Contrastive functional analysis

CONTRASTIVE FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

ANDREW CHESTERMAN University of Helsinki

JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA

Pragmatics & Beyond New Series Editor: Andreas H. Jucker (Justus Lie big University, Giessen) Associate Editors: Jacob L. Mey (Odense University) Herman Parret (Belgian National Science Foundation, Universities of Louvain and Antwerp) Jef Verschueren (Belgian National Science Foundation, University of Antwerp)

Editorial Address: Justus Liebig University Giessen, English Department Otto-Behaghel-Strasse 10, D-35394 Giessen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] Editorial Board: Shoshana Blum-Kulka (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) Chris Butler (University College of Ripon and York) Jean Caron ( Universite de Poitiers); Robyn Carston (University College London) Bruce Fraser (Boston University); John Heritage (University of California at Los Angeles) David Holdcroft (University of Leeds); Sachiko Ide (Japan Women's University) Catherine Kerbrat-OrecchioQi (University of Lyon 2) Claudia de Lemos (University of Campinas, Biasil); Marina Sbisa (University of Trieste) Emanuel Schegloff (University of California at Los Angeles) Paul 0. Takahara (Kobe City University of Foreign Studies) Sandra Thompson (University of California at Santa Barbara) Teun A. Van Dijk (University of Amsterdam); Richard Watts (University of Bern)

47 Andrew Chesterman

Contrastive Functional Analysis

CONTRASTIVE FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

ANDREW CHESTERMAN University of Helsinki

JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA

The paper used in this publication meets the mtmmum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences - Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chesterman, Andrew Contrastive functional analysis I Andrew Chesterman. p. cm. -- (Pragmatics & beyond, ISSN 0922-842X ; new ser. 47) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Functionalism (Linguistics) 2. Contrastive l~tics. 3. Discourse analysis. I. Title. II. Series. 1998 Pl47.C48 97-50498 410--dc2l ISBN 90 272 5060 X (Eur.) I 1-55619-809-4 (US) (alk. paper) CIP ©Copyright 1998- John Benjamins B. V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. • P.O.Box 75577 • 1070 AN Amsterdam • The Netherlands John Benjamins North America • P.O.Box 27519 • Philadelphia PA 19118-0519 • USA

Contents Preface Chapter l. Contrastive 1.1. Similarities 1.1.1. Similarity Assessment 1.1.2. Divergent and Convergent Similarity 1.2. Equivalence in Translation Theory 1.2.1. The Equative View 1.2.2. The Taxonomic View 1.2.3. The Relativist View 1.3. Equivalence in Contrastive Analysis 1.3.1. Tertia Comparationis 1.3.2. Bilingual Competence and Translation Competence 1.4. On Psychological Realism 1.4.1. The Problem of the Psycholinguistic Fallacy 1.4.2. Interference and Re-entry 1.4.3. Universalist vs. Relativist 1.5. CFA methodology 1.5.1. Primary Data l.5.2. Comparability Criterion and Similarity Constraint 1.5.3. Problem and Initial Identity Hypothesis 1.5.4. Hypothesis Testing 1.5.5. Revised Hypotheses

5 5 6 12 16 18 21 24 27 29 37 40 41 44· 48 52 54 55 57 57 59

Chapter 2. Functional 2.1. Grammar as a Tool Factory 2.2. Interpreting the Constraint of Relevant Similarity 2.3. An Outline Model of Semantic Structure 2.3.1. Overview 2.3.2. Predicates 2.3.3. Actants 2.3.4. Specifiers 2.3.5. Complicators

63 63 67 72 74 75 76 79 80

vi

CONTRASTIVE FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

2.3.6. Commentators 2.3.7. Conjunctors 2.3.8. Concluding remarks 2.4. Other Functionalist Models 2.5. Other Contrastive Models

82 83 84 86 90

Chapter 3. Analysis 3.1. States of Disease (English) 3.2. Inclusion (English and Finnish) 3.2.1. Similarity Constraint and Initial Data 3.2.2. Testing the Identity Hypothesis 3.2.3. Revised Hypotheses 3.3. Invitation to Eat (English, German, French, Swedish, Finnish) 3.3 .1. Similarity Constraint and Initial Data 3.3.2. Testing the Identity Hypothesis 3.3.3. Revised Hypotheses 3.4. Genericity (English and French) 3.4.1. Similarity Constraint and Initial Data 3.4.2. Testing the Identity Hypothesis 3.4.3. Revised Hypotheses 3.5. Speaker perspective (English, German, Finnish) 3.5 .I. Similarity Constraint and Initial Data 3.5.2. Testing the Identity Hypothesis 3.5.3. Revised Hypotheses

93 93 98 98 104 110 112 113 117 122 123 124 127 135 139 139 141 148

Chapter 4. Rhetoric 4.1. Background 4.1.1. Contrastive Text Linguistics 4.1.2. Contrastive Discourse Analysis 4.1.3. Contrastive Rhetoric 4.1.4. Methodological 4.2. Text Types 4.3. Text Actants: Episodes 4.4. Text Specifiers 4.4.1. Point 4.4.2. Profile 4.4.3. Angle 4.4.4. Chronology 4.5. Appeals 4.5.1. Pathos 4.5.2. Ethos

151 154 154 155 157 158 161 165 169 170 171 175 178 179 179 182

CONTENTS

4.6. Coherence 4. 7. Interaction 4.7.1. Exchange 4.7.2. Exchange Types 4.7.3. Moves 4.7.4. Exchange Specifiers 4.7.5. Status Relations 4.7.6. Controls

Chapter 5. Closing Comments 5.1. Applications 5.2. Conclusions References Author index Subject index

VII

183 186 187 187 187 188

192 194 197 197 199 205

225 229

Preface

Contrastive Functional Analysis is a research methodology. It starts from perceived similarities of meaning across two or more languages, and seeks to determine the various ways in which these similar or shared meanings are expressed in different languages. It thus represents one general approach to Contrastive Analysis. It is an approach designated as "functional", in the sense that it is based on meaning and follows the process of semiosis: it looks at the ways meanings are expressed. The perspective is from meaning to form. Research using this methodology also aims to specify the conditions (syntactic, semantic, pragmatic etc.) which govern the use of different variants, and ultimately to state which variant is preferred under which conditions. Broadly speaking, the approach is thus a paradigmatic one, with a Hallidayan-type focus on the options that speakers have in expressing meanings. It is in fact a kind of cross-linguistic variation analysis. Chapter 1 explores general issues of contrastive methodology in some detail. We start with the concept of similarity, how it can be defined,,analysed and assessed. This leads to a comparison of the ways in which the crucial concept of equivalence has been understood and analysed in the two related disciplines of Translation Theory and Contrastive Analysis. The contrastive functional approach illustrated in the book is closely related to translation. It also links up with the psycholinguistic concept of interference: the general issue of psychological realism in Contrastive Analysis is discussed, and related to a recent proposal in neurology. The first chapter concludes with a presentation of a falsificationist methodology built around the idea that contrastive studies should produce hypotheses that can be empirically tested. Chapter 2 specifies what is meant by "functional" in this approach. It includes an outline model of a semantic structure framework forming the basis of a functional syntax, and compares this model with other functional and contrastive theories. Chapter 3 offers five sample mini-studies using this methodology, at the clause level or below. The sample studies have been selected to illustrate different aspects of the model; the languages concerned are English, Finnish, German, Swedish and French.

2

CONTRASTIVE FuNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

Chapter 4 then suggests ways in which Contrastive Functional Analysis can be extended beyond clause-level phenomena. The contrastive analysis of textual meaning needs a model of contrastive functional rhetoric. This in turn can be further extended to account for interactional phenomena of contrastive discourse. Chapter 5 reviews the main points of the book and suggests how the methodology might be applied more generally.

Acknowledgements My thanks go first of all to Arto Mustajoki for inviting me to join his functional syntax project for a year and arranging funding from the Finnish Academy. Other members of the project team who kindly read and commented on earlier versions of my manuscript are Hannes Heino and Jyrki Papinniemi. Ulla Connor gave valuable feedback on chapter 4, and Raija Markkanen commented encouragingly on an early version of the book. Susanna Shore offered fruitful criticism and discovered many misprints and slips at the final stage. Two anonymous reviewers from Benjamins provided a wealth of input for the final revision, for which I am most grateful. Responsibility for the final version is of course mine alone. Special thanks to my wife, Marja, for being there. I dedicate the book to our daughter, Sanja: for making so much difference.

AC, Helsinki, November 1997

3

PREFACE

Abbreviations Abbreviations and .:.:ase endings in the Finnish and Swedish glosses are as follows. Nouns and adjectives in the base form, nominative singular, are not given a case gloss. CAUS = causative morpheme COND = conditional mood DET = definite article IMP = imperative INF = infinitive INT =interrogative suffix PAS= passive PAST = past tense PL =plural POS = possessive suffix PP = past participle PRES.P = present participle SG = singular

Finnish cases:

NOM= nominative ACC =accusative GEN = genitive PAR= partitive ESS ~ essive ADE = adessive INE = inessive ALL= allative ABL = ablative ILL = illative ELA = elative COM = comitative 1RA = translative

Chapter 1. Contrastive 1.1.

Similarities

"Why is a raven like a writing-desk?" Alice thought she could answer this riddle easily, but no answer is actually indicated in Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Friends to whom I have posed the riddle suggest various answers. A linguist replied immediately: "Because they both begin with an 'r' sound," a response that takes the key terms at the de dicta level. A literary scholar I asked, after a moment's thought, suggested: "Because they can both serve as sources of inspiration for poetry"- alluding to Poe's famous poem "The Raven", plus the traditional image of the poet seated at a desk, quill in hand. This solution to the riddle thus revolves round a semantic ambiguity of the word source in the scholar's reply. Further, ravens and writingdesks are felt to do similar things or have similar effects in their capacity as sources, they are felt to have the same function. In his Annotated A lice, Gardner ( 1970: 95) informs us that Carroll' s own answer had been: "Because it can produce a few notes, tho they are very flat; and it is never put with the wrong end in front" - with a pun on notes. Other answers Gardner records have exploited homonymy in some way: "because Poe wrote on both" (on top of, on the subject of); "bills and tales are among their characteristics" (bill of a bird, bill to be paid; tails, tales); "because it slopes with a flap" (flap of a wing, flap (lid) of a desk). Another poses a common semantic element: "because they both stand on legs". And yet another combines this with semantic ambiguity: "because they both ought to be made to shut up". One answer that takes the de dicta reading one absurd step further has been: "because there is aB in 'both'". The various answers thus fall into several groups, they play with various kinds of likeness: -purely formal (two occurrences of the same sound) -homonymic (same aural or visual form, different meanings: puns) -semantic (same semantic feature) -functional (similar function or purpose) Alice' s riddle introduces some of the main leitmotifs of the first part of this book. Theoretically, what does it mean to compare or contrast two things? How does

6

CONTRASTIVE FuNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

one set about establishing similru;ities and differences? On what grounds are two different things (a raven and a writing-desk, for instance) proposed for comparison in the first place? What does it mean to say that two things are "the same", or "similar"? Why is it that different people see different likenesses between the same pair of entities? With respect to the study of language and language behaviour, there are two fields in particular that deal with such issues: Translation Theory and Contrastive Analysis. Although these are neighbouring disciplines, it nevertheless often appears that theoretical developments in one field are overlooked in the other, and that both would benefit from each other's insights. But before I take up this challenge, let us pause to examine one fundamental concept in some detail: the concept of similarity. My aim will then be to apply this conceptual analysis to the ways in which "sameness" has been understood in Translation Theory and Contrastive Analysis, as various notions of "equivalence". This will lead to an explicit specification of the concept of contrastiveness upon which Contrastive Functional Analysis is based.

1.1.1. Similarity Assessment Similarity is a problematic concept. Some of its logical and philosophical puzzles are discussed by Sovran ( 1992). For instance, if "similarity" is a relation between two entities, it ought to have some regular logical properties; but this seems not to be the case. Similarity is not necessarily symmetrical, for instance: we can say (1), but are unlikely to say (2): (1) (2)

This copy of the Mona Lisa is incredibly like the original. ? The Mona Lisa is incredibly like this copy of it.

Similes, too, are non-reversible: (3) (4)

Richard fought like a lion. ? The/A lion fought like Richard.

Similarity is not necessarily transitive, either: if A is similar to B, and B is similar to C, it is not logically implied that A is similar to C. Finnish ginger biscuits are often like stars in terms of their shape (because of their cultural associations with Christmas), and stars are like glow-worms in that both glimmer, but it does not therefore follow that such ginger biscuits are like glow-worms in any way. An underlying cause of these problems seems to be the ambiguous nature of the concept of similarity itself, for it does not pertain only to the world of logic

CONTRASTIVE

7

or physical matter, or indeed the social world, but also to that of cognition. We speak of entities "being similar", but also of them "being thought of as similar". Similarity seems to be both "out there", objective, and also "in the mind", subjective. Triangles are all objectively similar in that they have three sides; but you and I can perceive quite different similarities between ravens and writingdesks. It will therefore be helpful to make an initial distinction between what I will refer to as similarity-as-trigger (objective) and similarity-as-attribution (subjective). Similarity-as-trigger is intended to capture the notion of a particular relation existing between entities in the world, a relation that impinges upon human perception, from matter to mind, in a particular way: different triangles do indeed have three sides. Similarity-as-attribution is the result of the opposite movement, from mind to matter: it results from the subjective, cognitive process of perceiving two entities as being similar, and perhaps classifying them accordingly (e.g. as words beginning with a given sound). Both aspects of similarity are always present. Other traditional puzzles concern the quantification of similarity, whether we can measure degrees of similarity, and if so, how? There have been two main models of similarity assessment in cognitive psychology (see e.g. the papers in Cacciari (ed.) 1995). One is the mental distance model, according to which concepts referring to entities perceived as similar are located closer to each other in the mind; the degree of similarity can then be represented in terms of multi-dimensional scaling, so that relative similarity is reflected in the relative proximity of values on particular dimensions. The second model is known as the feature or contrast model; here, similarity is seen in terms of overlapping feature sets, with the degree of overlap representing the degree of similarity. This model was originally proposed to account for some of the difficulties experienced by the mental distance model, such as the lack of symmetry in certain similarity relations. The classical source of this approach is Tversky (1977). Let us look at this model in more detail. Tversky argued that the degree of similarity between two objects can be measured in terms of the number of shared and distinctive features that characterize them, i.e. in terms of their degree of feature matching. A "feature" is defined as any property of the object "that can be deduced from our general knowledge of the world" (329). On this view, we can propose the following preliminary definitions: (a) Two entities are similar if they share at least one feature. (b) Two entities are the same if neither has features that the other lacks. A single shared feature would obviously mean no more than minimal similarity. Maximum similarity would lead to confusion between the two objects concerned:

8

CONTRASTIVE FuNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

in fact, degree of similarity might be measured in terms of probability of confusion - a point to which we shall return. As they stand, neither of these definitions is adequate. The first depends on the second, in that shared features are presumably (instances of) the same feature. But the list of features that any entity can be said to have is presumably open-ended: any entity may then be similar to any other entity in some respect. Virtually any two entities may share at least some attributes and hence be "similar" precisely with respect to those attributes that are shared. The whole point of riddles such as Alice' s, of course, is that they juxtapose two entities that at first sight seem very different, and by so doing challenge the hearer to find attributes that are nevertheless shared. Such riddles, we might say, wittily remind us that all entities in the universe are related somehow. Goodman (1972) argues that this is one reason why similarity is so insidious as a philosophical concept. Riddles aside, however, the concept of similarity naturally becomes vacuous if anything can be said to be similar to anything. "Similarity" must accordingly be constrained in some way, particularly if we are to pinpoint the essence of the concept as it is expressed in everyday language, in the true Wittgensteinian spirit. One way of introducing such a constraint is via prototype theory: features are conceived of as being present or absel).t to a certain degree, not absolutely, "and similarities are assessed in terms of relative closeness to a prototype. The prototype thus serves as a tertium comparationis. In other words, the relation of the assessed entities to the prototype takes precedence over other possible dimensions of assessment. Here too, however, the relative closeness tends to be conceptualized in terms of features: robins are more similar to eagles than penguins are, because although all three are birds the first two are closer to the prototype "bird" since they share the prominent prototypical feature "ability to fly".

This suggests that some notion of prominence itself is actually what provides the necessary constraint. Goodman (1972) appeals to the relative "importance" of different features, so that judgements of similarity are in practice made by calculating all the shared important properties only, or rather "the overall importance of the shared properties" (444); but of course "importance" is itself a volatile, shifting concept, always relative to context and interest. Other terms that have been used to capture this necessary constraint on feature-counting are salience and relevance: only features that are salient or relevant should count in the attribution or measurement of similarity. Salience (also labelled prominence by some) is another complex notion. Tversky ( 1977) argues that it is determined both by the intensity of individual features and by their diagnosticity (i.e. how significant they are for a given similarity judgement). Intensity, thus understood and defined, is a quality

CONTRASTIVE

9

intrinsic to the entity itself, as colours or lights or sounds exhibit various degrees of intensity regardless of who observes them. It is defined objectively, e.g. for sounds in terms of decibels. It tends to be stable across different contexts, it is less bound by perception or context. Intensity in this sense is thus primarily a quality of similarity-as-trigger. Tversky' s diagnosticity is close to what others would call relevance. Judgements of similarity are, after all. ways of organizing and clarifying one's mental representations of the world. This is precisely the point made by Sperber and Wilson (1986: 103), who claim that "the relevance of new information to an individual is to be assessed in terms of the improvements it brings to his representation of the world." Endorsing the link between similarity and relevance, they suggest further that "a proper account of the perception of resemblance in general should be based on a well-developed notion of relevance" (232-3). In terms of their theory of relevance, this means roughly that the way we perceive similarities depends on (a) the effect this perception will have on our immediate cognitive environment, and (b) the effort that needs to be expended in the perception process. Some similarities are harder to perceive than others, but may therefore become more significant when they are perceived. Dali has a painting called "Ch~i_st of St. John of the Cross" in which the central shape on the cross is very similar· to that of an ox skull, the outstretched arms being like ~he horns, etc.; the perception of this similarity affects the whole way one sees the picture. (See website http://www .trentgrf.com/hunt/d 105 .htm.) Other similarities are immediately obvious, so obvious that we seldom bother to become conscious of them (the colour of the folder on my desk is very close to that of the card-box next to it, and I call them both "green", but I seldom need to be actually aware of this similarity). With respect to similarity judgement, diagnosticity is entirely contextbound; it depends on the whole frame of reference, the purpose of the judgement and the intentions of the person judging. As Goodman (1972) puts it, "similarity is relative, variable, culture-dependent" (438) and also theory-bound. The same pair of entities can be judged by the same person to be similar or different depending on the context or frame of reference. Imagine a simple size judgement: oranges are to be assessed as either big or small. Given a single pair consisting of a small orange of 4 cm diameter and a middle-sized one of 7 cm diameter, we will no doubt place the middle-sized one in the "big" category. But if a third and enormous orange of, say, 12 cm diameter is introduced into the set, the middlesized one will probably be reclassified as "small", in the new context provided by the addition of the enormous one. "Circumstances alter similarities" (Goodman 1972: 445).

10

CONTRASTIVE FuNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

Salience, because of its component of diagnosticity, is thus not an absolute concept. That is, a given feature of an entity is not salient per se. It is salient to someone, to an observer, from a particular point of view. Likewise, a given feature is relevant with respect to some purpose or, again, from a particular point of view. Judgements of salience or relevance are of course made by someone, but it is important to appreciate that the very concepts themselves are relative in this sense. In other words, this relativity pertains to similarity-as-attribution. Semiotically speaking, after all, "similarity" is a sign that is attributed to a set of entities, attributed by someone and also interpreted by someone. Furthermore, like relevance, salience is also relative within itself: a feature is not judged absolutely, as salient or not salient, but as more or less salient. Salience is obviously a matter of degree: different features will have different. weightings for salience. This point has been stressed in psychological research on judgements of similarity degree in sorting experiments. Tversky, for instance, showed that judgements of similarity do indeed depend heavily on context: asked to estimate the relative degree of similarity between Austria and other countries, subjects responded quite differently in the context of "Austria, Sweden, Poland and Hungary" as compared to "Austria, Sweden, Norway and Hungary". In the first context, the country most similar to Austria was felt to be Sweden; in the second, Austria was felt to be most similar to Hungary. In other words, the context affects the salience of various distinctive versus shared features, and this in turn affects judgements of relative similarity. Tversky summarizes this point as follows (1977: 344). Classifications based on relative similarity are not determined by similarities among the objects themselves. Rather, "the similarity of objects is modified by the manner in which they are classified". Similarity thus not only serves as a basis for classification (i.e. causally, similarity-as-trigger), but also results from and is modified by the particular classification adopted (derivatively, similarity-as-attribution). Compare the way in which Sperber and Wilson ( 1986: 39) regard the cognitive ability of sight as a simile for other cognitive abilities. What is visible to someone is argued to be a function both of the physical environment itself and of the person's visual abilities. Similarly, a fact is said to be "manifest" to an individual if he or she can represent it mentally. The total set of manifest facts accessible to an individual comprises his or her cognitive environment. A person's cognitive enviroment is thus a function of physical environment and cognitive abilities. In my terms, this physical environment includes instances of similarity-as-trigger; the cognitive abilities includes the ability to attribute and assess similarity. To attribute similarity is to represent it mentally.

CONTRASTIVE

11

Further: just as some things are more visible than others, some facts are also more manifest than others in a given environment, again depending partly on the environment itself and partly on an individual's cognitive abilities: in other words, depending on the degree of salience. Sovran refers to other studies which also complicate the picture of similarity-as-attribution. It seems, for instance, that judgements of visual similarity (e.g. between pictures of landscapes) are based more on distinctive features, whereas judgements of verbal similarity (e.g. between descriptions of meals) are based more on shared features. Some researchers point out, moreover, that it is not a priori clear what is to count as a feature at all, and that the basis for similarity judgements is thus also unclear. Here again the appeal must be to salience. Similarity judgements also vary across subjects even in the same context, as the different responses to Alice's riddle indicate. Different subjects focus on different features of the situation, assess salience in different ways. And even a single subject may make (or appear to make) different similarity assessments at different times, even within the same conversation. Recall Hamlet's exchange with Polonius (III.2.400-406): Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel? Polonius: By the mass, and 'tis like a camel, indeed. Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel. Polonius: It is backed like a weasel. Hamlet: Or like a whale? Polonius: Very like a whale.

A further point about similarity that will be of theoretical significance in due course is the relation between the range of items assessed as being similar, and the degree of the similarity assessed. The relation is one of inverse correlation. That is, the greater the extension of the set of items assessed as being similar, the less the pertinent degree of similarity. (Many things are green, but few are the precise shade of green of my folder.) At one extreme, as suggested above, anything can be seen as similar to anything else, or even everything to everything else: at this level, however, the degree of similarity is of course very slight. When an assessment increases the degree of similarity that is deemed to be relevant, this then diminishes the range of items that can qualify as being similar. (Humans share many genes with chimpanzees, more with other members of the human species, and more still with their own parents.) At the other extreme, the specification of degree of similarity is so demanding - amounting in fact to "identity" - that nothing is assessed as being similar to anything else: at this

12

CONTRASTIVE FuNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

level, everything is different. (No-one is genetically identical to me.) Between these extremes, judgements of similarity therefore involve establishing a compromise between degree of similarity and range of similarity. The establishment of this compromise is of course determined by relevance, by the purpose of the assessment. When we say or perceive that something is similar to something else, we are thus doing something rather complex. Medin and Goldstone ( 1995) argue that similarity judgements are creative, constructive processes in the mind of the comparison-maker, affected by directionality (A is like B vs. B is like A), relevance or salience, context, purpose, and so on. Logically, similarity is a multi-placed predicate, not a two-place one (A is like B) nor even a three-placed one (A is like B in respect C): when we say that A is similar to B, what we really mean is that "A is similar to Bin respects C according to comparison process D, relative to some standard E mapped onto judgments by some function F for some purpose G" (1995: 106). Medin and Goldstone' s paper reports some of the empirical, experimental evidence behind this statement. The details are not relevant to my argument here, but their general conclusion serves to substantiate some of the main points I have made in this section. 1.1.2. Divergent and Convergent Similarity

Sovran's (1992) approach to an analysis of similarity is to set up a taxonomy covering a number of English lexemes in the broad semantic field of similarity. She groups these items into various sub-domains representing types of similarity: repetition, copy, reconstruction, mistaken identification, the type-token relation, representation, and analogy. Sovran's main contribution to the debate is the proposal that similarity (which subsumes sameness) is not a unitary concept at all, and that its various sub-domains are qualitatively different; and further that these sub-domains display a tension between the two tendencies of "oneness" and "separate individuation". In effect, we are offered a binary concept of similarity that I find extremely fruitful. Sovran clarifies as follows: (a) The 'oneness' starting point. Adapting Sovran somewhat, I shall call this divergent similarity, and symbolize it thus: A~

A', A", A'" ...

Divergent similarity describes a relation resulting from a process that moves from one to more-than-one. The original "one" is usually conceived of as a kind of

CONTRASTIVE

13

standard, as having higher status or temporal priority. Prototypical examples are similarity via duplication (5) and forgery (6); less prototypical are examples of reconstruction (7) or of mistaken identity (8) (examples from Sovran). (5) (6) (7)

(8)

They manufactured hundreds of copies of the same product every day. This is a forgery of the original painting. The rebuilt church looks very much like the destroyed original building. You look so much like your father, I was sure you were he. (In other words, A' was mistakenly thought to be A.)

(b) The 'separateness' starting point. I shall call this convergent similarity, and symbolize it thus:

This symbolization is intended to capture the idea that A converges towards B and B towards A. (In its simplest form, illustrated here, this similarity exists between two entities, but it is of course not restricted to two.) Two entities start by being separate, and the similarity relation creates a bridge, a mutual approximation, between them. The movement is from more-than-one to one. Here, no assumption is made concerning priority status between the two: both have equal status. Prototypical examples are similarity as resemblance (9) or analogy (10) (Sovran's examples again). (9) They look very much the same. (10) There is a certain analogy between the two countries' policies. Of Sovran's set of sub-domains, the only one so far unaccounted for is the typetoken one, which seems to be the most complex. At first sight, we might hypothesize that the difference between token-identity and type-identity would correspond to the conceptual difference between sameness and similarity. To test this via English, let us assume that a prototypical expression of the notion of sameness in English is the lexeme same, and for similarity correspondingly the lexeme similar. In favour of the hypothesis we can then point to evidence such as the following: ( 11) Both teams have the same number of players, viz.: eleven. ( 12) Sue and Sam arrived on the same day: October 4, 1994.

14

CONTRASTIVE FuNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

(13) This is the same pen I used yesterday- I remember the toothmarks. (14) There should be a similar number of people in each group, somewhere between 10 and 15, say. (the same range) (15) We had a similar day last week- mist in the morning and then bright sunshine later. (same kind of weather) (16) These two pens look similar, but one is more expensive than the other. (same class of appearance) Indeed, with respect to similarity, any sorting task must by definition rely on people's ability to perceive similarity in terms of same-category-membership, in terms of entities seen as tokens of the same type. On this view, the puzzle facing Alice is simply: what category (what type) can be postulated such that both ravens and writing-desks can be said to be members of it (tokens)? However, with respect to sameness the situation is not that simple: the difference between English similar and same is not at all clear-cut. Consider examples such as the following (from Sovran): ( 17) "I want a different apple." "Why? They are all the same." (18) They wore the same dress. (i.e. same style and colour) (19) I'll have the same as her. (said to a waiter) In such examples, same clearly denotes not identity of referent but membership of the same class; in other words, it denotes not identity of token but identity of type. In fact, same is frequently ambiguous between type and token identity: example (18) above is given a type-reading by the gloss, but (out of context) a token reading is equally possible (i.e. Sue wore the dress on Monday and then lent it to Sarah, who wore it on Tuesday). To hypothesize that same automatically denotes token-identity is thus an oversimplification. Correspondingly, although the concept of similarity necessarily excludes tokenidentity, the concept of sameness applies equally well to both token and typeidentity. It should be stressed, however, that the slippage between sameness and similarity evidenced by these two English lexemes may differ from similar slippages in other languages. In Finnish, for instance, the standard word for 'same' (sama) cannot be used to express the type-identity in (17), and would be unlikely in (18) as a type reading; but it can give the type-reading in (19). The point nevertheless remains: that sameness does not always correlate exclusively with token-identity. Sovran argues that type-token relations, illustrated by examples (14-19), depend on a combination of (what I have called) divergent and convergent

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similarity. Looked at from type to tokens, the relation is divergent; looked at from tokens to type, it is convergent. With respect to the two macrolinguistic fields concerned with multi-lingual matters, the approach usually taken in Translation Theory focuses on divergent similarity and that usually taken in Contrastive Analysis on convergent similarity. That is, a translation starts with a single phenomenon and derives others from it which retain a relation of similarity with the original; whereas a contrastive analysis starts with two different phenomena which are already assumed to contain some features of similarity. As we shall see, Translation Theory has tended to take different views on equivalence, depending on the tolerated degree of divergence between the derived phenomenon and the original; Contrastive Analysis has tended to view equivalence more stringently, so that the relation between different phenomena is seen as convergence or non-convergence, identity or non-identity. This difference will have some bearing on the discussion of equivalence below. The final point I wish to borrow from Sovran concerns the role played by the imagination in the attribution of similarity. This is initially suggested (in Sovran's article) by the polysemy of the Hebrew word dimyon, which means both 'imagination' and 'resemblance'. Sovran links this insight to other data (such as the grammar of as, as an operator of similarity in English), and to cognitive procedures underlying deixis. The details do not concern us here, but the general conclusions are thought-provoking. The gist of the argument is that similarity "has its origins in imagination and creation, as well as in making precise and in recognizing" (342). Similarity is closely bound up with perception and cognition. We can identify entities, e.g. by naming them or otherwise referring to them, deictically locating them; and we can classify them, in terms of perceived similarities with other entities. To perceive a similarity is to see something as something else, to imagine it in a particular way. The ability to perceive similarities is thus limited only by the range of the human imagination. Alice's riddle challenges her to "scan the feature space" (as Tversky would put it) in her imagination, in search of an appropriate frame of reference within which at least one shared feature could be located. In relevance-theoretical terms again: the more puzzling the riddle- i.e. the more unlikely the proposed similarity - the greater the processing effort required to solve it, and the greater the "contextual effect" or "cognitive effect" of the eventual solution, with this effect being construable as something like "intellectual satisfaction". The above-mentioned recourse to the imagination also supplies a solution to the paradox we encountered earlier about the definition of sameness. Whether or not two entities are the same (with respect to all salient features) is actually

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beside the point; there will always be features, albeit perhaps not salient ones, which separate any two entities. ·But the point is whether or not two entities count as the same, within a given frame of reference and for the purpose in hand. And whether something counts as something else is, ultimately, a question of imagination. The ability to see something "as" something else is, after all, central to human cognition, as Sovran also stresses. Indeed, Wierzbicka ( 1980) takes the concept of "being thought of as" to be one of her fundamental set of only thirteen semantic primitives. Let me now recapitulate my own main points so far, points that will count as basic building-blocks for what will follow. (a) The concept of similarity is Janus-faced. It simultaneously refers to a relation-in-the-world and a perception-in-the-mind. The element of subjective perception is always present in any judgement of similarity. (b) Two entities are perceived to be similar to the extent that their salient features match. (c) Two entities count as the same within a given frame of reference if neither is perceived to have salient features which the other lacks. (d) Assessments about what counts as a feature and how salient a feature is are both context-bound (where context includes the purpose of the assessment) and assessor-bound. (e) Assessments of similarity are thus constrained by relevance. (f) Degree of similarity correlates inversely with the extension of the set of items judged to be similar. (g) Two main types of similarity relation can be distinguished: divergent and convergent. Similarity has traditionally entered Translation Theory and Contrastive Analysis under the rubric of "equivalence", a term which has been given a wide variety of interpretations in these two fields. The next two sections examine these interpretations, and assess the degree of overlap between them.

1.2.

Equivalence in Translation Theory

As we shall see, Contrastive Analysis frequently makes recourse to what it calls "translation equivalence"; however, the concept has also evolved somewhat independently in the older field of Translation Theory, where it is of course

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ubiquitous. By way of necessary background, this section offers a concise overview of the concept of equivalence in Translation Theory. First of all, recall that the word for translation itself in many languages (lndo-European ones at least) goes back to an etymology of 'carrying across' or 'setting across'. (In Finnish, by contrast, the image is one of 'turning', which well fits the notion of divergent similarity!) That which is carried across is not expected to change en route, it is expected to be "the same" on arrival, as one might carry a man across a river and set him on the opposite bank unaltered. (The man carried across the river is of course some minutes older when he gets to the other bank, some of the atoms composing him have gone elsewhere, etc.; but such changes are irrelevant here.) Or, to use another well-worn image, as one might carry a set of clothes in a suitcase through the border customs from one country to another, being required by the customs officials to open the suitcase, unpack and then repack; the actual clothes would nevertheless remain the same. We have a temporal process, in which something- call it A- already existing "before" the process, is assumed to remain the same "after" the process, in its new state as A'. Let us call this the translation identity assumption, formalized simply as: A (tl) =A' (t2) where tl denotes 'time before' and t2 denotes 'time after'. The only difference between before and after is thus e.g. 'the geographical position of the man who was carried across the river' or 'the packed arrangement of the clothes taken through customs'. This formula is of course reminiscent of the one often used to represent metaphor: X= Y. That is, in some sense something (X) "is" something else (Y). X and Y are different entities, but in some sense they are "the same". Jasper "is" a pig when he eats sp&ghetti, in the opinion of those who observe him. And indeed, the term metaphor and its cognates in other languages also goes back to exactly the same origin as translation, the notion of carrying across or beyond. Implictly, then (in In do-European cultures at least), translation has been thought of in very much the same way as metaphor is thought of. A translated text (a target text) "is a metaphor of' its source text. In the theory of metaphor, the element that the metaphor is based on, by virtue of which Jasper is said to be a pig, has sometimes been called the ground (Richards 1936). In this metaphor, the ground is something like 'messy way of eating'. The fact that this ground is deemed to be common to both Jasper and a typical pig is the motivation for the use of the metaphor; and the ability of a reader or hearer to interpret the metaphor depends precisely on the understanding of this common ground. A metaphor, in

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other words, builds upon a perceived similarity between two entities; so does translation. The big problem for Translation Theory, in a nutshell, has been: what is the ground by virtue of which we can say that something is a translation of something else? I will distinguish three broad approaches: the equative view, the taxonomic view, and the relativist view.

1.2.1. The Equative View This approach is perhaps the oldest one (see e.g. Kelly 1979; Rener 1989). It is based on the original mathematical definition of equivalence, denoting a reversible relation: A is B and B is A. The classical Greek view of language was

architectural·. language is a structure composed of elements, words, which function as signs. Signs represent meanings; meanings are absolute, unchanging, they are manifestations of the ideal, they are Platonic Ideas. Changing the sign (sonum) had no effect on the meaning (significatio). To translate (for Augustine, for instance) meant decomposing the original structure, extracting the bricks with which it was constructed, and building a new structure from the same bricks. The bricks themselves remained constant. Identity of meaning, of the signified, was thus supported (and in fact guaranteed) by a particular view of language, including certain beliefs about meaning. Such an approach to translation appears to have been heavily influenced by the uses to which translation was put at the time, and other more general beliefs of the scholars who thought about these matters. The postulation of significatio identity was in fact one way of getting round a serious paradox. Namely: many of these early scholars were concerned with the translation of the Bible. If you believed that the Bible was indeed the Word of God, as originally uttered in Hebrew or Greek or Aramaic, how could you meddle with it without committing sacrilege? On the one hand, the original was sacred; on the other, God himself had instructed believers to spread the message. The obvious solution was to set up a theory of translation based on a separation of form and meaning: the form would necessarily change during the process from one language to another, but the meaning could be assumed to remain constant. Hence a belief in the identity of meaning across translation. The belief was of course a vulnerable one, and was gradually chipped away from different angles. There were many source-text words whose meaning nevertheless seemed to change in translation. One solution was to use loanwords (such as the incorporation of Hebrew amen into Latin) as a way of guaranteeing the required identity; but this could not be used all the time. Another solution was to admit the necessity of some change but to reduce this as far as possible by

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adopting a strategy of minimum formal change. This strategy was also supported by the idea that not only the meaning or message but also the very form of the original text was sacred. St. Jerome, patron saint of translation, is quoted as having believed quite explicitly that in Holy Writ, "even the order of the words is a mystery" (Huetius, [1683] 1992: 92). The issue is thus felt to be an ethical one: referring to his own translation practice, Erasmus wrote that he preferred "to sin through excessive scrupulousness rather than through excessive license" ([1506] 1992: 60). The consequence of such attitudes was therefore an emphasis on literal translation, based ultimately on an enormous respect for the original text. The equative view has two fundamental weaknesses. Consider first the identity metaphor which underlies it, that of carrying something across in such a way that it remains unchanged. The trouble with this metaphor is that it only captures part of the notion of translation, and hence gives a distorted picture of the whole. In transporting something across from A to B, there is only one something (say, a man to be carried across a river); and upon arrival at B the something is, by definition, no longer at A. The identity of the something is thus guaranteed by the assumed material constancy of all objects through reasonably short- or mid-term time spans. But in translation this is not the case. A source text (or message or meaning) does not disappear from the source culture by virtue of its translation into a target culture; it continues to exist at its source. The whole idea of translation as movement is thus misleading. Translation is not equative, but additive. The point can be formalized very simply. Whereas the equative view is based on the identity assumption and is denoted (omitting the temporal aspect) by A=A' the additive view of the translation process is A==>A+A' That is: the source text remains the same (A), but the process has given rise to an additional text at time 2, the target text A'. This formula highlights several points which clash with the identity 'assumption. It captures the idea that translatiop is a process of addition: a text is added to the universe of texts, new potential readers are added to those for whom the original message is accessible. Furthermore, the status of the source text itself is now 'value-added', since it is now a text-thathas-a-translation, no longer a text-on-its-own. Translation is additive in another sense too, in that a given text can be translated several times, at different periods, by different people, for different purposes, and so on, hence giving rise to

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several target texts; there may be not only A', but also A", A'" etc. Further, unlike the mathematical definition of an equivalence relation, the translation relation is not normally reversible: back-translated texts very seldom. end up being the same as the original source. (Obvious exceptions are word-level translations of many technical terms.) But what of the relation between A and A' etc.? If the metaphor of constancy-through-movement is abandoned, the very notion of identity becomes demoted. On this view, the relation between A and A' etc. is very like the relation of divergent similarity mentioned in the previous section, which was symbolized as A:::} A', A", A'" ... Applying this to translation, and incorporating the fact that the source text does not disappear, and also that a given source text may have many translations, we get: A:::} A,A',A",A"' ... This illustrates that the only true identity that is preserved through the temporal process is that of A itself (albeit with value-added status). The target text, A' in the first place, is not identical with its source A, but only divergently similar to it. The first argument against the equative view is therefore that it is based on a misleading metaphor. The second argument is that the equative view is based on the converse accident fallacy: it generalizes non-validly from one particular text-type to all text-types. It is, after all, manifestly not the case that all source texts have the same kind of high, sacred status as Holy Scripture. Some are certainly valued as such - legal texts, some philosophical texts, for instance - but many more are not. Translation practice through the ages has of course recognized this. Competent professional translators have always translated different texts in different ways as a matter of course, sometimes more literally, sometimes more freely (see e.g. Bass nett 1991). From this point of view, the equative approach is far too narrow, and also too uniform in its evidently false assumption that all source texts form a homogeneous set, and moreover that sacred texts are prototypical examples of this set.

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1.2.2. The Taxonomic View To counter criticisms such as these, proposals have been made that equivalence is not a unitary concept but consists of several types. Different types of equivalence are argued to be appropriate in the translation of different kinds of texts. Alternatively, some types are argued to be more important than other types, so that for each text (or text-type) there is a hierarchy of types of equivalence. In these ways, the concept of equivalence is argued to be context-sensitive. In the Western tradition we can trace the beginnings of this view in Jerome, who held that non-sacred texts should be translated more freely than sacred ones: however equivalence was to be defined for non-sacred texts, it was not felt to be strictly equative in the sense discussed above. We also find explicit comments by later translators which demonstrate their own need to work with a taxonomy of equivalence. In its simplest form, this appears as a division between equivalence of form or style versus equivalence of content. To take just one example: in the 17th century Cowley stated quite explicitly that his aim in translating Pindar was not to preserve the content of the original but its style (Steiner 1975: 66); indeed he felt quite free to omit, select and add what he pleased in the actual content. On a more theoretical level, many explicit taxonornies of equivalence have been proposed during the past 30 years or so. I will mention just a few, to illustrate the general approach. An early and influential example is the distinction made by Nida (1964) between formal equivalence and dynamic equivalence. The binary division here is between the form-and-meaning of a message on the one hand, and the effect of a message on the other. Nida argued that translators (of the Bible, too) should give a higher priority to dynamic equivalence, so that the target text would have the same effect on its readers as the source text did on the original readers. An important corollary of this is the priority Nida gives to naturalness in the target text, since unnatural style is a factor that interferes with, and alters, the effect of the message. By thus stressing the importance of the role played by text-reception in influencing the translation process, Nida helped to shift theoretical attention away from texts-as-such to texts-as-people-use-them; semiotic ally, this meant a shift towards pragmatics, towards users and interpreters of signs. Catford ( 1965: 27) makes a different distinction. On the one hand, he postulates "formal correspondence", which exists between source and targetlanguage categories when they occupy "as nearly as possible, the 'same' place" in the "economies" of the two languages. Thus defined, formal correspondence denotes an approximation, an optimal or maximal closeness, not a true identity: 'same' is hedged by the quotation marks. On the other hand, there is "textual" or "translation equivalence", which denotes the relation between a text-portion in a

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source text and whatever text-portion is observed to be equivalent to it in a given target text. Textual equivalence is thus no more than the relation that de facto exists between any source text and a target text that is accepted as being a translation of it. Textual equivalents are not defined by a translation theory but discovered in practice, via the authority of a competent translator or bilingual. Catford argues that the condition for translation equivalence is "interchangeability in a given situation" (49). Expressions in different languages rarely "mean the same" in all respects; but they are mutually translatable insofar as they relate to "(at least some of) the same features of [situational] substance" (50). That is, the common ground is to be found in the situation itself, not in the semantics of sentences: there is no equivalence of meaning, since meanings are language-specific, and so we cannot "transfer meaning" from one language to another. We can translate I have arrived into Russian asja prisla not because they "mean the same"- they don't- but because there is an overlap between the sets of situational features which both utterances select as relevant: there is a speaker, there is an arrival, and this arrival is a prior event. The fact that each utterance also selects other situational features (such as the sex of the speaker in Russian) does not invalidate their mutual translatability. Notice how close Catford's view is here to the theory of similarity assessment advocated by Tversky (discussed above). What we have is, precisely, a process of feature matching. In different terminology, we could frame Catford's position as follows. I We have three potential kinds of equivalence: formal equivalence, which can only '\ be approximate; semantic equivalence, which is theoretically impossible; and , situational equivalence, which is the basis for translation. The underlying belief, of course, is that situational equivalence actually exists, at least insofar as we can speak of "the same features of substance" as being present in the source and target situations. Significantly, Catford uses no quotes around "same" here: this is indeed the locus of his identity assumption. Catford's view is also relevant to my own argument in that he too rejects the movement metaphor: nothing is transferred from A to B in translation. Rather, he defines translation as the process of "replacing" textual material in one language with textual material in another (20). Although situational features may be "the same", predicting what will be replaced by what, in any actual instance of translation, is a matter of probability. Unconditioned probabilities of equivalence specify the likelihood of a given source-language item being replaced-in-translation by various target-language items: the probability of French dans being translated into English as in is .73, according to a sample analysed by Catford (1965: 30), compared with a .19 chance of appearing as into. Conditioned probabilites, on the other hand, include

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a specification of the conditions under which a given source item tends to get translated as a given target item: in the environment of a preceding verb of motion and a following locative noun, for example, the probability of dans being translated as into is practically l. Specifying conditioned probabilities between language pairs is precisely the challenge for machine translation, of course. Catford also suggests a further extension, to which we shall return in the following chapter; he· writes (31 ): Provided the sample is big enough, translation-equivalence-probabilities may be generalized to form 'translation rules' applicable to other texts, and perhaps to the 'language as a whole' -or, more strictly, to all texts within the same variety of the language [... ]. A rather different taxonomy of equivalence in Translation Theory has been proposed by Koller (e.g. 1979), comprising five types: (i) Denotative equivalence (otherwise known as invariance of content, semantic equivalence); (ii) Connotative equivalence (including equivalence of style, register, and frequency); (iii) Text-normative equivalence (concerning text-type usage norms); (iv) Pragmatic equivalence (receiver-oriented, equivalence of effect); (v) Formal equivalence (including aesthetic· and poetic features). For Koller, these types represent various qualities or values or features of the source text that "must be preserved" as far as possible. They may have different priorities and form different hierarchies in different text-types and translation assignments: pragmatic equivalence often takes precedence over the other types. Some types are in principle more attainable than others: in principle, denotative equivalence should, he claims, always be attainable (contrary to Catford!); coimotative equivalence, on the other hand, is seldom totally achieved. From a theoretical point of view the taxonomic approach too suffers from a number of serious weaknesses. For one thing, there appears to be little agreement on how some types of equivalence should be properly defined. With respect to dynamic/pragmatic equivalence of effect, for instance, it is not clear whether "effect" can be defined and measured at all, let alone how this might be done; nor is it clear whether we can determine the recipients on whom some effect might be measured; or what the relation should be between actual effect and author's intended effect; and so on- there are a host of unsolved problems here.

