazardly sprinkled, and frequently omitted (or suppressed by some intermediate processing), a tendency that presents a particular dilemma in that it removes the sole means of processing the surface text for sentence boundary. Web pages are a mixture of text and metatext (including URLs and other links). For some purposes, the linguist requires access to the text itself; for others, such as the study of meta-terms for specialised dictionary creation (see Kübler and Foucou 2000), access to the metatext. Scarcely any purpose is served by a system which retrieves a mixture of both. A partial solution here is to construct a retrieval routine that identifies and ignores the kind of text, such as link text, on the Web page which is not required. 3.4
Linguistic data requirements
3.4.1 Concordance presentation options There are a number of variables that serve a linguist and are readily producible. With reference to the WebCorp GUI, we offer options for case sensitive/insensitive search, URL display and full text hyperlink, specifiable span (ideally up to a maximum of the total text), and selected formats (including HTML, ASCII and HTML Tables). 3.4.2 Sentence-length concordances The production of sentence-length concordances might seem routine to the linguist, but sentence identification can be problematic in electronic text, where layers of processing can lead to the full stop (the prime clue to sentence boundary) being suppressed. As mentioned, in Web text the use of the full stop is
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even more erratic. In a grammatically tagged corpus, sentence ending could be deduced from the grammar itself. With Web text untagged as it is, however, few clues exist at surface level as to sentence boundary. A WebCorp heuristic searches backwards from the search term to the previous full stop, until either one has been traced or a maximum number of characters has been analysed. The results are often uninformatively long, and look as follows: owned first quarter losses after cutting costs in its South African and Scandinavian operations Ananova: Melissa computer virus creator gets 20 years in prison David Smith, who admitted creating the ‘Melissa’ virus that swamped computer networks worldwide and caused millions of dollars in damage in 1999, was sentenced today to 20 months in prison, prosecutors said. So another approach to finding sentence boundary has been tested with WebCorp, in which it simply searches backwards through the text, left of the search term, for the previous upper-case initial word. This simple measure is surprisingly successful in identifying a sentence start, or at least a clause start, which is often a satisfactory compromise in terms of the interpretability of a context. However, its success is determined by various factors, such as grammar. For instance, it works well with the verb swamped because the previous upper-case initial word is very often the noun (or proper name) designating the clause subject. (This word relates to David Blunkett’s unfortunate remark in 2002 about schools being ‘swamped with immigrants’). Our output is shown in Figure 5. •
• • • • • • • •
•
David Smith, who admitted creating the "Melissa" virus that swamped computer networks worldwide and caused millions of dollars in damage in 1999, was sentenced today to 20 months in prison, prosecutors said. January 2000 "Swamped! Technology Summary: Swamped! By combining research in autonomous character design, automatic camera control, tangible interfaces and action interpretation, Swamped! Academic Papers: Swamped! Sorry, I have been swamped with other stuff but Or, as with any developer, you’re probably swamped with bugs. Some of the competitors, however, persisted in racing until they were swamped. Birmingham City’s ticket offices were bracing themselves to be swamped by eager football fans today hoping for a ticket for the Division One play-off final. Call centers of high-tech companies are swamped, and consumers are fuming
Figure 5. Potentially sentence-length contexts for swamped
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In contrast, an adverb like sulkily is less successful, because it often collocates with reporting verbs, so we find such fragments as Ed sulkily, which due to verbnoun inversion, have lost their actual sulky utterance. • • • • • • •
He grabbed the stapler, and sulkily asked me to make him a cup of tea. Her husband, who is driving, frowns sulkily. "I suppose so," the other sulkily replied, as he crawled out of the umbrella. "Sorry," they mumbled sulkily. Cilla: (sulkily) All right, fine Ed sulkily. Elinor responded sulkily as she smoothed the folds of her long cambric overdress.