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More importantly, there does not seem to be any theoretically motivated constraint on the possible number of equivalence types: is the set potentially infinite? Snell-Hornby (1986: 15) claimed to have found as many as 58 types of A.quivalenz mentioned in German studies. If every translation assignment, every source text, is sui generis, and defines its own hierarchy of values-to-bepreserved, is there even any sense in trying to establish a finite set of general equivalence types? Most importantly of all, the proposed taxonomies tend to be both mutually and internally inconsistent with respect to the basic problem of the identity assumption. With some types of equivalence, identity seems impossible: the same effect would ideally require the same recipient in the same situation in the same frame of mind etc.; sameness of collocation would similarly require identical cognitive history and environment; sameness of style would require identical repertoires of styles to draw from etc. Some (such as Jakobson 1959) argue that denotative equivalence is always possible, others deny it. Others again argue that sameness of meaning is not possible but that sameness of situation is - as if meanings existed somehow on their own, isolated from any situation. In fact, to split equivalence into subtypes merely shifts the basic problem of sameness one level down; it does not eliminate the problem. 1.2.3. The Relativist View

' In the light of the above comments it is not surprising that many recent contributions to Translation Theory have tended to reject the identity assumption altogether, and with it the concept of equivalence. For Snell-Hornby (1988), for instance, equivalence is no more than an illusion. What has amounted to a campaign against equivalence has exploited three main lines of argument. The first has been a rejection of "sameness" as a criterion for any relation between source and target, and its replacement by more relative terms such as similarity (e.g. Ross 1981), matching (Holmes 1988) or Wittgenstein's family resemblance (e.g. Toury 1980). The latter term is particularly interesting. Recall that Wittgenstein's point was to demonstrate that exemplars of a given concept such as "game" actually resembled other things called games in many different ways: resemblances are of many kinds. In Translation Theory, where "family resemblance" describes the relation between a source and a target text, the term thus brings the insight that the resemblance in a given case is only one of a number of possible resemblances. Whereas sameness is one, similarities are many. This line of argument is also linked to a particular understanding of the rationality of the translating process. On the sameness view, a translator's

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rationality is what E. Itkonen (1983) has called prescriptive: there is only one rational solution to the translation problem, only one target variant that is truly "equivalent", and the translator's task is to find it. On the similarity view, a translator's rationality is descriptive: there is more than one possible solution, and the translator's task is to find one of them, heuristically the best he or she can think of at the time. (True, there are occasions when only one right variant will do, as in the translation of technical terms; but these are usually word or phraselevel matters only.) This weakening of the demand for sameness has led to the postulation of a relation norm (among other norms) governing professional translation behaviour (Chesterman 1997: 69). This norm is designed to capture the empirical fact of the enormous range of possible relations between source texts and other texts that are claimed to be, and accepted as being, translations of them. The norm is stated in the following way, with no reference to identity or equivalence. The relation norm: a translator should act in such a way that an appropriate relation is established and maintained between the source text and the target text. It is then up to the translator to decide precisely what this appropriate relation should be in each case. To take one extreme example: Georges Perec's extraordinary novel entitled La Disparition ([1969] 1988) does not use the letter "e" at all; the work is a stylistic trick, mirrored in the title itself. This has been translated into English (by Gilbert Adair, 1994) under the title A Void, in a version that similarly dispenses with the letter "e" throughout. The translator's interpretation of the relation norm has thus been: the relation must be such that one particular stylistic trick is preserved, at the expense of all other features if necessary. The title, for instance, is not denotatively equivalent to the original ('The disappearance'), there is an added pun, and the French definite article becomes English indefinite. The translation throughout exploits a stylistic trick that is similar to that of the original. In some respects the trick is "the same", in that both texts can be described in words such as "they do not use 'e"'; but in other respects it is different: the normal distribution of the letter can scarcely be exactly the same in the two languages and so the overall effect is bound to be slightly different. The use of the trick also affects the text as a whole in different ways: for instance, English avoids all definite articles (the) but accepts indefinite singulars (a), but French is even more restrictive, having to avoid definite masculines and plurals (le, les), feminine singulars (une) and indefinite plurals (des), and only accepting indefinite singulars that are masculine (un). The example illustrates the way

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translators first decide on the nature of the relation norm which will be optimally appropriate in a given situation, and then adapt other aspects of the translation process to the constraints imposed by this norm; in this case, one result is an acceptance of considerable differences of meaning, for example. What matters, in other words, is whatever the translator decides is the relevant similarity (or similarities) in this particular case, just as in the traditional sorting task mentioned earlier (p. 10). Pym ( 1992) reminds us that equivalence is fundamentally an economic term, denoting exchange value in a particular situation: "equivalence depends only on what is offered, negotiated and accepted in the exchange situation" (45). In each situation, the parties concerned decide what is of value, what is worth exchanging for what. The second relativist line of debate against equivalence is the argument from cognition, developed most cogently and at some length by Gutt ( 1991 ). It has already been touched on above; in brief, it runs as follows. The interpretation of any utterance is a function of the utterance itself and the cognitive state of the interpreter: we interpret things in the light of what we already know. No two people can ever be in exactly the same cognitive state, for no two people have exactly the same cognitive history. Therefore, no two people can ever interpret a given utterance in exactly the same way. This argument of course holds within a given language too, but it is particularly relevant to translation. Gutt shows, for example, that in translating the Bible it is an illusion to suppose that contemporary recipients can interpret an utterance in the same way as people in another culture several thousand years ago, for their whole cognitive environments, including all kinds of cultural and contextual assumptions, are of course entirely different. To think that one is aiming at equivalence of effect is pure self-delusion. This argument also conclusively rejects any sameness of situation. The third line of argument has come from comparative literary studies and literary translation. Scholars such as Toury ( 1980, 1995) have sought to turn the source-target priorities on their heads, by claiming that Translation Theory should take the target culture as its starting point, not the source culture. After all, it is in the target culture that translations are accepted as translations rather than something else; literary translations enter the target culture polysystem, not that of the source culture. Rather than start from a source text and prescribe in advance some kind of equivalence which a translation of it should fulfil, we should start with existing translations and then examine the various kinds of resemblances/relations which exist between these and their source texts. We could compare several target versions of the same source, for instance, and deduce what the translators' strategies had been, perhaps at different periods of

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history; we could try to establish the various constraints that impinge upon a translator's decision-making (e.g. Lefevere 1992a). Such an approach makes Translation Theory a descriptive endeavour rather than a prescriptive one. Toury (1991, 1995), for instance, is explicit about Translation Studies being an empirical science whose aim is to determine the general laws of translation behaviour: what, under specified temporal, geographical and cultural conditions, are translators observed to do? Other scholars have arrived at a similar overall view by elevating the notion of the translation skopos (aim, purpose) to priority status (cf. e.g. Reiss and Vermeer 1984). They reject the assumption that a translation should automatically seek to achieve the same skopos as the original: what counts in the translation process is not what the original skopos was, but what the skopos of the translation is. It may be very different from that of the original, as when verse is translated as prose, or a novel adapted for a children's version, or a text extract glossed as a linguistic example. Translations have many purposes and are of many kinds. Relativist views of translation equivalence naturally go hand in hand with relativist views of language in general, as opposed to universalist views. I return to this opposition, in connection with the Universal Base hypothesis, in section 1.4.3. In conclusion: most scholars in Translation Theory today tend to reject equivalence as an identity assumption in all its forms (formal, semantic, pragmatic, situational...); they argue that it is theoretically untenable, and also that on empirical grounds it misrepresents what translators actually do. The relation of relevant similarity between source and target text is not given in advance, but takes shape within the mind of the translator under a number of constraints, the most important of which is the purpose of the translated text and the translating act. (For further discussion and some divergent views, see Pym 1995.)

1.3.

Equivalence in Contrastive Analysis

It is sometimes suggested that whereas translation is concerned with communication via texts, i.e. particular instances of language use in particular situations, as parole, the focus of Contrastive Analysis is on differences and similarities between language systems, between grammars, language as langue (e.g. Vehmas-Lehto 1987). However, this difference in viewpoint is becoming increasingly blurred. Both translation theorists and contrastivists have extended

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their focus of attention towards each other, and some scholars have openly sought to establish conceptual bridges between the two disciplines. On the one hand, translation theorists have become interested in establishing principles or rules of translation that would hold more generally than for individual texts: recall Catford's approach cited in the previous chapter, for example; and compare Toury's search for the general laws of translation behaviour, beyond those determined by particular texts. On the other hand, Contrastive Analysis itself has expanded into the area of parole, particularly since the advent of machine-readable corpora. Krzeszowski (1990: 25) actually specifies two major types of contrastive study, one based on lang ue ("systematic" or "projective studies") and the other based on parole ("text-bound studies"). Text-bound studies do not venture generalizations about the underlying grammars that generate texts. Attempts at bridge-building between the two fields often centre on the concept of the norm. Theorists such as Toury (e.g. 1981, 1995) and Coseriu (e.g. 1981) have argued for the centrality of norms, describing an intersubjective level of language midway between competence and performance. Toury proposes that this level of norms should be the main focus of Translation Theory, and Coseriu sees norms as central for both Translation and Contrastive Analysis. Coseriu's definition of the level of norms actually provides a good gloss for the functional approach to be adopted below: the object of linguistic research at this level, he writes (1981: 189), should be the "tibliche traditionelle Realisierung der einzelsprachlichen Funktionen; z.B. fi.ir inhaltliche Funktionen: ihr tibliche Anwendung in der Bezeichnung". For Toury, the norm level of language is the locus of translation competence and what he calls translation potential or translatability; this is defined (1981: 253) as "the capacity of substituting TTs [target texts] for STs [source texts] under certain invariance conditions". For this substitutability to exist, there must be some relevant similarity between source and target. It is the task of Contrastive Analysis to establish the potential similarities, and the task of Translation Theory to explain how and why the translator selects (or has selected) one similar target version rather than another, why one similarity is prioritized over another as being more relevant. In other words (1981: 256): [A]ny "similarity" established in CL [Contrastive Linguistics] is to be rewritten as "translatability under invariance condition x".

This formulation therefore suggests that Contrastive Analysis and Translation Theory are in some respects terminological variants of each other: a "similarity" ' is indeed a kind of "translatability".

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Another respect in which in which Contrastive Analysis has refined its conceptual tools beyond pure langue is illustrated by research in contrastive sociolinguistics or pragmatics, which seek to provide analyses that are more delicate than those at the level of an idealized standard language. The interest here is in anchoring contrastive studies more firmly in the different ways languages are used in different situations, by different kinds of people, at different levels of formality, in different registers and genres, and so on. The aim, in short, is to make contrastive studies more sensitive to various aspects of language use. Oleksy (1984), for instance, argued over a decade ago that Contrastive Analysis should move beyond "form-centred theories of language" (such as structuralism) and incorporate "use-centred" theories (such as speech act theory). Contrastive Analysis should thus expand beyond Chomskyan competence to include many aspects of language performance. Indeed, this is exactly what has happened: Contrastive Analysis has moved outwards from syntax to pragmatics, following broader trends in linguistics as a whole. As Oleksy pointed out, this meant that its central concepts su<>h as congruence and equivalence have needed to be redefined. The current section traces the way in which these concepts have been developed by contrastivists. In so doing, it will also demonstrate the conceptual rapprochement between Contrastive Analysis and Translation Theory. It will thus set the scene for an explication of the methodological approach I will call Contrastive Functional Analysis (hereafter abbreviated to CFA). CFA is defined as a general contrastive methodology, one that is based on semantics in the broadest sense of the term. As a general methodology, it is not tied to any particular grammatical model; I shall, however, use one particular model to demonstrate how the methodology works.

1.3.1. Tertia Comparationis The concept of equivalence in Contrastive Analysis is necessarily linked to that of the tertium comparationis. It has been a commonplace to point out that no comparison can be made between any two entities without a frame of reference provided by a third term of some kind, and that decisions about equivalence are ipso facto decisions about the tertium comparationis. It is also a commonplace to observe that different kinds of analysis require different kinds of third term: this is most obviously the case with respect to the different focuses of phonological studies, lexical studies and syntactic studies. This book does not deal with phonetics or phonology, and I therefore bypass them in what follows. It is instructive to set this initial comparability requirement (i.e. that there must be a tertium comparationis) alongside the foregoing discussions of a "ground" for translation and of the shared features appealed to in similarity

30

CONTRASTIVE FuNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

judgements. A translator, an assessor of similarity (such as someone looking for an answer to Alice's riddle), and a contrastivist all assume a priori that there is some shared ground, and that their task is to find it. Unlike the other two, however, the contrastivist appears to run the risk of circularity, in that the result of the comparison may be thought to be no more than the initial assumption itself. In Krzeszowski's words (1990: 20): We compare in order to see what is similar and what is different in the compared materials; we can only compare items which are in some respect similar, but we cannot use similarity as an independent criterion in deciding how to match items for comparison since similarity (or difference) is to result from the comparison and not to motivate it. (Emphasis original)

We shall return to this methodological problem below. Contrastive Analysis has made use of various kinds of tertium comparationis (see e.g. James 1980). Phonology aside, these have been based either on form or on meaning. Formal bases include surface structure, syntactic deep structure, and formal operations of various kinds (e.g. a given transformation, rule-ordering and the like). The term "formal correspondence" is often used to describe an identity (or maximal similarity) relation at the formal level. Semantic bases (components of lexemes, speech act type etc.) depend explicitly on translation. However, formal correspondence also involves translation implicitly, in that if there is no semantic relation (broadly understood) between two items there seems little point in investigating their possible formal correspondence, unless as part of a search for abstract formal universals. In contrastive studies, formal relations and semantic relations in fact constrain each other. When looking at form, for instance, we assume a semantic equivalence between grammatical terms: an initial reason why we compare the Finnish passiivi to the English passive is because the two terms seem translations of each other (cf. Shore 1988). On the other hand, when looking at meaning relations as manifested through translation, we have tended to omit data that seem to be "too freely" translated - i.e. which differ too much from the original form, as well as its meaning- in addition to data that have been "wrongly" translated. Krzeszowski has suggested that the primary data for (syntactic) contrastive studies should be "the closest. approximations to grammatical word-for-word translations and their synonymous paraphrases, if such forms exist" (1990: f9). This formulation illustrates the mutual constraints of form and meaning rather well: the data must be translations (a minimum meaning constraint), but they must be translations that are as literal as grammatically possible (the formal constraint). In this way Krzeszowski avoids the circularity mentioned above: if

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31

the initial assumption of similarity is a formal one, the semantic relation of (formally constrained) translation is outside the circle of formal properties. Let us now examine the contrastivists' conceptions of equivalence and tertium comparationis in more detail. A convenient entry-point is the work of Krzeszowski (many of whose major papers and insights appear in revised form in Krzeszowski 1990, to which I shall be referring). Krzeszowski's approach to the concept of equivalence is a taxonomic one, and I shall take each of his types in turn (1990: 23f). Krzeszowski first introduces the useful concept of a "2-text", defined as "any pair of texts, written or oral, in two languages, which are used as data in contrastive studies" (25). One member of a 2-text pair may be a translation of the other; or the pair may be matched only in terms of genre, field, tenor, mode etc. Some contrastive studies are based on a 2-text corpus (the "text-bound studies" referred to above) while1 others ("systematic studies") use 2-texts only to test hypotheses. Krzeszowski' s first type of equivalence is statistical equivalence, which is said to obtain between two selected items which have "maximally similar frequencies of occurrence" (27). In order for two items to be selected as candidates for statistical equivalence there must of course be some reason other than their similar frequencies: the motivation must derive from one of the other kinds of observed equivalence, formal or semantic. Type 2 is translation equivalence. Krzeszowski is careful to point out that this is a broad concept, including all kinds of translation: not only "unacceptable" translations but also versions that deviate from the original in various perfectly acceptable ways, motivated by communicative and pragmatic considerations. Translation equivalence is thus not to be equated with "sameness of meaning" (cf. the previous chapter, and with respect to contrastive studies, also I vir 1983). It would appear that the study of translation equivalence is, in fact, the study of what translators actually do, or what they tend to do or have tended to do. Since translators always work from one language to another, studies based on this type of equivalence are inevitably directional, although Ivir also uses back-translation as a way of constraining his primary data. Marton ([ 1968] 1980), however, goes one step further, proposing that the relation of equivalence only holds between sentences that are mutual translations of each other, and furthermore that these mutual translations must be "optimal" translations in a given context: translation equivalence, after all, is always equivalence-in-context, it is always textual (Vehmas-Lehto 1987). Type 3 is system equivalence. This is a relation that may hold between paradigms which are comparable by virtue of a common grammatical label, such as "pronoun" or "article". We can thus compare the pronoun or article systems in-

32

CONTRASTIVE FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

different languages. Clearly, however, the initial assumption of comparability based on "cognate grammatical terms" is open to amendment: the whole system (the whole category of pronouns, for instance) may actually function differently in the two languages, and the grammatical labels may turn out to be misleading. If you were to study the mood systems of French and Finnish for example, modern Finnish grammatical terminology would lead you to suspect that Finnish konditionaali should be lined up against French conditionnel. However, a hundred years ago the same Finnish mood was known in Finnish grammar as the subjunktiivi, which would naturally suggest a link with French subjonctif. In fact the Finnish mood overlaps semantically with both these French ones (see Helkkula et al. 1987), but the example neatly illustrates the risk of assuming sameness of meaning between grammatical terms in different languages: terms, after all, can change. (On the problems of non-equivalent grammatical terminology, see e.g. van Buren [1970] 1980; Jakobsen and Olsen 1990.) Type 4 is semanto-syntactic equivalence, which may hold between constructions. This is the type on which Krzeszowski bases his own theory of Contrastive Generative Grammar, without doubt the most ambitious contribution to theoretical Contrastive Analysis that has appeared so far. I shall return to this grammar in more detail later, but let us here examine the particular concept of equivalence that underlies it. Semanto-syntactic equivalence is defined as identical deep structure, where deep structure is understood to be semantic, a semantic input structur~ to syntactic derivations (Krzeszowski 1990: 152). This identity assumption is crucial for Krzeszowski's grammar, and he goes to some length to defend it. Problems occur, for instance, when two sentences in language A have demonstrably non-identical deep structures (such as an active and its passive), but both appear to be translatable as the same sentence in language B (see Bouton 1976). It all depends, of course, on what the deep structure is considered to contain- a matter which remains somewhat speculative, since the deep structure is not accessible to observation. Krzeszowski restricts his deep structure to sentence semantics in order to save his identity assumption. Problems also occur in the distinction between semanto-syntactic equivalence and translation equival~:;nce. According to Krzeszowski, "the ability to recognize [semanto-syntactic] equivalents is a part of a bilingual person's competence" (161). This view thus predicates such equivalence on intuition. But suppose bilinguals differ in opinion? How might a claim of semanto-syntactic equivalence be falsified? The problem comes up in the way data are sometimes discussed in the contrastive literature. Both Bouton and Krzeszowski, for instance, take the following Finnish-English pair to be equivalent because they

CONTRASTIVE

33

are the closest approximations to grammatical word-for-word translations (seep. 3 for a key to gloss abbreviations): (x) (y)

Someone broke the window. Ikkuna rikottiin. (window break+PAST+PAS)

However, any English-speaking Finn would disagree. The closest approximation to (x) is not (y) but (z): (z)

Joku rikkoi ikkunan. (someone break+PAST+3SG window+ACC)

This "closer" approximation had evidently not occurred to the two scholars in question, although we can certainly accept (x) as a translation of (y). My point, however, is not to quibble with the data here, but to illustrate that judgements of semanto-syntactic equivalence are just that -judgements, made by someone in a particular situation. And such judgements may vary: recall the discussion of similarity assessment above. The literature on equivalence - particularly on pragmatic equivalence, which we come to in a moment - contains many examples of disagreements about what is a "better equivalent" to what (see e.g. the references under Type 7, below), just as there are disagreements about grammaticality judgements in the general linguistic literature. This of course raises the whole question of the role of intuition in Contrastive Analysis, which I shall return to later. Krzeszowski' s position is that the various semantic relationships between pairs of sentences in two languages form a series of concentric sets. On the outside, we have translation equivalents: sentences in language B that have been judged by a translator to be translationally equivalent to certain sentences in language A. Within this set, there is a subset consisting of translation equivalents that also happen to be the closest approximations to grammatical word-for-word translations. And within this set there is another, consisting of pairs of sentences that have identical semantic inputs: this latter subset is the locus of semantosyntactic equivalence. A translation equivalent of some kind can always be found, indeed more than one; of these, one or another can be claimed to be formally the "closest". Just as there may be disagreements about what constitutes a good (or: the best) translation (cf. Quine 1960), so too there may be disagreements about which of the possible translations is formally the closest approximation. There are disagreements, of course, because "form" is not unitary but complex, so that a

34

CONTRASTIVE FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

pair of sentences may be close with respect to, say, word-class categories but not close with respect to constituent order, or theme-rheme structure, or morpheme boundaries, or whatever. The degree of overall closeness is a matter of weighing the various formal components against each other, in other words it is precisely a matter of judgement. But a sentence in language A may not necessarily have a semanto-syntactic equivalent in language B: there may be semanto-syntactic gaps. Semantosyntactic equivalence is thus rather heavily constrained. It is defined theoryinternally: if two sentences can be given an identical semantic input by the grammar, they are by definition semanto-syntactically equivalent. And conversely: if they are thus equivalent, they must have identical semantic inputs. Equivalence type 5 is rule equivalence. Krzeszowski's frame of reference here is a transformational-generative one, and "rules" are rules of phrase structure formation, of transformation. Sentences in different languages may, in their process of generation, undergo the same formal rules, in which case we have rule equivalence. The actual kinds of rules will depend on the model of grammar being used. An important concept here is that of congruence (cf. Marton 1968). Two transformation rules are said to be identical if they operate on congruent structures and result in congruent transforms. Congruent structures are those that underlie congruent sentences. And congruent sentences are those which are (a) semanto-syntactically equivalent and (b) consist of the same number of lexical items of the same word-class, with the same syntactic function, in the same order (Krzeszowski 1990: 135). Congruent structures thus have identical formatives in an identical linear order. Function words, grammatical morphemes, even auxiliaries, are disregarded. Marton also proposes a technical distinction between "identical" and "similar" along these lines: for two transformations to be similar only, the base strings must be congruent but the resulting transforms need not be. Rule equivalence has been useful as a way of measuring the degree of similarity between two sentences (see also Di Pietro 1971; James 1980): more similar structures remain congruent through more phases of the generation process than less congruent ones, which diverge earlier. Type 6 is substantive equivalence. It is based on extra-linguistic substance, either acoustic I articulatory I auditory for phonological studies, or semantic I situational/ external reality for lexical studies. In the latter case, Krzeszowski stresses that it is not the external reality as such but rather "its psychic image in the minds of language users" (29). Recall Catford's appeal to shared features of "situational substance", mentioned above. In this context it is worth mentioning that the idea of shared features has been interestingly debated in the contrastive literature. Kalisz (1981) proposed

CONTRASTIVE

~hat

35

equivalence be recognized as intrinsically relative, a matter of degree, and that it should be defined as a partial matching of properties (properties being syntactic, lexical, pragmatic etc. features). The greater the match, i.e. the overlap, the more equivalence. This proposal derives from prototype theory, and I shall come back to it below. Krzeszowski (1990: 220), however, rightly points out that degree of matching is not actually a matter of the number of overlapping features but of their relative salience (he speaks of "the status attributed to various properties": some properties are more privileged than others). Recall again the earlier discussion of similarity judgement. Degrees of substantive equivalence obviously imply a scalar concept, a point recognized by many contrastivists. In her work on contrastive lexis, for instance, Snell-Hornby (1983) uses a scale ranging from total equivalence (e.g. technical terms with consistent back-translations), through working equivalence (acceptable as translations, in context) and partial coverage (some features match, others clearly do not; translations may need to be expanded), to nil-coverage (e.g. culture-specific concepts). She speaks of total equivalence between lexemes as an "illusion" - compare the denial of the possibility of complete synonyms within a language- and sees partial coverage and non-equivalence as "a reality in interlingual comparison" (247). Type 7 is pragmatic equivalence. This is the basis for contrastive stylistics and sociolinguistics; others use the term functional equivalence. Krzeszowski' s definition is this: pragmatic equivalence is a relation that holds between two texts in different languages such that "they evoke maximally similar cognitive reactions in the users of these texts" (30). Unlike all the other kinds of equivalence here mentioned, pragmatic equivalence is the only one that is explicitly said to pertain to texts. Pragmatic equivalence has been variously understood and much debated in the literature. Riley (1979) proposed that "contrastive pragmalinguistics" should take account of both illocutionary structure and interactive structure. Implictly, his approach thus assumed equivalence at the level of the speech act (illocutionary) and at the level of interactional tactics such as exchanges and moves. Faerch and Kasper (1984) take the general interactional tactic of maintaining and regulating discourse to be the tertium comparationis in their study of conversational gambits in German and Danish, but feel rather uncomfortable about the language-neutral status of their formulation. They point to the lack of an adequate frame of reference for comprehensive discourse analysis. Oleksy (1983, 1984, 1986) explores speech act equivalence in some detail: he suggests that an expression in language A is pragmatically equivalent to one in language B if both can be used to perform the same speech act under corresponding circumstances (i.e. with the same values for parameters such as

36

CONTRASTIVE FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

sex, age, formality level, etc.). Janicki (1985) finds such definitions unsatisfactory, partly because almost any linguistic expression can be used to function as almost any speech act, and also because there is no guarantee that any two people will interpret a given speech act in the same way. He also draws attention to the circularity problem: pragmatic equivalence cannot be both the motivation for analysis and the result of analysis. What we need, rather (Janicki 1986), is a series of tertia comparationis defined in terms of an inventory of categories of user (age, education, occupation etc.) and use (topic, setting, channel). Kalisz (1986: 1250), on the other hand, suggests that utterances are pragmatically equivalent "if and only if they exhibit maximally similar implicatures", whether conversational or conventional. Krzeszowski (1990: 218222) prefers a criterion of maximal similarity of anticipated perlocutionary effect. Wierzbicka (1991) doubts the value of looking for purely pragmatic constants. In particular, she is critical of the view that speech acts (or even pragmatic maxims such as those proposed by Grice (1975) or Brown and Levinson (1988)) can be taken as constants across cultures. She argues that such a view is merely "misguided universalism" (69), and brings together a great deal of evidence in support of a very different approach. This assumes that people speak in profoundly different ways in different cultures, and that these differences reflect quite different values or value-hierarchies. The level at which constants must be sought is thus not that of speech acts but that of independently established cultural values which can be expressed in simple semantic terms. In one sense, the tertium comparationis thus becomes increasingly abstract, but in another it becomes more accessible, since woolly pragmatics is reduced to more definable semantics. Wierzbicka' s proposal is that the universal building bricks of language, thought of by Leibniz as the innate natural language of human thought, can be formulated in terms of a small number of fundamental universal concepts, semantic primitives. These concepts must be expressible in simple everyday language. In her 1980 book she proposed a set of thirteen such primitives, but her 1991 book uses more: 27. By combining these primitives in various ways, she is able to specify a large number of very subtle distinctions between speech acts, different particles, and the like. Her formulations of contrasts are lexically very simple, because her "radical semantics" aims to use concepts that are immediately comprehensible in any language, easily translatable; but in complex combinations the formulations become formidably clumsy, extending for many clauses. What is gained on the swings tends to be lost on the roundabouts. If the aim is a universal semantic deep structure consisting of a small finite set of primitives, the problem is: how deep to go? Presumably, at the very deepest level there would be a single primitive perhaps corresponding to something like the total universal meaning of the first

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37

sound a human being utters upon entering the world? Wierzbicka has elected to work at a slightly higher level than this, and seems to be moving further towards the surface as the number of her primitives grows. The level at which one operates of course depends on what one wishes to say. In my view, Wierzbicka has certainly shown that the level of speech act is not deep enough, and that many pragmatic phenomena can be formulated in semantic terms. The arguments about pragmatic equivalence have highlighted two of the conclusions drawn by Oleksy (1986: 1416) concerning equivalence in Contrastive Analysis in general. (a) It is becoming more and more evident that equivalence as a whole is a relative concept, so that references to "identity" increasingly give way to the notion of "maximum similarity". Moreover, it is becoming increasingly obvious that judgements about how similarity is to be measured, and about what constitutes maximum similarity, vary across assessors; so that maximum similarity is relative to those judging it. Further, formulations of equivalence or similarity are also relative to the particular theoretical framework in which they are made. In the light of the arguments outlined above, none of this should be surprising. (b) As Contrastive Analysis spreads out into pragmatics its definitions of equivalence have become less rigorous, again because of the very nature of its framework theories. (It is precisely this tendency that Wierzbicka seeks to counter.) Krzeszowski's set of equivalence types actually serves as a useful guide to the way Contrastive Analysis has developed over time. The early (non-phonological) studies were structural, based on system equivalence and a kind of construction equivalence, plus translation equivalence. The era of transformational grammar brought an interest in rule equivalence, while generative semantics and case grammar focused more on the substantial equivalence furnished by semantic universals of various kinds (see especially Di Pietro 1971). And more recent research has then branched out into pragmatic issues. 1.3.2. Bilingual Competence and Translation Competence

It will by this time have become clear that there is a striking resemblance between the kinds of equivalence listed by Krzeszowski above and those commonly recognized in Translation Theory. Let us now look at the relation between these two fields more closely. We can start by lining up the types we have· been discussing in each, as indicated in Table 1. To a large extent, it seems, the two fields are talking about the same phenomena in different words. Of particular interest is the fact that all types of equivalence used by contrastivists, with the possible exception of rule equivalence, make some appeal to translation as a way of establishing and

38

CONTRASTIVE FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

constraining the primary data. Quantitative contrastive studies can use data that is not thus constrained, with texts matched only for genre etc.: this is the basic approach of contrastive rhetoric, as we shall see in a later chapter. But we contrast systems partly on the basis of the assumed translatability of their elements or of the categories describing their elements; and the other types in the contrastive list involve translation quite transparently. Table 1. General types of equivalence. Contrastive Analysis

Translation Theory

Statistical Translation System Semanto-syntactic

Connotative, stylistic Translation, textual Formal Formal plus denotative

Rule

(?)

Substantial (lexical) Pragmatic, functional

Semantic, denotative Dynamic, functional, text-type normative

What, then, is the real difference between the two? Let us pick up a point made at the beginning of this chapter, concerning the fuzzy relation between langue and parole, competence and performance. As I mentioned, contrastivists often shrug off translation matters as performance phenomena. Here is Krzeszowski, for instance (1990: 161): "The ability to recognize (semantosyntactic] equivalents is a part of a bilingual person's competence, while ability to translate is a part of translation performance." I think this view is confusing. In the first place, "ability to translate" must be part of a competence of some kind, not part of performance. Putting an ability into practice, using an ability, is performance; not the ability itself. Ability to translate is translation competence. Both bilingual competence and translation competence are of course matters of degree, not absolute states. In this respect both are different from nativespeaker competence, which is normally thought of as being either present or not, partly no doubt as a result of the idealized homogeneous speech community bequeathed by structuralism and generative grammar. Native-speaker judgements about grammaticality are therefore not on a par with judgements of equivalence made by bilinguals or translators, for the nature of their intuitions is different. In the latter case, a much wider range of disagreement is naturally to be expected. Further, it is well known that not all bilinguals are good translators; and also that not all good translators need to be maximally bilingual, for the mastctry

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39

of the target language is more important than an active mastery of the source language. Translation competence is thus not the same thing as bilingual competence, although there is of course an overlap between the two. We might say that bilingual competence is the ability to function linguistically in two cultures, while translation competence is the ability to mediate linguistically between two cultures. Bilinguals perform by functioning in their two languages, and translators perform by translating. Instances of such performance are thus (a) utterances and interpretations in two languages, and (b) translations. On this view, estimations of any kind of equivalence that involves meaning must be based on translation competence, precisely because such estimations require the ability to move between utterances in different languages. Translation competence, after all, involves the ability to relate two things. Translation competence also includes the ability to compare different translations. Pym (1992: 175) specifies this exactly: he suggests that translation competence is (a) the ability to generate a series of possible target versions for a given source item or text, plus (b) the ability to select from this series the most appropriate one in a given situation (which, he says, can be proposed "to a particular reader as an equivalent" of the source). The given situation might stipulate, for example, that the selected version must be formally as close to the source as grammatically possible. It might even stipulate that grarnmaticality can be over-ridden if necessary, as in linguistic glosses used in books like this one. Judging whether a sentence is semanto-syntactically equivalent or not - or selecting one that is, if such is required - is thus no more than one normal way of using normal translation competence. It follows that a sharp dividing line between Translation Theory and Contrastive Analysis is not well motivated, in that both fields are studying data which rely on translation competence: translations, or judgements about translations. After all, when a contrastive linguist discusses data in two languages, the examples are almost always presented implicitly as translations, albeit often context-free ones: we compare I have been waiting for two hours with J'attends depuis deux heures precisely because we can offer one as a possible translation of the other. As argued by Krzeszowski, the data for Contrastive Analysis are indeed mostly subsets of possible translations. In this respect one might even see Contrastive Analysis as a form of translation criticism: it investigates and evaluates differences between possible translations, under precise formal constraints. Both fields are interested in seeing how "the same thing" can be said in other ways, although each field uses this information for different ends. Indeed, in informal terms, "seeing how 'the same thing' can be said in other ways" captures the essence of Contrastive Functional Analysis very well.

40

CONTRASTIVE FuNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

This kind of analysis builds on many of the conclusions that we have so far drawn. As we shaH see, it is based on a notion of similarity rather than one of identity; it explicitly relies on translation competence; it covers all the kinds of equivalence listed above except that of rule equivalence - in other words, all those which can or must involve translation; and it aims at psychological realism, as I shall argue below. Contrastive Functional Analysis (CFA) aims to be compatible with psycholinguistic research, because another consequence of the position sketched out above is that the final court of appeal in both fields lies within the human mind, the locus of any competence. As judgements of similarity depend on perception, so judgements of appropriate translations depend on the assessor's understanding of the translation situation, and judgements of equivalence depend ultimately on intuition. Insofar as equivalence, as we have seen, is a theoryinternal matter (determined by how it is defined in the theory), it also depends on the mind of the linguist who creates or uses the theory. Postwar Contrastive Analysis was interested in the mind of the languagelearner. From Fries (1945) and Lado (1957) onwards, much research was motivated by the belief that information about differences and similarities between languages could be applied directly to language teaching (for historical surveys, see Rusiecki 1976; James 1980; Fisiak 1983). Predictions of learning difficulty based on such research, however, were often unsuccessful, and &fter Alatis ( 1968) Error Analysis arose to pick up the psychological challenge. More recently, however, Contrastive Analysis itself has returned to the task of trying to probe into the language-user's mind. As well as moving outwards into pragmatics, taking more account of the mind as a social construct, it has also been moving inwards, partly in response to advances in cognitive linguistics. The following section takes up the topic of this inward movement, which has also been of theoretical significance to the general position taken by CF A.

1.4.

On Psychological Realism

Some contrastivists, such as Fisiak (e.g. in his introduction to Fisiak 1980), draw a distinction between theoretical and applied contrastive studies. Theoretical studies are said to be non-directional, starting from some shared or presumably universal property and looking at its manifestations in two languages. Theoretical studies are thus akin to work in language typology and are relevant to the concept of universal grammar. Applied studies, on the other hand, are directional: they start from a property or expression in one language and investigate its manifestation in another. Applied studies in this sense have been assumed to be

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41

relevant to language learning and teaching. Other scholars, such as Krzeszowski (e.g. 1990), have queried this way of drawing a distinction between pedagogical and pure contrastive studies: on this view, which I share, both directional and adirectional studies may be of both pedagogical and theoretical relevance, as this book indeed seeks to demonstrate. 1.4.1. The Problem of the Psycholinguistic Fallacy

The origins of the theoretical/applied distinction lie in the postwar developments of Contrastive Analysis, which were strongly motivated by the need to improve language-teaching methods and materials. In other words, contrastive studies were trusted to be psychologically real, for what scholars were really interested in was the language-learner's mind. The results of contrastive studies, when applied in teaching, should be somehow reflected in the cognitive processes of language learners. The well-known classical assumption, of course, was that linguistic difference correlated directly with learning difficulty. Empirical research in the 1960s and 1970s undermined this assumption. Hypotheses about learner behaviour, predicted according to contrastive findings, were by no means always well supported. It appeared that Contrastive Analysis, like some other schools of linguistics, had succumbed to the psycholinguistic fallacy (Chesterman 1980). That is, it had non-validly equated its descriptions of linguistic objects (structures, grammars, rules etc.) with descriptions of mental states, capacities or processes. Popper's concept of the three Worlds elucidates this fallacy well. Popper (e.g. 1972) distinguished between the world of physical, material objects (World 1), the world of subjective mental states and processes (World 2), and the world of objective knowledge, theories, arguments etc. (World 3). Grammars constructed by linguists are entities of World 3, not World 2. One manifestation of this fallacy can be illustrated by means of the difference between static and dynamic views of language (see e.g. Sajavaara 1984). A contrastivist looks at a language as a whole, synoptically, from a bird's eye position as it were; the language is a static unit, entirely "present" at one time. Contrastive descriptions are typically based on this view; they look at systems, sets of structures or rules, as a whole, as static blocks. But a language learner does not see the target language in this way. A learner approaches the target language dynamically, bit by bit, seeing successions of partial systems, partial sets of structures etc., which gradually become more complete over time. The actual structures themselves are of course "static", but the learner's exposure to them and acquisition of them is processual, piecemeal. The learner's overall

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picture of the whole, moreover, may never materialize in the same way that it does to the contrastive linguist. The solution proposed by Sajavaara and others is that contrastivists should abandon a static view and seek to focus on actual processing differences between speakers and learners of different languages. We should look at differences in the perception process, for instance, or in how different speakers actually use their various languages. We should move towards contrastive interaction analysis, looking at both speaker performance and hearer performance. We should seek to take account of all the features that affect linguistic perfomance: situational ones, emotional and attitudinal ones, cognitive ones, personality ones, those bound to teaching method or textbook, level of proficiency, and so on. Ktihlwein (1984), for example, argues explicitly for a psycholinguistic perspective, originating from a conceptual basis, an "underlying universal conceptual grid" (325), and incorporating the whole range of perceptual and conceptual strategies. In this way, we could maintain an acceptable level of psychological realism. For after all, only psychologically real phenomena can be transferred. Which brings us to the crucial concept of interference, otherwise known as negative transfer. Pedagogically oriented Contrastive Analysis is of course founded on this very concept, on the belief that native-language structures etc. tend to be transferred in foreign-language performance, and thus produce errors or deviant usage of various kinds. Pedagogical Contrastive Analysis is thus predicated upon psychological realism by virtue of its key concept of interference. One of the classical statements of this point occurs in Weinreich' s discussion of interference. His definition runs as follows ([1953] 1974: 1): Those instances of deviation from the norms of either language which occur in the speech of bilinguals as a result of their familiarity with more than one language, i.e. as a result of language contact, will be referred to as INTERFERENCE phenomena.

The locus of language contact is bilingual individuals. (Weinreich's concept of bilingualism is very broad, encompassing any degree of competence in more than one language, dialect, or even variety of the same dialect.) Interference is said to be the result of a bilingual's tendency towards "interlingual identification". This is understood as the merging, in the bilingual's mind, of two distinct entities because of a perceived resemblance between them: aspirated /p/ in one language may be merged with (identified with) unaspirated /p/ in another, by virtue of their shared articulatory features (+bilabial, -voiced). It is the physical resemblance between these two sounds that "tempts the bilingual to identify the two" (7). Interlingual identification may occur on any level of language (sound,

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form, content, use ... ), and the perceived similarity that prompts the merging may be of any kind. In each case, what happens is a "classificatory overlapping" in which distinct entities are deemed not to be distinct after all. For the bilingual, this merging of linguistic systems is motivated on laboursaving grounds: it leads to a reduction of the linguistic burden and makes processing easier. On the other hand, there is a price to pay: too much interference will obviously hamper communication simply because the language produced (or the interpretation arrived at) will be too deviant. From the point of view of communicative efficacy, we have a typical cost-benefit ratio. Weinreich is at pains to stress that a contrastive linguistic analysis can only reveal areas of potential interference; there are many other (non-linguistic) factors that determine whether or not such interference will actually be realized in practice. Interference thus takes place in the mind of the bilingual. Contrastive Analysis therefore has a natural interest in models of grammar which explicitly seek psychological realism, models which at least seek to be compatible with what is known about how the brain works. Models of this kind have been proposed in cognitive linguistics, and there have been some interesting applications in contrastive studies. One was mentioned above: the suggestion (Kalisz 1981) that equivalence could be defined in terms of prototype theory, as partial pattern matching or overlap between natural categories. A rejection of classical Aristotelian categories demotes such notions as identity or sameness, and promotes others such as family res.emblance or similarity; fuzzy boundaries are seen as normal. A pioneering study by Krzeszowski ( 1986, 1990) showed how this approach can shed light on the complex relation between the semantic fields covered by the English preposition over and the relevant data in Polish. Krzeszowski concludes that prototype theory provides a useful tool for assessing degrees of similarity. In theory, at the most similar end of the scale we have "complete pattern matching of semantic and/or syntactic properties". Concerning the other end of the scale Krzeszowski concludes (1990: 230-1): The lower bound of the scale is not delimited by the matching patterns themselves since there is no a priori way of deciding on the necessary minimum of similarity required for the recognition of two linguistic forms as matching. Therefore, the lower bound of the scale is delimited cognitively through the bilingual informant's recognition of two linguistic forms in two languages as being in one category within the domain of contrastive studies. Thus, the decision is made not on the basis of the inherent properties of the

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compared categories but on the basis of what Lakoff calls "background framing" ...

I would add that "background framing" surely plays a role at all points on the similarity scale, not just at the lower bound. We arrive again at the conclusion that judgements of similarity depend on perception, on cognition.

1.4.2. Interference and Re-entry Let us now approach the matter from another angle, from the brain itsetf. If we wish to claim that our contrastive analyses do ·indeed have psychological relevance, it behoves us to ensure that they are at least compatible with what is known about the workings of the human brain. True, much that is mental remains inaccessible, in the infamous black box; but contrastivists with cognitivist aspirations cannot afford simply to neglect the results of neurological research, for instance. In the interests of bridging the gap between these two approaches, let us now make a brief excursion into neurology. I shall attempt to sketch one particular theory which seems to me to be of the utmost relevance to linguistics in general, and especially to Contrastive Analysis. My aim is to show what the neurological correlate might be for linguistic similarity, and hence to suggest how the brain might actually go about making judgements of similarity and what might actually happen during interference. My source of inspiration is the work of Gerald Edelman, and particularly his book Bright Air, Brilliant Fire (1992). This is a non-technical summary of his trilogy Neural Darwinism, Topobiology and The Remembered Present. The general thrust of Edelman' s w9rk is to put the mind back into the body, to demonstrate that theories about consciousness, memory, learning, language etc. must be compatible with the biological facts if they seek to be more than formalist games. The mind cannot be understood in the absence of biology. Edelman argues that neurology is a "recognition science". That is, it studies the way an organism adaptively matches elements in one domain to elements in another domain (1992: 74f). The crucial point is that this matching takes place without prior instruction: there is no innate structure which governs the matching process, which works by selection. This is how evolution works. Edelman illustrates with an example from immunology (in which he was awarded a Nobel prize in 1972). If a foreign molecule enters an organism, what happens roughly speaking is that the host organism selects from its antibodies the ones which fit the shape of the foreign molecule most closely, and reproduces precisely these antibodies (as clones) in large numbers, which are then available to counter any future foreign molecules of the same shape. The incoming molecule does not

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"instruct" the immune system how to make the appropriate antibodies; rather, the system itself selects those of its already existing antibodies which match most closely, and multiplies these. The point of interest here is this: what the organism recognizes is similarity. Each immune cell makes an antibody with a slightly different shape; antibody molecules have a "constant region" which binds them to the cell, plus a "variable region" which adjusts itself to the foreign molecule, like an adjustable spanner. The matching is not total; it is not a matter of identity. In Edelman's words, the foreign molecule "is bound by just those antibodies on the cells of the immune system that happen to fit parts of its shape" (76). The matching is one of partial overlap, partial fit. Elsewhere he says that the foreign molecule binds to antibody shapes that "happen to be more or less complementary to it" (77). Edelman argues that the brain is another example of a recognition system. His theory of how the brain carries out this recognition is called the theory of neuronal group selection (83f). The theory has three main tenets. (1) Developmental selection: competitive cell movements, divisions and deaths in a population of neurons lead to a "primary repertoire", an initial set of neural networks in a particular region of the brain. This repertoire is not specified in advance by the genetic code, which only imposes certain constraints. Even genetically identical individuals are most unlikely to have identical networks, because selection is not genetic but epigenetic, and no two individuals have the same experience of the environment. (Recall the argument against equivalenceas-identity: no two speakers will interpret an utterance in exactly the same way, because they will have different cognitive histories.) (2) Experiential selection, during which populations of synapses are strengthened or weakened as a result of behaviour. This "carves out" certain circuits from the primary repertoire, and these constitute the secondary repertoire. These strengthened circuits form the basis of memory, for instance. (3) Re-entry. This third tenet is the crucial one, and the most complex. The term denotes a process of repeated signalling between the neural maps that have been formed by the primary and secondary repertoires. These maps are interconnected many times over, and re-entrant signalling takes place along the connections: successions of signals "re-enter" time and time again, constantly causing slight adjustments in the relative strength patterns of the synaptic network. When a particular group of neurons is activated, other groups in different but connected maps may thus be activated at the same time. Re-entrant signalling then correlates the activated synapses, so that the two maps begin to have similar patterns of synapses. This is how two independent inputs become correlated. Input A activates neuronal map A, and input B activates neuronal map B; re-entrant signalling between the two maps then strengthens the connections in

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each map which have similar co-ordinates. The result is an association betwe~n the two patterns of responses, what Edelman calls a "classification couple". This process is the basis for perceptual categorization, and presumably for other types of categorization as well. Edelman stresses that perceptual categorization cannot occur in terms of classical categories, because it is based on the "disjunctive sampling of properties" (87). Categorization decisions derive from "the statistics of signal correlations" (90), not from a computerlike, algorithmic instruction. They result from the selection of neuronal groups that behave in an appropriate way. Appropriateness, in turn, is defined with reference to "internal criteria of value" (90). These values are set by evolutionary selection (having to do with survival, warmth, food, light etc.). The concept of re-entry has been compared to the communication between players in an orchestra, whose individual performances respond all the time to those of the other players. Consider the tuning-up process, for instance, in which various pitches gradually approximate as closely as possible to the note A. The players respond individually to the input provided initially by the oboe, but also refine their own tuning (and, especially, their subsequent playing) in continuing response to what they hear each other producing: this response is like re-entry signalling. Edelman' s concept of re-entry seems to me to be precisely the neurological correlate of interference, in which two inputs are treated as one: the response patterns in the two neuronal groups are initially interconnected, and this correlation is reinforced by re-entry, so that after a given time the two maps become more similar. Edelman' s theory has a number of serious consequences for linguistics, some of which he draws attention to himself. If this is the way the brain works, the brain is not like a computer. Nor is it like the network models proposed by the connectionists, because it learns by selection, not instruction. Edelman elsewhere compares the brain to a rainforest, teeming with variety, fuzzy-edged, organic, full of populations adapting for survival, interacting with itself and with what is outside it. Agreeing with Putnam, he insists (224) that: The brain and the nervous system cannot be considered in isolation from states of the world and social interactions. But such states, both environmental and social, are indeterminate and open-ended. They cannot be simply identified by any software description. ' Axiomatic models of language structure that work with algorithms cannot expect , to be psychologically real; formal attempts to "generate" sentences tell us nothing

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about the mind, or how language is acquired. Edelman is critical of the formalist Chomskyan approach for this reason, and sees his own research as providing support for the views of Lakoff, Langacker and others in cognitive grammar, and of Rosch at el. in prototype theory. The categories which the brain makes tend to be fuzzy, not Aristotelian (classical, clear-cut). Being a product of man's interaction with the environment and other people, language cannot be welldefined. (Keenan ( 1978) has argued that the fuzziness of language is in fact functional, because human beings themselves are "by nature imprecise"; language would be a much less efficient instrument of communication if it were well defined.) Further, there is no language acquisition device sitting ready in the head. Meaning itself is interactional, being determined partly by the environment and partly by a given speech community, and partly by the very body of the speaker. Language, like the mind, is "embodied". Incidentally, Edelman's delight in the fuzzy, open-ended variability of language and the idea of the human mind as a rainforest has obvious implications (which he discusses) for creativity, freedom and morality. It is paradoxical that Chomsky can derive similar ideas about creativity, freedom and morality from an apparently diametrically opposed view of the human mind. Edelman would surely call Chomsky's view mechanistic- consider the following comments by Chomsky in a recently published interview (Reime 1994: 52): Interviewer: You have said in your recent writings that in a way language is unusable or at least not very functional. On the other hand, you have stressed that [the] language faculty is a kind of mental organ. Is there some kind of, not inconsistency or contradiction, but some kind of tension between these two views? Chomsky: No. I think most organs are non-functional in the same sense. That was meant to be deliberately provocative. When I say that it's not functional or not usable, I don't mean you can't use it. It just means that it's not well-designed for use. But in that respect it's like most organs ... Take one [... ] that happened to strike me recently, namely the spine. The spine is very poorly designed, and apparently this poor design goes all the way back to the origins of vertibrate history. We live, but if an engineer was designing a vertibrate, he would not do it this way. So in that sense it's not functional. Linguist-as-biologist vs. linguist-as-engineer ... Interestingly, Giv6n (1993) uses a similar metaphorical contrast: he suggests that functionalists see language as a biological organism governed by communicatively motivated behavioural laws, rather than as a logic machine governed by Newtonian laws.