Figure 6. Potentially sentence-length contexts for sulkily An obvious strategy for improving the output is to download the text for postprocessing, at which point the potential of grammatical and other factors for sentence identification may be exploited. 3.4.3 Collocational profiles Collocational information is a standard measure in lexical studies. Ideally, statistical measures of its strength and significance in relation to the search term are applied. But this requires a knowledge of the total size of the body of data from which it is extracted, and the totality of the Web is not measurable. Statistical significance calculations also require a reasonably large amount of data, but the corpus created from the relatively small number of Web pages downloaded in a search is rather small. What can be produced is a frequencybased profile, a simple frequency count of the collocates within a specified span to the search node term. A collocational profile for the word minimum is provided by WebCorp as in Figure 7, showing the frequencies of collocates above a specified threshold, here one occurrence, and indicating their left-right position within a +4/-4 span. The collocational profile in Figure 7 in fact also serves as a guide for the user to the role adopted by the word minimum as a noun modifier. A possible enhancement would be to extract a fuller collocational profile by retrieving a very large number of Web texts, so that a significance count might just be derivable. This could be a larger dataset than the user actually specifies as the desired number of contexts to be displayed. It would require more computing power, however. A collocational dilemma is raised in discontinuous phrasal search via pattern matching and wildcard use. The operational definition of collocation in WebCorp is ‘the words that sit to either side of a word’. But the wildcard search assumes that there are also collocational sets in the asterisked spaces within the variable phrases or lexical (lexico-grammatical) strings. This problem can be
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solved by differentiating, in the collocational calculations, between external and internal phrasal collocates. Word wage national rate Please set UK National standards requirements level guide new rates section maximum regulations
Total L4 L3 L2 L1 36 15 6 5 5 4 4 4 4 4 3 3 3 2 2 2
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Figure 7. Top collocates of minimum (excluding stopwords) A further complication that arises in the course of producing collocational information is that a word may occur inordinately often on a single Web page. An example is the adverb sulkily, which occurs constantly throughout a Webretrievable novel, Alice in Wonderland. A solution is to allow the option of retrieving only one concordance line per site. This is a manipulation of the facts which may serve for some purposes but not for others. It is a reminder of the limitations of the linguistic validity of treating the Web as a corpus. 3.4.4 Pattern matching Lexical items are often common combinations of two or more words, in more or less fixed patterns. It is possible with WebCorp to search on the Web for these, and also for discontinuous phrases, which can be effected through the use of a wildcard character. So ‘the * sank’ retrieves a series of phrases containing some of the collocational set which sits between the words the and sank, which is:
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the boat sank, the ship sank, the ferry sank, etc. Multiple wildcard characters within the pattern ‘the * * sank’ can expand the search to discover some of the members of each of the two collocational sets that sit between the words the and sank, which include: the ‘unsinkable’ ship sank, the Russian submarine sank, etc. It is also possible to support a search for variable strings using wildcards. These can match inflections and suffixes, such that ‘run*’ will represent run, running, runs, runner, runners, but also runt, rune, rung. However, wildcard use in the matching of initial word elements (e.g. *ing) is not supported by search engines, though there are obvious off-line post-editing remedies to apply. Square brackets and pipe characters (as separators) are additional measures for introducing grammatical or orthographic variation into the search, as for instance ‘the boat s[a|u]nk’. Square brackets around lexical variants, e.g. the [boat|ship] sank, allows a search for the alternatives specified. Brackets can be used to allow more flexibility and/or specificity, so that run can be explicitly expanded to r[un|an|unning|uns], which will retrieve instances of run, runs, running, and ran. Wildcards allow the discovery of new/unconventional forms, of the kind that supports the testing of a user’s hypothesis that electronic communication encourages greater inflectional variation, especially in youth-speak. For example, the query formulated as follows: ‘[he|she|I] text* [him|her|me]’, confirms this and moreover reveals that text not only functions as a verb but as an uninflected past tense verb: • • • • •
I sent him my picture and he text-ed me back that I look like his wife I was almost speechless when she text’d me the last one below Yesterday he text’ed me in a meeting with ‘you want to go out?’ The next time I text him, he didn’t reply I texted her and invited her to meet us
A combination of all these pattern-matching options can be used to represent complex patterns. For instance, ‘dr[i|o]ve[s|n|] * [a|]round the’ retrieves the following phrases: • • • • • • • •
Start up drives me round the twist Fury over lorry that drives residents round the bend Her Majesty was driven twice round the Mews yard Over used, that stupid drumbeat drove me round the bend ‘Sick’ Diana pic drives critics round the Benz We quit - you’ve driven us round the bend We’ll drive you round the island or take you shopping The noise drove her around the bend
The pattern can be further specified in the light of first run results, as in:
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dr[i|o]ve[s|n|] * [a|]round the [bend|twist] Alternatively, patterns can be less extensive, thus allowing variable phraseology to be retrieved. For example, the pattern ‘dr[i|o]ve[s|n|] [her|him|me]’ specifying only the verb and pronoun common to a set of variable phrases, retrieves not only the prepositional phrases found by ‘dr[i|o]ve[s|n|] * [a|]round the’, as shown above, but others, e.g. up the wall as well as some adjective complements: crazy, mad, insane and nuts. It is not possible, using search engines, to retrieve lexico-grammatical patterns, as this requires word-class tagging at the corpus input stage, which clearly does not exist on the Web. However, as with sentence identification, better results could be achieved by off-line post-processing. We are working on this; it requires considerable processing power for fast online search. 3.5
Search refinement
3.5.1 Detailed search specification A single search term is a blunt instrument in the retrieval of linguistic information, particularly so from the Web, which is not set up to facilitate delicate text search. To increase the relevance (or ‘precision’) of Web-based output, the following kinds of basic specification are available and can be exploited, as they are by our WebCorp system: • • • • •
Text type and genre can be specified via the Open Directory or Yahoo Some indication of document date (typically last update) can be identified, where it is provided, using the WebCorp output option that displays URLs Search may be limited to the whole or part of a particular URL, such as bbc.co.uk, or .gov Search may be limited to certain (and multiple) domains, using Boolean terms as follows: .net OR .org; .ac.uk OR .edu A word filter may be used, specifying that the search term, e.g. plant, must occur in a text also containing, or excluding, a particular word or words, such as +flower –nuclear
3.5.2 Internationalisation Search can be refined through the specification of relevant language(s), to allow the user to focus on languages other than English, the primary and most ubiquitous Web language. The different aspects of this issue include the user’s specification of a particular language for search routines, the system’s automatic identification of particular languages, and its handling and representing of texts in
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other languages. We have in the last year or so built some of this functionality into WebCorp. 3.5.2.1 Refining search by specifying language The user may wish to refine his/her search by specifying the language of the context surrounding the chosen search term. One possibility is to specify a particular country code. However, our findings are that there is no one-to-one correlation between a country code and its associated language. The country code can retrieve text in other languages than that associated with the country. A search on the term gracejar, a Portuguese word meaning ‘to joke’, might be expected to generate relevant output, but even with the specification of a country code, in this case ‘.pt’, it does not, as shown in Figure 8. • • • • • • • • • •
que não era bonito gracejar com coisas tão s refere Chris Newell, para depois gracejar com um caso que conheceu rbara Alexievna, chegando mesmo a gracejar com ela. Mas não Dêem-lhe uma oportunidade para gracejar e trazzz .. aí está ele disposição e gostava de gracejar à custa de Pulquéria Ivanovna sei que ele está a gracejar, mas nem por isso é menos tentou em vão brincar, gracejar e conhecer as razões desatou a rir e a gracejar: deixaram-no à vontade e ele aproveitou aram a rir e a gracejar sobre o caso curiosíssimo explicar, frisar, generalizar, gracejar, imaginar, incitar, informar, insinuar,
Figure 8. GRACEJAR with specified domain .pt (Portugal) The final example above is actually in Spanish, and presented in a Spanish context. This happens when the search term is ambiguous in the sense that it exists in more than one language; e.g. it is an international brand name, global term, or a term originating from EU legislation. The word gracejar also exists, rarely, in Spanish. The word swamped will retrieve English text even with the domain specification ‘.no’, of Norway, as seen in Figure 9. The English language dominates the Web and the fact that a site is based in a particular country, in this case Norway, does not mean that the site will necessarily be written in that country’s national language. • • • • •
letters asking for Syrian intervention swamped our ministries from Lebanese your query earlier: it got swamped by > xmas xcesses. > offering cheap Internet connections, completely swamped the systems and low priority to avoid being swamped (spammed). This is something which considerable period, this emphasis was swamped by a shift in the
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Antoinette Renouf, Andrew Kehoe and David Mezquiriz is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the at large are already virtually swamped. The proletarian is without property such. > I basically got swamped with K5 stuff, and became an organization which was immediately swamped with congratulations from their staffs were overloaded and swamped with cases involving companies
Figure 9. SWAMPED, domain .no Perhaps the best one can say is that the country code refines the scope of reference to one of interest to inhabitants of that country, and this tends to favour texts in the native language. Ultimately, success in retrieving a particular language via the country code comes primarily with search terms that are unique to the language associated with it. The exclusively French word blaguer with French domain setting retrieves only French language contexts, as in Figure 10. • • • • • • • • • •
lui mentir, même pour blaguer, sans pouffer automatiquement de rire dis ça, c’est pour blaguer 27° Si vous avez des 02 16h59 "C’était pour blaguer, si on ne peut m tchou tchou Est connu pour blaguer et parfois vomir Un tr compagnie des enfants, elle aime blaguer avec eux. Âgée de monde extérieur. J’aime bien blaguer et mes réponses sont moral baisse, plus personne n’ose " blaguer " sur la guerre. Les permissions est hyper important. On peut blaguer, se prendre des coups de 2000 “On peut même blaguer!” 14/12/2000 ”J’ai un besoin d’aide, pas question de blaguer: dans
Figure 10. BLAGUER with domain specification .fr (France) Even so, if the search term is cited rather than used, it could occur anywhere, as we see in Figure 11 below, where we submitted the search term blaguer to Portuguese text domains and nevertheless managed to retrieve it in Portuguese contexts. • • •