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For Contrastive Analysis, conclusions can be drawn from Edelman's theory which support the earlier discussion about similarity. In nature, and in the brain, variety is all. No two individuals have the same experience of the , ; environment, none are neurologically wired in the same way, no two stimuli are perceived as identical. What I have earlier referred to as the identity assumption, therefore, turns out to be extremely unlikely at the neurological level at least. In this sense, to make the identity concept the basis of a contrastive theory would be a step away from psychological realism. On the other hand, family resemblances and prototypes are highly relevant notions. However, similarities can be perceived in many ways that are not accessible to a logical, hierarchical description, and may be perceived quite differently by different people. Categorization (which involves perception of similarity) is based on value, on values recognized as being salient at a given moment. Contrastive Functional Analysis embodies an approach to the analysis of language pairs (or sets) which at least seeks to be compatible with the views sketched above. Such an approach aims to develop a model that is psychologically at least plausible. This is exactly the goal of "psychological adequacy" set by Dik (1989: 13). Yet grammatical models used in CFA remain World 3 entitities, products of human minds; they do not describe World 2 states and processes directly.

1.4.3. Universalist vs. Relativist It is paradoxical that modern contrastive studies really took off during the postwar structuralist period in linguistics, when the dominant belief was that each language was sui generis; this belief naturally made the formulation of a shared tertium comparationis somewhat problematic. Among linguists of an anthropological bent, linguistic relativity was widely assumed, either in a weak form (different languages influence cognition differently) or a strong one (language determines cognition). The Universal Base hypothesis - that all human languages share a universal deep structure - runs counter to these Whorfian views. It lies at the heart of post-structuralist linguistics, and has also inspired much theoretical and practical research in language acquisition. (See e.g. Beretta 1993, plus the other papers in that special issue of Applied Linguistics; and see also Pinker 1994, for a defensive state-of-the-art survey.) Among supporters of the Universal Base hypothesis there are differences of opinion about the level of this base and its constitution: for some, it is formal; for others, semantic; for yet others, cognitive.

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To the contrastivist today, the debate between the relativists and the universalists seems unduly binary. The impression is often given that one must either take the view that at some level all languages are "the same", or else the view that all languages are in all respects "not the same". This opposition is often linked to different theories of meaning. Universalists are then associated with a belief in objective meanings, meanings as entities "out there"; and relativists are associated with a belief in negotiated meanings, meanings as results of negotiation among speakers of a particular language. However, human cultures are neither all the same nor totally different. Translation between different languages is possible, precisely because there are (and insofar as there are) similarities in the ways different cultures and languages conceive of the universe. It is because of these overlaps that cross-cultural communication is possible, that we can have any understanding of a language and culture other than our own. Quine's famous example (1960) of the linguist wondering what some native expression "gavagai" means is thus misleading. Since it is uttered when the native informant sees a rabbit, the default inference the linguist can make is that its meaning has something to do with a rabbit. Precisely what it means is not clear, agreed: a rabbit, a rabbit running, a potential lunch, a part of a rabbit, or what? But it will probably have something to do with a rabbit. (True, the connection might only be as tenuous as "Look!" or "Give me my gun" ... ) Quine focuses on the impossibility of an outsider knowing exactly what the impression means; but we may also note what an outsider can reasonably infer. It is here that the overlap exists, between the outsider linguist's understanding of the world and that of the native speaker in question. We can return to our earlier discussion of similarity. Between the Weltanshauungs of the native and the linguist there exist similarities, simply by virtue of the fact that they live on the same planet and are both human beings. Similarities, after all, are partly dependent on features of the objects deemed similar. And similarities are relative, in that entities can be more or less similar. In time, we might guess that Quine's linguist would become more familiar with the native culture, hear "gavagai" uttered under various conditions, and thus gradually arrive at a more precise understanding of its meaning, just as children gradually refine their earlier understandings of the meanings of words in their mother tongue. The fact that he might never arrive at a conception of the meaning that was exactly the same as the native's is immaterial. It would be equally true to say that this particular native's conception is unlikely to be exactly the same as that of any other native speaker of the language, even, given that no two people have the same cognitive environment or experience (as argued earlier). Neurologically, too, no two individuals have identical networks.

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I therefore take the view that to talk of "sameness", or an "identical" universal base, is misleading. For Contrastive Analysis to make any sense at all, there must be a belief in some kind of overlap between the different ways speakers of different languages tend to speak. We need to commit ourselves neither to an identical universal base nor to unsurmountable difference. Pinker (1994), making a strong case for Universal Grammar, concludes with the dramatic assertion that "we all have the same minds" (430), albeit not of course in the sense of neurological identity. He takes this shared mental capacity as indicating the existence of innate (i.e. genetically inherited) formal universals underlying the grammars of all human languages. Of particular relevance here, however, is Pinker's appeal to the notion of similarity and to the perception of similarity (others would speak of analogy: see especially E. Itkonen 1991) as the foundation of all learning. He argues that the notion of similarity must be innate, that it is "in the mind of the beholder" (416) quite literally, from birth or even before. He then suggests that this innate "similarity space", insofar as it is applied to first-language learning, is defined and constrained by Universal Grammar. On this view, Universal Grammar is in fact none other than a set of similarity constraints, a notion we shall return to shortly. These constraints determine which utterances the child will construe as being "similar" to which other ones, and hence use as bases for generalizations. As we prepare the groundwork for a general methodology of CFA, we do not need to make any strong claims about cognition or Universal Grammar, but our general conceptual framework, based on the notion of similarity, ·Seems strikingly in accord with Pinker's arguments from cognitive psychology. Recall now my own earlier discussion of similarity, and in particular the fact that degree of similarity correlates inversely with extension of similarity. The linguistic notion that captures this relation is that of delicacy. This has perhaps been used most explicitly by Halliday, but it is also highly relevant for Contrastive Analysis. Delicacy is usually defined in linguistic terms as "level or amount of detail"; it typically characterizes the level of detail of taxonomies, how many subclasses are indicated, how far a hierarchy extends. With respect to Contrastive Analysis, it captures the dimension of degree of similarity. With a very delicate analysis, degree of similarity can be specified in such detail that the range of items actually judged to be similar ends up being very small indeed, perhaps even zero. This often tends to be the case when the degree of similarity is specified to be "identity", for instance in non-fuzzy algorithmic generative models. One of the particular characteristics of CFA is that it operates at a different level of delicacy. By placing less strict demands on the relevant degree of similarity, it can include a wider range of items in a given comparison, and then focus on their different conditions of use. The decision to operate at this less

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constrained level of similarity is thus a heuristic one, determined by the aims of a given analysis. Too much delicacy would mean very limited paradigms; too little delicacy would mean too broad and undifferentiated paradigms. The theoretical aim is an optimum level of delicacy between these two extremes, which allows the specification of paradigms that are conceptually realistic. A key concept here is that of the similarity constraint, which I introduce in the following section. The semantic structure posited in CFA (to be described in chapter 2, below) defines the overlap between two (or more) languages at a given level of delicacy. At a "deeper" and more abstract level, for instance, we might propose analyses in terms of a very small set of semantic primitives as suggested by Wierzbicka (1991), or in terms of cognitive or phenomenological categories as suggested by Preston (1980), or the needs and the affective and cognitive states of the speaker (Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk 1983). At a less abstract level, on the other hand, where the similarity constraint would be defined less stringently, we might investigate "translation equivalence" of various kinds. The position I take with respect to linguistic relativity and the Universal Base hypothesis may be compared to the view taken in semiotic research. Shaumyan (1984), for instance, points out that linguistic relativity itself is relative: it is relative to semiotic invariance. Relativity and invariance, on this view, are in a complementary relationship, comparable to Bohr's famous complementarity of wave and particle theories of light. For a semiotician, the primitives are: (a) X is a sign of Y, and (b) Y is a meaning of X. Shaumyan proposes a principle of semiotic relevance governing the level at which semiotic research operates: "only those distinctions between meanings are relevant that correlate with the distinctions between their signs, and vice versa, only those distinctions between signs are relevant that correlate with the distinctions between their meanings" (239). This principle constrains the degree of abstraction in linguistics, and it also constrains the level at which CFA operates. We posit invariance, as an initial operational assumption, when no relevant distinctions are being drawn; but, as we have argued earlier, what counts as relevant depends on many factors and is itself variable. In different terms, as suggested earlier, the level at which CFA seeks to operate might be regarded as that of natural linguistic categories: fuzzy, but assumed to be similarly accessible to speakers of different languages. Against this view, it might be argued that natural categories, being prototypes, are culture-specific and thus not universally shared. This point has been made by Ivir ( 1987), and also by Kalisz (1988), who argues further that all contrastive analysis must therefore be implicitly directional, since the analysis must proceed from the analyst's own culture-bound cognitive perception of reality. True. Different cultures will manifest different "dominant semes" (Tarasova 1993) in a

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given field of experience. Yet we are not necessarily always determined by our native language/culture; it exerts what Popper called a "plastic control" over us, not a mechanical one. A bilingual analyst can call upon cognitive resources in more than one language. And, as was also stressed above, human beings are endowed with imagination: it is not impossible for people to see things from another point of view. What the contrastivist can do is compare prototypes, and see to what extent they overlap (as Krzeszowski does in his study of over in English and Polish, 1990: 213f). Theoretically, therefore, it would be more accurate to say that the level at which CFA seeks to operate is slightly "deeper" than that of culture-specific natural prototypical categories: that is, a level at \ ' which the overlaps can be formulated between such prototypes.

1.5.

CFA Methodology

Traditionally, contrastive methodology starts with a description of selected data. James (1980: 63) sees two basic processes: description and comparison. In his examples he uses a four-step algorithm: (1) assemble the data, (2) formulate the description (3) supplement the data as required, (4) formulate the contrasts. Krzeszowski (1990: 35) sets up three steps for "classical" contrastive studies: (1) description, (2) juxtaposition, (3) comparison. Additionally, of course, the descriptions must use the same theoretical model. The model chosen will then naturally determine how the contrasts are formulated. Both scholarswould agree that the primary data are partly factual, for instance attested sentence-pairs of maximally literal translations, and partly intuitive, generated by the competence of a bilingual informant. Simplistically, at the comparison stage we can then state that (a) certain items in the two languages are identical in some respects, (b) the items compared are different in some respects, or (c) an item in one language has no equivalent in the other language (cf. Krzeszowski 1990: 37-8). At this point, however, we meet the circularity problem mentioned earlier: if an item in one language has no equivalent in the other language, on what grounds are we comparing the two in the first place? On the traditional view, assumed equivalence is the justification for selecting data to be compared; so how can equivalence (identity) then also be proposed as a result of the analysis? The standard solution to the problem has been a recourse to the different levels of meaning and form, in one way or another. So we can say: the meanings are equivalent (initial, assumed equivalence) and the forms turn out to be equivalent in this respect but nonequivalent in that respect (result); or: the forms are equivalent (initial) and the meanings prove to be identical/different (result).

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In more sophisticated terms, consider the following research procedure proposed by Krzeszowski (1990: 101) for directional contrastive pragmatic studies: I. Given a socio-cultural setting m (Cm) in a language i (CmLi), is there an

equivalent socio-cultural setting n (Cn) in language j (CnCj)? If the answer is "no", note the socio-cultural contrast. If the answer is "yes": II. Is there a linguistic form (Fq) in Lj (FqLj) which is prototypically associated with CnLj in a way similar to the way in which FpLi is associated with CmLi? If the answer is "no", note the pragmatic contrast. If the answer is "yes": Ill. Is FqLj a se man to-syntactic equivalent of FpLi? If the answer is "no", abandon the analysis. If the answer is "yes", proceed with semanto-syntactic contrastive studies until you find contrast at some level of analysis

In essence, this procedure follows the same methodology: look for an equivalent and then start comparing, checking for similarities and contrasts. In the light of the arguments of the foregoing sections, however, I would like to suggest an alternative methodology which seems to correspond more closely to what contrastivists actually do. This proposal has a number of other advantages, too. It does not depend on a notion of equivalence-as-identity, which would appear to be a red herring anyway. It does not place the result-cart before the initial-assumption-horse. It acknowledges that people tend to think in natural, fuzzy categories. It therefore assumes that shared properties or universals too are moie likely to be natural categories than billiard-ball-like atoms. And it incorporates an explicit notion of falsifiability which can place contrastive studies on a firm empirical footing. I call this the CFA methodology. The proposal derives directly from Popper's (e.g. 1972) philosophy of science. Popper argues that all growth of objective knowledge proceeds as a form of problem-solving, in which hypotheses (tentative theories) are suggested, tested and refuted, giving rise to revised hypotheses which are in turn tested and revised, and so on in an endless process of conjecture and refutation. On this view, the goal of cross-linguistic comparisons is to propose and test falsifiable hypotheses, and their theoretical value lies precisely in this function (see also Janicki 1990). Falsification is not necessarily deemed to have occurred by virtue of a single counter-example, however: such counter-examples may be genuine exceptions, or peripheral in some way. Non-naive falsification requires a whole body of counter-evidence, outweighing the evidence in favour of the hypothesis. In practice, falsification is thus ultimately a matter of the judgement of the scientific community at large.

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In outline, my proposal for a general CFA methodology runs as follows: 1. Primary data: instances of language behaviour in different languages. 2. Comparability criterion: a perceived similarity, of any kind, between a phenomenon X in language A and a phenomenon Y in language B. For a given contrastive analysis, this criterion is then defined operationally in terms of a constraint of relevant similarity. 3. Problem: what is the nature of this similarity? 4. Initial hypothesis: that X and Y are identical. 5. Test: on what grounds can the initial hypothesis be supported or rejected? On what conditions (if ever) does it hold? 6. Revised hypothesis (if the identity hypothesis fails): that the relation between X and Y is such-and-such; or, that the use of X and Y depends on such-and-such conditions. 7. Testing of the revised hypothesis. And so on.

1.5.1. Primary Data Let us examine and illustrate this procedure in more detail, and see what it implies. The primary data against which hypotheses are to be tested are utterances, instances of language use. We observe, as facts, that speakers of language A use certain forms, and that speakers of language B use other forms. We can also observe the conditions (or at least some of them) under which certain forms are used. From these observations we infer underlying, unobservable systems or sets of potential choices, which we attempt to codify as grammars. We also infer meanings. Some would identify meanings with conditions of use, but it will be more useful in this book to keep these concepts separate. On this view, meanings themselves are not observable directly, but we do have some access to them, in three ways. First, I have subjective access to my own meanings, as when I say "I mean X"; these are meanings-as-intentions, and exist in Popper's World 2, the subjective world of feelings and mental states (World 1 being the physical world). True, I do not have direct access to other people's meanings-asintentions; and, as Labov (1987) stresses in a warning article, intentions are of course hard to define anyway, especially those of other people. It would be a risky enterprise to base a functional theory on meanings-as-intentions. Second, I have intersubjective access to other people's meanings, as when I say "it means X", insofar as I have learned the relevant language or other semiotic code; these are meanings-as-conventions, and they exist in Popper's

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World 3, the world of ideas, arguments, objective knowledge that lies in the public domain, accessible to all. Since World 3 phenomena interact with and affect World 2 phenomena, the mind (qua World 2 phenomenon) is thus to some extent also a social construct. From meanings-as-conventions I can also infer other people's meanings-as-intentions, to some extent at least. On this definition, contrastivists are therefore interested in meanings-as-conventions. (I am of course by-passing an enormous literature on meaning here, but these few comments will suffice in the present context.) Third, I also have some access to the effects of utterances, on the way people tend to interpret them, as when I say "it meant X to me" or "it seemed to mean X to her". We might caii this an access to meaning-as-intervention. Pinker (1994) takes this kind of meaning as the opening theme of his book The Language Instinct: he talks of our ability to "shape events in each other's brains". "Simply by making noises with our mouths, we can reliably cause precise new combinations of ideas to arise in each other's minds" (15). This image of putting ideas into someone's head iiiustrates meaning-as-intervention rather well: a speaker can intervene, literally, in a hearer's mental processes. We can assume, moreover, that communication is successful to the extent that meanings-as-intentions overlap with the effects of meanings-as-interventions (cf. bstman 1979). In other words, if a speaker's meaning-as-intention is X, this can be said to be communicated to a hearer to the extent that the speaker creates within the hearer an awareness of X. This is another way of arriving at the central notion of conventions: in time, we learn that certain meanings-asintentions conventionally correlate with certain perceived effects. 1.5.2. Comparability Criterion and Similarity Constraint

The starting-point for a given CFA-type analysis is a perception, made by a linguist, a translator, a language learner. This is a perception of a similarity of some kind, in the first instance of form or sound, between language-A-speakers' use of their language and language-B-speakers' use of theirs. Making a similar point, Janicki (1986: 1240) speaks of "a perceivable amount of sameness" as the initial reason for making a comparison. At one remove from the primary data, we can infer that these similarities reflect similarities at the level of langue, or we may infer that there is some similarity of meaning-as-convention or meaning-asintervention. It is this perception, not some assumed equivalence, that provides the initial comparability criterion. This initial perception may be vague, may be only a suspicion (asked why a raven is like a writing-desk, I suspect some hidden similarity and start looking for it). For the language learner, this initial perception is the potential trigger for interference. For the contrastivist, it is the

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reason why X and Y are worth comparing. It is significant that this initial perception is often vague, unspecified: one task of contrastive research is to clarify and specify such perceptions. An example: as a newcomer entering Finnish from English, I was struck by the way the case opposition between the partitive and the nominative/accusative in Finnish seemed to correlate with article usage in English. There seemed to be some similarity between the general areas of meaning expressed by these two means: they both had to do somehow with definiteness. I also noticed that I found the use of this case opposition difficult to learn, and that Finns found English articles difficult. As pointed out in the section on similarities ( 1.1 ), any assessment of similarity is constrained by relevance. Any contrastive study therefore has to define the criteria by which phenomena are judged similar, which is precisely what the constraint of relevant similarity does. In this example, the similarity constraint can be defined in terms of the concept of definiteness. A contrastive analysis would focus on the variation in the expression of aspects of meaning falling within the scope of this general concept, in both languages. It would exclude, for example, other aspects of meaning that might be expressed by the same means (say, by a particular Finnish case). In practice, the similarity constraint thus sets an upper bound to the range of phenomena considered to be relevantly similar, for the purposes of a particular study. (The similarity constraint is discussed further below, 2.2.) It must be acknowledged that some contrastivists reject a methodology based on a similarity constraint. Van Buren (1980), for instance, advocates a "notional" approach to contrastive analysis, but argues that this must be based on an identity condition rather than a similarity one. Arguing that an Aspects-type grammar is not very useful for contrastive analysis because it implies that deep structures in different languages are similar rather than identical, he claims ( 1980: 94) that "the disadvantage of the similarity condition is that the notion of substantive universals (or 'common categories' for our purpose) becomes incoherent." I think this argument is predicated on an unwarranted belief in Aristotelian categories rather than prototypical or fuzzy ones. In this sense, the identity view is cognitively much less plausible than one centred on similarity. Ivir (1983) is critical of the view that translation equivalence is automatically assumed to incorporate "sameness" of meaning, and he is thus also critical of contrastive analyses that implicitly build upon such an assumption, using translations as data. !vir's solution is to exploit the use of back-translation in order to eliminate differences that are motivated by communicative aims rather than by the intrinsic natures of the languages themselves; the resulting translated and back-translated corpora are therefore more constrained, pruned of irrelevant

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differences, and closer to being semantically identical. Absolute equivalence, identity, is nevertheless acknowledged to be impossible. What Ivir does, in fact, is to develop his own operational definition not of sameness but of similarity: his similarity constraint is arrived at via the procedure of back-translation, for pairs of sentences that cannot be mutually back-translated are deemed to lie outside the range of acceptable data for contrastive analysis. 1.5.3. Problem and Initial Identity Hypothesis

The problem in my example case was easy to define: what was the precise relation between the English ways of expressing definiteness and the Finnish ways? (And incidentially: why these learning difficulties?) In the CFA methodology the initial hypothesis of identity has the same status as the null hypothesis in experimental studies: one sets out to reject it, but the interesting thing is how one does this, and how convincingly: with what probability can one say that it has been rejected? Bouton (1976: 144) makes the same point: "[A contrastivist's] initial choice is based upon an [sic] hypothesis that the two elements he selects are equivalent in a sense important to his study. And his contrastive analysis will consist of determining to what degree that hypothesis was valid." As we have seen in the preceding sections, equivalenceas-identity is an exception, often an impossibility. Actually to find idtmtity would be an interesting surprise; the more determinedly one has set out to reject the hypothesis, the more interesting such a result would be. In Popper's terms, such an identity would be exceedingly well corroborated. In my example, the initial identity hypothesis was that the definite/indefinite opposition in the English articles eo-varied exactly with that between the nominative/accusative and the partitive cases in Finnish. Such a correlation would of course be exceedingly unlikely, on the grounds of the learning difficulty alone. However, this is more or less the correlation that language learners tend to make (at a given stage of learning); it is this identity hypothesis that lies at the root of interference, as we saw above. From this point of view, learning proceeds as the initial identity hypothesis is understood to be false and interference is thus reduced. 1.5.4. Hypothesis Testing

The initial hypothesis is falsifiablc, in that it can be empirically tested. And the testing of this initial hypothesis is the central process in CFA. This stage encompasses many procedures: selection of a theoretical framework, selection or elicitation of primary and additional data, use of corpora (translated or otherwise

58

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relevantly matched), appeal to one's own intuition (one's own native-speaker, , bilingual or translation competence), use of other bilingual informants, and so : on; even the results of error analyses of non-native usage might be relevant. The amount of testing that is necessary depends on the complexity of the phenomena compared. A simple universalist hypothesis may be easily refuted by a single counter-example, for instance of a Finnish accusative/partitive opposition that does not eo-vary with English article variation. But how then to account for the examples that support the hypothesis? The hypothesis becomes a relativist one: under what conditions does it seem to hold and under what conditions does it not hold? Then the testing becomes more complex. In the definiteness example, all the above forms of hypothesis-testing have been made use of (see Chesterman 1991 ). The result of this testing stage is a statement of the evidence in favour of the initial hypothesis and the evidence against. The evidence in favour amounts to an explication of why a similarity between X and Y was perceived in the first place: under such-and-such conditions there is indeed such-and-such an overlap. The evidence against amounts to an explication of why the identity hypothesis is rejected: there are such-and-such differences. On this view, it is the evidence in favour that actually constitutes the tertium comparationis (or, for the translator, : ( the ground for translation). In this methodology, the tertium comparationis is ;' thus what we aim to arrive at, after a rigorous analysis; it crystallizes whatever is (to some extent) common to X and Y. It is thus an explicit specification of the initial comparability criterion, but it is not identical with it - hence there is no circularity here. Using an economic metaphor, we could say that the tertium comparationis thus arrived at adds value to the initial perception of comparability, in that the analysis has added explicitness, precision, perhaps formalization; it may also have provided added information, added insights, added perception. The definiteness study referred to came to the conclusion that the concepts of definiteness in English and Finnish did overlap somewhat, but that there were 1 also considerable differences. A tertium comparationis was eventually formulated \ consisting of a number of shared semantic components. It was demonstrated that these were expressed in very different ways in the two languages, and that some of the components themselves were gradient concepts differently conceived of in the two languages. In particular, it was shown that whereas definiteness has become highly grammaticalized in English, it is much more diffuse in Finnish, where its expression spreads over a wide area of grammar (not just a single case 1 opposition), and furthermore it is often not expressed at all but left to be inferred. , The lack of similarity overall is proportionately so great that learning difficulties (both ways) are scarcely surprising, despite the initial perception of some apparent similarity. The initial perception thus led to a more differentiated one:

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definiteness itself turned out to be not a semantic primitive but a complex concept, and also a gradient one. This CFA methodology therefore differs from the traditional one in its interpretation of the tertium comparationis. Traditionally, this has been taken as the starting-point of a comparison; however, as suggested above, this view risks circularity, in that some kind of equivalence is both assumed at the start and arrived at in the conclusion. In the methodology proposed here, the starting-point for a comparison is not an equivalence but a perceived similarity: the startingpoint is this perception. The perception is then refined and operationally defined as a similarity constraint, specifying the acceptable range of similarity. The relation of identity (equivalence) occurs first in the initial hypothesis to be tested, and perhaps also as part of the result of such testing.

1.5.5. Revised Hypotheses The statement of evidence which completes the testing stage can obviously be formulated in many ways, depending on the model of description used. However it is done, it in fact constitutes a revised hypothesis proposing that the relation between X and Y is not one of identity but of such-and-such a kind; in other words, the relation consists of these similarities and these differences, these overlapping features and these distinctive ones. This revised hypothesis can then in turn be stated in a falsifiable form, subject t~ testing, in the following way. There are three main classes of variables here: meaning, syntactic form, and conditions of use. In principle, testable predictions can be constructed by positing one or two of these as independent variables and the remaining one(s) as the dependent variable(s). For instance, given a meaning M and a form F, we can predict conditions of use C and test the prediction. Given a meaning M and conditions C, we can predict the occurrence of form F and test the prediction. And given a form F and conditions C, we can predict that the interpretation will be meaning M. The result of such testing will be the establishment of contrasts of various kinds: of form, meaning, or conditions of use. Consider the following informal contrastive formulations, for instance, which illustrate versions of the three basic set-ups: (i) Under conditions [a, b, c], the meaning expressed in language 1 as X tends to be expressed in language 2 as Y. (Contrast of form) (ii) Under conditions [a, b, c], the meaning expressed in language 1 as X is not expressed in language 2 at all. (Contrast of form and use)

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(.iii) Under conditions [a, b, c], a form Fin language 1 is interpreted as meaning X and a similar form F' in language 2 is interpreted as meaning Y. (Contrast of meaning) (iv) The use of a form Fin language 1 is sensitive to conditions [a, b, c], but the use of a similar form F' in language 2 is sensitive to conditions (a, e, f]. (Contrast of conditions of use) (v) Under conditions [a, b, c], speakers of language 1 tend to perform speech act P, while speakers of language 2 tend to perform speech act Q. (Contrast of meaning and form) Formulations such as these can be tested by setting up the relevant conditions or finding them in a corpus, and checking the behaviour of speakers (what they say, how they translate, how they understand, how they react to computer-generated or literal translations, etc.). The challenge for the contrastivist is to specify the conditions, be they syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, stylistic, contextual, or whatever. Since language behaviour, like any human behaviour, is predictable only to some extent, probabilistically, there is no point at which the conditions can be absolutely specified and language behaviour 100% predicted, and so the field is always open for better specifications. I stress this point because of the apparent belief in Contrastive Analysis that once an analysis has been done the problem is solved for good; not so, I think: the result of the analysis is no more than a (hopefully) better hypothesis. After all, arguments for a particular analysis of components of definiteness, for example, can always be countered by other arguments, new evidence may be brought to bear, errors of various kinds in the analysis or the hypothesis can be exposed and eliminated, and so on. Additionally, the testing stage may also result in hypotheses of a different kind, not pertaining only to given phenomena in a given pair of languages but to the two languages more generally: an excellent example is Hawkins (1986) on a fundamental and pervasive difference between English and German (his hypothesis is that English surface structure is consistently more distant from its semantic deep structure than German is from its semantic deep structure). Or hypotheses may be proposed concerning common characteristics of all languages of a certain type, or concerning universal characteristics of all languages. In this way CFA links up with language typology and ideas about universal grammar. Of particular importance in the CFA methodology is the relation between corpus studies and hypothesis testing. Hypotheses may arise from many sources, including mere subjective intuition: any perception of a similarity, on whatever grounds. Corpus studies are a good source of hypotheses. But they are above all a place where hypotheses are tested, albeit not the only place. The more

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stringently a given hypothesis is tested- against a corpus, other speakers' intuitions, in a controlled experiment... - the better corroborated it will be. In conclusion, the methodology outlined above might be summed up in terms of Peirce's famous distinction between the three modes of reasoning: induction, deduction and abduction (1958, passim). Induction was the method preferred by the behaviourists in the 1940s and 1950s; deduction was the primary methodology used by the transformationists in the l960s and l970s (a good example is Krzeszowski's axiomatic Contrastive Generative Grammar, 1974). Abduction is a mode of reasoning that hypothesizes that something may be the case; its claims are therefore weaker than those arrived at via induction or deduction, but it is fundamental to scientific progress. It is a kind of rational. guesswork, and is the only way (according to Peirce) of opening up new intellectual ground, of stepping from the necessary to the possible.

Chapter 2. Functional

2.1. Grammar as a Tool Factory Contrastive Functional Analysis (CFA) can be broadly defined as a functional approach to Contrastive Analysis. This chapter explores what is thus meant by "functional". Language is as it is because of what it is used for. To subscribe to this statement is to take a functional view of language. "Language has evolved to satisfy human needs; and the way it is organized is functional with respect to these needs" (Halliday 1985: xiii). This explication of the term "functional" gives it a very broad interpretation, but one that is well in line with the everyday use of the word. We say that something- a tool, for instance- is "functional" if it can do what it is supposed to do, in other words if its form meets the requirements set by its use. Fillmore (1984) actually refers to grammar as a "tool factory"; pragmatics is then the description of how workmen use these tools, and semantics corresponds to "the knowledge of the purposes for which the individual tools were constructed" (122). In this extended metaphor, a text is then "a record of the tools used in carrying out an activity", and understanding is "figuring out, from the list of tools, just what that activity was" ( 123). To do this figuring out, one needs to know the conventions of how the to
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sign language) in order to achieve certain ends. Defining what these ends are is more controversial. Prague linguists speak of the "needs of communication and expression": we should first specify these needs and then examine how they are satisfied. Language functions are thus specified in terms of the needs of language-users. Many classifications of these functions have been proposed. A particularly influential one has been the tripartite taxonomy proposed by Btihler (1934 ): the functions of language are Darstellung (representation), Appell (to have an effect on the receiver), and Ausdruck (self-expression of the speaker). These correspond to basic categories of sign: respectively, symbol, signal and symptom. Another widely used taxonomy is Jakobson's (1960) set of six, based on elements of the communicative act: referential (context oriented), emotive (sender), poetic (mes§age), conative (receiver), phatic (channel) and metalinguistic (code). This analysis has obvious roots in information theory, and indeed one might see these functions as pertaining to utterances or acts of communication rather than to language in general. Halliday (e.g. [1985] 1994) combines aspects of both Btihler and Jakobson. He argues that the form of language is determined by three primary functions. These are the ideational function (to express content, to talk/write about something), the interpersonal function (to establish social relations, to talk/write to someone), and the textual function (to organize the form of the talk or text itself). The textual function is subservient to the other two, in that the form of a message needs to be organized in such a way as to be optimally appropriate to what is being talked/written about, and also to the overall communicative situation centred around the participants themselves. Halliday' s analysis is reminiscent of the traditional semiotic definition of the sign: something which stands for something to someone. Indeed, for Halliday language is a "social semiotic" phenomenon. At the most general level, in Halliday' s view, the essence of language is its capacity to make meaning: language is a means by which people mean. Language is meaning potential; to use language is to mean. "Meaning" then becomes an umbrella term for a great deal, of course; but we do need such a term. Let us say, therefore, that the means of language is its form, and the end of language is the expression and/or communication of meaning. On this view, ideational, interpersonal and textual are thus broad kinds of meaning. It is surprising that although Halliday's general theory of language has been applied in a great many ways, relatively little use appears to have been made of his general approach in Contrastive Analysis. The model of functional syntax to be outlined below is not a systemic grammar, but it does build on several of Halliday's insights, including the above analysis of language functions and the notion of language as meaning potential. Other Hallidayan-type notions that CF A can exploit are: the idea of lexicogrammar, rejecting a sharp border between

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syntax and lexis; delicacy (pertaining to level of analytical detail); and an interest in paradigmatic (choice) rather than syntagmatic (chain) relations. At the macrolinguistic level, CFA also shares an interest in textual phenomena above the sentence, and in linking linguistic phenomena with other forms of sociological behaviour. The term "functional" has also been used to characterize many other schools of linguistics, such as the Prague School, and several models of grammar, such as those developed by Dik, Bondarko and others (see the detailed discussion in Nuyts 1992: 26f, and also 2.4 below). All these approaches are typically opposed to a "formalist" approach, but such an opposition is not a clearcut one. Droste and Joseph (1991: 19-21) suggest the following criteria as ways of distinguishing between different approaches to language. - Syntactic base -Formal semantic base (logico-semantic structures) -Pragmatic base (utterances in their natural environment) -Cognitive base (conceptual structures) -Rule system (grammar as a formal device with well-defined rules) -Tendencies (as opposed to rules) - Structure oriented -Word oriented -One-one relation (between rules of syntax and semantics) -One-many relation (between rules of syntax and semantics) -Algorithmic (grammar is mathematically based) - Biological (grammar is an organic, dynamic, fuzzy system) -Modular -Integrated (i.e. non-modular) -Context-free -Context-sensitive On these criteria, functional grammars in general can be characterized as follows. They have a formal semantic base supplemented by a pragmatic one; they work with both rules and tendencies; they are oriented towards both structures and words; and they are context-sensitive. The kind of functional syntax used in the present work is, additionally, "biological" rather than algorithmic and modu!ar rather than integrated; it also focuses on one-many relations between semantics and syntax. Building on a semantic/pragmatic base entails that meaning is taken as primary: we move first from meaning to form, from ends to means. Functional grammars of this kind thus appear at first sight to be speaker-grammars, in that they look at language use primarily from the speaker's point of view: they model

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how meanings are put into words. However, it is fair to point out that functionalists (e.g. Dik 1989: 51-2; see also Halliday 1994: xxvi) often draw a distinction between the way their models are actually presented and the way they exist in theory, as systems; this reflects the theoretical aim to be psychologically neutral between reception and production. Looking at communication from a problem-solving point of view (and also using a Popperian paradigm), Leech (1983: x) writes: A speaker, qua communicator, has to solve the problem: 'Given that I want to bring about such-and-such a result in the hearer's consciousness, what is the best way to accomplish this aim by using language?' For the hearer, there is another kind of problem to solve: 'Given that the speaker said such-andsuch, what did the speaker mean me to understand by that?'

This puts the two perspectives in a neat nutshell. Leech's own approach to communicative grammar takes more the hearer's angle, looking at the interpretation of implicatures and the like; the present approach focuses on the speaker's problem. A caveat is in order here. Against such a meaning-based approach, it might be argued that such a view falsely assumes that meaning is somehow "already there", pre-existing in some objective sense, before it becomes manifest through expression in form. This asumption would then go against the evidence that meaning is something that is negotiated, that it emerges through the interactive use of language itself. Halliday ( 1992), for instance, talks of semogenesis, i.e. of creating rather than expressing meaning; meaning is seen as the way consciousness construes a relationship between an experience and an articulation. Yet there need be no fundamental contradiction between this view and the one underlying Contrastive Functional Analysis. Before speakers say anything, it is reasonable to believe that, in most cases at least, they have some vague intention of what they wish to communicate. True, their intention may only reach its final form during the actual process of speaking, but it is reasonable to assume that there has been a pre-verbal starting point of some kind. On empirical evidence, Levelt (1989), for instance, posits a stage du~ing which "pre-verbal sentences" are formed in the mind, prior to an actual utterance. One model which explicitly incorporates such an assumption is Nuyts' Functional Procedural Grammar ( 1992: 256f); this aims quite specifically at a theory of language that will combine cognitivist psychology and linguistic pragmatics, a theory that explicitly seeks cognitive plausibility. Nuyts takes the notion of "conceptualization" as central, and sets up a model of the way conceptualizations are converted into verbal patterns via a process of information selection frolll the "universe of interpretation", the contextualizing of this information in the situational network,

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and the subsequent verbalization itself. Mustajoki (1993), in his presentation of the model that we shall apply below, takes a very similar approach, starting with a level of conceptual structure prior to that of surface expression. Meanings-asintentions may be greatly refined, even altered, during speech, but one seldom opens one's mouth with no idea at all of the content of what will emerge, however vague the original intended meaning might be. The way in which Contrastive Functional Analysis accounts for this distinction, between the original meaning-as-intention and the expressed form of meaning-as-convention, is described in the following section.

2.2.

Interpreting the Constraint of Relevant Similarity

Mustajoki (1993: 21) points out that the idea of a linguistic description going from meaning to form has a long history in traditional grammar. Brunot ( 1922) advocated a description based on the classification of ideas or notions, understanding such notions as sociological facts; he emphasized that language was above all a way of signifying, so that a grammar - particularly a pedagogical grammar - should follow this direction from signified to signifier. Brunot's massive opus does this on a grand scale, with sections on such topics as how to express certain feelings, future time, logical and non-logical relations, how to characterize, how to determine etc., although he also makes use of formbased classifications such as "prepositions". Jespersen (1924) recommended a similar approach, as did von der Gabelentz (1891 ). The latter illustrated his point by listing several ways in which German expressed the idea of generality (1891: 97-8, as cited in Mustajoki 1993: 21): Ein Fixstern hat Jeder Fixstern hat (Die) Fixsterne haben Alle Fixsterne haben Fixsterne haben insgesammt

)

)

) - - - - eigenes Licht. ) )

This example is a good illustration of a paradigmatic analysis. Assume that there is a certain meaning that you wish to express, a meaning-as-intention. Let us call this the initial meaning. The first question is: what choices does the language offer for expressing this initial meaning? Each of the forms available has what I will call its own manifest meaning. The next question is: what are the differences between these choices, what are the differences between their manifest meanings? And then: under what conditions would each option be the preferred one?

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For it is clear that the choices cannot be exactly identical in their manifest meanings. In the example above there are, for instance, differences in the way reference is made, in the way generality is conceived. The first picks out a typical representative of the set, the second picks out each member separately, the third refers to the set as a whole, the fourth refers to the set-as-all-its-members, and the last also generalizes the verb via an adverbial, making a slightly weaker claim. Thus does manifest meaning refine initial meaning. In layman's terms, all five forms "say the same thing" (more or less). But if we are precise we must say rather that the five forms are similar in meaning, similar perhaps in all relevant respects, insofar as the differences just mentioned are indeed deemed to be not relevant, for instance in the context of someone wishing to state a general characteristic of stars, perhaps in a school textbook. On the other hand, one could imagine a different context in which such subtle differences would indeed be relevant- in a scientific article, for instance, where the writer might want to be careful about the precise degree of accuracy or confidence with which this general claim is made. Recall too the example of the folder and the card-box on my desk, mentioned earlier: I call the colour of both "green", and for me they are "the same colour"; but they would not be the same for an artist who set out to paint them, being of different shades that an artist would need to be sensitive to. The stars example thus illustrates one of the points that was stressed earlier: judgements of similarity depend partly on the aims of the person doing the judging. Linguistic decisions about where to draw the line between expressions to be categorized as similar and those that fall outside this range, depend on the level of delicacy that has been selected; and this in turn depends on the nature and purpose of the analysis. The level of delicacy therefore determines the boundaries of similarity, where the similarity constraint should be set. In any model of functional syntax, this constraint will limit the extent of the "more or less" which qualifies "the same thing", above. We are going from meaning to form, and we are investigating the range of forms which can express a given initial meaning. However, each different form affects the initial meaning in some way, for there are no such things as entirely synonymous expressions. We therefore need some principled way of limiting the range of forms that can be reasonably said to express the initial meaning, and excluding forms whose meaning is felt to be too far from the starting point. We can state initially that the manifest meanings of forms deemed to express a given initial meaning must be relevantly similar to this initial meaning. Stated in this way, the constraint is of course an elastic one; but for the linguist it must be possible to justify where the line is drawn, and to do this in such a way that native speakers of the language concerned tend to agree. In a model of semantic structure such as the one to be outlined below (2.3), therefore, the constraint works as follows:

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Constraint of relevant similarity: Manifest meanings are deemed to be relevantly similar to a given initial meaning (and hence also to each other) if they can be formulated in terms of the same semantic structure, in a way that is intuitively acceptable to speakers of the language(s) concerned. Expressions (in one or more languages) whose manifest meanings are similar in this sense will be said to belong to the same paradigm. What is meant by "semantic structure" is then defined by the model itself (see 2.3). CFA thus operates with a concept of similarity that is defined specifically to encompass variation, not with a concept of sameness that defines identity. Recall at this point the two similarity formulae introduced earlier in 1.1: Divergent similarity: Convergent similarity:

A~

A', A", A"'

A<=>B

We can now illustrate the constraint of relevant similarity along similar lines as follows. Let A represent an initial meaning and let A', A", A'" represent manifest meanings of it within a single language. The relation between the two kinds of meaning is then given by the formula for divergent similarity: this in fact captures the constraint of similarity, in that the element A is specified as being in common between all manifest meanings in this p~adigm (A', A", A"'). Contrastively, alongside this A paradigm in one language we set up another in another language: an initial meaning B, plus manifest meanings B', B'', B'' '. The constraint of relevant similarity stipulates in this case that in order for us to compare the manifest meanings A', A" and A"' with B', B" and B'" we must ascertain first that A is relevantly similar to B, i.e. that A and B can be assigned the same semantic structure. This state of affairs is none other than a strong version of the formula for convergent similarity. In fact, the constraint simply sets up a threshold: if we can reasonably postulate the same semantic structure (of initial meaning) for A and B, then A and B will count as identical, for whatever purpose is at hand. What I have referred to as the initial identity assumption or hypothesis is then that the set A', A", A"' is identical to the set B', B", B" ', and this is what a contrastive analysis sets out to examine and refute. In this way, Contrastive Functional Analysis exploits both kinds of similarity. In this way, too, CFA seeks to bridge the conceptual gap between translation-theoretical notions of equivalence and contrastive-analytical ones. By making similarity the central concept, not equivalence, it shifts the centre of attention away from strict equivalence (equivalence as identity), and towards looser relations between phenomena. It also takes a step towards practical and

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psychological realism: strict equivalence is hard to come by, both in "real life" and in contrastive analysis. It is important to stress that the notion of "same semantic structure" is thus a heuristic device. It represents a level of delicacy that is motivated because it serves the aims of the theory and permits a parsimonious description. A stricter limit would allow a closer focus on items that were even more "like", but generalizations would then be less powerful; a looser limit would obscure differences felt to be relevant. The "same semantic structure" is thus assigned to certain expressions by the linguist, on the basis of a particular functional model; we are not assuming identity as an initial postulate, but defining operationally an upper bound of similarity within which we wish to work. A different model, a different level of delicacy, different descriptive goals, might set the limit differently. One might speculate that the limit of similarity selected in some way corresponds to the "basic categories" of cognition, neither too specific nor too general; arguments for or against this will not be considered here. However, the basic theoretical motivation for drawing the line where we do is ultimately provided by Occam's razor. The concept of the similarity constraint may be further clarified by comparing it to the comparability criterion introduced in 1.5.2. To take the earlier German example of the general statements about stars having their own light: the comparability criterion is the reason why we set them up as being similar in the first place, since we perceive that they do indeed say roughly the same thing. The similarity constraint then sets the bounds within which a contrastive analysis can be carried out. We could set the similarity constraint in terms of the notion of generality, in which case all the German data would be included. However, if we set the constraint more strictly, for instance in terms of genuine genericity, some of these examples will be excluded (at least the second, fourth and fifth examples: see further section 3.4). In other words, the similarity constraint sets an upper boundary on the limit of difference accepted for a particular study. Equivalence, understood as identity, constitutes the lower boundary, below which no closer similarity is perceived. In Contrastive Functional Analysis it is the similarity constraint that is prioritized, not equivalence. A functional grammar (in this sense) of a single language will thus aim to state the options available for expressing a given initial meaning within the constraint of relevant similarity. Such a grammar will ideally comprise three kinds of information: (a) a theoretical model of semantic structure in general; (b) a description of the forms of expression of particular semantic structures in the language concerned; and

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(c) a description of the conditions determining the differential uses of these different forms of expression of a given semantic structure. Compare Catford's conditioned probabilities of equivalence, mentioned in 1.2. Such a functional grammar is not generative, it is not interested in the process whereby meanings can be coded into forms, or in setting up algorithms to do this. Rather, it is interested in specifying the sets of options available, paradigms that may range freely across grammatical boundaries of all kinds, between syntax, lexis, word formation and prosody. A functional grammar that is contrastive, therefore, will seek to apply this approach to two or more languages. It will use a model of semantic structure as a basis for the description of forms of expression, plus the associated conditions of occurrence, for more than one language. In accordance with the general methodology presented earlier (1.5), a contrastive functional grammar will also be expected to formulate claims about paradigms of forms of expression in ways that are empirically falsifiable: that is, by relating options to conditions of use in such a way that statements about them can be tested. In principle, such testing can be done in various ways, as mentioned earlier. Given a meaning and a set of forms which express it (within the constraint of relevant similarity), we can predict that form F will tend to be used under certain conditions and form G under certain other conditions. Or: given a meaning and a set of conditions, we can predict that a form F will tend to be used to express this· meaning. Or: given a meaning and a form F, we can predict the conditions under which F is likely to be used. Or: given a form F and a set of conditions, we can make predictions about how F will tend to be interpreted, what meaning will tend to be attributed to it. And so on. All such predictions can be empiricially tested. All such tests involve three kinds of factors, corresponding to the three types of information mentioned above: meanings, forms, and conditions of use. Ideally, therefore, we need (a) an inventory of possible meanings, (b) an inventory of possible forms, and (c) an inventory of possible conditions, pertaining both to user and to use. In practice, what is currently available amounts to (a) a medley of semantic theories and thesauruses, (b) a variety of grammatical and textlinguistic models, and (c) a collection of sociological, pragmatic and stylistic parameters, theories of genre, register and dialect and the like. Since language is an interactive phenomenon, born of embodied human minds, it is by nature indeterminate, open-ended; it is therefore unlikely that any of these inventories will ever reach completion. At the core of any contrastive functional analysis, then, there will be some kind of model of semantic structure. Several well-known models of functional grammar are available for this purpose; the general methodology outlined in the

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., foregoing sections is not bound to any particular model. However, I shall select one model- based on Mustajoki (1993)- as the basis for the illustrative studies to be presented in chapter 3. Readers with other preferences and backgrounds should find it easy enough to see how other models could be used in very similar ways. The followil)g section (2.3) introduces this particular model in outline. I will not go into the details, as our interest here is not in justifying the model itself but in the methodology it can be used to demonstrate. Section 2.4 then compares it briefly to some other functional models, and section 2.5 relates it to other contrastive models.

2.3. An Outline Model of Semantic Structure As mentioned in the previous section, any framework for Contrastive Functional Analysis seeks ultimately to do three things: (a) provide a theoretical model of semantic structure in general; (b) provide a description of the (primarily syntactic) forms of expression of particular semantic structures in two or more languages; and (c) provide a description of the conditions of use determining the differential distribution of the various forms of expression of a given semantic structure, in the languages concerned. The general aim is thus to construct a single, coherent theoretical framework for a wide range of different types of contrastive studies. In its present form, the framework I outline here focuses on sentence-level phenomena, but potential extensions above the sentence are discussed in chapter 4. The present section focuses particularly on the level of semantic structure. Recall the suggested stages for a contrastive methodology: I repeat them here for convenience: 1. Primary data: instances of language behaviour in different languages. 2. Comparability criterion: a perceived similarity, of any kind, between a phenomenon X in language A and a phenomenon Y in language B. For a given contrastive analysis, this criterion is then defined operationally in terms of a constraint of relevant similarity. 3. Problem: what is the nature of this similarity? 4. Initial hypothesis: that X and Y are identical. 5. Test: on what grounds can the initial hypothesis be supported or rejected? On what conditions (if ever) does it hold? 6. Revised hypothesis (if the identity hypothesis fails): that the relation between X and Y is such-and-such; or, that the use of X and Y depends on such-and-such conditions. 7. Testing of the revised hypothesis.

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A model for Contrastive Functional Analysis serves as a conceptual toolbox that is of use particularly in the testing stages (5 and 7). It can also provide ways of formulating hypotheses and specifying conditions. And, as indicated in the previous section, it provides an interpretation of the similarity constraint; this serves to define the range of phenomena whose similarity is such that a contrastive analysis is warranted. In this way, the model also provides a filter through which primary data can be sifted. Mustajoki's model (Mustajoki 1993, 1995) has been developed primarily for Finnish-Russian contrasts. It has been strongly influenced by Russian functionalist scholars (for a full documentation of this, in Finnish, see Mustajoki 1993; a complete Russian grammar based on the model is under preparation, and a shorter English version of this grammar is also forthcoming.) With all classifications in the model, it is acknowledged that we are not dealing with classical categories but with prototypes or continua. There will always be areas where one category shades off into another, or where it is difficult to decide which category an item belongs to. This is accepted as a natural consequence of the fuzzy and open-ended nature of language itself. All grammatical categories are therefore inevitably ineffable (cf. Halliday 1988). Recall, too, the earlier discussion of delicacy level. Furthermore, many of the sets of subclasses within a category are recognized to be open sets. The model rests on a semantic or conceptual level of description. Meaning is taken as primary, and the similarity constraint is interpreted in terms of a shared semantic structure. This semantic structure could be thought of as a "deep structure" or "deep semantics"; but I shall not use such terms because of their associations with very different (generative) kinds of grammars. The semantic structure constitutes an analysis of what I have referred to as "initial meaning". In essence, what the model does is to offer a way of describing this semantic structure in fairly precise terms, so that it can act as a basis for a subsequent analysis of syntactic forms. The model uses only a rather flexible, loose formalism, for several reasons: it is not generative, and does not prioritize computer applications; it sets out to be a readily adaptable conceptual tool for contrastive analysis between different languages; being interested in ranges of relative similarities rather than absolute universals, it does not need a high level of abstraction or delicacy; it aims to be easily accessible, practical; and it recognizes the fuzzy open-endedness of human language. Giving priority to paradigmatic relations, it thus does not set out to generate syntactic form from semantic structure; rather, it aims to list the range of possible forms that can express a given semantic structure, within the similarity constraint. More precisely, because it is not primarily concerned with distinguishing grammatical from ungrammatical forms, it seeks to determine the range of

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preferred possible forms that can express a given semantic structure. It acknowledges that all such paradigms tend to be open-ended, because the process of semiosis which is language use is itself open-ended. The semantic level centres on "sentence meaning", but it also includes certain aspects of pragmatic meaning. In this respect, it also covers what Leech (1983) defined as pragmalinguistics: the study of "the particular resources which a given language provides for conveying particular illocutions" (11). To "particular illocutions" we would add "and particular meanings". In this attempt to incorporate some pragmatic information into a semantic model, we are not staking out a "radical semantic" position, claiming that all pragmatics is ultimately a matter of semantics. What we are seeking to do is develop a single framework which includes both semantic "sense" and pragmatic "force". Not being a dictionary, the framework does not extend to details of lexical semantics. However, in examining the range of options within a given paradigm, it does not exclude lexical means of expression; this is especially apparent in the treatment of speech functions. The underlying concept here is therefore one of lexicograrnmar, although the model operates at levels of delicacy that do not (yet) extend very far into lexis. Unlike many other models, the framework does not aim at an exhaustive description, in which every single semantic element of a proposition is reduced to a primitive. The analysis offered is not an end in itself, but a tool for a particular comparison. The model allows various levels of delicacy in analysis. Its purpose, for each given comparison, is to state the level of meaning at which two or more expressions may be said to have the same semantic structure, if such a level can be posited. 2.3.1. Overview In Mustajoki's model, the semantic structure of a simple clause centres round a nucleus called a predication. A predication is understood as a mental representation of a situation, a situation being some segment of reality ("real" or "imagined") which the speaker has selected to say something about. A predication consists of a predicate plus various actants, plus (optionally) a number of specifiers. A predication may also be embedded within another predication. A predication is a looser concept than a logical proposition in the strict sense; a predication may contain several atomic elements that would represent propositions. Around this central nucleus there may also be complicators, commentators and conjunctors. The model's overall picture of semantic structure is shown in Figure 1.

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Semantic structure

'----------------------------------------------{ (Commentators) (Complicators) [Predication] l.l (Meta + Actants (+ Specifiers))

l.l

{!. [Predicate (+ Specifiers) + Actants (+ Specifiers)]

(Meta + Actants (+ Specifiers))

simple nucleus

complex nucleus

Figure 1. Semantic structure. (Meta

=metaverb; explained on p. 80 below)

I will now look briefly at each category in turn, beginning with predications. 2.3.2. Predicates

Predications fall into eight main semantic types according to the type of predicate, ilh.:strated below with a couple of examples each. Each type has further subclasses, not illustrated here. In the notation, each type is indicated by two mnemonic letters.

Action (Ac) Sam washed up. Sam did the washing-up. Relation (Rl) Sam can't stand sport. Sam has a hatred of sport. Possession (Ps) That horse is Sue's. That horse belongs to Sue. Location (Le) Sam lay in bed all day. Sam spent all day in bed.

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CONTRASTIVE FuNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

Exist.ence (Ex) There were papers in the bag. The bag had papers in it. State (St) Sam has the flu. Sam is suffering from flu. Characterization (Ch) Sue is completely trilingual. Sue speaks three languages perfectly. Identification (Id) · Today is Thursday. It's Thursday today. The semantic structure can also indicate whether the state of affairs denoted by a predicate is being entered into or left; this is marked by an appropriate arrow, denoting change. Thus the State predicates underlying the following examples would be indicated as shown: the analysis assumes that the basic predicate remains the same, with the additional notion of inchoative change. Sue was tired Sue went to sleep

St

Sue woke up

St~

~St

2.3.3. Actants Actants fall into six main classes (with subclasses), marked in the notation by a single letter. These actants should not be confused with the use of the term in folk-tale narratology (Propp) or in semiotics (Greimas). Together with predicates, actants constitute elements of the predication which makes up the core of the semantic structure. The actants represent the roles which the speaker assigns to different participants in the action or state denoted by the predicate. It must be stressed that the number of these roles and the names they are given have been open to much debate in many models of grammar, from Fillmore's cases to theta roles in Government and Binding theory (see e.g. Ravin 1990). No claims are made here concerning final solutions to such issues. The aim of the model presented here is heuristic: to serve as one possible conceptual framework for contrastive studies. As such, the model aims to be flexible enough to allow adaptation for particular comparisons, as required.

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It must also be stressed that the dividing line between different roles is not always easy to draw, depending as it does on the speaker's interpretation of the elements in the predication: interpretations can vary across speakers, and even within a single speaker in different situations. For one thing, the roles may not be discrete in the first place, but perceived in terms of prototypes with fuzzy edges. However, in the long run the model should be able t~ aim at probabilistic predictions, i.e. that under given conditions a particular element will tend to be interpreted as playing a given actant-role. Among the actant-roles recognized by the model, those of ControUer, Experiencer and Recipient may only be filled by entities conceived of (by the speaker) as being animate and conscious. Whether other speakers, or hearers, would agree on this ascription of consciousness is beside the point. The six actant-types are as follows, accompanied by notional descriptions. Each type has various subtypes, not mentioned here. Elements representing the actant in question are underlined.

Controller (S) (the conscious subject, agent or controller of the predicate) Sue did it. It was done by Sue. Expel,"iencer (E) (actant in an emotional or physiological state, participating, involuntarily in an action) Sam rather liked it. It rather ~tppealed to Sam. Object (0) (the most neutral, default case) I lost~. My pen got lost. Topic (T) (something spoken or written about; Mustajoki actually calJs this "Theme", but I prefer to reserve this term for another sense.) He was talking about his thesis. He discussed his thesis. Recipient (R) (conscious beneficiary) Sam gave Sue a ring. Sue received a ring from Sam. Instrument (I) (material instrument) Seymour sliced the famous salami with a knife. Seymour used a knife to slice the famous salami. Locative (L) (e.g. place or natural state) Sue only just got to the station in time. Sue ba;ely reached the station in time.

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CONTRASTIVE FuNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

Actants also occur with metaverbs (see below). Propositions may also occur as actants (i.e. when they are embedded). One problematic issue concerning actants is whether certain actants are obligatory in the semantic structure or not. This has to do with differences between elements of a situation in reality, and elements that are actually mentioned in speech. For instance, the utterance Fred swept the floor does not make overt mention of the Instrument, the broom; and in Fiona told a dirty joke there is no mention of the Recipients implied by the choice of the verb. With respect to how these implied actants should be indicated in the semantic structure, various solutions suggest themselves. One would be to assume that these actants were automatically incorporated in the associated verbs and do not need to be included in the semantic structure. Alternatively, we could assume that they do not need to be included because they can easily be inferred from the context of utterance; or because the speaker has not thought them important enough to be worthy of overt mention. This last argument carries most weight in the present model. We aim to represent states of affairs as the speaker conceives of them, rather than as they may actually be, "objectively", in reality. Propositions purport to represent the speaker's view, rather than the situation itself. This allows the model to make a difference between utterances in which some actants are only implied, and others in which they are indeed mentioned: compare the following descriptions of two actions (Ac). ( 1) (2)

Fred swept the floor. [Ac; S, 0] Fred swept the floor with a bunch of birch leaves. [Ac; S, I, 0]

Another question has to do with the order of representation. In the semantic structure, actants are indicated in an order corresponding as closely as possible to their "activeness", salience or foregroundedness in the state of affairs described by the predication. This is one way of representing the speaker's "perspective", by which is meant the point of view from which the speaker looks at a given situation. This often means, for example, that the first actant corresponds to the subject of a verb. Compare: (3) ( 4)

Sue sold her Ferrari to Fiona. [Ac; S, R, 0] Fiona bought her Ferrari from Sue. [Ac; R, S, 0]

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If the term "theme" is defined as the starting-point of a message, manifested positionally as the first constituent of the clause (in English: cf. Halliday, e.g. [1985] 1994), the theme thus often coincides with the most active actant. Yet this is not necessarily the case: in an English agentive passive such as (5). (5)

The Ferrari had been completely repainted by Fred.

for instance, the most active actant is the clause-final agent Fred, &ut the theme is The Ferrari. 2.3.4. Specifiers Specifiers express additional information pertaining directly to the predicate or its actants. A specifier may be associated with (i.e. "specify") an actant or a whole predication. The notation is similar for all specifiers: the specifier (plus its subtype if required) is indicated in brackets after the predication type or after the associated actant, as in the two readings of the following, where Loc denotes the Place specifier: (6)

I thought of you in prison. {[Ac (Loc ); S, 0]} > I was in prison or {[Ac; S, 0 (Loc)]} >you were in prison

The main types are these, with abbreviations indicated:

Time (Temp) (several subclasses, based on Reichenbach 1947) Aspect (Asp) (six subtypes: stative, processual, momentary, resultative, terminal, dynamic) Modality (Mod) (external modality: possibility, necessity, obligation, permission, prohibition) Place (Loc) (open set of subtypes) Definiteness (Det) (distinctions between definite, specific, non-specific, generic) Quantity (Quant) (subtypes include precise vs. approximate, absolute vs. relative) Negation (Neg) Manner-(Man) (a heterogeneous category)

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CONTRASTIVE FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

2.3.5. Complicators In addition to this nucleus, the semantic structure may include two other elements: complicators and commentators. Whereas specifiers indicate particular circumstances of time, place, manner etc., complicators (and commentators: see below) have a more general effect on the meaning. Complicators add to the ideational meaning, having to do with the state of affairs itself, whereas commentators indicate something of the interpersonal meaning. It is in this way that the model also seeks to incorporate some pragmatic information, having to do with the speaker's general attitude to the predication and with the overall function of the speech act which it expresses. The predication and the complicators together make up the complex nucleus of the semantic structure. Both complicators and commentators are indicated in the model as what I shall call metaverbs, plus associated actants. A metaverb is a kind of semantic auxiliary, external to the nuclear predication. (Mustajoki ( 1993) uses the term "deep auxiliary", but I prefer to avoid this because of its purely syntactic connotations.) In some respects metaverbs are reminiscent of performatives, but the two concepts should not be confused, since we are not coming out in support of the well-known performative hypothesis, which assumed that performatives were present as actual main verbs in the deep structure of every sentence, and that utterances containing an explicit mention of such a verb were thus prototypical (as in I hereby declare the meeting open). The position adopted by the present model is different. Metaverbs are no more than labels for certain kinds of meaning which we construe as being external to the nuclear predication itself but impinging upon it. As such labels, they are abstract, superordinate terms. Some metaverbs represent categories which are traditionally thought of as semantic (such as causation), and others represent pragmatic types of illocutionary force (such as directive). In the notation, metaverbs are written as English verbs (in small capitals), but this is no more than an expository convenience (see below). Further to the difference between metaverbs and performatives, it is also relevant to note Levelt's claim (1989) that traditional performative verbs are probably not present in the preliminary stages of actual utterance production. Vilkki (1994) suggests that this psycholinguistic view argues against the psychological reality of Mustajoki's functional model. However, as argued earlier, in this model these elements are no more than a notational convenience; they could just as well be indicated as additional semantic features, symbols, or felicity conditions. A metaverb marked as CAUSE, for instance, simply means that the idea of causation is present, of someone causing something. Whether this idea is psychologically present as a separate notion, separate from other lexical elements, in the mind of the speaker before an utterance, is something the model does not take any stand on. For the internal purposes of the model itself, it is

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useful to have some way of generalizing and indicating such elements of meaning. The classification of complicators reflects fairly general semantic differences, which are altogether less delicate than a semantic analysis of individuallexemes. Three main classes are currently recognized in the model: one has to do with causation, a second with temporal phase, and a third with the modality of inclination.

Causation (abbreviated to Caus; indicated by metaverbs such as CAUSE, HAYE DO, FORCE, PERSUADE, PREVENT)

Unlike the solution proposed in some other models, such as generative semantics, this functional grammar does not assume that a feature "Caus" is present automatically in the semantic structure of any sentence for which one might be posited; it does not analyse give, for instance, as "cause to have", or build as " cause to exist". In this respect, the grammar could be said to be less delicate, and less abstract; on the other hand, it seems psychologically more realistic to treat such verbs as unanalysed and not break them down further.

Temporal phase (abbreviated to Phase; indicated by metaverbs such as BEGIN, FINISH, INTERRUPT, CONTINUE)

Inclination (abbreviated to lnc; covers various meanings having to do with the Agent's perspective-of-will on an action or event; indicated e.g. by the metaverbs CAN, MANAGE, DARE, FEAR, WANT, INTEND, DECIDE, TRY)

Inclination is one aspect of the general field of modality. Modality in general is well known to be a highly diffuse concept, defined and analysed very differently in different theories (cf. e.g. Palmer 1986; Kiefer 1987). There is agreement that modality is not a unitary phenomenon, but covers a wide range of semantic aspects having to do with attitudes and beliefs, obligations and abilities. The semantic model we are outlining makes a distinction between internal and external modality (cf. Lyons' (1977) similar distinction between subjective and objective modality). In internal modality, the nuclear predication is modified or "impinged upon" by a factor either bound to the speaker or to some (usually human) entity mentioned in the utterance. Internal modality can be conveniently analysed in terms of a separate metaverb, outside the predication: a metaverb tu which is associated a Controller actant. Broadly speaking, internal modality has to do either with an actant' s wishes and abilities concerning the predication's content (perspective-of-will), or an actant' s thoughts concerning its truth value

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CONTRASTIVE FuNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

(perspective-of-belief). The former is close to but broader than the traditional sense of boulomaic modality, and the latter is generally referred to as epistemic modality. I will use the term inclination to cover the modality of wishes and abilities (cf. Halliday 1985: 86) and evidentiality to cover speaker confidence. (Mustajoki uses "Modal phase" and "Degree of confidence".) The model treats inclination as an open-ended set of metaverbs covering notions of ability, skill, preparation, intention and the like; they are classed as complicators, because they are factually part of the state of affairs being expressed. Examples: Fred can knit, Fred intends to knit, Fred dares to knit. Evidentiality is treated as a set of metaverbs under commentators (see below), because this epistemic modality is more easily conceived of as being detached from the predication; like other commentators, metaverbs of evidentiality express some aspect of a participant's "commentary" on the predication. Examples: I think it is raining, I doubt it will rain, It will probably rain. Opposed to both kinds of internal modality we have external modality, which is bound not to actants but to circumstances. No metaverbs are posited here; this kind of logical and deontic modality is accounted for as a specifier (see above), comparable to other specifiers such as those of time or place. Examples: Fred has to go, Sue may win, This answer must be wrong. Compare: it is obligatory I possible I necessary that... Borderlines between kinds of modality are of course notoriously fuzzy: it is often a question of finding the most likely paraphrase in a given context. Sue may win might be paraphrased objectively as It is possible that Sue will win (a modality specifier), or more personally as I think Sue will win (evidentiality). With respect to inclination, the Controller of the associated metaverb is always coreferential with the Controller of the nuclear predicate. The basic notation is {(Inc; S) [P]}, where [P] stands for the nuclear predicate; metaverbs are specified when relevant, e.g. (lnc =INTEND). 2.3.6. Commentators

Outside the complex nucleus are the commentators. These introduce interpersonal meaning into the semantic structure, either in terms of speech-act functions (having to do with the purpose of an utterance), or in terms of what the model calls "authorization" (having to do with evidentiality and point of view). A full treatment of commentators would thus naturally involve considerations of cotext and situational context. Must~oki's current model, and this overview of it, stick only to the sentence level, but wider textual phenomena are discussed in chapter 4 as a possible extension of the model. All commentators are represented in the

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semantic structure as metaverbs, specified as required. The main groups are as follows:

Speech-act

functions (abbreviated Func; various subtypes distinguishing between assertive (basic metaverb STATE), rogative (ASK; the term is from Leech 1983), directive (ORDER), exclamative (EXCLAIM), proclamative ("performatives proper", or declaratives: PROCLAIM) and comitive (phatic: CONTACT) functions; more delicate metaverbs can be used as required, such as DECLARE, PROMISE, THREATEN, PERMIT, ASK, ENCOURAGE, ADVISE, WARN, HOPE, COMPLAIN, CONDEMN, WONDER, BE SURPRISED, BE HORRIFIED, GREET, THANK)

Authorization (Aut; indicates point of view, via metaverbs of opinion such as OPINE, APPROVE, PREFER, DISAPPROVE, PRIORITIZE; of degree of certainty such as DOUBT, BELIEVE, THINK, KNOW; and of sense such as SEE, HEAR, SMELL, TASTE, FEEL, and also REALIZE, REMEMBER, FORGET)

The concept of authorization here (much wider than the conventional sense of the word) concerns various aspects of speaker stance (cf. Biber and Finegan 1989), all having to do in one way or another with the speaker's attitude to the content of an utterance. (It does not include affect, however.) It covers the broad semantic areas of opinion, evidentiality and sense perception. The focus here, in contrast to speech functions, is not on the relation between the speaker (or the utterance) and the addressee, but on that between the speaker and the utterance itself. There is a fuzzy borderline between authorization and the modality specifier; the main criterion for classification under authorization is the ease with which the Controller of the authorization can be distinguished, as being distinct from that of the nuclear predication. 2. 3. 7. Conjunctors The last major category in the semantic structure is that of conjunctors. These pertain to the textual function of language. They are used to connect predications in various ways. At the level' of least delicacy four main types are distinguished:

Additive (indicated e.g. by AND, OR, NAMELY) Adversalive (indicated e.g. by BUT, WHEREAS) Temporal (indicated e.g. by AND THEN, AS SOON AS, AT THE SAME TIME AS, AS LONG AS, UNTIL) Logical {indicated e.g. by BECAUSE, IF, IN ORDER TO)

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CONTRASTIVE FuNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

2.3.8. Concluding Remarks First, a brief word about notation: the intention is that the model should be a useful conceptual tool, and so notational conventions have been kept as simple and mnemonic as possible. Semantic structure is given in a linear bracketed notation. Curly brackets { } enclose the whole structure. Square brackets [ ] enclose the predication. Round brackets ( ) enclose complicators, commentators, and specifiers. Predicates are represented by two letters, actants by one. A semicolon separates predicate from actants. Structures can be indicated at various levets of delicacy according to the needs of a particular analysis. Metaverbs may also have their own specifiers, such as the Temp one for time. At the level of least delicacy, with no time specifier marked, the semantic structure of Sa m kissed Sue is simply: ([Ac; S, 0]} An embedded predication is represented as P: (7)

I think it will rain.

{[Aut; S] [P]}

If they need to be specified at the level of delicacy required, metaverbs in semantic structure are represented in small capitals: (8)

I promise to be there.

( [(Func = PROMISE); S] [P]}

If other specifications need to be made, this is done via additions outside the basic formula; this illustrates the way in which a structural element can be thought of as a variable, whose value can be specified if necessary: (9)

Fred is in prison.

l{Lc; S, Ll} where L =prison

Further notation details mostly concern subscripts denoting subclasses of various kinds. Second, the foregoing sections will have made it clear how central the concept of delicacy is in this approach. The model offers more than one level of detail, in terms of which a contrastive analysis can be done. We can look at all the expressions of the phatic meta.verb CONTACT, for instance, or restrict the focus just to CONGRATULATE. Or we can specify still greater delicacy and look at a

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single subclass of congratulation, such as cases in which the recipient has not actually achieved anything by conscious effort, as with a birthday. It will also have become clear that the descriptive paradigms of the grammar itself are often open-ended: there is no closed set of speech functions, for example, or of phatic metaverbs. The basic grammatical framework can readily be extended to incorporate other pragmatic elements (see chapter 4). The notation also varies, in that it allows the analyst to mark more or less detail, as required, often in more ways than one (e.g. with or without specifying lexemes). All these characteristics underline the intrinsic nature of the model as a flexible framework, a versatile conceptual tool which is readily adaptable to a variety of contrastive purposes; the model is not an end in itself. Finally, the model acknowledges that many expressions can be assigned alternative semantic structures, according to the needs of a particular analysis or depending on which aspect of meaning is foregrounded. Alternative analyses often also differ in degree of delicacy. For instance, the following example could be seen as an Action predicate with an embedded Existence predicate, or as an Existence predicate alone, depending on how the part played by Sam is conceived of by the speaker. (10) Sam keeps all his schoolbooks.

or: or even:

[Ac; S, (Ex; 0)] [Ex; S, 0] [Ac (Neg); S, (Ex~; 0)]

The first analysis here stresses Sam's action in keeping the books. The second foregrounds the books, stressing their continued existence. The third stresses that Sam does not take any action that would lead to the disappearance of the books. For another example, consider the different ways in which the following sentence can be thought of: ( 11) Football is a great game.

or: or:

[Ch; P] {(Aut; S) [Ch; P]} [Id; 0]

The first analysis simply separates the basic predication Football is a game from the attribute great. The second foregrounds the notion that the statement is the speaker's subjective opinion. And the third classifies football as belonging to the class of great games. This flexibflity of the model is realistic, in that it reflects the slightly different ways in which natural language expressions can often be intended or interpreted, according to the general principles of relevance. It also stresses that

86 ~f

CONTRASTIVE FuNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

semantic structures are not "already there", given, absolute, in some objective reality; on the contrary, they are proposed by the linguist (on non-arbitrary grounds) in order to meet a particular analytical need. A semantic structure is not "a meaning" in itself, it is an analysis of a meaning. Semantic structures exist, that is, in Popper's World 3, as was argued in 1.4.1. They represent hypotheses, based ultimately on argument and evidence, that the meaning of such-and-such an expression can indeed be thought of as having such-and-such a structure.

2.4.

Other Functionalist Models

There are of course many similarities between this model and other models of grammar which can be called functional in a broad sense. The set of actants is reminiscent of Fillmore's notionally-based cases and other models constructed along similar lines: Halliday's "participants" and Dik's "arguments", for instance. Similarly, Mustajoki's specifiers and complicators are reminiscent of the "operators" of other models. However, the treatment of modality is more differentiated in the present model. Further, Mustajoki does not set up generative rules for deriving surface structures from deep semantic structures. The model also draws on ideas from notional grammar (Wilkins 1976) and communicative grammar (e.g. Leech and Svartvik 1975), which share the idea of starting with categories of meaning rather than of form. (Cf. also the mention of Brunot in 2.1.) This does not imply a neglect of form; merely that one does not start with it. Wilkins emphasized that the purpose of language is the expression of meaning, and so syllabuses should be designed on the basis of a categorization of kinds of meaning. He distinguished between conceptual, propositional meaning; modal meaning, including the expression of attitude and certainty; and communicative or functional meaning, as expressed in different speech acts. These meaning categories were in turn broken down into inventories of "notions", corresponding to a language learner's presumed communicative needs, such as suggesting, expressing possibility, referring to past time. Wilkins' whole approach to syllabus design was thus broadly based on the speaker's or writer's intentions- what they "meant to say". Leech and Svartvik organize the first part of their communicative grammar of English mainly in terms of general semantic concepts such as time-when, cause, comparison, although some use is still made of formal categories such as tense. Their analyses of information, reality and belief, and of mood, emotion and attitude, offer ways of classifying what the present functional model formulates as commentators. And their section on meanings in connected discourse similarly offers ways of classifying what we have called conjunctors. Leech and Svartvik's model thus implicitly uses the same broad Hallidayan

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division into ideational, interpersonal and textual meaning. It is also sensitive to several of the types of conditions referred to in the present model, such as those of formality degree. Another influence of a similar kind has been the work of Dirven and Radden (e.g. 1977). The pedagogical relevance of notionally-based contrastive analysis has been particularly stressed by Marton (e.g. 1974), who speaks of the usefulness of learning how to express "one core meaning through a variety of syntactic and lexical forms" ( 191 ), both in one language and in several. Halliday's influence has been mentioned several times in earlier chapters. As a general approach, CFA can profit particularly from work done on cohesion and individual systems of options in a Hallidayan framework (e.g. Halliday [1985] 1994, Halliday and Hasan 1976, Martin 1992). It shares Halliday's socio-semiotic view of language, and makes use of several insights and concepts from systemic grammar. However, Mustajoki's model is not algorithmic in outline, as systemic grammar is. Like Halliday, it stresses that what a speaker does (actually chooses) is a subset of what he/she can do (i.e. a subset of the total paradigm) in a given situation. Like systemic grammar, Mustajoki's model is a "choice grammar". And also like systemic grammar, it recognizes that certain choices are "canonical", i.e. preferred in a given situation; indeed, one of its aims is precisely to specify such canonical choices in different languages. Whereas systemic grammar has "entry conditions" to systems, Mustajoki's model seeks to define conditions of use for a particular form. But, like systemic grammar, it also accepts the methodological position that once the conditions (Halliday's "context of situation") are known, we can indeed make reasonable predictions about the language-form that will be used. Perhaps the closest relatives to Mustajoki's functional model are the models developed by Dik, Adamec, Zolotova and Bondarko. Dik (e.g. 1989) aims explicitly at pragmatic adequacy (the description of language properties with respect to their use), typological adequacy (a description that is general and abstract enough to be applicable to many languages), and psychological adequacy (so that the model sets out to be compatible with psycholinguistic research results). The emphasis on language in use and on cross-language applications is shared by both models. In the way it is presented at least, Dik's grammar reflects the speaker's viewpoint, following speech production from meaning to sound; Mustajoki' s model goes in the same direction, but aims to represent conventional language use rather than psychological reality directly. Like Danes (1964), and to some extent also like this contrastive model, Dik wishes to incorporate syntactic functions such as subject and object, semantic roles such as agent, and textorganization fun<Jtions such as Topic and Focus, into a single model. Unlike Mustajoki' s model, Dik' s makes use of rules applied in sequence from semantic to syntactic to pragmatic. Dik's deep semantic structure is more abstract than ours, for he is more committed to the search for universal features; we are more

88

CONTRASTIVE FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

concerned with defining similarities and differences between given languages. The two models also differ in their treatment of predicates: Dik's predicates are surface verbs, but in Mustajoki's model they are elements of an underlying semantic structure. Dik's "predicate frames" are nevertheless assumed to be highly similar across languages: compare our shared semantic structure. Finally, Dik assumes a hierarchical relationship between syntax, semantics and (at the top) pragmatics. In Mustajoki's model, on the other hand, specifiers, complicators, commentators and conjunctors are all seen as equal-status elements in the semantic structure, all contributing to the overall meaning. In its general approach, the Role and Reference Grammar developed by Foley and van Valin (1984, van Valin 1993) is also strikingly similar to the overall view of contrastive functional analysis in the present book. Their model of grammar has two levels: a semantic structure with clause predicates and arguments, plus a level of morphosyntactic structure. Their aims are to reveal the "contextual dependencies, both linguistic and social, of the utterances with the same 'meaning', i.e. which denote the same situation" (15). In other words, they too seek to specify the conditions under which different variants are used: they are interested in determining the "packaging variants" of "various clause patterns expressing the same basic semantic information" (108). Their work particularly explores the means used in different languages to express one kind of cohesive function: allowing hearers to keep track of referents across clause boundaries. Adamec (e.g. 1978) uses a "functional-transformative" model which generates surface structures from deep semantic structures. Partly because it aims to be generative, Adamec's model poses a more stringent relation between the two levels, but the form of his semantic structure is very similar to that of Mustajoki's model, with propositions, actants and predicates, plus various additional elements. It has been a clear influence on Mustajoki's work. Bondarko's model (e.g. 1991) also starts with semantic categories, and aims to account for all surface realizations, regardless of whether they are morphological, syntactic or lexical, or even implicit. The categories themselves are assumed to be universal. The model also posits "functional-semantic fields" which are nearer the surface structure of particular languages. These fields have names such as aspectuality, temporality, modality, possession: they thus correspond to what Mustajoki's model treats in terms of discrete elements of semantic structure. Like the present model, Bondarko' s model stresses that variant realizations of a single semantic structure are not synonymous if they are formally different: surface form always modifies the manifest semantic structure in some way. I have mentioned earlier that CF A could be seen as a kind of crosslinguistic variation analysis. Anderson ( 1990: 23) makes the same point quite explicitly: "Contrastive grammar is concerned with identifying and characterising

FuNCTIONAL

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variation within particular domains between n-tuples of languages." In fact, the future development of the model could undoubtedly profit from work done in variation analysis, as regards both methodology and results. To take just one example here: recall that we currently have a class of commentators grouped under the umbrella-term "authorization", which covers expressions of opinion, certainty and the like. Recent research in variation analysis has studied what is known as evidentiality in considerable detail (see e.g. Chafe and Nichols 1986). Biber and Finegan ( 1989), for instance, show how various markers of evidentiality such as certainty adverbs, verbs and adjectives, doubt verbs and adjectives, hedges and possibility modals are distributed differently across different speech styles in English. Using a statistical cluster analysis, they identify various "stance styles" which account for the eo-occurrences of these markers. In other words, they are able to identify with considerable delicacy the stylistic/pragmatic conditions determining the use of certain linguistic forms. Their work is only contrastive in that they compare (and in so doing define) different styles, but they exemplify an approach that could equally well be used across languages, with a CFA methodology. Attention should also be drawn to the similarities between Mustajoki's model and cognitive grammar. Cognitive grammar (cf. e.g. Langacker 1991) is non-algorithmic, partly because it stresses that grammaticality judgments are not black-and-white. Langacker refers to grammar as "a structured inventory of conventional linguistic units" ( 1991: 286), a view we would agree with: Mustajoki' s model stresses the inventory aspect of this, the paradigmatic sets of choices. Like the present model, cognitive grammar too is interested in describing the range of conventionalized expressions for given conceptual structures, the different ways in which some aspects of such structures are highlighted and others not. Moreover, it is thus interested in conventions rather than rules. Cognitive grammar makes the additional explicit assumption that semantic structure is eqy_iyalent to conventionalized conceptual structure, and thus goes one step further than Mustajoki' s model in the direction of psychological realism. However, as has been mentioned, Mustajoki's contrastive functional grammar certainly seeks to be compatible as far as possible with what is known about human cognition. Its metaverbs, for instance, might correspond to basic categories of cognition; and its predications might well match the phonologically defined "idea units" (or "information units") in terms of which speech seems to be produced. Chafe (1980, 1985) defines such idea units as prototypes, characterized by having a single intonation contour uttered between brief hesitations, typiciMly realizing a clause, and being about 7 words long in spoken English and about 11 words long in written English. An idea unit typically consists of a single verb phrase (cf. our predicate) plus associated noun phrases (cf. actants) and prepositional phrases, adverbs etc. (cf. specifiers, complicators,

90

CONTRASTIVE FuNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

commentators). A semantic structure as defined in the present model looks quite ciose to such prototype status. Insofar as this functional grammar seeks to incorporate semantic and pragmatic information, and centres around the concept of a structure (rather than one of rules), it may also be compared to the construction grammar currently being developed by Fillmore and others (Ostman 1988). The two approaches also share the tendency to see the resources of a language as a kind of inventory: for construction grammar, this means an inventory of all possible syntactic constructions, whereas for Mustajoki's model it means an inventory of semantic structures plus their possible forms of expression.

2.5.

Other Contrastive Models

Many contrastive analyses are functional in the sense that they take meaning as primary. That is, there are many studies that start with a semantic category such as "future time" or "definiteness" and explore the ways these are realized in different languages. Lipiriska ( 1980: 169) states the basic philosophy of this approach as follows: "CA [Contrastive Analysis] has to be meaning-based. What is to be compared are the ways of expressing the same meaning in different languages." One way of "expressing the same meaning in different languages" is of course via translation; in this regard, Halliday, Mclntosh and Strevens had made a similar point some years earlier (1964: 115): "If the items [to be compared] are not at least sometimes equivalent in translation, they are not worth comparing." There must be a shared meaning, in some way. Contrastive approaches have differed, however, in the way they seek to explore and formulate such differences. Lado's work (1957} was within a structuralist paradigm; of particular interest in the present context is his consistent way of analysing different phenomena - from sounds to cultural units - in terms of the three basic parameters of form, meaning and distribution (i.e. conditions of use). Another early structural model is that of Burgschmidt and Gotz (1974), which interestingly stresses the need to contrast paradigmatic relations as well as syntagmatic ones. Working within a semiotics framework, they establish a set of "deep structure elements" such as illocutionary act, modality, circumstances, time etc.; each such element can be realized by various signs in different languages. The contrastivist then looks both at the selection of signs and their possible combinations. There are obvious parallels here with the present model. A few years later, during the heyday of transformational grammar, Lipiriska (1980: 169) outlines a generative programme:

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91

The differences and similarities are to be found in derivational processes leading from common semantic structures to different surface structures. The differences and similarities are expressible in terms of types of rules required for the derivation of sentences and types of constraints on these rules.

An early study along these lines was Di Pietro (1971 ), which also made great use of a version of Fillmore's case grammar. Di Pietro postulated both semantic primes (e.g. number) and syntactic primes (e.g. name, sentence, "verboid") in his deep structure, and aimed precisely to formulate the deep-to-surface rules for the expression of a given universal in each language. Following the notion of transfer grammar suggested by Harris (1954), he focused on specifying the rules that were not shared between the two languages: these were the rules a learner would need to learn. The most ambitious project within this generative approach has been Krzeszowski's Contrastive Generative Grammar (1974). His model starts with a semantic input, assumed to be universal, in which "the fundamental semantic relations, i.e. the meaning of sentences" ( 1990: 173) are represented. The derivation then proceeds to language-specific categorial rules which assign word classes etc. This is then followed by syntactic rules arranging the major word classes in their surface linear order, and introducing minor categories such as prepositions. Then comes lexical insertion, and finally the post-lexical "cosmetic" stage assigning inflections, word boundaries etc. The model has been much discussed and criticized (see Krzeszowski's review and response in his 1990 book). In comparison to our functional model, some main differences are clear. Contrastive Generative Grammar aims to explain the ability of bilingual speakers to recognize semanto~syntactic equivalence; Mustajoki's model aims to chart the options of expression of a given meaning in different languages. This functional grammar is not generative, and is not interested in positing sequences of rules deriving surface structures from a semantic input; one risk of attempting to do this is the potential confusion with models of the psychologically real process of language-preduction. The model does not make a radical separation between le xis and syntax, or divide syntax up into major and minor portions. By focusing on paradigmatic relations rather than generating syntagmas, Mustajoki's model has the advantage of suggesting more achievable, if less ambitious, projects than Krzeszowski's. The two models also differ somewhat in methodology (cf. section 1.5), and perhaps also in their general underlying beliefs about how far human behaviou\' is amenable to algorithmic formulation: the present model stresses the open-endedness of human choices. Yet there are of course similarities between these two models. Both posit a semantic base (although the functional model includes pragmatic elements in this

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CONTRASTIVE FuNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

base), and (like many others) both use sets of semantic roles to classify actants/arguments. And like Mustajoki, Krzeszowski too acknowledges that the root of "equivalence" is the way phenomena in different languages are associated in speakers' minds: speakers can associate sentences for different reasons, including similarity of form or meaning (recall the discussion in 1.1).

Chapter 3. Analysis

This chapter demonstrates a number of sample contrastive analyses which illustrate the basic methodology of Contrastive Functional Analysis. They all make use of the outline of semantic structures described in 2.3, although, as I have pointed out earlier, the methodology itself is independent of that particular model. The various parts of Mustajoki's framework are useful in defining paradigms of expressions in more than one language, falling within a given similarity constraint. Each contrastive analysis then attempts to specify the differences found within a particular paradigm. I offer five sample studies, each focusing on a different facet of the model. They are all mini-studies, in that fuller and more detailed analyses would require much more space. The studies are presented not in order to reveal dramatically new contrastive results, but rather to illustrate how the CFA methodology works and how Mustajoki's model can be exploited in contrastive research. One of the central aims of the model, after all, is to provide a way of linking disparate insights into a holistic contrastive picture of the languages concerned. I hope these studies also show how even quite modest and restricted starting points can open up interesting avenues for future research. The first study is a preliminary examination of some restricted data within a single language. The second investigates one predicate type, concerning the relation of inclusion. The third focuses on a metaverb (the speech act of inviting). The fourth is based on a particular specifier (having to do with generic reference). And the fifth looks at speaker perspective.

(

3.1. States of Disease (English) I start with an intralingual example from English. One of the predicate types listed in 2.3 was that of State predicates. One subclass of this type consists of physiological states, symbolized in the notation as (StphJ). At one level of delicacy, we could then look at all the kinds of English structures that could be used to express such a state. Some of these would express only the state itself (My tooth aches), others would include the element of change of state (He blushed; He died of cancer).

94

CONTRASTIVE FuNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

At a more delicate level, we can examine particular classes of physiological states. Such classes can be defined semantically, for instance "states of pleasure", "states of disease" and the like. In formal terms, we can distinguish such states with superordinate lexemes, which thus act as constraints on the range of expressions to be investigated. If, for example, we wish to examine the expression of physiological states of disease, we stipulate that for all the structures we look at it must be possible to claim that an actant representing the superordinate lexeme disease appears at an appropriate place in the semantic structure. This lexeme then represents a range of hyponyms which name actual diseases. At a more delicate level still, we could further constrain the investigation by specifying a non-superordinate lexeme, for instance one particular disease, say AIDS, and look at the ways in which one can say that someone is in this particular state. To illustrate, I take the lexeme disease as the constraint. The actant denoting the person suffering from a disease is normally an Experiencer, and I shall mark the disease itself as an Object (alternative formulations are also possible). We thus have the following formula, which serves as our similarity constraint: {[StPhl; E, 0]} where 0 =disease The formula is thus neutral with respect to other aspects of meaning (types of Experiencer, presence of specifiers etc.). Methodologically, we set up this semantic structure as the tertium comparationis for our comparison. We thus exclude examples such as It's been diagnosed as cancer, which would be classified as an Identification predicate. Our initial hypothesis (the identity hypothesis) will be that all English expressions corresponding to this semantic structure will be identical in all structural and pragmatic respects. We then test the hypothesis by looking for ways in which such expressions are not in fact identical, so that we can reject it. English provides us with initial data (from my own native-speaker intuition) such as the following: ( 1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7)

(8) (9)

He has measles I a cold I Alzheimer's. He's got cancer I malaria I AIDS. He has a cancerous growth I a heart condition. He suffers from asthma I hayfever I epilepsy. He is having an attack of asthma I an epileptic attack. She has had measles I the measles recently. She is off with flu I the flu. Half the school was down with flu I mumps. He is in bed with malaria.

ANALYSIS

( 10) ( 11) (12) (13) ( 14) (15) (16) ( 17) (18) (19)

95

She is laid up with a cold I a touch of bronchial fever. He was afflicted by a chronic cold I by hayfever all the summer. She has caught chicken pox, from school apparently. She has come down I gone down with chicken pox. He is suffering from depression at the moment. He has become infected with AIDS. She has contracted I developed pneumonia. He has picked up an infection I a bug. He is asthmatic I epileptic. He is an epileptic I an AIDS sufferer.

These examples manifest a number of contrasts, allowing us to reject the initial identity hypothesis. First of all, there is a range of syntactic variation. In terms of clause structures (disregarding adverbials), we have four types, of which the first seems the most common and unmarked one: (a) (b) (c) (d)

subject+ transitive active verb+ object (e.g. 1, 2, 3) subject+ intransitive active verb+ preposition phrase (e.g. 4, 7, 8) subject+ passive verb+ preposition phrase (10, 11, 15) subject+ copula+ nominal or adjectival complement (e.g. 18, 19)

Within these structures there is further variation at the phrase level: nominal variation in the form of the nominal phrase expressing the disease itself, and verbal variation in the expression of the relation between the Experiencer and the Object. Syntactic variation in the nominal phrase occurs between definite, indefinite and zero article, and singular and plural; and in the verb phrase between stative (be) and dynamic (suffer, come, catch), and also with respect to aspect. This syntactic variation constitutes formal contrasts among the data. In terms of the three broad categories we have been using, these contrasts are differences in textual meaning, in the formal organization of a text. We can also pinpoifi.fSemantic contrasts, differences of manifest ideational meaning. Some of the examples express the state of disease as being temporary (5, 7, 8, 13, 14), others as being permanent or recurrent (3, 4, 18, 19); still others are neutral in this respect (1, 2). And there are also usage contrasts, differences in interpersonal meaning. These include differences in style, genre, pragmatic appropriateness to different social conditions, etc. For instance, some of these examples represent informal, even colloquial speech (2, 7, 10), others are distinctly more formal (11, 16). Several ofl these contrasts- such as the one concerning temporarinessrelate of course to much wider areas of grammar: verbal aspect in general, for instance. In a given analysis, the space given to such contrastive observations

96

CONTRASTIVE FuNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

will then depend on the particular purpose of the analysis in question: one rarely sets out to contrast languages in toto. Observation of these contrasts then makes it possible (in theory at least) to state the conditions governing the use of (or preference for) one syntactic structure rather than another, or (less generally) one expression rather than another. To the extent that we can do this, we can then formulate a revised hypothesis of the following form: structure/expression X occurs I is used I tends to be used following conditions are met: formal conditions [a,b,c], conditions [d,e,f] and usage conditions [g,h,i]. In structure/expression Y occurs when the following conditions are

when the semantic contrast, met: ...