inclusive o anjo. Era um "blaguer", um adorável mentiroso. Tinha inclusive o anjo. Era um " blaguer ", um adorável mentiroso. Tinha da Fonseca, <
Figure 11. BLAGUER with domain specified as .pt (Portugal) 3.5.2.2 Automatic language identification The second problem of internationalisation is the automatic identification of different languages. There are two obvious means by which the language of a text could be identified: one is through the use of the HTTP language identification
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protocol heading a Web document; another is through the application of language feature analysis to the candidate Web text. HTTP language identification protocol Using the HTTP language identification protocol, an automated system could theoretically identify the language of a Web page. However, this protocol is not yet widely or consistently used, and we have found that fewer than 10% of the pages listed by Google for any given search term return a language header when accessed. For the English pages where a language header is returned, this is given variously as ‘en’, ‘en-gb’, ‘eng’, ‘English’, etc. Feature analysis Secondly, one could identify a language through ‘Feature Analysis’ of a candidate Web text. Much work has been done on the automatic identification of particular languages, not least by the Leeds team of Eric Atwell, Clive Souter, and their postgraduate students (Souter et al. 1994). The two approaches that we have so far isolated as promising are what we shall call ‘Negative Feature Analysis’, and ‘Positive Feature Analysis’. The principle of negative feature analysis is that a text is deemed not to be in a particular language if it contains features not associated with that language. The features could be a sequence of characters drawn from text of a given language. This approach is exemplified by the work of a team of undergraduate computer scientists at the University of Paris VII (Longuemaux et al. 2001). They have built exemplar corpora in selected major languages, and they match a Web email to each in turn, ranking the unlikelihood of the email being in each language. The text is judged to be more likely to have been written in the language of which it contains fewest untypical or impossible features. The advantage of their system is that a one-page corpus furnishes sufficient features for matching, and the language of the unknown text can be identified after very few character combinations. The system can also rank the relative probabilities of the language content of a Web text or page that contains more than one. This would differentiate between the main language use and subsidiary languages, say occurring in links to text headers in other languages. The principle of positive feature analysis, as devised by Souter and team, is to build a character-bigram (or trigram) model of text in each of the languages that it is desirable to identify, then to compare new incoming text against each letter-bigram/trigram model. This isolates the right language in a few characters, because each language has specific patterns rarely found in other languages. It can sometimes function even with a single word as its input data. We are still finalising our method for the WebCorp tool, but language identification does not seem to be problematic.
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3.5.2.3 Handling/representing texts in other languages The third aspect of internationalisation basically involves the integration of Unicode/double-byte characters. We have developed a separate search mechanism, in collaboration with colleagues in Beijing and Shanghai, which will be built into WebCorp. 4.
Next steps
In the next phase, we will carry on this research within the framework of the University of Liverpool ‘ULGRID’ initiative. This is concerned with the design and implementation of the next generation of the Internet, with reference to the new types of software, ‘middleware’ and hardware that are required to facilitate the larger tasks and greater traffic anticipated for the future. Greater in-university processing power and distributed processing initiatives will help to increase the speed of WebCorp response. In terms of improving access to more linguistically usable Web-based text, we will be making recommendations, to the Semantic Web and other initiatives, to enrich and standardise Web text mark-up for document language and linguistically vital information such as date of authorship. A fledgling markup infrastructure exists, but its adoption and uniform use by Web page creators is slow. Acknowledgement We gratefully acknowledge the EPSRC funding of the WebCorp project. References Bergman, M.K. (2001), ‘The deep Web: surfacing hidden value’: http://www. brightplanet.com/deepcontent/tutorials/DeepWeb/deepwebwhitepaper.pdf. Kehoe, A. and A. Renouf (2002), ‘WebCorp: applying the Web to linguistics and linguistics to the Web’, in: Proceedings of 11th International World Wide Web Conference, Honolulu, Hawaii, 7-11 May 2002 (http://www. 2002.org/CDROM/poster/67/) Kübler, N. and P.-Y. Foucou (2000), ‘A Web-based environment for teaching technical English’, in: L. Burnard and T. McEnery (eds), Rethinking language pedagogy. Papers from the Third International Conference on Language and Teaching. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. 65-73. Longuemaux, F., F. Morandeau, A. Riviere, R. Tadayoni-Rouchon, P. Vaz Martinho (2001), Reconnaissance de la langue à partir de facteurs interdits. Unpublished manuscript, Univ. Paris VII Denis Diderot.
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Renouf, A. (2003), ‘WebCorp: providing a renewable data source for corpus linguists’, in: S. Granger and S. Petch-Tyson (eds), Extending the scope of corpus-based research: new applications, new challenges. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi. 39-58. Souter, C., G. Churcher, G. Hayes, J. Hughes and S. Johnson (1994), ‘Natural language identification using corpus-based models’, in: K. Lauridsen and O. Lauridsen (guest eds), HERMES Journal of Linguistics 13: Faculty of Modern Languages, Aarhus School of Business. 183-203.