To state this particular revised hypothesis in full here would extend this illustration unduly, but let us at least demonstrate it in principle by suggesting a few semantic conditions in more detail. Some of these conditions govern the eooccurrence of certain verbs or verb forms with certain diseases. Exploring them thus sometimes means taking the delicacy level down (or up) to lexis, to semantic characteristics of particular lexical items. Some diseases, for instance, are permanent states: AIDS and Alzheimer's are examples; one therefore does not recover from them (in the current state of medical science). This semantic feature seems ~o prevent the eo-occurrence of the names of these diseases with verb phrases denoting temporary states, such as be down with, be laid up with, be off with, have an attack of On the other hand, non-progressive verb forms denoting permanent states do not seem to collocate with diseases denoted by singular count nouns and hence understood as single occurrences (he suffers from hayfever but *he suffers from a cold I the flu). In both cases there is an unacceptable clash between a semantic feature of the verb and a semantic feature of the noun phrase. Incurable diseases also rule out the use of the present perfect tense (he has had measles but *he has had AIDS) unless an open-ended time period is specified (he has had AIDS for three years now). Other eo-occurrence restri~?tions seem to be governed by the perceived seriousness of the disease, whether it is potentially fatal or not. Thus we can say she's off with a cold I the flu I the measles but not *she's off with malaria I diptheria I meningitis. Furthermore, some diseases are not infectious, so that combinations with catch are then ruled out (*he caught schizophrenia from his cousin). On the basis of these observations, we can propose some preliminary candidates for revised hypotheses, to be tested against further data, such as the following.

ANALYSIS

97

(a) For any disease, the semantic structure defined above can be expressed in the form "subject + HAVE + disease" or "subject + HAVE + got + disease". (b) For any infectious disease, the structure can be expressed in the form "subject+ CATCH+ disease". (c) For any recurrent disease which is felt to be non-fatal and temporary, the structure can be expressed in the form "subject + BE + off with I down with+ disease" or "subject+ BE+ laid up with+ disease". (d) If a disease is felt to be serious, permanent or recurrent, the structure can be expressed in the form "subject+ SUFFER+ from+ disease". Formulated in this way, the revised hypotheses make claims about conditions governing possible expressions; we might also make hypotheses about conditions governing preferred expressions. These would then be tested quantitatively. For instance: (e) If the speaker wishes to stress the temporary or non-serious nature of the disease, the preferred expression will be either (i) one in which the disease is denoted by a singular indefinite count noun (as in a cold) or (ii) one in which the disease noun is itself a mass noun but is quantified/premodified by a singular indefinite count noun (as in a touch of malaria, a spot offever, an attack of asthma). This brief illustration has concerned contrasts within a single language, but it also suggests avenues for contrastive studies across languages. Apart from differences in preferred or possible syntactic structures or lexical choices, there may also be significant contrasts in the conceptual images underlying the various expressions of the semantic structure in question. In English, diseases seem to be conceptual~ed in terms of a few basic metaphors. One is possession: the sufferer "has" a <;lisease. Another is accompaniment: the disease is "with" the patient, alongside him, as it were, external to the self but nevertheless close to it (he is laid up with I has come down with I is afflicted with hayfever). And a third is a positional metaphor: whereas a normal or positive positional status is conceived of as being "up" or "on" (he is on form today I feeling on top of the world), states of disease are often conceived of as being "off' or "down" (he is off with I is down with I has come down with flu I he is feeling down), no doubt because if you are ill you do indeed tend to lie down. Further research along the lines of Lakoff and John~n (1980) or Langacker (e.g. 1991) in cognitive grammar might turn up interesting contrasts with other languages here, in terms of dominant mtrtaphors for particular semantic structures.

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CONTRASTIVE FuNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

The above example also illustrates how close this whole approach is to variation analysis. Both are concerned with exploring the variants by which a given constant is expressed, anci stating the conditions that govern this variation as closely as possible. Contrastive Functional Analysis could indeed be called cross-linguistic variation analysis.

3.2. Inclusion (English and Finnish) This section examines one subclass of Relation predicates in English and Finnish. In Mustajoki's model, Relation predicates have several subclasses, one of which is the Characterization relation. This is the relation which holds between two entities such that one is characterized in terms of another, as by comparison (A is like I is bigger than B), or by inclusion (A is a part of B). We deal here with the notion of inclusion. In other words, we are looking at expressions of the notion of hyponomy.

3.2.1. Similarity Constraint and Initial Data The inclusion relation can be stated in two basic ways, either bottom-up or topdown: we can either mention the part first and say that A is a part of B, or mention the whole first and say that B includes A. The two structures are in fact converses. The choice between the two is determined partly by the speaker's point of view, and partly by such factors as end weight (heavy constituents tend to be placed late in the clause). For the sake of simplicity here, I shall disregard examples involving negation or exclusion, and also the presence or absence of a Quantification specifier. Let us proceed to examine the expression of these structures contrastively in English and Finnish. In terms of the methodology outlined in 1.5, our comparability criterion is simply the perception that both languages express this inclusion relation (and additionally that translation of this meaning is not problematic). The initial identity hypothesis, which we shall set out to reject, is therefore that both languages express this particular meaning in identical ways under identical conditions. The relevant similarity constraint is defined by the two semantic structures formulated in Mustajoki's model as follows: [Rlch; (Oo). 0] (Bottom-up) [Rlch; 0, (0 0 )) (Top-down)

ANALYSIS

99

(In Mustajoki's notation, 0 0 simply denotes an Object that is explicitly mentioned a5 being part of another Object.) For English, we have data such as the following examples, which are partly based on the entry INCLUDE in the Longman Language Activator (1993). (This advertises itself as "the world's first production dictionary", and is an excellent source of materiai for contrastive studies of this kind.)

Bottom-up (1) (2)

(3) (4) (5)

(6) (7)

(8) (9)

The Institute is (a) part of the Arts Faculty. Flight tickets are I the flight is included in the price of the holiday. She is one of the most influential people in the Ministry. Pinter is I Pinter and Stoppard are among Britain's leading contemporary playwrights. Smith, Jones and Robbins are some of the most effective players in the side. Including you and me, there'll be eighteen people at the party. Counting Singapore, where we stopped to refuel, we've visited eleven countries in three weeks. With tax the bill came to four hundred dollars. The eight buildings around the sports ground constitute the campus.

In examples (6-8) above, the Relation predicate we are looking at is embedded. In (6), for instance, we have a Location predicate corresponding to [there will be eighteen people at the party], and within this a Relation predicate corresponding to [the eighteen people at the party will include you and me].

Top-down

~ (10) Today's programme includes a talk on interview technique. (11) Finland's best-known opera composers include Sallinen and Kokkonen. (12) The book has seven chapters. (13) Chapter four consists of six sections. (14) Chapter four comprises six sections. ( 15) Chapter four is made up I is comprised of six sections. (16) Chapter four is divided into six sections. ( 17) The course takes in practically all English dramatists between 1750 ant'! 1900. (18) All computer manuals should contain an appendix giving addresses of suppliers. ( 19) The central arm-rest incorporates a foldaway child seat.

'•

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CONTRASTIVE FuNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

(20) Levels of disability may range from very slight hearing problems to total deafness. (21) The Certificate course covers seven basic subjects. (22) The Hindu religion encompasses many widely differing forms of worship. (23) The category 'kinsmen' also embraces grandparents and grandchildren. (24) Among her reasons for resigning is the fact that she wants to move back to her home town. (25) Some major characteristics of the West European value world are individuality, commitment to change and consideration of others. (26) One of her most important works is the fifth string quartet. (27) Contemporary playwrights such as Pinter and Stoppard will also be discussed. (28) Important carnival periods were e.g. the sowing and harvest festivals. (29) We shall look at all the main metaphysical poets: Donne, Herbert etc. (30) The inclusive cost of the car, complete with tax and insurance, is £9,800. (31) The final price is inclusive of tax and insurance. (32) The library will be closed from April to June inclusive. (33) We're all going to the game, Betty included. The extension of the paradigm of expression for these semantic structures is presumably open-ended, particularly as regards potential embeddings, but the examples above seem to illustrate the preferred range adequately enough. Some of the variation is purely lexical, but this is less central to our syntactic model; in the analysis we shall therefore focus on the range of structural variation. For Finnish, we have material such as the following (various textual and translation sources; some examples are from Mustajoki 1993: 102, but they are classified differently there). (See page 3 for a key to the abbreviations in the glosses.) Bottom-f.lp

(34) Iiri kuuluu kelttiHiisiin kieliin. (Irish belong+3SG Celtic+ILL+PL language+ILL+PL) ('Irish belongs to the Celtic languages.')

(35) Sari kuuluu jalkapallojoukkueeseen. (Sari belong+ 3SG football-team+ILL) ('Sari belongs to the football team.')

(36) Tama toimenpide on osa laajempaa suunnitelmaa. (This measure be+3SG part broader+PAR plan+PAR)

ANALYSIS

101

('This measure is part of a broader plan.') (37) Tietokonepoyta on osa toimiston kalustoa. (computer-table be+3SG part office+GEN furniture+PAR) (' NThe computer table is part of (the) office furniture.') (38) Kyla on Hametta. (vi11age be+3SG Hame+PAR) ('The village is part of Hame I the Hame province.') (39) Piirpauke ja Leningrad Cowboys ovat Suomen nakyvampia bandeja. (Piirpauke and Leningrad Cowboys be+3PL Finland+GEN morevisible+PL+PAR pop-group+PL+PAR) ('Piirpauke and Leningrad Cowboys are some of I among Finland's more visible pop groups.') (40) Tuo laiva on Turun laivastosta. (that ship be+3SG Turku+GEN fleet+ELA) ('That ship. is from the Turku fleet.') (41) Paavo Nurmi luetaan urheilun suurmiehiin. (Paavo Nurmi count+PAS sport+GEN great-man+PL+ILL) ('Paavo Nurmi is counted among the great men of sport.') (42) Oppaat mukaan luettuina kaikki turistit olivat saksalaisia. (guide+PL+NOM with count+PAS+PP+PL+ESS all tourist+PL+NOM be+PAST+3PL German+PL+PAR) ('Guides included, all the tourists were Germans.') (43) Kaikkine lisaveroineen hinta oli kaksinkertaistunut. (all+COM extra-tax+PL+COM price be+PAST+3SG double+PP) ('With all the extra taxes the price had doubled.') (44) Saman sanan muodot yhdessa muodostavat paradigman. (same+GEN word+GEN form+PL+NOM together form+3P L paradigm+ACC) ('All the forms of the same word form/constitute a paradigm.') The last three above contain embedded Relation predicates, as in the earlier English examples (6-8). Top-down (45) Toirqiston kalustoon kuuluu tietokonepoyHi.. (office+GEN furniture+ILL belong+3SG computer-table) (The furniture of the/an office includes a computer-table.') (46) Laivastoon kuuluu kahdeksan alusta. (fleet+ILL belong+3SG eight vessei+PAR) ('The fleet consists of eight vessels.') (47) Yliopisto jakaantuu tiedekuntiin.

102

CONTRASTIVE FuNCTIONAL ANALYSIS (university divide+3SG faculty+PL+ILL) ('The university is divided into faculties.')

(48) K.ielet jakautuvat typologisiin ja geneettisiin luokkiin. (language+PL+NOM divide+3PL typologicai+PL+ILL and genetic+PL+ILL class+PL+ILL) ('Languages divide I are divided into typological and genetic classes.')

(49) Toimiston kalusto koostuu mm. yhdesta tietokonepoydasta. (office+GEN furniture consist+3SG among-other-things one+ELA computer-table+ELA) ('The office furniture includes one computer table.')

(50) Kirja koostuu kymmenesta luvusta. (book comprise+3SG ten+ELA chapter+ELA) ('The book comprises I consists of ten chapters')

(51) Kirjassa on kymmenen lukua. (book+INE be+3SG ten chapter+PAR) ('In the book there are I The book has ten chapters.')

(52) Kokonaisuus muodostuu useista osista. (whole be-formed+3SG many+PL+ELA part+PL+ELA) ('A/The whole is formed of many parts.')

(53) Tutkimus kattaa kaikki korpuksen alakaudet. (research cover+3SG all corpus+GEN subperiod+PL+ACC) ('The research covers all the subperiods of the corpus.')

(54) Asunto sisaltaa viisi huonetta. (flat contain+3SG five room+PAR) ('The flat contains five rooms.')

(55) Kauppaan sisaltyi myos asunnon irtaimisto. (deal+ILL be-contained+PAST+3SG also flat+GEN furnishings) ('The deal also included the furnishings of the flat.')

(56) Koulutukseen on sisallytetty runsaasti kaytannon harjoituksia. (training+ILL be+3SG be-contained+CAUS+PAS+PP abundantly practice+GEN exercise+PL+PAR) ('The training also includes plenty of practical exercises.')

(57) Lansieurooppalaisen arvomaailman keskeisia piirteita ovat yksilOllisyys, muutossuuntautuneisuus ja toisten huomioon ottaminen. (west-european+GEN value-world+GEN central+PL+P A R feature+PL+PAR be+3PL individuality, change-orientation and other+PL+GEN consideration+ILL taking) ('Some main features of the West European value world are individuality, an orientation towards change, and the taking of others into consideration.')

103

ANALYSIS

(58) Kirjan yhtena tavoitteena on selvittaa ideologian kasitetta. (book+GEN one+ESS aim+ESS be+3SG clarify+INF ideology+GEN concept+PAR) ('One aim of the book is to clarify the concept of ideology.')

(59) Rasvaista ruokaa kuten porsasta pitaisi valttaa. (fatty+PAR food+PAR like pork+PAR should+3SG avoid+INF) ('One should avoid fatty food like pork')

(60) En pida ihmisista, jotka tietavat totuuden, sellaisista kuin politiikot ja paavit. (negation-verb+lSG like person+PL+ELA who+PL+NOM know+3PL truth+ACC such+PL+ELA as politican+PL+NOM and pope+PL+NOM) ('I do not like people who know the truth, such as politicians and popes.')

(61) Loma kestaa 30 paivaa tama paiva mukaan lukien. (holiday last+3SG 30 day+PAR, this day with count+PRES.P) ('The holiday lasts 30 days, including this day')

(62) Venalaisilla funktionalisteilla lahestymistapa.

Bondarko jne. -

on erilainen

(Russian+PL+ADE functionalist+PL+ADE- Bondarko etc.- be+3SG different approach) ('The Russian functionalists - Bondarko etc. - have a different approach.')

Both languages make use of a wide variety of structures to express the inclusion relation. I will start with some syntactic generalizations and then discuss some semantic factors, taking each of the two basic variants of the semantic structure in turn. One caveat is necessary here. In discussing syntactic contrasts, I shall use familiar English terminology (such as "verb", "copula", "adve~·. "complement"), under the assumption that there is at least sufficient similarity between such terms and corresponding ones pertaining to Finnish. However, it should be borne in mind that this degree of assessed similarity, like all similarity judgements, is relative to the purpose of a given comparison. Equivalence of grammatical terminology is itself only a default hypothesis, to be maintained until evidence emerges to cast doubt on it. For instance, although I shall use "transitive" and "intransitive" to refer to classes of verbs (and also of clauses) in both English and Finnish, the classes of verbs thus designated behave differently in some areas of the two grammars: in English, intransitive verbs have no passive, but in 'Finnish they do; this in turn naturally raises doubts about the equivalence of the terms "passivelpassiivi" in the two languages (see Shore 1988).

104

CONTRASTIVE FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

3.2.2. Testing the Identity Hypothesis The bottom-up variant In English, the bottom-up variant is expressed via two basic clause-structure types. One, illustrated in examples (1-5), is simply subject-verb-complement, where the verb is or comprises a copula. The other, in (6-8), is adverbial-subjectverb-object/complement. (Example (9) illustrates closed inclusion, to which we will return shortly.) In the first structure, the noun (or nouns) denoting the "part" appears as subject, and in the second structure this noun appears in the adverbial. The nouns denoting the "whole" tend to be definite. The syntactic conditions governing the use of (1-5) have to do with the nature of the subject and complement nouns, as follows (Table 2): Table 2. Subject and complement noun conditions on verb phrase choice in English expressions of inclusion. The Eg. column refers to the data examples above. Eg. (l)

(2) (3)

(4) (5)

Subject noun ("part") singular sg/pl singular sg/pl plural

Complement noun ("whole") singular singular plural plural plural

Verbal element

be a part of be included in be one of be among be some of

If we assume that a speaker first conceives of the "part" and "whole" nouns, and then selects a verbal element to link them in order to express the inclusion relation, the syntactic features on the nouns can be seen as conditioning factors on the selection of the verbal element. A general condition pertaining to all the expressions listed is that they are seldom used (in the sense of inclusion) with the progressive aspect, because the inclusion relation is a stative one. The adverbial structures seem to be interchangeable, and flexible: the "whole" of which the adverbial noun is a "part" can be expressed as complement of the clause (6), object (7) or subject (8). In Finnish, the bottom-up variant uses three basic structure types. One centres round the verb kuulua, which means both 'belong to' and 'be included in'. This suggests that the inclusion relation is partly conceived of as a possession relation (as also in English: cf. (12)). The two meanings (inclusion and belonging) are distinguished by case differences on the accompanying noun: the inclusion sense requires the illative case on the noun denoting the "whole", as

105

ANALYSIS

in (34-35). This structure appears to be the unmarked one, in that all (36-40) could be paraphrased with kuulua. The "part" noun is coded as subject. The second basic structure type is a copula one, which exploits the richness of the Finnish case system. The examples show three constructions, each with the "part" noun as subject (numbers again refer to examples): (36-7) (38-9) (40)

olla ('be') osa ('part') olla

olla

noun+partitive noun+partitive noun+elative

Both the partitive and elative cases originally had a kind of partitive meaning (Denison 1957). In contemporary Finnish, the partitive has many functions, but one remains the sense of 'part of' or 'allowing the existence of a contextually relevant additional quantity' (T. Itkonen 1980), when used with nouns that are divisible (i.e. which are conceived of as being mass or plural). The modern elative case has the sense 'out of' or 'from', and hence also 'origin', as in (40). The two cases are not automatically interchangeable, in that the elative carries a temporal nuance: (40) could be paraphrased 'that ship comes from the Turku fleet' (although it does not appear to be with the rest of the fleet at the moment). Contexts in which this sequential nuance is impossible, as in (38-39), rule out the elative. This thus constitutes a semantic condition on the use of the elative variant. Finnish allows a significant variation be~ween partitive and nominative case on complement nouns (subject predicates). If this noun is partitive, as in several of the examples above, the predicate is interpreted as a Characterization. But if the noun is nominative, the predicate becomes one of Identification. Compare (39) above with: (39a) Piirpauke ja Leningrad Cowboys ovat Suomen nakyvimmat bandit. \ (Piirpauke and Leningrad Cowboys be+3PL Finland+GEN most'yisible+PL+NOM pop-group+PL+NOM) ('Piirpauke and Leningrad Cowboys are Finland's most visible pop groups.') The conditions determining the presence or absence of the noun osa 'part' with the partitive are semanto-syntactic ones, having to do with divisibility. In the sense that we are now considering, nouns denoting the "whole" that are naturally divisible do not deed the addition of osa: its addition would be strictly speaking redundant, since the same element of meaning is then expressed twice, once lexically and once morphologically (in the partitive case ending). In (38) Hame (a geographical area) is naturally divisible: a part of Hame can still be referred to as

106

CONTRASTIVE FuNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

Hame, and so the addition of osa is unnecessary, although in colloquial speech it would often be used. (Compare: That's a bit of real Dorset I That's real Dorset.) Similarly, in (39) a subset of Finland's more visible pop groups can still be referred to as some of Finland's more visible pop groups. In (36), by contrast, a 'plan' is not naturally divisible: a part of a plan is unlikely to be still referred to as a plan; and so the addition of osa is obligatory, to force a divisible interpretation. The situation in (37) illustrates the borderline: the word used here for 'furniture' actually means a set of furniture, and is countable; this suggests that it is not, strictly speaking, divisible. On the other hand, it is easy enough to see it as conceptually divisible, which means that the addition of osa is possible, but not obligatory. This concept of divisibility in Finnish thus has to do with the same kind of distinction that English makes between count and mass: count singular nouns are not naturally divisible; count plural nouns and mass nouns are naturally divisible (for further detailed discussion of this, see Chesterman 1991). The third structure type is illustrated in examples (42-43); these are comparable to (6-8), involving adverbial structures. The past participle in (42) is from the same verb lukea 'count, read' that appears in (41). In (41), the implication of the passive is one of a general opinion, which holds that Nurmi is included in the set of great sportsmen; in other words, the inclusion relation is subject to an Authorization. Example (44) illustrates a transitive SVO structure. Syntactically, then, there are surprising similarities in the ways these two genetically unrelated languages express the bottom-up variant. Both make use of copula constructions and comparable adverbial constructions, and in both there is a tendency for the noun denoting the "part" to be coded as syntactic subject. Both also have a lexical verb denoting the relation, although the verb in English (a whole includes a part) is the converse of the Finnish one (a part kuuluu 'belongs to' a whole): the subject of the Finnish active verb corresponds to the _glbject of the passive verb in English (a part is included in a whole). Other English items corresponding to the partitive are the indefinite pronouns one and some. In both languages, conditions on the use of one variant rather than another include matters concering divisibility or countability. English also uses the preposition among (4); the standard Finnish equivalent (joukossa) is not a true preposition!postposition but a noun in the inessive case, meaning 'in the set': vieraiden joukossa 'in the set of guests', i.e. 'among the guests'. This structure, however, is typically used in Location predicates, manifesting its original concrete sense, as opposed to those expressing an abstract inclusion relation. Semantically, we also find similarities. Both languages make use of the lexeme part!osa. Both use the image of counting (7, 41, 42) and that of

ANALYSIS

107

accompaniment (8, 42-43). Both express the relation between "part" and "whole" either by stating the whole as a superordinate term (e.g. 1, 2, 35, 37), or by referring to the set of hyponyms (e.g. 3, 4, 5, 34, 39). In the latter case, the noun denoting the "whole" appears as a plural, as a way of listing the hyponyms of which the referent of the subject-noun is said to be one. In other words, we can express inclusion either via reference to a higher, more general concept (the set itself), or via reference to the other hyponyms (the members of the set). It might be the case that each of these languages prefers one or another of these modes of reference, but the data above are inadequate for us to explore this further here. With respect to reference via naming other members of the set, we can now introduce a further semantic distinction that will be of relevance below. This is "open inclusion" vs. "closed inclusion" (this is actually an oversimplification, since what we have is more of a cline than a discrete binary choice, but I disregard this complication here). Open inclusion denotes a reference that is noninclusive in that it allows the existence of other, non-mentioned parts or hyponyms. Closed inclusion denotes a reference that specifies all the relevant parts or hyponyms; inclusively. Closed inclusion is thus semantically close to identification. So far, most of the examples we have discussed have been of open inclusion. For instance, to say that Piirpauke and Leningrad Cowboys are among the most visible pop groups in Finland is to imply that the set of such pop groups also contains other members. Finnish expresses precisely this nuance via the partitive, whereas English does so through the use of one of, some of, and among. The converse difference between the two standard verbs explicitly denoting inclusion (include and kuulua), referred to above, is perhaps suggestive. In English, the unmarked viewpoint here is top-down, and the image is etymologically one of closure, of enclosing within. In Finnish, the viewpoint is bottom-up, and the image one of belonging to a larger unit or set. A quantitative study might bear out a hypothesis that English in general tends to prefer topdown expressions of inclusion, whereas Finnish tends to prefer bottom-up ones. Such a hypothesis might also relate to preferred theme-rheme patterns. Again, the evidence presented in this section is obviously insufficient. The top-down variant We now move on to the second variant, which places mention of the "whole" before that of the "part". English uses two main structure types to express this variant, plus a cout'le of less productive ones. The dominant clause type, exemplified in examples ( 10, 11, 12, 14, 17-19, 21-23), is a simple transitive active clause: subject-verb-object. The noun denoting the "whole" is encoded as subject, and the "part" as object. There is a

108

CONTRASTIVE FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

wide range, 1of verbs that will fit this structure. The most significant condition determining their selection is the semantic distinction between open and closed inclusion, mentioned above. The verbs illustrated, including an intransitive example (20) and the passive variants in (15-16), can be classified as follows (Table 3).

Table 3. Engli~h verbs denoting open and closed inclusion. Numbers refer to examples. · Open inclusion inClude have take in contain incorporate range from cover encompass embrace

(10, 11) ( 12)

(17) (18) (19) (20) (21) (22) (23)

Closed inclusion consist of comprise be made up of be divided into

(13) (14)

(15) (16)

It seems that verbs of closed inclusion are marked, in that they cannot be used in verb phrases expressing open inclusion. Some verbs of open inclusion, on the .other hand, can sometimes imply closed inclusion if the context so requires. Compare: a week has/contains seven days; *your working day comprises a lunch

break. Another relevant condition here is the stylistic one of formality, together with spoken vs. written language. Some of these verbs are m~ch more likely to be selected in formal written contexts: incorporate, encompass, embrace, comprise. The second productive means of expressing this variant in English is via the form of the noun phrase denoting the ' 1whole". Some of these structures have . already been mentioned in the discussion of the bottom-up variant: they appear here in a different thematic word order. Examples (24-26) illustrate modification of the "whole" noun with among, some ... of, one of; (24) encodes this noun as a fronted adverbial, (25) and (26) as subjects. In (27) the "whole" noun is modified by the such as structure which incorporates the "part" nouns Pinter and Stoppard. It is significant that all these nouns are plural: the effect of the modification is to present the nouns as listings of hyponyms (reasons, contemporary playwrights), anticipating mention of individual hyponyms as members of this list (the fact that ... , Pinter ... ). All these structures are of open inclusion.

ANALYSIS

109

Other methods English uses are shown in (28-33). E.g. and etc. express that the inclusion is an open one, that the list of hyponyms is overtly incomplete. The adjective inclusive is unusually versatile. It can be either attributive, predicative plus of, or postpositive; its postpositive use is restricted to contexts stating both the beginning and end of a scale or period of some kind. The past participle included in (33) is structurally elliptical: the full ~onfinite clause would be Betty being included. There may also be other semantic and usage conditions affecting the selection of these methods of expressing this variant. The Longman Language Activator suggests that some verbs can have the temporal nuance of doing two or more things at the same time (encompass, embrace, cover); andthat some expressions are particularly associated with buying and selling (come with, inclusive). It also suggests that incorporate, and also take in, may foreground the deliberateness of an act of inclusion. Turning to Finnish, we find that here too the dominant means of expression of the top-down variant are via the verb or via the noun phrase denoting the "whole". As in English, there is a wide range of verbs, but there is some morphological variation within the verb. ''''·. The verbs in (45-52, 55, 57) are intransitive, and some are specifi(iaTly · marked with ,the reflexive morpheme u/y (47-50, 52, 55). The clause structure is either subject-verb-adverbial (with the "whole" noun as subject) or adverbialverb-subject (with the "whole" noun in the adverbial). The intransitive clause seems to be the preferred form of this variant in Finnish, in contrast to the English preference for transitive clauses. In these intransitive clauses, the accompanying ,nouns are mostly either illative (meaning 'into') or elative ('(}ut: of'), according to the semantics of the verb. The basic image is therefore a container one, with a whole being made up "out of' parts, or a whole being divided ~·into" parts, or parts being included "into" a whole. Both cases imply a temporal nuance, so that the selection of one or another structure also depends on whether "whole" or "part" is conceived of as being somehow more original, prior in time. In (47) for instance, the idea is that we start with a university, and that it then "goes into" faculties; in (45) we have a set of furniture, and into this set "conies" a table; in (49) we have the furniture, but then go back in time to mention one of the parts which went to make it up. Examples (53-54) are transitive. The related verbs in (54-56) show morphological variants: (54) is transitive, (55) is intransitive, and (56) is causative (rough~: it has been caused that exercises shall be contained in the training). Among all these verbs the same distinction can be drawn regarding open or closed inclusion. As for English, those listed as "closed" cannot be used to express open inclusion, although the reverse is not always true: see Table 4.

110

CONTRASTIVE FuNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

Example (46) shows how kuulua, the standard verb meaning 'include', can also imply closed inclusion. Table 4. Finnish verbs denoting open and closed inclusion. Numbers refer to examples. Open inclusion kuulua (45, 46) olla (51) kattaa (53) sisiiltiiii

(54)

sisiiltya sisallyttaa

(55) (56)

Closed inclusion jakaantua (47) jakautua (48) koostua (49, 50) muodostua (52)

Examples (57-60) illustrate means of expression having to do with the noun phrase, particularly the noun phrase denoting the "whole", as with English. In (57) the inverse word order (post-verbal subject) fronts the partitive noun phrase denoting an open list of hyponyms, and the subject then names three of them. The implication of the numerical modifier in the essive case in (58) is to foreground the point that the post-verbal clausal subject is only one hyponym of the set "aims of the book". The essive case implies 'temporary state', which again brings a temporal nuance into the mental image. It is as if the sense were: looked at from one point of view, at one point in time, X could be stated to be an aim; looked at from another point of view, at another point in time, some other aim could be stated. Examples (59) and (60) are similar to (27), with the "part" nouns incorporated as postmodifiers into the noun phrase denoting the "whole". Classifying (42) under the first variant and (61) under the second is on grounds of thematic order alone (part before whole vs. whole before part), since the phrase in question ("part" noun+ mukaan luettu I mukaan lukien) could be placed either before or after the "whole" noun. And (62) is like (29), with the Finnish etc. 3.2.3. Revised Hypotheses

The above analysis has drawn attention to several factors that support the initial identity hypothesis. Both languages distinguish structurally between two variants of inclusion ("part" first or "whole" first), and both distinguish lexically between open and closed inclusion. Both exploit two ways of referring to the "whole": by set-naming and by member-listing. Both use similar areas of clause structure to express the inclusion relation: variation in the verb, and in the noun phrases, and in the use of adverbials. Both have a verb which serves as the standard

ANALYSIS

111

expression of the relation (include, kuulua). In selecting between different variants, both languages also appeal to similar conditioning factors in the accompanying noun phrase: countability and divisibility. Both can express the inclusion relation via similar imagery, such as notions of counting, accompanying or containing. However, there is no lack of counter-evidence, and the identity hypothesis must of course be rejected. The two standard verbs are converses, suggesting opposing ways of conceiving the inclusion relation: top-down or bottom-up. The two languages seem to have different default concepts here. Because of obvious typological differences, English and Finnish distribute the details of inclusionexpression differently across syntax and morphology: Finnish exploits several cases, whereas English plays with articles and prepositions. The two languages have clearly different preferences as regards transitive vs. intransitive variants. If temporal nuances are present, English seems to suggest simultaneity whereas Finnish suggests sequentiality. Finnish also seems to conceive of inclusion more strongly in terms of possession than English does. We can now propose a revised hypothesis concerning the relations between the English and Finnish expression of inclusion, or in fact several revised hypotheses, based on the similarities and differences we have so .far pinpointed. As stressed in the earlier methodology discussion, these are indeed only hypotheses, and as such are subject to further testing and corroboration or rejection. (a) In both languages, speakers tend to thematize (place in clause-in,i-~ir· position) either the "part" noun or the "whole" noun, depending oif.t~~ speaker's point of view. In English, this thematization means that this noun tends to be encoded as subject. In Finnish, it means that the noun is encoded either as subject or as clause-initial adverbial. (b) Overall, there is a tendency for English to prefer the tqp~down variant, and Finnish the bottom-up one. (Evidence for this is so~~;~~~g~y: the nature of the default verbs (include, kuulua), plus the impression that there is a somewhat wider range of expressions for this variant in English.) (c) For the bottom-up variant, both languages prefer intransitive structures, and typically copula ones. (d) For the top-down variant, English prefers transitive structures and Finnish prefers intransitive ones. (This hypothesis assumes, of course, that we can indeed use the terms "transitive" and "intransitive" to refer to both languages rn this way.) (e) Overall, Finnish tends to make relatively more use of nominal variation and English more use of verbal variation. (Cf. the variations expressed by Finnish cases.)

112

CONTRASTIVE FuNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

(f) If the inclusion is "closed", default choices in English are consist of, comprise, be made up of, or be divided into. Default choices in Finnish are koostua, jakaantua, or jakautua.

These are all hypotheses that could be tested by quantitative analyses of a corpus. In principle, and ideally, further hypotheses could also be proposed at a level of greater delicacy, concerning e.g. the choice of a verbal vs. nominal vs. adverbial mode of expression, or even the conditions affecting particular lexical choices. Such conditions will have to do with pragmatic and stylistic matters, the semantic compatibility between nouns and verbs, and syntactic factors. Their detailed exploration would require much more research, but a few examples can be suggested by way of illustration: (g) If the context is one concerning the price of something, default choices in English are structures with inclusive. (h) If the communication medium is spoken language, structures with etc. I jne. are unlikely. (i) In both languages, if both noun phrases (denoting "part" and "whole") are syntactically heavy constituents, there will be a tendency to express inclusion via noun phrase syntax plus a semantically empty verb such as a copula, in an intransitive structure, rather than via a semantically full transitive verb. (This is highly tentative: for some circumstantial evidence, see examples (25) and (57).) (j) If the speaker wishes to emphasize that the inclusion is open, default choices in English are structures with an indefinite pronoun (one, some) or with among, and in Finnish with osa 'part', yksi 'one' or mm. 'among other things'. (See 3, 4, 5, 24-26; 36, 37, 49, 58.) All these hypotheses underline the fact that research is very much an open-ended process. Conclusions are no more than semi-colons, transitory pausing places.

3.3. Invitation to Eat (English, German, French, Swedish, Finnish) Contrastive studies of speech acts have a long history; an exemplary collection is Blum-Kulka et al. (1989) on requests and apologies in a number of languages; see also the papers in Coulmas (1981) covering greetings, compliments, announcements and other speech acts. This section presents one sample study to illustrate how such research fits into the syntactic framework we are exploring. We shall look at one subclass of the speech act of inviting.

ANALYSIS

113

3.3.1. Similarity Constraint and Initial Data Different speech functions are incorporated into Mustajoki's model of semantic structure as various kinds of commentators (see 2.3.6 above). One class of these comprises directive commentators, all having to do with the action of getting someone to do something, marked with metaverbs such as ORDER, ADVISE, INVITE. This next sample analysis now looks at the expressions of the INVITE metaverb under certain conditions across five languages: English, French, German, Swedish and Finnish. The semantic structure in question is formulated in Mustajoki's model as: {(Func

=INVITE; S, R) [P]}

That is: a given utterance has an INVITE speech function; a subject S invites someone (R) to do something (the embedded predication [P]). In order to narrow down the scope of the study to more manageable proportions, we choose to set restrictions on certain conditions, and examine how other conditions vary with different forms of expression. These predefined restrictions thus act as constraints on the range of data to be considered (recall the restriction of physiological states to those pertaining to disease, in the example discussed in 3.1 ). Rather than looking at all possible invitations of whatever kind, attention will therefore be limited here to certain kinds in certain situations. Formally, we specify these conditions by restricting some of the elements of the semantic structure, as follows: (a) S (i.e. the addresser) shall be a host or hostess with the authority to invite people to a meal (not just e.g. a coffee) that has just been prepared and is now ready. (b) R (i.e. the addressee(s)) shall be a person or persons who are prospective eaters of the meal thus prepared. Constraints (a) and (b) are thus pragmatic conditions, defining a particular situation and particular kinds of participants. To these we add a further pragmatic-stylistic condition to the effect that (c) the medium is spoken rather than written language. Informally: we shall restrict the data to spoken invitations to eat. Notice tha(we have set no conditions on the internal structure of [P], such as conditions concerning the class of predicate. The methodological position here illustrates the centrality of the notion of delicacy, and the way this determines the definition of the similarity constraint for a given study. The level of delicacy, and

114

CONTRASTIVE FuNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

hence the definition of the similarity constraint, is determined by the purpose of the study at hand. Our similarity constraint here is defined as the semantic structure given above, plus conditions (a-c). We start by using this similarity constraint to fllter some potential data. I will illustrate this using English. Consider the following preliminary data (from my own native-speaker intuition, plus that of a few other native speakers): Supper! Lunchtime! Come and eat! Would you like to come and eat now? Lunch is ready. I It's ready! Dinner is served. Lunch is on the table. Grub's up! Come and get it! Your table is ready, madam. Ladies and Gentlemen, kindly proceed to the dining-room. Please come and sit down. Isn't anybody hungry? It's getting cold! The President and Mrs Gump requyst the pleasure of your company at a dinner in honor of their silver wedding anniversary at ... (16) (The sound of a gong or bell) (17) (The sight of a waiter bowing and gesturing towards the dining room)

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) ( 10) (11) (12) (13) (14) (15)

At the level of least delicacy of all, we recognize all these examples as having something in common, which we could describe e.g. as "trigger to proceed to a place where food can be consumed". This initial recognition is our first comparability criterion. Moving to levels of greater delicacy, we can specify increasing similarities between some examples but also certain differences between these and others. Examples (16-17) are non-verbal, and are thus implicitly excluded by condition (c) above, specifying spoken language. Similarly excluded are written invitations, such as (15). We are left with (1-14) as potential candidates for a contrastive analysis. Of these, (10) and (11) are excluded because they do not satisfy condition (a): they would be unlikely to be spoken by the host or hostess, but probably by a waiter or butler. However, not all those that remain are explicit invitations to eat; that is, without knowledge of the situation, a hearer will not interpret them invariably as such. From this point of view, examples (12-14) are only implicit invitations.

ANALYSIS

115

Recall the point made earlier, that practically any utterance can be used to perform any speech act. Overtly, examples (12-14) could have quite different meanings in different situations: (12) and (14) might have nothing to do with eating at all; (13) might equally well be said by a disappointed hostess when no-one want a second helping, or by one of a group of people watching a football match - situations different from the one defined by conditions (a) and (b), and expressions of different metaverbs (perhaps PERSUADE or SUGGEST); (14) could refer to the weather. For methodological reasons, the model is primarily concerned (at this stage) with explicit, not implicit meaning. None of ( 12-14) would be interpreted invariably as invitations to eat, and we therefore exclude them here. Example (9) is a borderline case. We might argue that it too could be used in quite different situations, and therefore filter it out of the data; but it is a strongly conventionalized expression, and its default interpretation nowadays, in British English at least, does tie it to the invitation-to-eat situation we are looking at. For this reason, I shall include it. The remaining data ( 1-9) therefore comprise forms of expression that either invariably, or at least primarily, correspond to the given semantic structure and additionally meet conditions (a-c). Applying the same procedure to other languages, we end up with preliminary corresponding data such as the following. These examples are not exhaustive, but they are certainly typical and even preferred expressions. They are all associated with the invitation-to-eat situation, as preludes to the ritual of communal eating. (They were provided by a small number of native informants who were simply asked what they might say in the given situation. See the Preface for a key to gloss abbreviations.) German: (18) Essen! (19) Bitte Essen! (20) Zum Essen! (21) Komm und iB! (22) Komm essen! (23) Das Essen ist fertig! (24) Gehen wir essen! I Gehen wir essen? (25) Das Essen wird serviert. (26) Darf ich (Sie) zu Tisch bitten? (27) So bitte, setzen wir uns an den Tisch. lt

French: (28) Atable! (29) C'est pret.

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CONTRASTIVE FuNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

(30) (31) (32) (33) (34) (35) (36) (37)

Le diner /le repas est pret. Venez manger! A la bouffe! Bien! Passons atable. Nous pouvons passer atable. Bon &ppetit! Voulez-vous passer atable? Si vous voulez bien passer atable. Le diner est servi.

Swedish: (38) Mat! (food) (39) Maten ar fiirdig. (food be+3SG ready)

(40) (Ja, var sa goda da.) Nu lir maten ni.rdig. ((yes, be so good then) Now be+3SCi food ready)

(41) Kom och at! (come+IMP and eat+IMP)

(42) Det lir mat! (it is food) (43) Maten lir serverad. (food+DET be+3SG serve+PP) (44) Nu lir det flirdigt. (now be+3SG it ready) (45) Maten star pa bordet. (food+DET stand+3SG on table+DET) (46) Det lir serverad. (it be+3SG serve+PP) (47) Var so viinliga, middagen lir serverad. (be so good, lunch be+3SG serve+Pf>) /

/

Finnish (with literal translations): (48) Ruokaa! I Ruoalle! (food+PAR I food+ALL) ('Food! I To food!')

(49) Ruoka-aika! (food-time)

(50) Syomaan! I Tulkaa syomiiiin! (eat+INF+ILL I come+IMP eat+INF+ILL) ('To eat! I Come to eat!')

(51) (Tulkaa) Poytiiiin!

ANALYSIS

117

((come+IMP) table+ILL) ('To the table!')

(52) Nyt olisi I Taallii olisi nyt syotavaa keittiossa. (now be+COND+3SG I here be+COND+3SG now eatable+PAR kitchen+INE) ('Now t~ere would be food (here) in the kitchen.')

(53) (Tulkaa syomaan,) Ruoka on poydassa. (food be+3SG table+INE) ('Food is on the table.')

(54) (Tulkaa syomaan,) Poyta on nyt katettu, olkaa hyvat. (table be+3SG now lay+PP, be+IMP+PL good+PL) ('The table is now laid, please.')

(55) Ruoka on valmis I valmiina I valmista. (food be+3SG ready I ready+ESS I ready+PAR) ('The food is ready.')

(56) Saanko I Saisinko pyytaa poytaan? (may+lSG+INT I may+COND+lSG+INT ask+INF table+ILL) ('May I ask (you) to the table?')

(57) Jospa tulisitte nyt syomaan. (if+PARTICLE come+COND+2PL now eat+INF+ILL) ('If you would come now to eat.')

(58) Olkaa hyvatja kaykaa poytaan. (be+IMP good+PL, and go+IMP table+ILL) ('Please go to the table.')

(59) Tervetuloa syomaan I poytaan. (welcome eat+INF+ILL I table+ILL) ('Welcome to eat I to the table!')

3.3.2. Testing the Identity Hypothesis We can now examine these examples contrastively. The identity hypothesis is that fot any feature we select, no difference will be found between the various languages. Methodologically, as illustrated earlier, we set up an initial working hypothesis that the utterances in question are identical in all respects because of the shared semantic structure which we attribute to them, and then test the hypothesis by looking for ways in which they are not in fact identical. The subsequent step"'will be to propose a revised hypothesis to account for any contrasts we come up with, in terms of the conditions that determine such contrasts.

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CONTRASTIVE FuNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

We can start by making the obvious point that if an invitation in one language cannot be translated "literally" into another and retain the force of an acceptable invitation, the identity hypothesis of course will not hold. Such preliminary testing therefore points to the existence of clear contrasts, and we can then go on to try to formulate exactly what these contrasts are. I will illustrate this with respect to English. The following forms of invitation are either ungrammatical or unacceptable as invitations in English, although they correspond to "literal" translations from one of the other languages. They therefore represent potential candidates for interference in the English interlanguage of speakers of these other languages. (60) (61) (62) (63) (64) (65) (66) (67) (68) (69) (70) (71)

?Eat! (Cf. German 18.) ?Please eat! (Cf. 19.) *To eat! I *To food! (Cf. 20, 50.) *Come to eat! (Cf. 22, 31, 49.) *So please, let us sit down at the table. (Cf. 27.) *To the table! (Cf. French 28, Finnish 51.) *Let us go to the table. (Cf. 33.) *We can go to the table. (Cf. 34.) *Would you like to go to the table? (Cf. 35.) *If you would like to go to the table. (Cf. 36, Finnish 57.) ?Food! (Cf. Swedish 38, Finnish 48.) *Please, the lunch is served. (Cf. 47.) (72) *There would be food in the kitchen now. (Cf. 52.) (73) *The table is laid, please. (Cf. 54.) (74) ?Please go to the table. (Cf. 58.)

Similar lists could be drawn up for the other languages. Rather than belabour the obvious, however, let us take a closer look at the similarities and contrasts suggested by the data. Syntactically, the data show that various kinds of clause types are used across all or several of these languages (but recall the caveat mentioned at the end of 3.2.1: we continue to accept the default assumption that English terminology can be usefully applied to other languages). There are examples with a clause fragment alone: a nominal phrase (Supper!) or an adverbial one (A table!). Among main clauses, we find declarative clauses with various structures: subject-verb-complement (Lunch is ready!), subject-verb-adverbial (Lunch is on the table), subject plus passive verb (Dinner is served). Imperative clauses also appear, either with a following infinitive (Venez manger!) or in co-ordination with a second imperative (Come and eat!). The imperative may be ellipted, to be inferred by the form of the infinitive (Syomiiiin!). Some languages make use of an interrogative clause

119

ANALYSIS

(Gehen wir essen ?) . Subordinate clauses are also used, without an accompanying main clause (Si vous voulez bien passer atable). However, the languages differ as to which structures they tend to select from this range, as Table 5 indicates. Table 5. Range of clause structures selected by English, German, French, Swedish and Finnish to express a spoken invitation to eat. Brackets indicate the number of an illustrative example. Structure Clause fragment: nominal phrase adverbial phrase verb (bare infinitive) Declarative clause: subject verb complement subject verb (passive) subject verb adverbial Imperative clause: verb & verb (imp) verb verb (inf) Interrogative clause Subordinate clause

Fr

Sw

Fi

En

Ge

(1)

(18) (38) ( 48) (20) (28) (51) (SO)

(5)

(6) (7) (9) (4)

(23) (30) (39) (55) (25) (37) (43) (54) (27) (33) (45) (52) (21) ( 41) (22) (31) (50) (26) (35) (56) (36) (57)

Table 5, like examples (60-74), shows up a number of syntactic contrasts which enable us to reject the identity hypothesis. As pointed out above, from the point of view of interference it is particularly relevant to note structural options that seem to be definitely avoided by each language, either because they would be ungrammatical in any case or because they would not be appropriate to express this meaning. Thus English does not make use of a bare adverbial (*To table I *To lunch) in this kind of invitation, although the structure is not ungrammatical as such, as an isolated utterance. English does not invite with a bare infinitive, either. The option imperative+infinitive is also rejected (*Come to eat); this structure with verbs of movement is more generally unacceptable in modern English, with imperative+and+imperative being preferred (Come and eat, go and see). (But we also have the poetic Come fly with me, where and is deleted.) English does not use an isolated subordinate clause in this function, but interrogatives are"possible in implicit invitations (Would you like to take your places?). German also avoids a bare infinitive: the form Essen is a nominal. It also avoids an isolated subordinate clause. French avoids a bare nominal phrase, and

120

CONTRASTIVE FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

also a bare infinitive. It rejects coordinated imperatives in any context where the first verb is one of movement, and selects imperative+infinitive, contrary to English. Finnish also avoids the imperative+and+imperative option with movement verbs, but Swedish accepts it. In these invitations, all five languages disprefer a plain imperative alone (?Eat!), no doubt for reasons of general pragmatic politeness: bare imperatives tend to be interpreted as commands rather than invitations. French and Finnish seem to be the only languages here to make natural use of a subordinate conditional clause in this situation. And Finnish is the only one that uses a bare infinitive (there are four infinitives in Finnish, but only three in general use; the third infinitive occurs in several cases). Transitive structures and syntactic objects seem to be dispreferred in generaL (An exception is the second clause in Come and get it.) Structures shared and preferred here across all the languages are all full declarative clauses: intransitive verbs with a complement or adverbial, or a passive clause. Here, the pragmatic force of an invitation is conveyed via a simple statement whose semantic sense is a description of a state of affairs, and the actual invitation itself is inferred from this. Another potentially significant syntactic variable is the choice of syntactic subject, manifesting the speaker's perspective. In terms of the main elements of the state of affairs being described, the speaker may opt to encode a syntactic subject from any of the following situational elements: the food itself, the time, the place, the inviter, the invitee, and the actual process of eating. I interpret imperative verbs here as having ellipted invitee subjects, obviously also present in the situation. In the data listed above, the most frequent choice for subject seems to be the food itself, especially in English, Swedish and Finnish. All five languages also make use of imperatives with implicit invitee subjects. Encoding time or place as subject is less usual (English has Lunchtime!, Finnish has a similar expression (49), and a Finnish informant suggested an equivalent to 'The table is laid' (54)). German and French informants suggested versions with a first person plural subject (24, 27, 33, 34), including both inviter and invitee. None of the examples given select the eating process as subject. What semantic and pragmatic contrasts do we find? Let us first look at the commentator itself, which comprises three elements referring to distinct aspects of the state of affairs in question: the INVITE metaverb, the subject of this metaverb (S), and its addressee (R). The metaverb itself may be overtly expressed in English by such verbs as invite or come or by the imperative form, its subject e.g. by the pronoun I, and the addressee e.g. by the pronoun you. Table 6 below shows that there is some variation as regards whether the examples listed above contain any overt expression corresponding to these elements, or whether they are left implicit.

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ANALYSIS

Table 6. Overt expression of INVITE, S and R, in English, German, French, Swedish, Finnish. Numbers indicate examples.

INVITE

En

Ge

Fr

Sw

Fi

3,9

21,22,26

31

41

50,56

24,26,27

33,34

56

24,26,27

33,34-36

54,58,59

s R

4

Using an admittedly small data sample, this table is nevertheless suggestive. It seems that English and Swedish tend to prefer implicit expression of the commentator itself, while. German, French and Finnish are more explicit. One reason for this difference may be that the latter three languages, and especially German and French, exploit different degrees of conventionalization in the expression of this invitation function. In German and French, for instance, examples like (26-27) and (33-36) appear to be strongly associated with precisely this situation; in English, by contrast, similar expressions such as Let's sit down, Please come and sit down, Please come and take your places all seem less bound to the eating situation alone, and were hence filtered out of our initial data. This is not to say that they could not be used as implicit invitations, but to suggest that they have not become so conventionalized in this sense that it would constitute an automatic default reading. Strict boundaries are of course impossible here, but some such contrasting tendency does nevertheless seem discernible. Conventionalization is perhaps most obviously seen in the French expression passer atable, which occurs in four of the preferred versions suggested. Another reason for this relative difference might be that prototypical situations of eating and invitations thereto are in general more institutionalized and formal in French and German, as opposed to English and Swedish. This in turn might reflect some difference in the cultural significance or status of such activities. There is no natural English equivalent for Bon appetit! or Mahlzeit!, for instance. Formality differences are also evident in the examples given for each language. In the J.anguages other than English, for example, there is obvious variation between 2nd singular and 2nd plural uses. In general, longer expressions tend to be associated with more formal situations. Expressions with an overt mention of S or R also seem more formal than expressions where these

122

1

CONTRASTIVE FuNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

are only implicit. Informal situations, on the other hand, typically allow much more freedom of choice to the speaker, opening up a wider range of options involving playfulness, irony and the like; this might be revealed by an examination of implicit invitations more typical of informal situations - a topic for another study. As is well known, there are also differences in the use of the element please and its equivalents in the other languages here. Despite its origin in the phrase if it please you, contemporary English please is typically used in utterances whose function is to benefit the speaker in some way: Could you please tell me ... ; Please don't lose it (i.e., 'it would please me if you did not lose it'). Its use in invitations reflects this. If a hostess says Please come and eat or Please come and sit down, the implication is that the hearer would politely please the speaker by so doing. Please could not be added to any of the filtered English examples above except (4). In the other languages, the situation is quite different. The pragmatic focus of the item in French, German, Finnish and Swedish is on the benefit of the hearer, not that of the speaker. In Finnish and Swedish the expressions normally translated as 'please' are in fact imperatives meaning literally 'be good', and the French equivalent is explicitly 'if it please you'. (For a contrastive study of English and Finnish 'please', see Markkanen 1985.) In all these languages apart from English, the expression for 'please' can be fairly freely added to the examples given above. 3.3.3. Revised Hypotheses

It is difficult to formulate anything very specific on the basis of the above discussion, but some general contrasting tendencies suggest a few hypotheses for future exploration. Pragmatically, we might distinguish six "modes of focus", corresponding to the main situational elements: (i) Food focus (there is food) (ii) Time focus (it's ready now), (iii) Place focus (it's on the table), (iv) Inviter focus (I invite), (v) Invitee focus (you come), (vi) Eating focus (do some eating). These may either occur alone or in combination. Each focus is expressed partly by the choice of syntactic subject and partly by the selection of situational elements which are explicitly encoded in the utterance. The languages we have looked at make use of all these modes of focus, but some seem less preferred than others. Conclusions here are of course probabilistic only, but they nevertheless constitute revised hypotheses for further exploration. In all the languages, invitations with a focus on some element other than the food itself or the eating of it seem to be somewhat more polite or more formal, as might be expected. English tends to avoid a focus on the inviter: invitations such as May I ask you to take your places now please come across as being markedly

ANALYSIS

123

formal and hence unusual. German seems more ready to include an inviter or invitee focus, for example via the use of the 1st person plural. The homonymity of Essen 'food' and essen 'to eat' allows the focuses on food and eating to merge. French prefers a place focus, particularly in more polite speech, and does not make much use of the more direct eating focus. Like English, Swedish avoids an inviter focus, and prefers a food focus to an eating one. Finnish has a mixture of all six focuses. In all five languages, invitations to eat prefer intransitive or passive clauses over transitive ones. In all five languages, structures with imperatives are used in more informal situations, as are shorter structures generally. The expression of these invitations seems more conventionalized in French and German than in the other languages. In contrast to the other languages, explicit invitations in English tend not to use please. English please is more likely in implicit invitations (that is, in expressions that are not conventionally bound to the invitation-to-eat situation alone). One obvious path for further research along these lines would be the range of implicit invitations used in these languages, using the kind of data we have excluded here, particularly more informal data. For instance, one hypothesis would be that English and Swedish make more use of implicit invitations than the other languages. One might also compare (and expand or adjust) the range of expressions provided by these few informants with data from tape-recorded corpora in the different languages. Another possible follow-up would be to compare invitations-to-eat with other kinds of invitations, thus varying the specification of S and R; this might throw light on whether the differences mentioned above are specific to the eating situation or whether they are more generally valid across these languages. It might then be possible to relate contrasts to more general differences in cultural behaviour - a topic to be raised below.

3.4. Genericity (English and French) There have been many contrastive studies of specifiers. Research on the expression of Time, Aspect, Modality, Negation and Definiteness across different languages has been a popular subject over the past few decades, as any bibliography of contrastive studies will show. Less attention has so far been given to the contrastive study of the expression of Place, Quantity or Manner, perhaps because these seem conceptually more diffuse. Contrastive Functional Analysis therefore brings little that is radically new in this respect; it merely specifies the locus of such research at a particular point in a broad framework of

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CONTRASTIVE FuNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

semantic structure. However, its general methodology may have something of interest to offer even in this well-worn area of contrastive analysis. This fourth sample analysis examines one particular specifier, in fact one subclass of it. The specifier in question is that of Definiteness, which is categorized into four subclasses in Mustajoki's model of semantic structure: Definite, Specific, Nonspecific, and Generic. We shall look here at the Generic subclass, and how it is expressed in two related languages, English and French. 3.4.1. Similarity Constraint and Initial Data

We can initially say that the similarity constraint is simply stated as being any noun phrase with the specifier (Det = Gen). However, precisely which noun phrases should be assigned this specification is not a transparent matter. Genericity is well known to be a particularly thorny problem in linguistics. Even more strikingly than many other linguistic concepts, it seems to be an inherently fuzzy idea, and there is considerable disagreement in the literature about which noun phrases are to be counted as generic and which are not. (For a brief survey of these disagreements, see e.g. Chesterman 1991: 32f.) Recall, for instance, the data from von der Gabelentz (1891) cited earlier in 2.2: ( 1) (2) (3) (4) (5)

Ein Fixstem hat eigenes Licht. Jeder Fixstern hat eigenes Licht. (Die) Fixsteme haben eigenes Licht. Alle Fixsteme haben eigenes Licht. Fixsteme haben insgesarnmt eigenes Licht.

All of these express "generality", but (for most linguists at least) not all would be classified as generic. There would be agreement that (1) is generic, and that (2) and (4) and (5) are not; there would be disagreement about the status of (3), particularly in the form with the definite article. With respect to English, some have argued that only noun phrases functioning as syntactic subject can be rightly called generic (cf. C.S. Smith 1964); or that the+plural (the stars) can never be generic (cf. Burton-Roberts 1976); or that unstressed some is never generic (e.g. Quirk et al. 1985). Still others have doubted whether the zero article + noun (stars), or a plus noun, are generic (Burton-Roberts 1981; Jespersen 1949). Others have refuted these claims and included some or all these structures under the generic umbrella (cf. N.V. Smith 1975; Chesterman 1991). More disturbingly, there have also been disagreements about the generic or even grammatical status of much-quoted examples, such as:

ANALYSIS

(6) (7) (8)

125

A beaver built dams in prehistoric times. (generic for N. V. Smith 1975, nongeneric for Perlmutter 1970) The idea is more perfect than the object. (generic for Vendler 1968, dubious for N. V. Smith 1975) A toad, the scholar is being fascinated by these days. (generic for N. V. Smith 1975, starred for me)

In Chesterman (1991) I argued that genericity is not a binary feature but a continuum, with some noun phrases being more generic than others. In effect, this implies that genericity is a typical prototype concept, with some manifestations at its core and others at its periphery. In order to specify the similarity constraint more carefully, then, we need to define some cut-off point beyond which peripheral expressions will be discounted for the purpose of this particular study. One way of doing this in a non-arbitrary fashion is suggested by the proposal made by Galmiche ( 1985) that generic readings are based on two distinct intuitions. One is that generic expressions (or: speech acts, passim) do not refer to individual particulars but to something more general; the other is that generic expressions predicate some property of a whole genus, not a subspecies. On this analysis, we can define prototypical generics (at the core of the concept) as being those expressions which conform to both these intuitions. More peripheral types of expressions may conform to one or the other intuition, but not both. We will further restrict our similarity constraint here to include only the prototypical cases, and exclude peripheral ones. We can therefore start by excluding structures which trigger readings known as subtype or subspecies readings, for these do not conform to the second intuition. Examples of such expressions in English are: (9) (10) (11) (12) (13)

Lars wants to study a deer that abounds in southern Africa but is rare in the north. (from Burton-Roberts 1981) The horse known as Przewalski's horse comes from Mongolia. Among the lizards, iguanas are the most popular as a local food. Celia is campaigning about some seals- the kinds that are found in Newfoundland and Alaska. Seals of the Saimaa and Baltic kinds are being threatened with extinction.

These English examples show that genericity is not simply a matter of the structure of the noun phrase itself, the presence or absence of a particular article. Rather, genericity is something that is expressed (and interpreted) via the whole context. Indeed, there is a rich literature on the way in which generic readings interact with, and depend on, factors such as aspect, frequency adverbs, and the

126

CONTRASTIVE FuNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

semantic class of the verb (see e.g. Law1er 1972, Nunberg and Pan 1975, Seppanen 1984). Generic readings seem to arise as inferences based on many factors. Some have argued that, for this reason, there can be no such feature as "generic" in semantic structure, as a primitive, but that it represents a derived reading under certain cotextual conditions (Ihalainen 1974, Nunberg and Pan 1975). The view I take here is that for CFA it is nevertheless useful to posit such a subclass of the Definiteness specifier, because it allows us to establish a similarity constraint for interesting comparisons. In addition, CFA will ultimately aim to determine precisely what the cotextual and contextual conditions are, under which a given expression is interpreted as being generic; it will also aim to investigate whether these conditions vary across languages. The present study will not go as far as that, but focus on the structures themselves. As well as subspecies readings, we shall also exclude the kind of data illustrated in (6-8), in order to ascertain that we are indeed dealing with the most central core of the concept. For the same reason, we will also focus on examples of the kind recognized to be most typically generic, in which the noun phrase in question functions as syntactic subject (a further restriction on the similarity constraint). We thus aim to play as safe as possible, and make no apologies for sticking to traditional examples. The initial data therefore consist of utterances such as the following for English: (14) Beavers build dams. (15) The beaver builds dams. (16) A beaver builds dams. For the French data and the discussion of it, I rely primarily on Kleiber (1990). Kleiber starts with what he takes as a paradox: given that the following utterances are unanimously recognized to be generic ( 17) Les castors construisent des barrages. (18) Le castor construit des barrages. ( 19) Un castor construit des barrages. -how come they all have different noun phrase structures? In terms of our CFA methodology, the fact that they are all read as generic simply constitutes the similarity constraint. An intralingual contrastive functional analysis would then seek to specify what the differences are within this constraint. And this is precisely what Kleiber sets out to do (in particular, he is interested in what makes (18) different from the other two), and I borrow aspects of his argument in the following analysis.

ANALYSIS

127

Given the fact that both languages have article and number systems, and given the mutual translatability of ( 15-16) with ( 18-19), the initial identity hypothesis that suggests itself (for instance to a learner going from one language to the other) is as follows: In generic expressions, the subclass of the English article = the subclass of the French article (i.e. definite= definite, indefinite= indefinite). A comparison of examples ( 11) and ( 17) shows the necessity of a first amendment to this hypothesis: generic reference in French can be made via a definite plural noun phrase, but in English a definite plural noun phrase in a generic context gives rise to a subspecies reading and is thus excluded here by our similarity constraint. Moreover, the evident similarity between (14) with an indefinite plural and ( 17) with a definite obviously requires a second amendment to the hypothesis, as follows:

In generic expressions, English indefinite (zero) plural= French definite plural English definite singular = French definite singular English indefinite singular = French indefinite singular I w1ll refer to these three noun-phrase structure-types as variants. The last two, with singular nouns, look like instances of true identity, and the first one looks like a regular correspondence. Let us see how far this amended hypothesis takes us.

3.4.2, Testing the Identity Hypothesis I start with the plural variant. The contrast between indefinite ( 14) and definite ( 17) hints at a broader difference between the article systems in the two languages. Both have definite, indefinite and partitive articles (English some, French dulde la/des), and both also have zero articles (for instance with proper names). So given the evident correspondence of the other two pairs of generic examples above, why should plural nouns behave differently? One answer to this question is offered by the article theory of Guillaume (originally 1919, later 1945), and applied to English by Hewson (1972) and Chesterman (1991). The crux of the matter lies in Guillaume's concept of extensivity, which has to do not with the contrast between definite and indefinite but that between article and noarticle. In brief, Guillaume argues that when (French) nouns are used in their most general, abstract sense, as "noms en puissance", they take no article; when

128

CONTRASTIVE FuNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

they are actualized, they are used as "noms en effet", and take an article. In a delightful simile, Bodelsen (1949) summarized Guillaume's point with the image of a room full of balloons floating under the ceiling: these represent nouns in their fullest extensivity. Some balloons have weights attached to them, so that they are brought down to the floor: the weights are articles. Balloons representing proper names, however, are always on the floor anyway and so need no additional weighting. With respect to (14) and (17) then, what we seem to have is a difference in extensivity. The definite/indefinite opposition is effectually neutralized in a generic reading anyway. Following Bodelsen's image, we can suggest that French balloons seem intrinsically lighter than English ones, and so articleweights are more often needed to make them available for actual use, to "concretize" them. Hewson (1972: 77) puts this point succinctly as follows: In Modern French all nouns except the names of people require an article or other definer unless the significate [signifie] in view is felt to remain in the realm of pure notion, lacking any reality exterior to the mind; the article is, in this way, not only a definer, but also an instrument of actualization. The threshold between use and non-use of articles lies between the presentation of the notion as something real and its presentation as pure idea. In English the word without article does not represent a mere idea, a total abstraction. It may represent, in fact, a concrete reality, but a reality without clarifying exterior form, a mass-word or continuate. Add an article and the concept is given form and becomes a thing-word or class-word; the threshold in English lies between the presentation of the notion as a formless, nonnumerical entity, and its presentation as a separate singular entity, member of a class and necessarily having form. (Italics original, square brackets added) The two languages thus draw their thresholds between article and no article in different places, although the overall parameter (less extensive <-> more extensive) is the same. The upshot of this difference is that English makes much more use of the zero article than French does. In marking generic plurals with the definite article, French seems to stress the unique identifiability of the set of entities thus designated, whereas English, in using the zero article, highlights the generality of the concept concerned. Of particular relevance to genericity is the fact that English uses the zero article not only for indefinite plurals but also for indefinite mass nouns; both these groups must take an article in French. Before discussing the significance of mass nouns, let me first return to the notion of genericity as a prototype concept. One question that arises here is this: which of the various forms of generic noun phrase should be taken as maximally prototypical, at the very core of the concept? In other words, what is the unmarked variant? On the basis of the distribution of the three structure types we

ANALYSIS

129

are looking at (14-16 and 17 -19), the unmarked variant seems to be the plural one in both languages. Evidence for this is provided by its wider potential occurrence in various kinds of generic contexts, as illustrated below (French examples mostly from Kleiber 1990; subspecies readings are excluded). (a) Dynamic contexts with event predicates (20) Beavers were introduced into Alsace by the autonomists in 1925. (21) The beaver was introduced into Alsace by the autonomists in 1925. (22) *A beaver was introduced into Alsace by the autonomists in 1925.

(23) Les castors ont ete introduits par les autonomistes en Alsace en 1925. (24) Le castor a ete introduit par les autonomistes en Alsace en 1925. (25) *Un castor a ete introduit par les autonomistes en Alsace en 1925. (b) Kind or class predicates (26) Beavers abound in this region. (27) The beaver abounds in this region. (28) *A beaver abounds in this region.

(29) Les castors abondent dans cette region. (30) Le castor abonde dans cette region. (31) *U n castor abonde dans cette region. (c) Stative or habitual predicates (32) Madrigals are popular. (33) The madrigal is popular. (34) *A madrigal is popular.

(35) Les madrigaux sont populaires. (36) Le madrigal est populaire. (37) *Un madrigal est populaire. (d) Generic readings of hyperonyms (38) Pines I Trees grow slowly. (39) The pine I *The tree grows slowly. (40) A pine I A tree grows slowly.

(41) Les sapins I Les arbres poussent lentement. (42) Le sapin I *L'arbre pousse lentement. (43) Un sapin I Un arbre pousse lentement.

130

CONTRASTIVE FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

In both languages, the plural variant is the only one that occurs in all the above uses. In English, the unmarked form of a generic noun phrase is thus identical with its most "extensive" (in Guillaume's sense) plural form, with a zero article, in contrast to the grammatically possible form with the+plural (which, as mentioned above, induces a subspecies reading in generic contexts). French, on the other hand, lacks this distinction in plural nouns: an article is obligatory, whether the reading is generic or not. If we accept that in both languages the plural is the unmarked generic structure, this suggests that the notion of "generality" which lies at the heart of genericity is most naturally conceived of as a plurality covering all members of a set. That is, if we wish to refer not to particular members but more generally, the most obvious way to do so in both languages is to refer to all members indiscriminately: genericity via pluralization. The cognitive move from one to more-than-one thus represents the first step towards abstraction. We now move on to the definite singular and indefinite singular variants. Generic expressions with a singular noun arrive at generic readings via different paths, and it is this difference that accounts for their contrasting distributions. The following two utterances, for instance, would occur in different contexts (cf. K.leiber 1990: 44): (44) Un soldat espagnol sait resister ala fatigue. (45) Le soldat espagnol sait resister ala fatigue. Utterance (44) could well be something a (French-speaking) Spanish soldier might proudly say to someone commiserating with his situation, whereas (45) would be extremely unlikely in such a context; (45) is more likely to be uttered by someone during a general discussion of the subject, as an aphorism. I think the same point holds good for the English equivalents of these utterances (A Spanish soldier I The Spanish soldier). Kleiber mentions several other examples all illustrating the same point: that the structure with the singular definite article seems more abstract, even more scientific, whereas the indefinite variant is more applicable to a particular case. Another possible semantic distinction is that between external and internal contrast. Consider the following pair: (46) Le lapin se reproduit en moyenne to us les six mois. (47) Un lapin se reproduit en moyenne tousles six mois. The le variant (46) focuses on an external contrast: the rabbit as opposed to other species of animal. Internal contrast is illustrated in the un variant (47), in that it selects a trait common to the members within a group. Again, the point also

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131

seems to hold for English. One naturally asks What is a rabbit?, not What is the rabbit? The former asks for an internal definition: what are the characteristics of a rabbit? The latter, oddly, asks for an external definition: what is the species "rabbit" vis-a-vis other species? And the same goes for French, as Kleiber comments (p. 66). Both these differences in semantic nuance clearly derive from the original numerical sense of un and a, 'one': a sense that, by very definition, particularizes a single member of a set. The development towards a generic reading is via the non-specific 'any one member', and further 'any typical member', leading to a situation in which any single member is counted as being typical of all members of a set. Generic indefinite singular structures in both languages therefore work via typicalization. It is this that blocks the use of the indefinite singular in the sets above (20-37): none of the singular indefinite variants are compatible with a "typical member" reading. This part of the identity hypothesis therefore appears to survive intact so far, and indeed finds some corroboration. In both languages, the indefinite variant variant seems to be the most marked one, subject to the most distributional constraints. Certainly the most complex variant is the singular definite one. There are many theories about how this structure can give rise to a generic reading (surveyed in detail by Kleiber), and about how the precise semantic nuance of this structure should be described. I shall not discuss these here, but focus on the theory proposed by Kleiber himself for French, which seems both persuasive and interesting for our contrastive analysis. Kleiber's basic argument is that le+ noun phrase in generic contexts acts like a mass concept. More precisely (p. 84): generic le + count noun =mass noun phrase. The rationale for this proposal is partly the parallel distributions of the definite singular variant with that of ordinary mass nouns in French, and partly the semantics of the structure itself. The key insight is that this variant somehow "homogenizes" the referent, neutralizing its heterogeneity, so that members of a set are no longer conceived of as discrete members but more as a kind of amorphous mass. A generic le castor is thus similar to a mass like le sable. This characteristic of le constitutes the main difference between it and les: the plural form, by definition, highlights heterogeneity, a set of discrete members, while the singular form merges this discreteness into a whole. Evidence Kleiber cites in favour of this view comes from examples such as the following, where the definite singular is impossible; the explanation is that this is because the cotext or context somehow presupposes or foregrounds heterogeneity, which is thus incompatible with the homogenizing effect of generic le. (48) *Le castor est nombreux dans cette region.

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CONTRASTIVE FuNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

(49) (50) (51) (52) (53)

*Le castor se divise en deux sous-especes. *La cigogne se rassemble en automne. *Le medecin forme un important groupe social. *Le castor s'aide l'un aI' autre. ?L'oiseau, saufl'autriche, vole.

All these are also impossible in their English counterparts, but perfectly acceptable in both languages with the plural variant. Against K.leiber, we might argue that since the singular indefinite variant is also ruled out here (in both languages), the reason could just as well be that the cotext requires a plural rather than a singular. He would no doubt reply that the plural, precisely, denotes heterogeneity, and that un is ruled out because if these noun phrases do indeed behave like mass nouns, un does not eo-occur with mass nouns. Kleiber also returns to the well-known reluctance of hyperonyms to appear in generic contexts. The reason, he says, is that nouns at the top of hierarchies (such as tree, animal, vegetable in English) cover so much heterogeneity in their hyponyms that the subordinate categories cannot be merged conceptually into a homogeneous whole. We have to come down the hierarchy to a level at which homogeneity is more plausible before the singular definite variant can be used in a generic context (cf. the pine, the beaver, the onion). We also have contexts in which homogeneity is so intrinsic that it rejects the plural variant: (54) (55) (57) (58)

La bicyclette a ete inventee par *Les bicyclettes ont ete inventees par L'automobile est en crise. *Les automobiles sont en crise. 000

000

These also reject the singular indefinite variant, because the "typical" feature is incompatible. The same points hold here for English. Further evidence comes from generic contexts with a deontic function, in which the speaker's intention is ~o establish an obligation for a particular addressee: it is this particularizing focus that rules out the use of homogenizing le. See the following examples: (59) Un enfant ne met passes coudes atable. (60) Les enfants ne mettent pas leurs coudes atable. (61) *L'enfant ne met passes coudes atable. (starred if a deontic function is intended)

ANALYSIS

133

The same goes for the English counterparts; the preferred English variant would certainly be the plural one. Kleiber's neatest example is a quote from Sacha Guitry, with which he both opens and closes the book: (62) On met la femme au singulier quand on a du bien a en dire, et on parle au pluriel quand elle nous a fait quelque mechancete. This actually illustrates Kleiber's thesis very well: women en masse, idealized and homogenized, versus women as heterogeneous instances ... In sum, we can suggest that the development by which the definite singular article takes on a generic meaning is one of homogenization. This now raises an issue which Kleiber does not foreground, but which is highly relevant for a contrastive analysis. It has to do with mass nouns. Kleiber's examples of generic noun phrases are exclusively of count nouns. At several points he adduces evidence in favour of his hypothesis by lining up some distributional and semantic characteristics of mass nouns (such as le sable, l 'argent) alongside those of generic le noun phrases, and shows how they coincide. This of course implies that mass nouns in certain contexts are themselves interpreted as generic, for instance in such sentences as these: (63) Le sable abonde dans cette region. (64) Le sable a ete utilise en Alsace en 1900 pour construire des moulins a biere. (65) Le sable est lisse. If generic count nouns behave like mass nouns, it follows that mass nouns behave (in certain contexts) like generic nouns. Perhaps the reason why Kleiber does not make this point explicitly is that mass nouns like sand are not usually conceived of in terms of a genus, a concept often supposed to be the basis of true genericity. (In a later book, 1994, he does talk about generic uses of mass nouns.) However, if we neglect to look at the relation between generics and mass nouns the other way round as well, we shall lose the opportunity for some interesting generalizations. Let us shift our attention to English for a moment, and consider how Guillaume's notion of extensivity applies there. Most traditional treatments of the English articles take the zero article (books, honey) and the unstressed some + plural/mass as being free variants, both being "indefinite" in the same way and both being the plural/mass equivalent of a. Yet there are of course many environments in which only one or the other of these variants occurs, such as the following (where some is unstressed sm):

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CONTRASTIVE FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

(66) I really love books I *some books 11 honey I *some honey. (67) I got some books I *books 11 some honey I *honey at the sale. In terms of extensivity, the zero variant is maximally extensive, meaning approximately '~books/honey in general", whereas the some variant is less extensive, referring to a concrete quantity of books/honey. Contexts which imply an "in general" reading reject some, and those which imply a "concrete quantity" reading reject the zero variant. As regards extensivity, some therefore lines up with a, and both are different from zero. Carlson (1977) argued that the zero plural in fact acted as "the proper name of a kind", and I would add that this , designation is basically a generic one. The situation in English, with respect to the distribution of this generic zero, is thus that no difference is made between mass and plural noun phrases: in other words, indefinite plurals behave like indefinite masses. (It should be added that zero also has a less extensive reading in non-generic contexts, where it does vary with some: There were sheep I some sheep in the field. Context is thus crucial in determining how a zero article will be interpreted. See further Chesterman 1991.) Kleiber's argument for French is strikingly similar, except that the generic variant lined up with mass noun phrases is not the plural one but the definite singular one. In both languages, markers of genericity blur the boundary between mass and count noun phrases. With respect to the generic marking of mass noun phrases, then, we find both a difference and a similarity. The analysis so far is summarized in Table 7.

Table 7. Determiner markers of generic noun phrases in English and French. Plural

Mass

Singular count

DEF

INDEF

English

zero

zero

the

a

French

les

le/la

le/la

unlune

The notion of a generic mass noun phrase is thus profiled slightly differently in the two languages. In English, the crucial feature of any mass noun is its divisibility: like plurals, mass nouns are divisible in that a part or member of the set denoted by the noun can also be denoted by the same noun. If we have a set , a portion of this set can also be called books; and a part of the set is also known as honey. By contrast, a singular book is not divisible: a

ANALYSIS

135

part of a book is no longer called a book, but something else. Divisibility is what unites plural and mass nouns in English, and hence constitutes the shared feature justifying the use of generic zero for both. In French, if we follow Kleiber, the highlighted characteristic of generic mass nouns is not their divisibility but their homogeneity. This feature makes them more like other singular nouns, but because they remain uncountable and thus reject un (except in subspecies readings), only le is available. With respect to mass nouns, English thus prioritizes a kind of assimilative tendency towards the plural, towards the unmarked expression of genericity via pluralization; French assimilates towards the singular, with genericity via homogenization. 3.4.3. Revised Hypotheses

By way of summing up the above discussion we can now propose a set of revised hypotheses. In both languages, generic readings depend on cotextual features outside the noun phrase itself (not discussed here), so the following hypotheses refer only to contexts in which a generic reading is possible. a) The unmarked expression of genericity in both English and French is via a plural noun phrase. In English this takes the zero article, in French the definite article. (b) Both in collective contexts (i.e. with event or class predicates) and in distributive ones (with habitual predicates), genericity can also be expressed in both languages via the definite article plus singular count noun phrase. (c) In distributive contexts, i.e. those allowing a "typical member" reading, the genericity of a singular count noun phrase can be expressed in both languages via the indefinite article. (d) The genericity of a mass noun phrase is expressed in English via the zero article and in French via the singular definite article. (e) The three main variants of generic expression generalize away from the particular via different routes: pluralization (for the plural variant), typicalization (for the singular indefinite variant) and homogenization (for the singular definite variant). In both languages, choice between these variants is partly determined by the compatibility between the type of generalization process and the context itself. Apart from the possible semantic preferences suggested earlier, for pluralization vs. homogenization, the only significant contrasts so far discussed are those pertaining to plural and mass nouns, where English selects zero and

136

CONTRASTIVE FuNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

French a definite article. Both these derive from a difference in extensivity. If the distributional conditions really were this straightforward, that would be the end of the matter. But there remain a number of instances around the periphery of genericity which suggest the necessity for further revision, and I consider a few of these briefly here. One infamous exception concerns the English item man when used generically. Contrary to what we would expect, it cannot be used generically with the definite article. In French, on the other hand, it behaves quite normally, like any other count noun, and can take the article: (68) Man I *The man set foot on the moon in 1969. (69) L'homme a mis le pied sur la lune en 1969. This exceptional characteristic also applies to woman, but it does not apply to, for instance, child or even human. We either have to say that this item falsifies revised hypothesis (b), or, more reasonably, grant it the status of a genuine exception or a non-prototypical use. Some explanation might be offered in terms of extensivity again, and the tendency for English to make more use of maximal extensivity (i.e. zero article) than French. On this view, generic man would be similar to non-count items like mankind and nature, which also reject the. In Kleiber's terms, generic man does indeed seem to be conceived of as homogenized, like a mass noun. Another field where we find apparent counter-evidence is that of plural nationality nouns. Again, French behaves as predicted, with the plural article, but English seems to have two alternatives: (70) (71) (72) (73)

Les Alsaciens sont des buveurs de biere. ·Les Americains ont remporte plus de 70 medailles. Alsatians I The Alsatians are beer-drinkers. Americans I The Americans have taken over 70 medals.

That is, English accepts both the predicted zero and the exceptional the+plural. With common nouns in a generic context, the+plural allows a subspecies reading, as pointed out above. A possible implication is that in using the+plural with nationality nouns, English also suggests some kind of less-than-wholespecies reading here too, one that is less general than a claim made with zero+plural. Whereas zero+plural refers to an open, maximally general set, the+plural can refer to a closed (sub)set, such as a national sports team. When I refer to the Alsatians or the Americans in (72) or (73), I am manifestly not actually predicating something of ALL Alsatians or Americans; it may be that most Alsatians drink beer, but it is certainly not the case that most Americans

ANALYSIS

137

have won medals. I can even use the+plural to refer to a single pair of Americans, as in (7 4) The Americans first set foot on the moon in 1969. Significantly, this is distinctly better than (75). ?Americans first set foot on the moon in 1969. It seems that the plural structure with the makes a claim that is somewhat less applicable to the whole nationality-genus than the structure with zero. In this sense, the+plural is indeed not prototypically generic, as argued above. We could therefore say that with plural nationality nouns, English speakers have a choice between a (more prototypically) generic structure with zero and a non-generic (or less prototypically generic) one with the. This would, at least, save our revised hypothesis (a). One line for follow-up research would indeed be the expression of subspecies meanings, in both languages. It may also be that the zero form with English nationality nouns is more likely to be used by "insiders" - who are themselves members of the genus referred. to- and the the form by "outsiders": yet another hypothesis for follow-up corpus work. Further peripheral problems are found in pairs such as the following, with intended generic readings: (76) (77) (78) (79)

La cravate est obligatoire. A tie I ?The tie is obligatory. Le bouquet fait toujours plaisir. A bouquet I ?The bouquet always gives pleasure.

Kleiber (1990: 143) compares these to examples like (80) Le miroir ne trompe pas. but unlike (77) and (79) this is fine in English as (81) The mirror does not deceive. although the variant with an indefinite article might be preferred. Kleiber's point is that the homogenizing effect of generic le fits these contexts in a similar way: each event of wearing a tie, offering a bouquet, looking at oneself in a mirror, involves only one such object, and so it is easy to "homogenize" a plurality of such events into a mass-like generic whole, as it were. Such examples are

138

CONTRASTIVE FuNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

opposed to (82), which does not apply to events involving only one dog at a time:

(82) Les chiens sont interdits I *Le chien est interdit. (83) Dogs are prohibited I *The dog is prohibited. These two work as predicted by the hypotheses, in that the pluralization implied by the context (ALL individual dogs) clashes with a singular noun phrase and so accepts a generic reading only via the plural variant. But (76-79) remain puzzling. One explanation might appeal to the deontic function of these utterances: the tie examples are injunctions to wear a tie, and the bouquet examples seem to have an advertising nuance- "so buy a bouquet today!" With respect to English, the reason for the rejection of the would then be the same as that proposed for (5961) above: that the deontic function implies a particularization that clashes with the homogenization of the generic definite article. The fact that French nevertheless accepts generic le here would then suggest that the particularizing deontic function of these utterances is perhaps less to the fore in French. This is clearly one area where further analysis is needed. A final curious generic corner worth mentioning concerns the typicalization mode of expression, which leads in both languages to the variant with an indefinite singular article plus count noun phrase. In English, another structure is also available here, albeit restricted to informal contexts and the spoken language. This is the generic second person possessive, as in: (84) Now your professor, he never goes on strike, does he? (85) Your professors never go on strike, do they? (86) Your real gentleman scholar is a dying species nowadays. Although both (84) and (85) have non-generic readings, they also have generic ones, and (86) has only a generic one. In French, it seems that only the equivalent plural variant is acceptable in a generic context: (87) Vos professeurs, ils ne se mettentjarnais en greve, quoi? (88) *Votre professeur, il ne se met jamais en greve, quoi? (starred if generic) Other curious corners abound in this region, for instance concerning the effects of modification and syntactic function, the expression of subspecies genericity, and the additional correspondences between English zero and the French partitive article; one might also consider the relations between generic specifiers and generic persons (such as you and one in English). But I leave

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ANALYSIS

further exploration, testing and revision of the revised hypotheses for future research.

3.5. Speaker Perspective (English, German, Finnish) This last sample study takes a somewhat different approach. So far, we have been looking at cross-language differences in the paradigms expressing certain semantic structures or elements. We can also use this general functional approach to study possible constraints on the range of these paradigms, prior to studying the actual paradigms themselves. That is, we can do more abstract contrastive analyses, whose aim is to allow us to make generalized,predictions about the potential range of syntactic expressions for any semantic structure. We might find, for instance, that certain forms of expression of a given structure-type are typically dispreferred in a particular language; this would be relevant information when we seek to formulate the conditions of occurrence for different expressions. In this way we could relate contrasts across whole grammars, much as Hawkins (1986) does for English and German. I shall return to some textual aspects of this point in chapter 4; in the current section I exemplify it in terms of a sentence-level feature, that of the speaker's perspective. 3.5.1. Similarity Constraint and Initial Data

The concept of speaker's perspective was mentioned briefly in 2.3.3. It is indicated in the notation by the order of the actants: the actant conceived of as being "most active" is given first position. This perspective often corresponds to the animacy hierarchy, with more animate actants preceding less animate ones. It also relates to the accessibility-to-subject hierarchy explored e.g. by Dik ( 1989: 226f; 1991: 262f): in Dik's terminology, Agents and Goals are more accessible to subject status (universally) than, for instance, Instruments or Locatives. The mini-study reported in this present section suggests that Finnish is like German in allowing less ready access to subject position for semantic roles that are less "agent-like", as compared with English. In many languages, it seems that the unmarked representation of this perspective is to encode the "more active" actant as the syntactic subject, so that it syntactically governs the verb; the syntactic form is then iconic with respect to the speaker's perspective. This unmarked situation is illustrated for English by the following examples ( 1-2). (1)

(2)

Fiona gave Fred a new CD. Fred got a new CD from Fiona.

[Ac; S, R, 0] [Ac; R, S, 0]

CONTRASTIVE FuNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

140

Speaker perspective is not to be confused with theme. In (3), the theme (defined as initial constituent) is That new CD, but the speaker perspective nevertheless selects Fred as syntactic subject: (3)

That new CD Fred got from Fiona.

[Ac; R, S, 0]

We shall now examine one particular aspect of speaker perspective, having to do with the interplay between certain actants and the status of syntactic subject in English, German and Finnish. The basic contrastive facts are already well known (although many of the details still remain unclear) and have been stated previously in case-grammar terms (cf. e.g. Zimmermann 1972; Karttunen 1977; James 1980; see also Quirk et al. (1972: 351f; [1985] 1989: 743f) on the flexibility of the syntactic subject in English); I use them simply to demonstrate one kind of application of functional syntax. Recall again the general methodology used in the foregoing sections. We start as usual with an observed similarity, which in this case we can describe thus: it seems that all three languages share the ability to select different kinds of actants to encode as syntactic subject. We make this preliminary observation on the basis of evidence such as the acceptability of examples (1-2) plus the following (the notations throughout include only the relevant features, omitting specifiers etc.; see page 3 for a key to gloss abbreviations):

(4)

This new CD came from Fiona.

[Ac; 0, SJ

(5)

Fiona gab Fred diese neue CD. Fred bekam diese neue CD von Fiona. Diese neue CD kam von Fiona.

[Ac; S, R, 0] [Ac; R, S, 0] [Ac; 0, S]

(6) (7)

(8)

[Ac; S, R, 0] Fiona antoi Fredille tfuniin uuden CD:n. (Fiona give+PAST+3SG Fred+ALL this+ACC new+ACC CD+ACC) (9) Fred sai taman uuden CD:n Fionalta. [Ac; R, S, 0] (Fred get+PAST+3SG this+ACC new+ACC CD+ACC Fiona+ABL) (10) Tfuna uusi CD tuli Fionalta. [Ac; 0, S] (This new CD come+PAST+3SG Fiona+ABL)

In other words, on this evidence all three languages seem to accept Controller, Receiver and Object actants as syntactic subjects. An English-speaking learner of German or Finnish might therefore arrive at the following identity hypothesis: the range of variation of the syntactic subject in German/Finnish is identical to the variation in English. This conclusion would

141

ANALYSIS

lead to interference, for if we examine further the ranges of variation a~cepted in the other two languages a number of contrasts emerge. In case-grammatical terms, we shall see that the languages have different constraints on subjectivization. In functional-syntax terms, we shall note differences in preferred speaker perspective. Our contrastive analysis is circumscribed by the similarity constraint as follows: we are here comparing a range of expressions which can all be analysed as instances of a simple shared semantic structure that can be formulated as: ____-[Predicate type; initial actant, other actants] The focus of interest is the way the initial actant can be expressed syntactically; in particular, we are interested to see whether all initial-actant types can (or tend to) be expressed as a syntactic subject. In other words, this mini-study does not look at actual paradigms of expressions in different languages, but at possible conditions determining the potential formal range of any such paradigms. 3.5.2. Testing the Identity Hypothesis

We now test the ini~ial identity hypothesis by supplementing the data and extending the range of subjectivizable initial a<;tants to include Experiencer (E), Instrument (I), Locative (L) and Topic (T). For English, we have data such as the following (where J,>s Possession predicate, Ac Action, St State, Rl Relation, Ch Characterization):

=

=

=

=

[Ps~; E, 0] ( 11) Fred has lost the earphones. (12) Sam burped. [Ac; E] (13) The cat has the flu. [St; E, 0] (14) Sue loves Sam. [RI; E, 0] (15) This key will open that door. [Ch; I, S, 0] (16) His 12 novels won him the Nobel prize. [Ac; I, R, 0] (17) Cancer kills many people. [Ac; I, 0] (18) This new computer can do practically anything. [Ac; I, 0] (19) 5,000 marks could not buy you a decent car nowadays. [Ac; I, S, 0] (20) The fall of the Berlin Wall began a new era. [Ac; I, 0] (21) A fist banged angrily on the door. [Ac; I, S, L] (22) The notice said No Smoking. [St; L, T] (23) The papers criticized the Pope's statement. [Ac; L, 0]

=

142

CONTRASTIVE FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS (24) The radio announced that a hurricane was imminent. [Ac; L, T] (25) The centre of town saw a remarkable development in 1989. [Ac; L, 0] (26) The tent sleeps four. [Ch; L, 0] (27) The criticism of Chomsky dominates the second part of the book. [Rl; T, 0] (28) Norwegians were the subject of most of his jokes. [Ch; T, S, 0] (29) The recession did not figure largely in the President's speech. [Ac; T, S, L]

Evidence such as this suggests that any actant-type may be realized as a syntactic subject in (active) English sentences corresponding to quite a variety of semantic structures. (Further research might of course show that some actants were relatively more frequent than others in this syntactic function, but I shall not go further in that quantitative direction here.) However, the same range of variation is not so characteristic of German, nor of Finnish, as the following data show. In some cases, tne preferred ways of expressing the meanings of the above English examples do not encode the initial actant as syntactic subject; and in some cases such a structure would be ungrarnmatical. Native translator informants came up with the following data. (In the numbering, G stands for German.and F for Finnish.) German, Experiencer in italics: (11G) Fred hat die OhrhOrer verloren. (12G) Sam hat sich iibergegeben I hat sich erlJrochen. (13G) Die Katze hat Fieber. (14G) Sue liebt Sam. German thus appears to be like English in its acceptance of subjectivized Experiencers. Finnish, Experiencer in italics: ( 11 F)Fred on hukannut I kadottanut kuulokkeet. /1 Frediltii havisi kuulokkeet. (Fred be+3SG lose+PP earphones+ACC 11 Fred+ABL disappear+PAST+3SG earphones)

( 12F) Sam royhtaisi I Samilta paasi royhtaisy. (Sam burp+PAST+3SG I Sam+ABL go+PAST+3SG burp)

(13F) Kissa on flunssassa. I Kissalla on flunssa.

ANALYSIS

143

(cat be+3SG flu+INE I cat+ADE be+3SG flu)

( 14F) Sue rakastaa Samia. (Sue love+3SG Sam+PAR)

In traditional Finnish grammar, Finnish subjects must either be nominative or partitive (depending on various factors which are irrelevant to our present concern). For all the above examples, Finnish has a form which encodes Experiencer as subject, in the nominative case (unmarked here in the gloss); however, for the first three examples alternative structures are also available, with the Experiencer in a non-subject case. The role of the syntactic subject is then played by another .actant. In (llF) the alternative form is nowadays more colloquial; in (13F) the alternative is the standard possessive structure and would be the unmarked choice. In (12F) the alternative structure emphasizes the involuntariness of the event, as also in (11F); by not selecting Experiencer as subject, the speaker seems to diminish the Experiencer's responsibility for the event. The absence of an alternative structure for (14F) might tQUS suggest that loving someone in Finnish inevitably involves active subjecthQod. (On the relation between an actant's "degree of activity" and the probability of it appearing in various word-order positions in Finnish, see further Hiirikoski 1991, which shows that semantically more active subjects tend to appear more often in preverbal position.) German, Instrument in italics: ( 15G) Mit dies em Schlilssel wirst Du I kann man jene TUr Offnen. (16G) Seine 12 Romane brachten ihm den Nobelpreis ein. I Er erhielt den Nobelpreis fiir seine 12 Romane. (17G) Krebs ist die Ursache fiir den Tod vieler Menschen. I ?Krebs bringt viele Menschen urn. (18G) Dieser neue Komputer kann praktisch alles. I Mit diesem neuen Komputer kannst Du praktisch alles machen. (19G) Fur 5,000 Mark kannst du heute kein anstandiges Auto kaufen. (200) M it dem Fall der Berliner Mauer begann eine neue Ara. (21G) Eine Faust schlug zomig an die Ttir. This evidence suggests that German is less tolerant than English of subjectivized Instruments; there is a tendency, particularly in the standard language, to disprefer metaphorical senses in which non-animate subjects "do" something. A wider range of such subjects is nevertheless accepted in colloquial speech. In (15G), for instance, a version with Dieser SchlUssel as subject is distinctly less acceptable in the standard language; in (16G) the verb is made less emotive (won-> brought) in order to facilitate the ("metaphorical") Instrument

144

CONTRASTIVE FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

subject; in (17G) and (18G) the Instrument subject seems acceptable only colloquially, and even then is doubtful in (17G). In (19G) and (20G) German encodes the initial constituent as a prepositional phrase; to encode it as a subject would be unacceptable here, although subjectivization works in (210). Finnish, Instrument in italics: (l5F) ?Tiimii avain avaa tuon oven. I Tiillii avaimella saa tuon oven auki. (this key open+3SG that+ACC door+ACC I this key+ADE get+3SG that+ACC door+ACC open) (16F) Hiinen 12 romaaniaan toivat hanelle Nobel-palkinnon. (he/she+GEN 12 novels+PAR+POS bring+PAST+3PL he/she+ALL Nobel-prize+ACC) ( 17F) Syopa tappaa paljon ihmisHi.. I Syopiian kuolee paljon ihmisia. (cancer kill+3SG many people+PAR I cancer+ILL die+3SG many people+ PAR) (18F) Tiimii uusi tietokone tekee melkein mita tahansa. I Tiillii uudella tietokoneella voi tehda melkein mita vain. (this new computer do+3SG almost anything+PAR at-all I this new computer+ADE can+3RD do+INF almost anything+PAR at-all) (19F) 5,000 markalla ei saisi ostetuksi kunnon autoa nykyaan. 1*5,000 markkaa ei ostaisi ... (5,000 mark+ADE negation-verb+3SG can+COND buy+PP+TRA decent car+PAR nowadays I 5,000 mark+PAR negation-verb+3SG buy+COND ... ) (20F) Berliinin muurin purkamisesta alkoi uusi aika. I Berliinin muurin purkaminen aloitti uuden ajan. (Berlin+GEN wall+GEN dismantling+ELA begin+PASt+3SG new time I Berlin+GEN wall+GEN dismantling begin+PAST+3SG ... ) (21F) Oveen hakattiin vihaisesti nyrkillii. I ?Vihainen nyrkki hakkasi oveen. (door+ILL bang+PAST+PAS angrily fist+ADE I angry fist bang+PAST+3SG door+ILL) Finnish also seems less tolerant of Instrument subjects. In (15F) the subjectivized version is unusual. Alternatives which select another element as subject are often preferred; this other element may be an implied "missing" subject ('one') as in (15F), (18F) and (19F), or another actant such as Object (17F). In (16F), where the partitive case on the subject is determined by the numeral, Finnish weakens the verb in the same way as German, evidently to lessen the metaphorical force. The Instrument sum of money cannot be subjectivized in (l9F), and the subjectivized Instrument in (21 F) is felt to be marked, non-colloquial.

ANALYSIS

145

German, Locative in italics: (22G) Auf dem Zettel stand Nicht Rauchen! I *Die Notiz sagtellautete ... (23G) Die Zeitungen kritisierten den Papst ftir seine AuBerungen. (24G) Im Radio wurde angektindigt; daB ein Hurrikan im Kommen war. I ?Das Radio ktindigte an, daB ... (25G) Das Zentrum der Stadt hat im Jahre 1989 eine gewaltige Entwicklung erlebt. I *Das Zentrum der Stadt hat ... eine gewaltige Entwicklung gesehen. (26G) Das Zelt ist fiif vier. These examples show a similar tendency to the Instrument ones. Locative subjects are often unacceptable (22G, 25G) or dubious (24G). In (23G) it appears that there is a stronger implication of human agency, which makes it more acceptable. Example (25G) encodes the Locative as syntactic subject, but makes the verb passive, thus attributing the agency to a different actant. Example (26G) has a Locative subject, but the verb is no longer transitive. Finnish, Locative in italics: (22F) Ilmoituksessa luki Tupakointi kielletty. I Ilmoituksessa sanottiin Tupakointi kielletty. (notice+INE read+PAST+3SG smoking forbidden I notice+INE say+PAST+PAS smoking forbidden)

(23F) Lehdet kritisoivat paavin lausuntoa. I Lehdissa kriti~oitiin paavin lausuntoa. \ ' (paper+PL+NOM criticize+PAST+3PL pope+gen statement+PAR I paper+PL+INE criticize+PAST+PAS pope+GEN statement+PAR)

(24F) Radiossa ilmoitettiin, ettii. hurrikaani oli tulossa.l *Radio ilmoitti, etta (radio+INE announce+PAST+PAS that hurricane be+PAST+3SG coming I radio announc+PAST+3~G that ... )

(2.SF) Kaupungin keskusta koki (?naki) valtavan kehityksen vuonna 1989. I Kaupungin keskustassa tapahtui valtava kehitys vuonna 1989. (town+GEN centre experience+PAST+3SG (?see+PAST+3SG) enormous+ACC development+ACC year+ESS 1989 I town+GEN centre+INE happen+PAST+3SG enormous development year+ESS 1989)

(26F) Telttaan mahtuu nelja. I Teltta vetaa nelja henkilOa. (tent+ILL fit+3SG four I Tent 'draw'+3SG four person+PAR)

146

CONTRASTIVE FuNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

Again, Finnish is similar to German with respect to its ability to subjectivize Locatives. Example (23F) works with one, perhaps for the same reason as the German equivalent, but (22F), (24F) and (26F) do not. The second (non-subjectivized) alternative of (23F) is felt to be more natural. In (25F) a subjectivized Locative is less good with niiki 'saw', perhaps because this verb would require a more strongly metaphorical (and also more active) reading than koki 'experienced'. Finnish often resorts to the so-called passive structure (in fact an impersonal structure) to avoid subjectivizing a Locative actant: cf. (22F, 23F, 24F). German, Topic in italics: (27G) Im zweiten Teil des Buches dorniniert die Kritik an Chomsky. (28G) Die meisten Objekte seiner Witze waren die Norweger. (29G) Das Thema der Rezession spielt keine groBe Rolle in der Rede des Prasidenten. All three examples here accept Topic as subject, although the first one places it post-verbally. Finnish also accepts subjectivized Topics freely, as the following examples show. Finnish, Topic in italics: (27F) Kritiikki Chomskya kohtaan dorninoi kirjan toista osaa. (criticism Chomsky+P AR against dominate+3S G book+G EN second+PAR part+PAR)

(28F) Norjalaiset ovat hiinen useimpien vitsiensa kohteena. (Norwegian+PL be+3PL his most+PL+GEN joke+GEN+POS object+ESS)

(29F) Lama ei tullut juurikaan esille presidentin puheessa. (recession negation-verb+3SG come+PP scarcely out president+GEN speech+INE)

All in all, evidence such as the above confirms that the subject in English can encode a wider variety of actants than that in German or Finnish. In particular, the English subject is much less constrained with respect to Instrument and Locative subjects. In other words, the evidence allows us to reject the initial identity hypothesis, at least insofar as it applies to Instruments and Locatives. This rejection in turn raises several other problems to be explored, concerning the formal, stylistic and semantic conditions at work here. First, given the evident German and Finnish restrictions on subjectivized Locatives and Instruments, we might suspect that there may also be differences concerning the subjectivization of other actants, but that our evidence so far simply does not include enough data. In fact, further evidence would demonstrate

147

ANALYSIS

that English and Finnish also differ at least with respect to the acceptability of certain types of subjectivized Object. In other words, the formal conditions affecting the occurrence of various kinds of subjectivized actants need to be specified in more detail. Consider the following data, for instance: (30) Her book is really selling well. (30G) Ihr Buch verkauft sich gut. (30F) Hanen kirjansa myy todella hyvin.

[Ch; 0]

(she+GEN book+ACC+POS sell+3SG really well)

(31) This shirt washes easily. [Ch; 0] (31 G) Dieses Hemd ist leicht zu waschen I laBt sich leicht waschen. (31F) *Tama paita pesee helposti. I Tama paita on helppo pesta. (this shirt wash+3SG easily I this shirt be+3SG easy wash+INF)

(32) The new Ferrari drives very smoothly. [Ch; 0] (32G) Der neue Ferrari liegt sehr ruhig I *fahrt sehr ruhig. (32F) *Uusi Ferrari ajaa hyvin pehmeasti. I Uusi Ferrari kulkee hyvin pehmeasti. (new Ferrari drive+3SG very smoothly I neW:, Ferrari go+3SG very smoothly) \

These examples reveal differences in the ways German and Finnish encode initial Objects. Both seem to avoid encoding Objects as subjects of non-reflexive transitive verbs. German uses a reflexive form or an intransitive structure, and Finnish also prefers intransitive structures. English, in contrast, can use the socalled middle voice with some verbs. Example (31F) seems to be exceptional; Karttunen (1977) suggests this may be due to English influence. He also notes that Finnish is becoming more tolerant of Locative subjects. Second, we note that the acceptability of certain actants in the subject role seems to be sensitive to stylistic conditions in Finnish and German, in particular to the parameter "spoken or colloquial language vs. standard written language". Somewhat surprisingly, this stylistic condition seems to work in opposite directions in the two languages: in German, subjectivized Locatives and Instruments are more colloquial, whereas in Finnish they often seem to be less colloquial. This suggests the need for further research, with a much more extensive corpus. We might hypothesize a relation, for instance, with the general tolerance of metaphorical or personification expressions in the three languages; or with medium, genre or text-type differences; or with general diachronic developments in the two languages.

148

CONTRASTIVE FuNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

Third, there also seem to be semantic conditions involved. Finnish seems to accept subjectivized Experiencers more easily if they are felt to be active, responsible participants in the event described. Another relevant factor concerns how closely a human agent seems to be associated with the Instrument or Locative in question. For Finnish, Karttunen ( 1977), albeit using a different terminology, observes that when a Locative has become virtually indistinguishable from the Controller actant it implies, both Locative and Controller can be subjectivized equally easily, as in the following: (33) The committee proposes in the report that ... (33F) Komitea esittlHi mietinntisslilin, ettli ... (commitee propose+3SG report+INE that ... ) (34) The report of the committee proposes that ... (34F) Komitean mietinto esittaa, etta ... (committee+GEN report propose+3SG that ... ) Here, the encoding of the Controller actant as the genitive modifier (in 34F) makes the presence of the Controller quite manifest, although it is not actually encoded as subject. To the extent that the above observations hold good, they constitute constraints on the paradigms of possible syntactic forms expressing any semantic structure in these languages.

3.5.3. Revised Hypotheses On the basis of the above analysis we can propose a first revised hypothesis as follows: English can encode different actants freely as subject. In Finnish and German this subjectivization is restricted according to the following conditions: Controller, Recipient, Topic - no conditions. Experiencer- German: no conditions; Finnish: subjectivization less likely if Experiencer is a non-responsible participant. Locative, Instrument- subjectivization unlikely in both languages; German: marginally acceptable if style is spoken colloquial. Object - German: acceptable with reflexive or intransitive verbs; Finnish: acceptable with intransitive verbs.

ANALYSIS

149

Further quantitative testing against a wide range of data would then undoubtedly show that this revised hypothesis, and the probabilistic predictions it implies, needed to be further revised in turn; and so it goes. The preliminary observations made above also lead into another sequence of hypotheses. If Finnish and German tend not to express speaker perspective by subjectivizing certain actants, under certain conditions, then what do they do instead? In English, subjectivization appears to be the unmarked way of expressing speaker perspective, but other languages may obviously have other unmarked ways of doing this. The data examined above suggest that where Finnish and German do not subjectivize the "most active" actant, they nevertheless tend to place it in clause-initial position; either as a prepositional phrase (German) or in an oblique case (Finnish). In other words, there is a tendency to make such actants into themes (defined as initial constituents). Indeed, it may turn out that we can make more powerful predictions about the thematization of such actants than we can about their subjectivization. I shall not pursue this line of argument here, but we can obviously formulate the following exploratory hypothesis, leading to another sequence of testing and revision: In English, actants felt to be "most active", and thus representing the speaker's perspective, tend to be subjectivized (whether or not they are thematized). In German and Finnish, such actants tend to be thematized, whether or not they are subjectivized.

t~onsideration

An exploration of this hypothesis would naturally lead of the well-known typological differences between languages as regards the status of the syntactic subject, the difference between subject-oriented languages and theme-oriented languages. With respect to the difference between English and German, for instance, the evidence considered above supports Hawkins' (1986) general claim that German syntax lies closer to its semantic deep structure than English does: German prefers syntactic subjects to be semantic Controllers. A second avenue of research would be to examine different preferred kinds of ic~micity in different languages: iconicity of syntactic form, or rectio, vs. iconicity of constituent order, or linearity. That is, the speaker's perspective may either match the perspective of one constituent governing another - a subject governing a verb- or it may match the perspective of one constituent preceding another.

Chapter 4. Rhetoric

The discussion and sample studies so far have been limited to the sentence level or below. However, there is no reason in principle why the general conceptual framework of Contrastive Functional Analysis should not be extended to account for larger chunks of language. This final chapter first sketches my own proposal for a model of semantic macrostructure (cf. van Dijk and Kintsch 1983) which seeks to account for supra-sentential meaning in the same way as the framework of semantic structures accounts for sentence meaning. I call this macrostructural extension a model of contrastive functional rhetoric. One aim of the model is to specify the main text-semantic/pragmatic parameters along which a speaker exercises a number of options. In the final section, this model is then further extended to account for some interactional features. This chapter thus differs from chapters 2-3, in that they were presenting and applying an existing model of semantic structure whereas chapter 4 now seeks to extend the model itself, within the same CFA framework. At the outset, it is worth pointing out that Mustajoki' s model of sentencesemantic structures is already open to extensio~ supra-sentence phenomena in several obvious ways. One is the category of conjunctors. So far, we have thought of these as linking predications, typically clause-level units, but they can of course account equally well for semantic links between sentences or still larger units. Secondly, the incorporation of speech functions already implies an interactive element between a speaker and a hearer, as was illustrated in the study on invitations (3.3); a speech function may be realized by a sequence of more than one sentence. This potential will be further developed in 4.7 below. Further, the notion of speaker perspective carries implications that extend beyond the sentence: speaker perspective is influenced by the surrounding cotext and info(lllation structure, as reflected in choices of word order and thematization. The focus of contrastive functional rhetoric is first of all on stretches of language known as texts. A text is understood here as a complete monologic turn by a single speaker/writer, thus excluding the interactive element of receiver response. This definition matches the view taken by van Dijk (1977: 3), who likewise takes a text to be a unit of monologue discourse. We are therefore abstracting away from the sense in which all texts can be regarded as dialogic, as involving interaction with an implied reader. Prototypically, texts are thus

152

CONTRASTIVE FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

stretches of written language, where receiver response occurs, if at all, after a distinct time interval. Single turns of spoken language can also be considered as texts on this definition, but I shall stick to written texts here. Discussion of the overtly dialogic, interactive element of language use is postponed until section 4.7. Texts are thus formal units, parallel to the notion of a sentence. Defined as complete units, texts come in an enormous variety of lengths, ranging from three-volume novels to the description of ingredients on a soup packet. Data for contrastive functional rhetoric are often parallel texts (matched for genre, text type, subject matter etc.), or translations (in which one text acts as information input for another). Defined in this way, a minimal-length text may of course be no more than a single sentence long, or even shorter. There is therefore some inevitable overlap between sentence-level and text-level analyses, and the border between the two is not a clear-cut one. This in itself is one reason to expand Contrastive Functional Analysis in order to take account of a wider range of language phenomena. For obvious reasons, the practical contrastive analysis of texts tends to focus on smaller text-sizes, or else on text-segments of various kinds. Of particular relevance are text-segments that I shall call P-units. This concept derives by analogy from that of the T-unit (Hunt 1965). To segment a text into Tunits, you divide it up into the shortest possible units that could still be grammatical sentences; a compound sentence will thus consist of more than one T -unit, and the end of. a T -unit marks the place of a possible full stop. Correspondingly, a P-unit (mnemonically a "paragraph" or "potential text" unit) is a segment of a text that could be taken as an independent and self-contained text itself, which can reasonably stand in isolation from the preceding and following text. (It does not seem necessary to further specify a P-unit as being a self-contained text that is as short as possible, as this would simply introduce a frequent overlap with sentences.) The crucial criteria are that a P-unit is marked by closure at both ends (cf. Grimes 1975: 21, citing Pike), and that it is not bound to a particular position within a longer text by virtue of its reference to the surrounding cotext. P-units are thus "moveable" constituents of a text, unlike 1 other kinds of text-segments. Many paragraphs are P-units, such as the foregoing one. By contrast, the first paragraph in this section is not a P-unit, because of the anaphoric and cataphoric references. P-units may also exist above and below the paragraph level; in a longer text, a section or chapter might qualify as a P-unit. Methodologically, it may often be more appropriate for contrastive functional rhetoricians to work with P-units rather than other, less independent textsegments. On the semantic-pragmatic level, the nucleus of a sentence is a predication; the textual equivalent of this I shall call a message. A text (or a P-unit) is a way

RHETORIC

153

of expressing or encoding a message. Alternatively, one might think of a text semantically as an offer of information (cf. Vermeer 1982), which downplays the pragmatic, communicative aspect somewhat. Conceptually, contrastive functional rhetoric starts with the idea of a message, and then explores the different ways in which it can be expressed. (Compare the way in which we have so far looked at the variation of expression of semantic structures at the predication level.) The same basic methodology is used, with similarity constraints defined accordingly. As before, the aim is to establish the nature and range of possible variants of message-expression, and determine the appropriateness conditions for their use in different cultures. As before, some of these conditions will be formal (such as text-form conventions, language-type constraints), some will be text-semantic (such as preferences for particular macrostructure realizations over others), and some will be pragmatic (such as culture-specific tolerance for mixing formal and informal styles, cultural norms in general). As we shall see, there is already a good deal of work in contrastive text linguistics and contrastive rhetoric that implicitly or explicitly uses the contrastive functional rhetoric paradigm. The model aims to show how this work can be incorporated within a single framework. The present chapter is organized a:Ioilg the same general lines as the model outlined in 2.3. I take each element of the model in turn, and illustrate how it is used in contrastive analysis. In outline, this extended model parallels the framework we have been using for semantic structure at the sentence level. As there are types of predicate, so there are types of message (text types); elements of a message can be distinguished, each playing a particular role, like actants do in a predication (episodes); these elements themselves have additional text-level ideational meanings that can be specified in various ways (text specifiers): further text-level elements concern interpersonal meaning (appeals); and there are markers of text coherence. The parallels between sentence level and text level are shown in Table 8. Before discussing the model further, let me put it in context by providing a · brief survey of the background from which it has evolved, in contrastive text linguistics, discourse analysis and contrastive rhetoric. (A more comprehensive survey, from a slightly different viewpoint, is given by Pery-Woodley (1990).)

154

CONTRASTIVE FuNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

Table 8. Sentence meaning and text meaning. Level of sentence meaning

Level of text meaning

semantic structure predication predicate types actants specifiers complicators commentators connectors

semantic macrostructure message text types episodes text specifiers (re aspects of episodes) " " appeals (re pathos, ethos) coherence (re logos, metatext)

4.1. Background 4.1.1. Contrastive Text Linguistics

The terms "text linguistics" and "discourse analysis" have been used iiJ overlapping senses for decades, sometimes with one as the superordinate notion and sometimes with the other. Bulow-M!Illler (1989) takes text linguistics to cover grammar, stylistics and rhetoric, and reserves discourse analysis as a hyponym, focusing on the communicative value of texts. Other scholars, such as van Dijk (e.g. 1977) use discourse analysis as the more general term. Hartmann (1980) takes discourse analysis and contrastive analysis to be the two superordinate fields, whose conjunction gives rise to "contrastive textology". In this chapter, I shall use text linguistics to refer to the study of texts qua monologic texts, as defined above; discourse analysis will be reserved for texts qua interactive communication. There is no need here to recount the development of text linguistics as such. Enkvist (1984, 1987) outlines four major stages which broadly reflect a shift from texts as products to texts as processes: (a) sentence-based text models (matters concerning cohesion, textual fit); (b) predication-based models (textualization strategies); (c) cognitive models (networks and nodes, linearization); (d) interactional models (felicity conditions, conversational maxims, face, turn-taking, reading comprehension). The first three of these would be "textual" in my sense. All four models have been used in contrastive studies. The examples of contrastive text linguistic research listed by James (1980) are all within the sentence-based model, and deal mostly with cohesion

RHETORIC

155

preferences in different languages, making much use of Halliday and Hasan (1976). James illustrates how contrastive studies of textual cohesion can be relevant to text typology and to the evaluation of translations. Hartmann ( 1980) also stresses the link between early contrastive text linguistics and translation studies, via research not only on actual translations but also on parallel texts (i.e. texts produced independently in different cultures but sharing the same field, tenor and mode as far as possible, being in the same register or style). We can refer too to the early work on comparative stylistics (such as Vinay and Darbelnet 1958). For instance, Guillemin-Flescher (1981) argues that English prefers coordinate structures and French subordinate ones, and that English uses more explicit specification than French. Such preferences add up to what Hartmann (1980) called a "national style". (See also the studies by Doherty and others on information structure and information density, collected in Linguistics 34-3, 1996.) Contrastively, we are of course dealing with very general probabilities here, which may vary enormously between genres; but it is reasonable to assume that a speaker's subconscious aw~ess of, or feelings about, such preferences will influence choices about how messages will be encoded into texts. The preferences thus constitute indirect conditioning factors. Predication-based models are also relevant to translation analysis. And they often underlie contrastive work on paragraph structure: a given set of predications can be encoded and ordered in different ways, according to the desired kind of paragraph, the context, the personal style and chosen textual strategy of the writer, the preferences embodied in the culture concerned, and so on. (See for instance Werlich 1976; Nash 1980.) Cognitive models underlie some of the early work in contrastive rhetoric, and interactional models are needed in contrastive discourse analysis. 4.1.2. Con'trastive Discourse Analysis

Contrastive discourse analysis has grown out of rhetoric, content analysis, speech act theory, action theory, the ethnography of communication and convers.ation analysis, into the general study of how speakers of different languages communicate. The general framework is interactional, focusing both on communicative competence and on communicative performance. (For an early overview of this development, see for instance Sajavaara et al. 1980.) Some of this work has an overt pedagogical focus, comparing the language performance of native and non-native speakers. Contrastive discourse analysis looks at language more as behaviour than as system; it is consequently also interested in non-verbal, paralinguistic and kinetic communicative behaviour, and in psychological and affective factors impinging upon language performance, such as motivation, mental set and personality type.

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It also highlights sociological factors such as situational context, and includes the study of high-level phenomena such as language shift and code-switching, plus the factors that influence these. Its approach is thus "functional" in an obvious way. It has often tended to merge with "contrastive pragmatics": the names and terminologies of the various subfields of contrastive analaysis are still far from being fixed. (For a representative selection of fairly recent work in contrastive pragmatics, see Oleksy (ed.) 1989.) An influential early paper in contrastive discourse analysis (albeit under the name "contrastive pragmalinguistics") was Riley (1979). This outlined the basic approach rather clearly. Riley suggested that a communicative situation has three levels of structure: formal structure, illocutionary structure, and interactive structure. The formal structure concerned "realizations", whether verbal, paralinguistic or non-verbal. The illocutionary structure concerned the sequence of illocutionary acts - e.g. invite, accept. And the interactive structure concerned the discourse tactics or moves, such as opening, reply, closing. Riley argued that contrastive analysis should encompass all three levels. Contrastive discourse analysis has focused on the illocutionary and interactive levels (the former of which we have already considered under the speech function commentators). At the interactive level, it has exploited the concepts of turn, move and exchange which have become familiar in conversation and discourse analysis more generally, and later also such notions as scheme and frame, borrowed from artificial intelligence (for a survey, see van Dijk and Kintsch 1983). To take just one simple example, Riley points out that in the speech act of complimenting, the English convention is to follow the opening move (the compliment) by a response such as thanking, but in French this is not the case. From this point of view, contrastive functional rhetoric is interested in looking at (a) differences in preferred or accepted sequences of illocutionary acts, and (b) differences in interactive structure. It is also interested in different crosscultural preferences for particular illocutionary acts overall: like preferences for formal features such as clause types, these preferences too will act as conditioning factors on a speaker's choice of expression. For instance, it seems that in some cultures the speech act of apologizing is distinctly less frequent than in others (Cohen and Olshtain 1981; for other examples, see also Little wood 1983). Longer sequences of illocutionary acts also allow the study of differences in conversational strategies, different ways in which speakers seek to attain a desired goal. The speech act of requesting, for instance, might be realized over a sequence of several sentences, with different cultures making different uses of various persuasive tactics (see e.g. House-Edmondson 1982). In ways such as these, contrastive discourse analysis broadens the contrastive view to include both cognitive and behavioural aspects of

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communication. Its focus on the interactional aspect also links it to what has become known as contrastive rhetoric. The work of Meyer (e.g. 1975; Meyer and Rice 1982) is representative in this respect. She is interested in the relation between rhetorical structure and reading comprehension and memory, i.e. in the cognitive effects of texts; her work thus has implications concerning the psychological reality (or at least plausibility) of rhetorical categories.

4.1.3. Contrastive Rhetoric More than the two subfields surveyed above, contrastive rhetoric has clear pedagogical roots. It started in the 1960's, with the realization that foreign students in the USA had difficulties writing the kind of English that they needed in their studies. It was not that they made grammatical errors, but that their whole way of organizing a text seemed to be non-English. The locus classicus is Kaplan's paper (1966), which suggested that different languages (or rather: groups of languages) tended to prefer different rhetorical styles, and that students tended to transfer the rhetorical patterns of their native language into their English. Kaplan illustrated this with the drawings that have since become notorious: a linear arrow representing the Anglo-American norm; a more irregular pattern, with great tolerance-for digressions, for the Romance languages and Russian; a series of parallel structures for the Semitic norm; a spiral for Orientals. In this early paper, Kaplan speculated that such rhetorical differences might reflect cognitive differences as well. The paper aroused much interest and much criticism (see e.g. Clyne 1981). Kaplan was accused of being a naive Whorfist, of inferring in validly from nonnative to native patterns, of being Anglo-American-centric, of overgeneralizing. He has since modified his views somewhat (see e.g. 1987, 1988). However, in spite of the criticism, contrastive rhetoric has become a flourishing field, and has engendered a good deal, of empirical research. Papers in recent collections (Kaplan 1983; Connor and Kaplan 1987; Purves 1988) cover such topics as cohesion, predication sequences, degree of subjectivity, amount of figurative language, relation with reader, narrative focus, concrete vs. abstract focus, clause-type frequencies, lexical density, argument structure. A major source of comparative data has been the International Study of Achievement in Written Composition, which looked at essays written on the same topics by schoolchildren in many countries (see Purves 1988). Psycholinguists and cognitive psychologists have continued to be interested in the general Whorfian hypothesis, and attempts have been made to produce quantifiable evidence either for or against it, e.g. involving computational (response) times for text segments with different kinds of textual features (e.g. Hunt and Agnoli 1991).

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Much of this research fits into our basic functional paradigm, focusing on the speaker's grammar and the movement from meaning to form. The basic setup is familiar: given a particular meaning or message (usually defined in terms of a particular communicative task) how do speakers of different languages go about expressing it? For instance, given the task of describing something, or of arguing a particular case, what kinds of texts do writers with different linguistic backgrounds produce? (But see the following section on methodological differences.) Contrastive rhetoric has since absorbed much from the methodology of sociolinguistic variation studies and from genre studies, and has expanded into research on literacy, reading, writing and revision processes, and interpretation strategies. It has thus merged to some extent with discourse analysis, although it has largely retained its broad educational interests. One of its aims, for example, has been to study the correlation between teachers' (or other readers') evaluative ratings of compositions and various text-linguistic features. (For an up-to-date account, see Connor 1996.) I shall refer to several specific studies in contrastive rhetoric during the course of this chapter.

4.1.4. Methodological The methodology of contrastive functional rhetoric follows the general model described and illustrated in earlier chapters. As in research at the sentence level, contrastive studies at the text level have looked not only at differences between different languages but also at those between native and non-native speakers of the same language: as mentioned above, one of the origins of the field lies in the pedagogical needs of language teachers. Some studies combine both approaches, comparing native usage and learner interlanguage across two or more languages (see e.g. Kasper and Blum-Kulka 1993, on interlanguage pragmatics). Some contrastivists have argued that this interlanguage dimension should indeed be the specific aim of "applied" contrastive analysis. Thus Sajavaara ( 1985: 256) writes that applied contrastive analysis should concern itself with "cross-language problems encountered by speaker-hearers when they use second and foreign languages". However, there are additional complications in the methodology of contrastive functional rhetoric. They are due to the simple fact that a speaker has many more choices at the text level than at the sentence level: the larger the unit, the more alternative expressions are available. This means that at the textual level of analysis we are not only interested in the conditions governing the various forms of expression chosen, but also in the semantic choices themselves, in what is to be expressed.

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Let me illustrate. At the sentence level, a speaker may wish to express an idea concerning, say, some past event. In Mustajoki's model, a past tense option is thus selected under the Temp specifier, and the contrastivist will be interested in noting what kind of past tense tends to be chosen, under what circumstances: in other words, how this notion of past time is expressed. However, it is of little interest to ask the question: why has this option been selected under Temp? It is of little interest because the answer is usually obvious: because the reference is to an event occurring prior to the speech time. In general, the semantic choice of temporal specifier is thus entirely predictable on the basis of (a) knowledge of the state of affairs the speaker wishes to describe, and (b) knowledge of the speech time itself. The focus of a contrastive analysis is therefore not on the semantic choice itself but on the various formal consequences of this choice. True, this does not hold to the same extent for all semantic choices at the sentence level. With regard to the Det specifier, for instance, it is often rather less easy to predict the semantic choice between Definite, Indefinite, Nonspecific and Generic, and so contrastivists are also interested in the conditions determining this semantic choice itself, as well as the various formal realizations of the different choices in different languages. The same can be said of the Aspect specifier (it is not trivial to investigate the conditions determining the semantic choices of subtypes of aspect, as well as their formal expression), and perhaps also some other elements of sentence-level semantic structure. And true, sentence-level contrastive analysis might also be interested in looking at the textual conditions governing a particular sentence-semantic choice. In horoscopes and weather forecasts, for instance, we can safely predict a relatively high frequency of indefinites and the selection of future time references. Yet these reservations notwithstanding, for most elements of semantic structure at the sentence level, contrastive research understandably tends to focus on how certain semantic choices are realized, rather than on why such choices were made in the first place. At the text level, however, the situation is different. Because of the exponential increase in the number of choices of expression available at this level, and the concomitant decrease in predictability, contrastive interest focuses not only on the formal expression of semantic elements but also on the semantic choic~emselves. Indeed, the latter focus could well be seen as primary. For instance, one of the text specifiers we shall look at is Profile, referring to the various ways of arranging predications in a text. There are various subtypes of Profile, one of which can be described as Linear. A contrastive analysis of this aspect of textual meaning would examine, first, the conditions affecting the choice of this particular type of Profile, and, second, the ways in which it is formally expressed and the conditions affecting each of these ways.

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A segment of semantic structure or macrostructure is in fact a hierarchy, with a superordinate (such as Det or Profile) at the top and various subtypes beneath (Definite, Indefinite ... ; Linear, Digressive ... ). Each subtype is then realized by a range of formal features (articles, case endings ... ; kinds of paragraph structure ... ). In sentence-level Contrastive Functional Analysis, the focus is mostly on the formal realizations of the bottom-most elements of this hierarchy. In text-level analysis, however, the focus is more on these bottommost elements themselves, on the conditions governing the choice of semantic subtype. A further methodological point concerns a difference between contrastive rhetoric (as described in the previous section) and what I am calling contrastive functional rhetoric. Both approaches investigate the relations between meanings, forms and conditions of use, but the two points of view are slightly different. Contrastive rhetoric has tended to specify certain meanings (e.g. an argumentative essay on a community problem) and certain conditions of use (e.g. American students I Thai students aged 16-18), and examine other differences in textual macrostructure as dependent variables (Thai student essays tend to have text -semantic feature X as compared to American essays, which are marked more by feature Y). The conclusion is then that Thai writers tend to prefer feature X and Americans feature Y. Contrastive functional rhetoric, on the other hand, starts in theory with a text macrostructure (or an element of one), sp~cified to a desired degree of delicacy, which constitutes the similarity constraint. It then seeks to examine (a) the ways in which this structure can be realized in different languages; (b) the conditions governing these various realizations; and, often most importantly, (c) the conditions governing the semantic choices within the macrostructure itself. For instance, we might choose to examine the conditions governing the use of a Linear Profile in different languages. We might find that in language A there are a great many conftitions, so that contexts in which they would all be satisfied are rare; a Linear frofile would consequently be rather infrequent in that language. In language B, there might be very few constraining conditions, so that this Profile would be used more freely and probably also more frequently. Studies in contrastive rhetoric would seem to be good sources of hypotheses that could be tested using a contrastive functional methodology. As the level of analysis widens from sentences to texts, so features which emerge as conditions on the lower level can be incorporated within the similarity constraint on the text level. At the sentence level, for instance, we might study the expression of directive speech acts, and discover that this is partly conditioned by text type, with certain forms of expression being particularly frequent in, say, instructive texts. At the text level, we can then specify "Instructive text type" as part of the similarity constraint defined for a contrastive

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study of directives, and then look at the conditions governing the variation of expression within this constraint. In this way, contrastive functional analysis becomes increasingly delicate, as more and more conditions are specified within the similarity constraint. It should be stressed that in CFA the theoretical (and also practical) point of the various categories proposed is not a comprehensive description of a particular language but simply to enable us to formulate similarity constraints in a meaningful and reasonable way, along the lines shown in the preceding chapters. At any level of analysis, a contrastive analysis only needs to specify the similarity contraints that are relevant to a particular study, to the particular phenomenon being examined; all other aspects of semantic structure or macrostructure can be left unspecified, to function as possible conditions of use. Given such-and-such a similarity constraint, what do we observe about possible correlations between forms of expression and conditions of occurrence (syntactic, semantic, pragmatic ... ) across languages? At the same time as contrastive analysis broadens to the levels of text and interaction it also becomes more tentative. Judgements about well-formedness at the text level, for instance, are even more tricky than those at sentence level. And disagreements about how to analyse a text are much more widespread than those about how to analyse a sentence. It follows that, at the textual level even more than otherwise, analytical judgements can only be ones of relative plausibility (see also Mann et al. 1992: 50-51). Attributions of particular semantic macrostructures to particular texts can represent only hypotheses, albeit hopefully plausible ones. This means that their falsifiability becomes increasingly a matter of relative plausibility rather than the possibility of direct rejection.

4.2.

Text Types

At the level of sentence semantics, we distinguished several types of predications (according to types of predicates) denoting various kinds of relations between actants. At the macrostructural level of text semantics, we can in the same way distinguish a number of text types. Strictly speaking, it might be thought that these should be called "message types", since text has been defined as a formal unit and we are looking at messages, at semantic macrostructures. However, there is a strong terminological tradition that text types are in fact defined functionally, and I prefer to keep to established terms where possible. There are several competing proposals concerning functional text typology, often running parallel with kinds of language function (see above, 2.1). Familiar examples are Bi.ihler's three functions (Darstellung, Appell, Ausdruck) and Jakobson's six (referential, emotive, poetic, conative, phatic, metalinguistic).

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One obvious problem here has been that actual texts (or P-units) almost always exhibit more than one such function, which means that we have instead to speak only of a text's dominant function. Another approach has been to work bottomup, starting with the relative distribution of speech-act types and thus basing a text typology on dominant speech acts (e.g. Glaser 1982; Btilow-MJ<:Iller 1989). A problem here is the classification of the speech acts themselves, and the difficulty of maintaining a consistent degree of delicacy. Yet a third approach has been to start with text-external criteria, situational features such as the relationship between addresser and addressee, public vs. private communication. On the other hand, text-external criteria are nowadays commonly used to distinguish genres rather than text types as such (see e.g. Swales 1991). The kinds of contrastive research mentioned in the previous section actually tend to use a very simple, rough-and-ready classification of text types which certainly has practical value in that they are easily recognizable. We should further bear in mind that in contrastive functional rhetoric the classification of text types is not an end in itself, nor an enterprise which is deemed necessarily to be exhaustive, but a means to an end: its purpose is to allow an operational definition of a similarity constraint for a particular study. The model therefore proposes to use the following canonical text types, at least at a non-delicate level of analysis (one standard source for these is Werlich 1976): (a) (b) (c) (d) (e)

Narrative Descriptive Expository Argumentative Instructive

There are good text-internal reasons for taking these five as major types. To take just one example, Grabe (1987) did a factor and cluster analysis of 33 syntactic and cohesion variables across a number of texts that might broadly be defined as expository, ranging from academic and scientific writing to popular textbooks. He compared these to fictional narrative and professional correspondence, and found that there does indeed seem to be a general text type we can label expository, in contrast to the control texts. There also seemed to be a number of distinct subtypes within the expository group, for instance corresponding to the natural science vs. humanities dimension. Various types of narrative texts also emerged as a distinct type. Throughout the contrastive functional model, however, sets and categories tend to be both fuzzy and open-ended. At more delicate levels, subclasses will abound: for instance, descriptive texts can be split into descriptions of places, animate beings, things, feelings, individual events, and so on. One particularly

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important additional distinction is between non-literary and literary texts, cutting across the initial classification. Without entering into the debate on literariness, and agreeing that "non-literary" texts can certainly exhibit "literary features", I will follow De Beau gran de and Dressier ( 1981: 185) in simply defining this distinction in terms of the world of discourse. That is, a literary text is one whose world of discour&e is imaginary, some kind of alternative to what we normally think of as the real world. This will suffice for our present purposes. What makes these major types particularly appropriate for contrastive functional rhetoric is the fact that the criteria on which they are based pertain clearly to aspects of meaning, aspects of the state of affairs that the speaker/writer elects to say/write something about. Werlich (1976) speaks of each type having a "dominant contextual focus", which he explicates as follows. In narration, the focus is on temporal phenomena; in description, on phenomena in a spatial context; in exposition, on the analysis or synthesis of constituent elements of concepts; in argumentation, on the relations between groups of phenomena; and in instruction, on the future behaviour of sender or receiver. Werlich also relates each type to a dominant cognitive process. Respectively, these are: perception in time, perception in space, comprehension, judging, and planning. De Beaugrande and Dressier (1981) argue along similar lines, albeit acknowledging that the types are not pure but represent dominances. They suggest that different text types are also characterized by different frequencies of various concept types and conceptual relations; descriptive texts, for example, prioritize concepts denoting objects and situations, with a high frequency of attributions, specifications etc. Even allowing for fuzzy edges and overlaps, and for the obvious existence of hybrid texts, this classification of text types has proved fruitful in contrastive research. The types are in fact defined in the same way as the predication types at the level of sentence semantics, in terins of kinds of statements/texts produced about aspects of a situation. By being thus semantically based rather than speaker-intention or communication-function based, they are less susceptible to ambiguity and easier to work with. There are many examples of contrastive work based on a given text type, and I will mention only a few here. Methodologically, the similarity constraint is usually specified (implicitly or explicitly) simply as text type (including literary or non-literary) plus discourse topic. A classical example is the studies on the socalled pear stories (Chafe 1980), which have looked at various aspects of narration. The topic here was specified as the story told by a particular silent film. Soter ( 1988) similarly held text type constant, as narration, and looked at differences in the way writers of different nationalities constructed and framed plots (see below, 4.3). She also drew attention to the way writers' rhetorical choices were conditioned by language-specific preferences for particular wordclasses or syntactic structures.

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In the composition writing project mentioned above ( 4.1.3), one assignment given to the schoolchildren was to write a persuasive composition describing some problem in their community and offering solutions to it. In other words, the similarity constraint was an argumentative text type on this topic. A sample study based on this project was reported in Connor (1987), which compared argumentative compositions from writers in England, Finland, Germany and the United States, using a particular model of argument structure (see below, 4.4). Connor compared rhetorical features in the compositions to teacher ratings, and also found some cross-cultural variation in the kinds of rhetorical structures used. Tirkkonen-Condit (1988) specified argumentative text type as part of the similarity constraint for a study of the expression of disagreement in Finnish, English and American newspaper editorials; she was interested in the degree of explicitness in the expression of disagreement, and concluded that the conditions affecting this variable were more political and journalistic than cross-cultural. As regards the expository text type, one of the most well-known contributions has been by Galtung (1979, 1983), who used the term "intellectual style" to describe the different ways writers in certain major cultures tend to produce academic texts (overlapping partly with the argumentative type). He distinguished between Saxonian, Teutonic, Gallic and Nipponian cultural norms, in rather the same way as Kaplan's original study, and associated these with dominant modes of thinking in different cultures. The Saxonian intellectual style, for instance (i.e. basically Anglo-American) was claimed to be more linear, more relaxed, less esoteric, more inductive and more dialogic than the Teutonic; Galtung is thus pointing to differences in formality and also in metatext and argument structure. (See also Clyne 1981.) Another illustrative example is Ostler (1987). She investigated differences between English and Saudi Arabian writers of English, and found that the Saudi writers tended to make relatively more use of balanced parallel and coordinate structures and also of proverbial sayings (commonplaces). The inference is that the Saudi writers were transferring rhetorical conventions from their native Arabic. Ostler relates these rhetorical differences to the different histories of rhetoric in the two cultures, again showing how such cultural expectations influence writers' rhetorical choices. Bickner and Peyasantiwong ( 1988) studied the variation between American and Thai students writing reflective essays; they reported that Thai writers make more use of listing sequences (cf. 4.4 below), and that the notion of a conclusion seems to be subject to different conventions in the two cultures (cf. 4.3). Thiele and Graustein ( 1990) also used the expository text type as their similarity constraint, looking at the differences between professional science and popular science writing.

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Taking the instructive text type as part of their similarity constraint, Delin and others ( 1995) look at the expression of various aspects of semantic content in English and a number of other languages. They are interested both in the relative frequencies of different forms of expression and in the conditions governing a speaker's choice of expression, such as kind of interpersonal relationship and degree of directness. This research exemplifies the contrastive functional rhetoric approach very well: consideration is given to defining the degree to which the semantic content communicated in two texts is "sufficiently similar" to be compared (i.e. the similarity constraint), and the overall focus is on showing how a given semantic content is syntactically realized in different ways in different languages, under certain pragmatic conditions. As I have indicated, such studies shed light on several kinds of differences in text rhetoric, and I shall return to some of them below. The model we are exploring will show how they all fit into a general macrostructure of textmeaning. At the head of a description of semantic macrostructure, therefore, there will be information concerning text type. Precisely how this is formulated or formalized is of secondary interest here. Following on from the semi-formal conventions established for Mustajoki's model, we can simply state the text type in the same way as the predicate type is indicated. The first element in the semantic macrostructure would then be marked as, say, Des, Nar, Exp, Arg or Ins, with subtypes marked as desired. The macrostructure of this current section could then be initially indicated as [Exp; ... ] The next step will be to fill in the dots; in other words, to see what corresponds at the text level to actants.

4.3.

Text Actants: Episodes

At the sentence level, an actant is a participant role in a predication. The corresponding semantic category at the text level is what I shall call an episode. I take the term in the first instance from van Dijk, but the concept appears under many names in the literature on text linguistics and discourse analysis. One alternative term would be "move", as used e.g. by Swales (1991 ). The concept captures an important aspect of the semantic macrostructure of a text. This macrostructure has two natural dimensions: hierarchical and linear. From one point of view, a text is a semantic hierarchy; it can be represented as a tree diagram, with a general superordinate topic or proposition at the top, and

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various branches denoting sub-topics or sub-propositions. From another point of view, a text is a linear structure, in that it proceeds in a certain linear sequence. This linearity is particularly evident from the speaker's angle: we cannot but speak one word, express one meaning (normally), at a time. A writer, particularly when producing a first draft or using a word-processor, has slightly more freedom to break a consistent linearity; a reader has considerably more. The notion of episode represents a semantic element that has both hierarchical and linear relevance: hierarchically, in that episodes are major semantic units of various kinds, subordinate to the overall message but superordinate to sentencelevel meanings; linearly, in that a message is a sequence of episodes. Van Dijk and Kintsch (1983: 124) define the notion of episode in a way that reflects hierarchical and linear structure as follows. Their macrostructure model is based on propositions and macropropositions: macropropositions may or may not be expressed as such in the text, but they can be easily inferred. Macropropositions are in fact entailed by the propositions in the part of the text they dominate (cf. van Dijk 1977: 137). Hierarchically, an episode is simply a semantic unit that is dominated by a macroproposition; an episode is thus a semantic branch of the macrostructure, and the node labelling the branch is a macroproposition. Linearly, an episode is defined as a sequence of propositions, and such a sequence is characterized by being coherent in some way. This highlights the process aspect of a text, the way it tends to proceed in coherent stretches. Our contrastive functional model has preferred to work with looser predications rather than logical propositions, to allow a wider scope for potential similarities; but apart from this slight difference the form of van Dijk and Kintsch' s definition is eminently appropriate. Of particular interest, in the light of the model's general aim to be psychologically plausible, is the experimental evidence reported by van Dijk and Kintsch concerning the psychological reality of episodes. This is manifested, for instance, by tests of comprehension and memory. People tend to remember macropropositions, representing for instance the main events in a story; this suggests that texts are indeed processed in terms of their dominant episodes. Evidence is also given for the psychological reality of propositions; however, the point is not that knowledge is always stored in terms of propositions, but that it can be, and in particular that it tends to be retrieved in such terms. As thus defined, episodes obviously exist on different levels. Particularly in long texts, the hierarchical macrostructure will be extremely complex, with many levels of episodes, sub-episodes and so on. At the sub-episode level, a useful descriptive model is that of the discourse bloc (Pitkin 1969; Ostler 1987). This concept refers to a unit of discourse larger than sentence, corresponding for instance to a paragraph, or minimally to a group of sentences whose

a

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meanings are related in some coherent way; i.e. their combined meaning can be captured by a macroproposition. I shall not pursue this sub-episode level any further here. In very short texts, there may be little point in trying to distinguish episodes at all. The textual realization of episodes may vary enormously, from a single sentence to a paragraph or longer chunk. In proposing a general model we will focus on the least delicate level, and examine only the most general categories of episodes. As with actants, the distinguishing features will be the different semantic roles that episodes play in the overall semantic macrostructure. A preliminary observation is that different episode types tend to occur in different text types, although they are not a priori restricted in this way and there is some overlap. (To some extent, this matches the relative eo-occurrence of certain actants. wi.th certain ~redi.cate t~~es..) l shall therefore introduce them teKt type by text type, and then mention some illustrative contrastive research. Some text types have been much more studied than others in this respect, and there is already some degree of consensus concerning the canonical episodes in narrative, argumentative and expository texts, albeit with some terminological variation. In some text types, episode types and sequences seem highly conventionalized, while in others there is more variation: this in itself is of course a topic for contrastive investigation. As with actants/cases/roles, the total set of episodes does not seem to be a closed one. To start with the narrative text type: the main episodes here can be labelled Beginning, Setting, Complication, Resolution and Ending (cf. van Dijk 1977). These are relatively uncontroversial, although labels vary. In English at least, the default order of occurrence is the one given, but variation is of course possible, particularly in literary narrative. The Beginning episode is usually short, announcing the story or establishing a frame; the Setting provides the background and introduces the characters etc.; the Complication expresses the conflict or problem, and the Resolution its solution; the Ending may contain an evaluation, moral or other conclusion. The descriptive text type has been less studied. A preliminary proposal would be that, minimally, there must be a Setting episode and a Centre one. The Setting (or Situation) provides the background and the Centre the fore grounded elements. Expository text types of some kinds have a highly conventionalized episodic structure. Experimental papers in the natural sciences keep closely to the set Introduction, Data, Methods, Results, Discussion, Conclusion. To these episodes we can add at least Problem, Solution and Evaluation. An academic paper in the humanities might thus consist of the following sequence: Introduction, Problem, Discussion, Solution, Conclusion. Introductions are similar to Settings, but whereas Settings tend to be static, simply presenting

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background information, Introductions typically also serve dynamically, as previews to the subsequent message. Argumentative text types can also be structured semantically in terms of Data (or Facts), Problem, Solution and Evaluation episodes, and may further include a Setting (or Situation) episode. Toulmin' s (1958) influential model of argument structure starts with the Data episode, and then sets up categories of Claim and Warrant, both of which merit inclusion here. The Claim is the central assertion of an argument, and the Warrant is the bridge between Data and Claim, i.e. the evidence which is appealed to (implicity or explictly) in order to support the Claim. In the classical syllogism, we have Warrant (All men are mortal), Data (Socrates is a man) and finally Claim (Therefore Socrates is mortal). Instructive text types typically have Setting and Directive episodes, often proceeding as a paired list: under such and such conditions, it is necessary or desirable to do X. (Headache? Take an aspirin!) The point, then, is that texts have semantic macrostructures which can be modelled as sequences of various kinds of episodes. (In very short texts, of course, sequences of separate episodes cannot not always be distinguished.) Complete texts vary in terms of what episodes they are composed of, how each episode is realized, and how many times it is realized. In research coming under the umbrella of contrastive functional rhetoric, the approach has usually been to specify both a text type and an episode type, hence defining the similarity constraint in this way, and then to examine any variation and its conditions in different languages. I will now illustrate this with a few examples showing how the notion of episode has been made implicit use of. In each case, the similarity constraint can be formulated in the same way, as a text type plus an episode type. Soter ( 1988), in a study of narrative texts by Vietnamese, Arabic-speaking Lebanese and English-speaking students, found a significant difference with respect to what I have called the Beginning episode of a narrative. (Her similarity constraint can therefore be formulated simply as [Nar; Beginning].) The Vietnamese students gave much more emphasis to this episode than the other two groups, often developing into a "story about a story" with an elaborate "framework in which someone is introduced as the teller of the story, and so on. Indrasuta (1988) carried out a complex analysis on American and Thai writing. One of the variables examined concerned the Setting episode in narrative texts; the finding was that Thai writers made more use of "backdrop" as opposed to "integral" settings. A backdrop setting is more abstract, more psychological, whereas an integral setting is tied to concrete time, place and character. Indrasuta refers to the Buddhist background of the Thai writers, which apparently "enhances the belief that Thais do not have control over the events in their lives" (220) and hence seems to diminish the importance of concrete events in themselves.

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The study by Bickner and Peyasantiwong (1988) which I referred to earlier also looked at differences between American and Thai rhetoric. One point the authors make demonstrates the contrastive study of a single episode particularly clearly: the Conclusion episode in the expository text type. Among other things, they found that both groups of students included a conclusion in their essays, but that its realization tended to be different. In the American texts, conclusions tended to be both backward-looking, with a summary of the main points, and also forward-looking, with speculation about possible consequences or inferences. In the Thai tests, this speculation aspect was absent, and the writers focused on summarizing only. Within this shared rhetorical element, the Conclusion episode, we thus find some striking language-specific variation. Connor and Lauer (1988) looked at argumentative essays by 16-year-olds in the US, Britain and New Zealand, using (among other things) the episodes Situation, Problem, Solution, Evaluation. They were interested in seeing whether the presence and form of these episodes correlated with expert ratings, and whether ther~would be any cross-cultural differences. It turned out that the presence or absence of the Evaluation episode was particularly relevant to the expert rating. In a separate analysis, which was characterized as concerning informal reasoning rather than argument superstructure, the study looked at the realization of Data, Claim and Warrant; here, US students made much less use of Warrant and also Data episodes, and their essays were accordingly rated lower.

4.4.

Text Specifiers

Specifiers were defined as semantic elements that specify the meaning of actants or predications in various ways. Both specifiers and complicators concern ideational meaning, the former having a narrower focus on some element of the predication and the latter more generally on the whole predication; only the latter were indicated as metaverbs. However, this difference is not a clear-cut one. At the textual level, it seems unnecessary to maintain two separate categories of aspects of ideational meaning. Accordingly, a single category is proposed here, labelled text specifiers. The specifiers here are no doubt an open set, but the ones listed below seem to be important ones. They all represent various aspects of the overall semantic macrostructure of a text. They have to do with its general profile and arrangement, and include some features of what could be called stylistic meaning. I also include brief mentions of some relevant contrastive studies. Formally, text specifiers can be indicated in the same way as sentence-level specifiers. For instance, if we avoid abbreviations here for the sake of clarity, a similarity constraint for a study in contrastive functional rhetoric might be specified as follows:

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[Narrative; Ending (Profile= linear)] This states that the study will concern narrative texts, the Ending episodes of these, but only episodes whose Profile is linear. All data included for analysis would have to be plausibly compatible with this rhetorical structure. Differences of realization and conditions would then be examined within the bounds of this similarity constraint. (The same format will serve for other categories of text and interaction structure, and as a form of representation it will not be developed further in this book.) 4.4.1. Point

One major text specifier concerns the representation of the topic of the text or Punit, for instance the theme or hypertheme of a paragraph. Since the term "topic" has been used in a different sense in this model (denoting a particular actant), I shall call this text specifier Point. (Cf. also Martin 1992: 448f.) It is an obligatory one (as are some sentence-level specifiers, such as Time): every complete message, and also every episode, indeed every text unit that has semantic coherence, must have a Point. In van Dijk's terms, a Point may be defined as that macroproposition which dominates a given sequence of predications. In rhetorical structure theory, Point corresponds to the "comprehensive locus of effect" of the text as a whole: see e.g. Mann et al. 1992. Compare also the notion of "peak", signifying a climax, in narrative discourse (see e.g. Longacre 1985). The two basic subtypes of Point are the following: (a) Single: a single macroproposition can be posited for the whole of an (episode, text or P-unit. (b) Multiple: a given episode, text or P-unit is dominated by more than one clearly specifiable macroproposition. A Point may be given formal textual realization in a number of ways: as in Contrastive Functional Analysis in general, these represent a speaker's choices of expression for a given meaning. Some main realizations are these: (i) Explicit expression as a topic sentence (or sentences), text-initially; (ii) Explicit expression as a topic sentence (or sentences), text-medially; (iii) Explicit expression as a topic sentence (or sentences), text-finally; (iv) Diffuse expression, without a topic sentence or sentences. Explicit Points are often expressed by some form of highlighting (cf. J. Miller 1995, who nevertheless looks more at sentence-level manifestations) or foregrounding. There is quite some variation in the expression of Point in

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different languages. Mauranen (1993) found that some cultures (such as Finnish) prefer a later or text-final position for what I would call a statement of Point, whereas others (such as English) prefer an earlier or text-initial position; in an academic text, for instance, given a claim that an author wishes to make, Finns tend to choose a strategy proceeding from premises to conclusion, while AngloAmericans prefer to proceed from result to explanation. Kachru ( 1988) showed that Hindi writers tend to select diffuse expression of a paragraph topic; his subjects evidently felt much less need for explicit expression of Point than English writers, and hence work with rather different notions of paragraph structure. The textual realization of Point thus links up with a second text specifier, that of Profile.

4.4.2. Profile The Profile of a text describes the general structural shape of its meaning, the way the ideas proceed through the text; compare the notion of "staging" in Grimes (1975: 323f), which seems to incorporate aspects of both Point and Profile. A Profile defines a certain kind of sequence of predications or macropropositions. One way of conceptualizing and analysing such sequences would be in terms of thematic patterns (see e.g. Martin 1992: 434f; Fries 1995). Like Point, Profile is also a compulsory text specifier. The number of possible Profile types is no doubt endless, but there do seem to be some canonical ones. Kaplan's original work in contrastive rhetoric had to do precisely with the preferred Profiles of different languages/cultures, and some of his categories suggest labels for prototypes. Here are some candidates, which I will illustrate with short but complete texts, all from the same issue of the Guardian Weekly newspaper (March 26, 1995). (a) Linear: there is a direct progression either from or to an explicit expression of Point. The sequence of predications or macropropositions proceeds without interruption in various ways: from general to particular, cause to effect, large to small, earlier events to later ones, evidence to inference, and so on. Some of these linear progressions have been suggested to be universals (cf. van Dijk 1977), representing basic default orderings. The following example has a text-final Point, typical of jokes: joke contexts are thus one condition for this kind of Profile. It proceeds from general to particular. The context is a series of scandals about football players being bribed, and the Point lies in the misprint of the last word. A new twist in the match-fixing saga. The match sponsorship package detailed in the Chelsea programme earlier this month included the following

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benefits: car-park facilities, directors' box. seats, ex.clusive use of sponsors' lounge, three-course lunch, including win. (b) Parallel: the text proceeds in a series of balanced pairs of predications, for instance reflecting contrasts or different facets of a single theme. In English, a typical condition of occurrence of a Parallel Profile is the Argumentative text type. The following example is a letter to the editor; the context is the collapse of the Barings bank. Will Hutton 's conclusion (March 12) that the Barings collapse is symptomatic of all that's wrong with the free market is ex.traordinary. It is no more symptomatic of the free market than corruption in the former communist Russia was symptomatic of communism. Hutton is peeing in the wind if he thinks that more regulation and control will protect us from human folly. The realization of a Parallel Profile is apparent in the repetition of a single predication with slight formal variants, with an affirmative matched by two negatives. Let X and Y be noun phrases, and let [P] represent the predication X is symptomatic of Y. The Profile can then be roughly illustrated in the form of the underlying argument, as follows: Hutton's claim that [Pd is extraordinary It is not the case that [PI] Because it is not the case that [P2] (c) Spiral: the text circles into or away from its Point in different directions, and is characterized by a lack of sequential cohesion. The example below is from the sports page (boxing): the Point comes first, followed by various bits of additional information given in sentences that might have been placed in several other orders. Chris Eubank's 10-year unbeaten run came to an end in the Green Glens area at Mill street, Co Cork, when Dublin's proudest fighting son, Steve Collins, beat him on a unanimous points decision to claim the WBO supermiddleweight crown. Eubank was knocked down in the eighth round and he then floored Collins in the tenth, but the Irishman was undisturbed. It was Eubank's first defeat in 44 bouts, 20 of which were WBO title fights. Collins said later: "I had no doubt I'd win. I'm the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world and no one can prove me wrong."

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(d) Scatter: the text scatters ideas centrifugally and without much cohesion. The example below is another item from the sports page. I classify this as Scatter partly because the actual Point remains so ambivalent: the British athlete was actually defeated, but the structure of the text tends to make his achievement into a victory. Information about what happened two years ago, and who won the other two medals, is scattered here and there in such a way as to foreground the British viewpoint, like the scatter of a comet's tail. Britain's Richard Nerurkar, winner of the 1993 World Marathon Cup, was pipped at the post in the Dong-A International Marathon in Seoul when he recorded a time of 2hr 11min 3sec - five seconds behind the winner, Lee Bong-ju of South Korea. Mexican Andres Espinosa was third.

(e) Digressive: the text proceeds from or towards a Point by a series of digressions. A digression is understood as a predication not dominated by the macroproposition of a given sequence. The following news item has a digressive Profile, in that after the initial Point (given in the first two paragraphs) the textual progression sidesteps to mention several other aspects of the lives and achievements of the two main characters (especially in the fourth paragraph) before returning to the main theme in the final paragraph. This Profile seems typical of the more popular newspaper style in English. Hallelujah for Jimi Hendrix The society which is buying two houses in Mayfair to create a London shrine to the devout composer Handel has discovered that one of the most brilliant urchins in rock music lived in one of them. The Handel House Society now faces the prospect of a plaque to Jimi Hendrix going up a few feet from Handel's. The society chairman, Stanley Sadie, -said that this would be "inappropriate". Handel, whose best known saying is "Hallelujah", occupied 25 Brook Street from 1713 to 1759 and wrote Messiah there. Hendrix, who wrote Purple Haze, lived in a flat at No. 23 in 1969. The singer knew about the Handel link, but, he said, "to tell you the God's honest truth, I havefilt heard much of the fella's stuff'. However, he told a British rock paper before he died from a drug overdose in 1970 at the age of 28: "I dig a bit of Bach now and again." Hendrix' s British ex-lover, Cathy Etchingham, and his biographer Harry Shapiro remain keen on a plaque to him. They have the blessing of English Heritage and the London Advisory Committee. (f) Listing: the text is a series of co-ordinated predications all subordinated or linked to a single predication, as in: [P 1] IF [P2] AND [P3] AND [P4] etc. This

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example is a text directed at potential advertisers in the newspaper; the first paragraph has a marked Listing Profile, stating the conditions, and the same Profile dominates again at the end of the text. A typical condition of use for this Profile in English is in legislative provisions. It is a condition of acceptance of advertisement orders that the proprietors of The Guardian Weekly do not guarantee the insertion of any particular advertisement on a specified date, or at all, although every effort will be made to meet the wishes of advertisers; further, they do not accept liability for any loss or damage caused by an error or inaccuracy in the printing or nonappearance of any advertisement. They also reserve the right to classify correctly any advertisement, edit or delete any objectionable wording or reject any advertisement. Although every advertisement is carefully checked, occasionally mistakes do occur. We therefore ask advertisers to assist us by checking their advertisements carefully and advise us immediately should an error occur. We regret that we cannot accept responsibility for more than ONE INCORRECT insertion and that no republication will be granted in the case of typographical or minor changes which do not affect the value of the advertisement.

The above examples will have made it clear that Profiles, like text types, are seldom pure, and may vary between one part of a te.!Ct and another; dominant Profiles can nevertheless be distinguished. There have been many studies of Profile differences since Kaplan's original paper, mostly having to do with cultural preferences (i.e., in contrastive functional rhetoric terms, with the degree to which different Profiles are constrained by particular conditions of use). Kachru (1988) found that Hindi writers make rather less use of a Linear Profile than English writers, and prefer a more Digressive one. Ostler ( 1987) confirmed that Arabic writers favour Parallel Profiles (in expository texts), partly because of their strong tradition of oral rhetoric. The influence of a culture's rhetorical tradition is also stressed by Eggington ( 1987), who shows that Korean students disprefer Linear Profiles and prefer Digressive ones; his Korean subjects also found linear texts harder to recall in comprehension tests, presumably because this Profile goes against their cultural expectations. Bickner and Peyasantiwong (1988) argue that Thais have a particular preference for Listing Profiles, partly because these are frequent in Thai folk literature. Taylor and Tingguang (1991) are critical of such generalizations. They looked at the introductions to English academic papers written by AngloAmericans, Chinese papers by Chinese, and English papers by Chinese writers. They were building on the work in genre analysis by Swales (1991), which

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models such introductions as a series of moves: establishing the field, summarizing previous research, stating a problem or gap, and stating the actual aim of the paper. Each move thus represents a sub-episode, or a discourse bloc (see 4.3). Overall, the progression of moves can be seen as showing a Linear Profile for the typical Introduction episode, culminating in the Point. The authors found no evidence for an "oriental spiral" Profile in their data; on the contrary, all three groups of writers followed the same, basically linear progression of moves. There was some variation, however: in particular, Chinese writers made much less use of the second move, summarizing other research and citing references; one might argue that this made their text Profiles even more linear! The Chinese also wrote more briefly, and used fewer unconventional moves. Other variation correlated with academic discipline across the two cultures, so that geologists exhibited the greatest variation from Swales' basic pattern and engineers the least. Taylor and Tingguang speculate that some of the cultural differences might be due to the different, less dialogical rhetorical tradition of academic discourse in China, and also perhaps to the relative lack of bibliographical resources there. In other words, in criticizing a simplistic view of culture-determined variation, the authors of this study are drawing attention to a number of other conditions which may affect a writer's rhetorical choices. In effect, they are working more within a contrastive functional approach, seeking to determine a whole range of conditions of use. Profiles may not always be culture-determined but rather discipline or genre-determined. And there may also be variation in the degree to which dominant or preferred (i.e. relatively unconditioned) Profiles are actually adhered to. We also need a subtler classification of Profile types. 4.4.3. Angle The Angle specifier has to do with the writer's point of view insofar as this is reflected in the "angle of telling" (Simpson 1993: 123). Angle has been particularly discussed (under various names) in narrative theory, with respect to different kinds of narrators in fiction (see e.g. Toolan 1988, under 'focalization'). Compare also the notions of viewpoint or vantage point in cognitive grammar, and Kuno's concept (1987: 203f) of empathy, which he describes in terms of "camera angle". Although more complex taxonomies can be set up, the basic choices are these: (a) First person. The writer is personally present, and the message content is presented through his/her own eyes, as in a personal letter. In literary fiction, of course, a first-person Angle may be only a persona, and other subdivisions are then necessary. Representations of someone else's thoughts, as by an omniscient narrator, are also typical examples of a projected first-person angle. The first-person presence may be individual, pertaining to the writer alone, or it

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may be a group presence, where the writer comes across as a member of a group (as in the academic we). This group may even include the reader (Let us now look at another analysis ... ). (b) Second person. The point of view here is the reader's, either as an individual or as a member of a group. Obvious examples are to be found in instructive text types such as recipes, operational instructions and tourist directions. (c) Third person. This is the most neutral choice, the most suggestive of objective reporting. Under certain conditions, texts may mix Angles, alternating between one and another. To illustrate the concept, and to show how a writer can make use of all three kinds of Angle in turn, in a context where the aim is presumably to enhance credibility and achieve a certain kind of effect in the reader's mind, here is an extract from the end of Michael Stubbs' book Discourse Analysis ( 1983), in which he quotes from his own field notes in order to illustrate a point about research methodology. The incident he cites is in fact from a conversation in which he himself had played a part, indicated as MS. Square brackets indicate my interpolations. As a concrete footnote to a rather abstract methodological chapter, consider the following short conversational exchange, from my field notes, as a piece of data which illustrates some of the things that I have been discussing: namely, a problem in communication, a moment of miscommunication, and a long string of interpretative work collapsed into a very short interchange, including two reinterpretations of one remark. The situation is a small conversational group within a party on an evening during a research conference. C is doing imitations of people. He does a peculiar walk. No one recognizes it. Finally I recognize it as Groucho Marx. C redoes his walk, and the exchange goes: MS: Very good. Ten out of ten. Full marks. C: (Pause. No reaction.) (Suddenly.) You've almost got it. MS: I HAVE got it. C:

Ah!

I start with a problem of how to communicate to C that I have recognized the walk without telling the others the answer. I must not only tell C that I know the answer (he might think that I was bluffing), but show him that I know. Within this short exchange at least the following interpretations were performed and solutions to problems found. (a) I find a play on words: Marx/marks. [... ]

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[Stubbs proposes an analysis of the exchange, and then explains how he sought to corroborate or "triangulate" his analysis by checking it against the view of the other participant, C:] Having shown this analysis, precisely as it appears here, to C, I received these comments from him which can be used to triangulate on the quoted data: You need ... my cultural expectations ... (The incident) was a surprise - it was not in my expectations for how you would be thinking and talking ... [ ... ] [Stubbs then concludes the section as follows:] A central topic for sociolinguistic study is ways in which more general and formalized statements can be made about this kind of interpretative work which is routinely performed on connected discourse. Without such interpretations, discourse is not connected. [Stubbs 1983: 243-246]

The above extract starts with a second-person Angle by means of which the reader is invited to think about something (cf. the imperative consider ... ). Most of the extract makes use of the first-person Angle, expressed by the personal reminiscence, the author's own conversation, the first-person verbs. Yet this Angle is made more complex by the way in which Stubbs recasts his personal notes as "a piece of data", i.e. as something purportedly objective, and by distancing his own role via the notation MS. He then introduces another party (C), thus shifting to a third-person Angle embedded within the dominant firstperson one. The final paragraph then reverts to a normal (non-embedded) thirdperson Angle. I think we are all more likely to accept the point of this last paragraph - the claim that Stubbs is making about sociolinguistic research precisely because of the credibility established by the preceding first-person Angle, which serves to make the reader generally sympathetic to Stubbs' view and to treat him as trustworthy. One contrastive application of this concept has to do with the way in which shifts of Angle are signalled in different languages (cf. the introduction of the first-person verb Finally I recognize it after the preceding third persons in the above example). Another concerns the way in which choice of Angle is affected by the writer's ideology (see Simpson 1993), and the degree to which a writer takes a "personal" approach to a topic. Stubbs tends towards a first-person Angle throughout his book, which makes for a rather close relation with his readers, a sense that "you and I are doing this discourse analysis stuff together", stressing solidarity rather than power or authority. A third topic for contrastive research here concerns the correlations between Angle choice and text type or genre. Firstperson Angle, for instance, may be becoming an increasingly significant characteristic of expository Anglo-Arnerican academic discourse (see Chesterman

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1995), as opposed to academic discourse in some other cultures. Degenhart and Takala ( 1988) also found some cultural differences in this respect, with some cultures preferring a less personal stance in student compositions. Within a given language, too, Angle preferences may correlate with subject-matter or, in academic writing for instance, with discipline. 4.4.4. Chronology"

The Chronology text specifier has to do with the representation of time sequences, and can thus be compared to the Aspect specifier. If we designate event-time points chronologically as tl, t2, t3, t4, we can distinguish at least five subtypes among which a narrator can choose, perhaps even selecting a mixture of these. (a) Iconic: the representation follows the order tl, t2, t3, t4. (b) Reverse: the representation follows the order t4, t3, t2, tl. (c) Flashback: the order is e.g. t2, t3, tl, t4. (d) Flashforward: the order is e.g. tl, t2, t4, t3. (e) Overlay: the order is e.g. tl, t3; t2, t3; tl, t2, t4. This last term is from Grimes (1975: 292f), and denotes a kind of repeated narrative sequence which has the form of a serie:; of "planes" or "passes" through the narrative, highlighting particular events via repetition in a subsquent "pass" and introducing some new element in each pass. It may be that languages have different preferences (different degrees of conditioning) concerning relative tolerance of a non-iconic presentation. For English at least, Nyman (1993) found that in operating instructions (i.e. the Instructive text type), iconic presentation was certainly the norm and that deviations from this W9fe usually explicitly marked and motivated. Grimes (1975) comments that Overlay seems frequent in certain languages in narrative contexts, but extremely rare in others. As regards the formal realization of different Chronologies, a contrastivist will be particularly interested in the sequence of tenses, the way one tense affects the choice of subsequent ones in later predications, and on the different formal constraints which different languages impose on these sequences. (For some differences between English and Finnish in this respect, see Markkanen 1979.)

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4.5.

179

Appeals

At the sentence-semantic level, commentators were defined as elements that had to do with the speaker's attitude to the state of affairs, and also to the communicative act in question and its participants. They thus concern interpersonal meaning. The corresponding broader category at the macrostructural level, I suggest, has to do with the classical rhetoricians' notions of pathos (roughly, the power of arousing feeling) and ethos (literally, 'character', i.e. credibility). These macrosemantic features can be called appeals.

4.5.1. Pathos Pathos was traditionally seen as involving powerful language and rhetorical figures (schemes and tropes), in order to enhance the effect of a speech. Pathos appeals are thus appeals to the addressee's emotions or aesthetic sense, over and above a purely rational appeal. The motivation for selecting an option under Pathos can best be explained by looking first at the kind of text that results if a Pathos option is not selected. In such a case, the text will have what we could describe as a plain and simple style, consisting of the bare bones of a message expressed in a maximally economical way. This in itself is of course a rhetorical choice, and might indeed be perceived to be highly credible (see the following section). Such a choice can be seen as a kind of default option, although this view bypasses various ideological and pragmatic issues (concerning the impossibility of entirely neutral or totally transparent texts and the like). Roughly speaking, if no Pathos option is selected, we can say that the speaker's priority is on the hearer/reader's ease and speed of processing. The precise form which this default option takes may of course vary in different cultures. On the other hand, the speaker may opt to prioritize processing depth, the efficacy of the communication rather than merely its efficiency. For instance, I have just described an efficient style as being "plain and simple". If I had chosen differently, I might have written instead that such a style has "a lean and linear look". The intended effect of this alliteration would have been to inscribe the concept more memorably in the reader's mind; additionally, in some readers' minds an association might be triggered with Caesar's description of Cassius as having "a lean and hungry look", in Shakespeare's play, thus deepening the processing still further. The general motivation of such choices, then, is to enhance processing depth. This is of course a well-known point. De Beaugrande and Dressier ( 1981) make a similar distinction between the "efficiency" of a text and its "effectiveness"; the former aims at the minimum of processing effort, and the

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latter at making a strong impression on the hearer/reader and attaining the communicative goal. Van Dijk and Kintsch (1983: 18) describe some of the cognitive effects of rhetorical figures as follows: Figures of speech may attract attention to important concepts, provide more cues for local and global coherence, suggest plausible interpretations [ ... ], and will in ·general assign more structure to elements of the semantic representation, so that their retrieval is easier.

One aspect of this motivation is the wish to play with language, particularly beloved of postmodern literary critics. By drawing attention to the form of the message in this way, a writer can create humour, express irony, exploit ambiguities and etymologies, and so on. More seriously, in poetry and much other literature it is also possible to create and express meanings that are not obviously paraphrasable in a plainer prose. At the most general level, the main kinds of Pathos can be reduced to three. (a) Figurativeness. This is what is expressed via the familiar range of rhetorical tropes: metaphor, simile, personification etc. It is thus a measure of the text's distance from literalness. Texts express Figurativeness not absolutely but relatively, to a degree which can be quantified in terms of a trope count; and texts may differ with respect to relative frequencies of particular tropes. Contrastively, we can posit that cultures may differ in corresponding ways: there may be different conventions governing degree of figurativeness in particular text or episode types, and their may be different conventions regarding preferred tropes overall, or regar'tiing the conditions of their use. A study of such differences will define the similarity constraint in such a way that it contains the element: (Pathos =Figurativeness), plus any other restrictions of text type etc. Some suggestive research has been done in this area. One of the variables studied by Connor and Lauer (1988) concerned the use of figurative language, images and other affective features; US students made rather less use of these in their compositions than did students from the UK and New Zealand; this perhaps reflects culturally different expectations about what compositions should be like, i.e. whether writers should exploit Pathos or stick to a plain style. Degenhart and Takala (1988) also included the dimension "metaphorical vs. plain" in their study of expectations and evaluations of student essays; their data suggested that Australian and US students tended to expect an essay to be in a plain and simple style, while Finnish students preferred more metaphorical language: in other words, these two groups set different conditions on the use of this form of Pathos. The US students in Connor and Lauer's study thus seem to have indeed been doing what they thought they were expected to do. Indrasuta (1988) also

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found that American students used less figurative language in English compositions than Thai students writing in Thai. (b) Schematicity. This is what is expressed by the traditional rhetorical schemes such as alliteration, repetition, chiasmus and so on. All these have to do with formal patterns over and above those created by syntax. Just as speakers may choose whether to include a figurative dimension or not, in the same way they can choose whether or not to use any of these additional formal patterns. Martin Luther King chose to repeat "I· have a dream", but he also had other options. The fact that he did choose a repetition pattern of course added to the force and memorability of his speech. And it also illustrates that political oratory is a facilitating condition on the use of rhetorical schemes in English. Here too, we can expect some differences in culture-specific and text-typespecific conventions. Reference has already been made to the preference of Arabic speakers for parallel structures, for instance. Similarly, I would hypothesize that Finnish newspaper texts make more use of alliteration than English ones, because of the important role this scheme has played in Finnish folk poetry. It would be interesting to examine cross-culturally whether a tendency to opt for Figurativeness goes together with a tendency to opt for Schematicity, or whether the two choices do not correlate much. It would also be interesting to plot the conditions favouring the use of Pathos against those favouring plain style across different text types and episode types in different languages. (c) Affect. Affect is classed as one aspect of stance by Biber and Finegan (1989), alongside evidentiality. (See also Martin 1992: 533f.) In Mustajoki's model of sentence-level semantic structures, evidentiality is partly represented by Authorization and partly by the Modal specifier. Affect, though, is seen here as a broader category, realized at the textual level rather than the sentential one. Affect covers the speaker's emotionality in general, as expressed in the text; Affect can therefore be understood as a form of emphasis. Biber and Finegan, doing a factor analysis of a number of English texts, found one cluster they called "emphatic expression of affect". Together with a division into positive and negative emotion, these suggest the following subclasses of Affect. All three are of course relative, not absolute. (i) Neutral. The situational conditions are such that maximum credibility is achieved by avoiding all emotional elements -i.e. (in English) by choosing the default "plain and simple" option in this respect. (ii) Emphatic Positive. Typical situational conditions in English would be informal exchanges between personal friends. This subclass also includes humour. (iii) Emphatic Negative.

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For a brief illustration, compare these mini-texts (all adapted from a University of Brighton brochure): - Smoking is not permitted in the university buildings. [Neutral] - All internal public areas of the university are smoke free. Designated smoking areas are clearly signed, and you may smoke in your bedroom. [Positive Emphatic: cf. the words free, clearly, may; and the stress on where you can smoke.] - SMOKING is ABSOLUTELY FORBIDDEN in any of the university buildings except where officially designated. [Negative Emphatic; cf. the capitals, absolutely, any.]

A few contrastive studies have touched on aspects of Affect, and it is also implicit in some translation studies. The US students studied by Connor and Lauer ( 1988) evidently preferred a neutral option in their compositions more often than the subjects from the UK or New Zealand. Expectations about degree of humour was one of the parameters included in the pilot contrastive study by Degenhart and Takala (1988). Vehmas-Lehto (1989) points out that Soviet journalistic style tended to be more emotive than Finnish norms would accept, which led to translation difficulties. Kaufmann and Broms (1988) compared newspaper coverage of the Chernobyl explosion in the US, the USSR and Finland, and also found differences in emotiveness, with Finnish reporting being the least emotive. 4.5.2. Ethos Traditionally, ethos meant the signalling of a speaker's personal position. At one extreme, we can posit totally impersonal texts where the writer's presence is completely effaced and anonymity is the norm: a telephone directory, for instance. At the other end, the writer is constantly present, like in a personal letter to a loved one. Whatever the mode of a writer's presence, a text seeks to be such that the reader will trust the writer, i.e. will trust that the writer is being truthful and accurate. A writer seeks to present a certain Ethos, and a reader perceives one (not necessarily the one the writer intended, of course). The perceived Ethos of a message is an extraordinarily powerful factor: a text whose writer is felt to be untrustworthy can scarcely achieve its desired effect. Contrastive functional rhetoric looks at ethos from the writer's point of view: how is Ethos expressed? Two general facets of Ethos where cross-cultural variation can be expected here are (a) Author-presence, and (b) Ideology.

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The firsl links up with the concept of involvement, much studied in variation analysis (e.g. Chafe 1982; it is also related to the concept of Angle (4.4.3)). Overt authorial presence in some text types and cultures might add to credibility, while in others it might detract from it. The second has to do with values and their explicit or implicit expression, themes that have been centres of attention in critical linguistics and critical discourse analysis (see e.g. the special issue of Discourse and Society, 4, 2, 1993; also Verschueren 1995). A functional approach compatible with the one we have been developing in this book would start by specifying a similarity constraint in terms of, say, a given positive or negative value (e.g. simply as: X is good, Y is bad), and then explore how this is expressed (or not) in different texts and cultures. To take just one example, Tirkkonen-Condit (1993) shows how the style of editorials in the main Finnish daily newspaper gave both explicit and implicit expression to the value "joining the EU is good" during the period in which this issue was being debated in Finland. She compares her results with other research on Swedish editorials, which manifested a more dialogic and less authoritarian attitude, i.e. a more ambivalent value.

4.6.

Coherence

Particularly since Halliday and Hasan (1976), the study of cohesion and coherence has flourished in text and discourse analysis, and also in contrastive analysis. It has become widespread to distinguish between the two concepts, so that cohesion is taken to refer to the formal means of expression whereas coherence refers to the underlying semantic or logical connectedness that makes a string of sentences a text. Markers of cohesion alone do not create textual connectedness, in the absence of any ideational and ideological links, as is well known. ·From the viewpoint of contrastive functional rhetoric, the starting point is coherence and the interest is in how various aspects of coherence are expressed via forms of cohesion in different languages. In terms of classical rhetoric, we are looking at part of logos. We can start with the same basic semantic categories that were used in the classification of conjunctors at the level of sentence-semantics (2.3.7). Each of these can be further broken down into subclasses, for which many models are available; one is the open set of relations holding between text spans in rhetorical structure theory (see e.g. Mann and Thompson 1988; Mann et al. 1992), some of which I borrow here (for a, b, and d). (a) Additive coherence (e.g. Addition, Elaboration, Restatement, Summary, Evaluation, Interpretation).

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(b) Adversative coherence (e.g. Contrast, Concession, Antithesis). (c) Temporal coherence (e.g. Sequence, Simultaneity). (d) Logical coherence (e.g. Condition, Cause, Purpose, Result, Solutionhood, Enablement, Justify). Three additional categories can be proposed, which were not included at the sentence-semantic level but are relevant to contrastive functional rhetoric. (e) Metatextual coherence. This is expressed via the ways in which the writer refers to the text itself, previewing and reviewing, placing signposts to other parts of the text, and so on. Other examples include the indication of topic shifts and transitions, digressions, and returns to the main thread of the message. Possible subclasses are Preview, Review, Transition, Digression, Return. (For a full discussion of metadiscourse, see e.g. Crismore 1989.) (f) Informational coherence. This refers to the way in which a writer takes account of the state-of-mind of the reader in terms of the presentation of various kinds of given and new information: i.e., the text is manipulated or "unfolded" in such a way as to fit with what the writer assumes the reader knows or is conscious of at each point. De Beaugrande and Dressier ( 1981) call this textual feature "informativity"; other scholars talk of information arrangement or information structure. It is expressed in different languages by a number of means, such as intonation and stress in the spoken medium, and otherwise by word order, deictic elements, particles and thematization patterns. (See also the special issue of Linguistics, 34-3, 1996.) (g) Intertextual coherence. This refers to the way in which a text is made to fit into the space between other, already existing texts. Explicit intertextuallinks - indications of manifest intertextuality - are created by means of bibliographical references, allusions, parody, and the like. Implicitly, intertextual fit is also realized by the chosen degree of conformity to the prototype template of an existing text type- constitutive intertextuality (Fairclough 1992: chapter 4 ). (See also Interpretive mode, below, 4.7.4.) In contrastive functional rhetoric, as usual, the procedure will be to define the similarity constraint in terms of one of these categories or subclasses, and then examine its various modes of expression in different languages and the conditions that govern the distribution of these modes of expression. One exemplary study that does precisely this is Svindland (1995), which looks at preferred expressions of coordination in Norwegian and English, i.e. a feature of Additive coherence. As in CFA, Svindland starts with the identity assumption that English and will correspond always to Norwegian og, and English or to Norwegian eller. This hypothesis is eventually rejected, partly because or has a wider distribution than eller in his parallel corpus. He then proceeds to examine the conditions which govern the use of the different items in the two languages,

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such as the presence of negation, a synonymous relation, or a frequent collocation, testing his hypotheses further against informants' judgements. With respect to the realization of all these types of coherence, languages seem to differ in two main ways: the implicit/explicit parameter, and (if explicit) the actual form of expression. Halliday and Hasan (1976) offer a basic classification of ways of realizing some forms of coherence in English (via reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion). De Beaugrande and Dressier (1981) highlight varieties of repetition as means of (metatextual) coherence which are preferred in certain text types (such as legal texts in English); preferences and tolerances for repetition types will also vary across languages. There has been some contrastive research both on the relative implicitness of coherence in different languages and on its forms of expression. Mauranen (1993) studied coherence differences in academic texts in different cultures, particularly the metatextual type. Some cultures (more homogeneous ones, such as Finnish) value implicit coherence; in others (more heterogeneous), the norm is for more explicit expression. These norms are often taught as such in schools; Finnish university students of English often comment that they have been taught specifically not to include explicit metatext in their school Finnish essays, because it is unnecessary and boring and bad style; the taught norm in England seems to be precisely the opposite in this respect. On intertextual coherence, Purves (1988: his Introduction) comments that some differences within English academic writing seem discipline-specific: in the humanities, references to other research tends to come either at the beginning or sprinkled throughout the text; in psychology they occupy a separate section; and in the biological sciences they are more often placed in separate articles, not within a particular research report itself. Some coherence differences between English and Hindi are discussed by Kachru (1988). One of the problems besetting contrastive research on coherence is a conceptual one concerning coherence itself: there is not yet much of a consensus on how the subject in general should be treated or what terms should be used, and studies tend to stress its inherent fuzziness. Markkanen, Steffensen and Crismore (1993), for instance, in a discussion of methodological problems of quantitative contrastive research, use "metadiscourse" as a cover-term for all nonpropositional information, with "text connectives" forming one subclass. Text connectives evidently include both sentence-level and text-level phenomena, and embrace several types of coherence: my types (a) to (e), above. Another subclass is that of "illocution markers", which seems to include what I have called metatextual coherence. Their "metadiscourse" also covers elements of textual and interpersonal meaning that I have classified quite differently, either at the

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sentence level or the text level (e.g. having to do with epistemic modality and attitude).

4.7.

Interaction

So far in this final chapter I have been sketching an extension of contrastive functional analysis into text linguistics. The idea has been to outline a description of semantic macrostructure that can serve as a basis for definitions of similarity constraints in the same way as the sentence-level semantic structures suggested in section 2.3. Our definition of "text" has been monologic (4.1), and all interactional elements of discourse have so far been avoided or downplayed. The extension has thus been "vertical", from sentence up to text. I would now like to demonstrate briefly how the same functional approach can in principle be extended a second time, from both sentence and text to interaction, "horizontally", as it were. Whereas the text-level categories outlined above offer a descriptive framework for semantic macrostructure, we could say that the aim of this second extension into interaction categories is to suggest a similar framework for the description of semanto-pragmatic interstructure. This second extension thus covers what Martin (1992) refers to as the central discourse system of negotiation: discourse as dialogue; but I am using "interstructure" in a wider sense, to include.more than what we normally understand by "dialogue" - for instance, it also includes intertextual phenomena, the "dialogue" between written texts. The fundamental theoretical question remains the same: what major semanto-pragmatic categories of communicative interaction can we propose as the basis for specifications of similarity constraints? This section suggests one set of such categories, parallel again to the sentence-level semantic structures with which we started. Most of the categories I present have already been extensively studied (albeit with various terminologies and frameworks) and widely surveyed in the literature (see e.g. Mey 1993, and the Handbook of Pragmatics edited by Verschueren et al. 1995), and I do no more here than draw attention to the way they can be lined up alongside the general descriptive framework we have been using. Methodologically, as with the text level, the contrastive interest at this interactive level is not only in the modes of expression of various aspects of interactive meaning, but also in the conditions governing the speaker's choices and preferences within a particular category, and whether these vary across languages. The study of interaction is usually restricted to spoken· language, but this is not theoretically necessary. The pertinent differences between spoken and written interaction are relative only. From a functional viewpoint, written interaction is

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characterized by a longer time-interval between participant turns, the different status of feedback and interruption opportunities, and the lower probability of a direct response at all. Of particular interest in this respect is Internet communication and the language of e-mail, which combines aspects of both spoken and written modes and underlines the relative nature of the differences between them. I will outline the suggested categories and briefly mention some contrastive research that fits this general framework.

4.7.1. Exchange Corresponding to the units of sentence and text, at the interaction level the basic unit is the exchange. This is defined by Stubbs (1983: 28-9) as "the minimal unit of interactive discourse". The notion appears, with slightly different nuances, in many studies and theories of discourse and conversation analysis, and would seem relatively unproblematic. Like sentences, exchanges are characterized by closure, they have beginnings and ends, they can be reasonably classified as well-formed or ill-formed, and they have internal structure (cf. e.g. Stubbs 1983: 128f). There are of course competing views about how this structure can best be described, as any survey of discourse analysis shows, but there is general agreement on the centrality of the notion itself. A minimal, two-part exchange is known as an adjacency pair (originally from the early work by Schegloff and Sacks, e.g. 1973).

4. 7.2. Exchange Types Corresponding to predicate types and text types we therefore have exchange types. The interactional criterion here is the nature of the exchange as defined by the number of participants. We can distinguish between exchanges that are Monologic (such as a public lecture or a recipe, in which receiver responses are delayed or indirect or non-verbal or absent), Dialogic (such as a conversation or an exchange of letters), and what we might call Polylogic (such as a meeting or an Internet discussion group involving more than two participants).

4.7.3. Moves Corresponding to the category of actant at the sentence level and episode at the text level, at the interaction level we have the move. Moves are the elements out of which exchanges are built; they are interactional actants. Interactionally, major subclasses are Initiate, Respond, Feedback, Interrupt, Inform, Close, and Boundary moves (this last signals the boundary between two exchanges). (The

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semantic functions of individual moves- Ask, Greet etc.- can be accounted for in the same way as the Speech-act functions mentioned earlier, in 2.3.6, perhaps with additional subclasses.) On exchanges and moves, Riley ( 1979) discusses several examples of move sequences that are well-formed in one language but ill-formed in another, in terms of what he calls interaction structure. Liebe-Harkort (1985) reports that exchange-final Close moves among the Apache Indians differ from e.g. those among white Americans in that there is no explicit expression of leave-taking: this is done via silence; similarly, at the beginning of a Polylogic exchange, Apaches do not use any Initiate moves whereby one participant introduces another to a third.

4. 7.4. Exchange Specifiers Corresponding to text-level specifiers we can posit an interactional category of exchange specifiers, covering various aspects of the ideational meaning of exchanges. Phenomena covered include the following: (a) Exchange Point. As with the text-level category of Point (4.4.1), every exchange too has a Point. A necessary but not sufficient condition for an exchange to be successful is that the Exchange Point must be implicitly agreed on by all participants: such an Exchange Point can be classified as single. Examples are "passing the time of day agreeably" and "coming to a decision regarding such-and-such". Exchange Points can be defined in terms of the interactive aims of the participants: if two participants have different conceptions of the Exchange Point, this can be classified as multiple, and the result of the exchange may be a clash. Contrastively, for instance, we can look at the different ways speakers of different languages tend to cope with such clashes. (b) Event-class (as discussed in Labov and Fanshel 1977). This category has to do with the subject matter of the interaction, and how it is presented vis-avis the universe of discourse of each of the participants. A-events are those to which the speaker has privileged access; B-events are those to which the hearer has privileged access; AB-events are shared knowledge between speaker and hearer; 0-events are known to everyone present in the exchange; D-events are known to be disputable. Of contrastive interest are the ways different languages encode references to these kinds of events, and the possible preferences different languages may have for constructing interactive discourse around one event-type or another. (I take "events" to include states of affairs here.) To illustrate the contrastive relevance of this concept, I quote from an anecdotal paper by Carbaugh (1993), an American recounting his encounters with the American Blackfeet Indian culture. In Blackfeet culture, he says,

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To speak is to acknowledge, or even to create, a break in the presumed connectedness, a tear in the "at one-ness" that is common to all, public and known. [Because of this belief, I recall the absolute bewilderment of one Blackfeet who asked me, "why do white people insist on talking about their relationships? It defeats the whole purpose!" Speaking of such things, in his -view, called relationships into question rather than affirmed them.] (Carbaugh 1993: 121; square brackets original)

This clearly reveals a cultural difference concerning certain AB-events or states: in Blackfeet culture, some of these are not things you talk about at all; their expression is thus via silence, which is highly valued for its communicative effectiveness in this culture. The similarity constraint can thus be stated in terms of AB-events, and contrastively we can look at how, and whether, various types of these are expressed. (c) Interpretive mode. This specifier has to do with the ways in which a given interactional turn can represent other turns in other interactions, and I will explain it at rather more length. It derives from the concept of interpretive use, in relevance theory, as opposed to descriptive use. So far, almost everything in this book has been concerned with descriptive use, with the normal function of language to say something about something, to decribe a state of affairs. Interpretive use, on the other hand, refers to instances of language use that are themselves representations of some other instance of language use, thus standing at one remove from the original state of affairs. Such representations are constrained by a "resemblance" which must exist between the representing proposition and the one represented. (See Sperber and Wilson 1986, for an extended discussion, especially p. 229.) Examples of interpretive use are direct and reported speech or thought, quotations, paraphrases, translations - all kinds of reports of other people's words. If what a speaker wishes to express is a meaning of this kind, i.e. a meaning that has already been explicitly expressed by someone else in some form, the speaker has an option from among classes of Interpretive mode. Interpretive use can also be seen as an instance of intertextual coherence. The number of options under Interpretive mode is rather restricted, perhaps even a closed set, although there are fuzzy borders between them. The list below is based on standard analyses of the representation of speech and thought, such as that given in Leech and Short (1981), slightly adapted and supplemented. A more complex descriptive taxonomy, with more· parameters, is given in Thompson (1996); this has been applied contrastively to English and German by Salkie ( 1997) in a way that corresponds quite closely to the methodology of CFA. One of Salkie's conclusions is that German places more emphasis than

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English on the reporter's attitude to the reported message (e.g. via the use of the subjunctive)- an interesting hypothesis for future testing. The examples here are from the Guardian Weekly of 26.3.95, unless otherwise specified. (i) Free Direct. This is a form of direct verbatim or near-verbatim representation without any overt indication that the use is in fact interpretive. It is found in unattributed and un-indicated quotations, allusions, and for instance where direct speech or thought is expressed without narrator's intervention in the form of quotation marks or a reporting clause. An example: the headline of a newspaper article on euthanasia reads A calm death do them part, an obvious borrowing from the Church of England marriage service ("till death us do part"). (ii) Direct. This is verbatim representation, and indicated by quotation marks etc. in English. (iii) Free Indirect. This covers various ways of presenting others' words between Direct and Indirect. In fictional narrative, this option allows the author to represent a character's speech or thoughts more immediately than via the Indirect option; in particular, its slight distancing effect (e.g. the use of the third person) allows play with irony. Leech and Short (1981: 327) cite this example from the coroner's scene in Dickens' Bleak House (chapter 11), which describes the interrogation of a small boy: Name, Jo. Nothing else that he knows on. Don't know that everybody has two names. Never heard of sich a think. Don't know that Jo is short for a longer name. Thinks it long enough for him. He can't find no fault with it. Spell it? No. He can't spell it. (Emphasis and spelling original) (iv) Indirect. This is the standard mode for a close representation without direct speech; it often involves slight paraphrase. An example: Health Minister Gerald Malone said the surplus - some 3.5 per cent of budgets - was evidence of the success of fundholding and would be ploughed back into patient care. (v) Act Report. This option reports by mentioning a speech act or thought act, and then paraphasing indirectly, perhaps also summarizing to some extent. Having mentioned s~ch an act (postulated, concludes in the example below), the speaker/writer can then continue for a while under the same umbrella, as it were (as in the last sentence of the example). Last week a Cornell anthropologist postulated the imminent collapse of the Earth's human population in a few years' time. Applying the Second Law of

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Thermodynamics to the world's population explosion, he concludes that human multiplication is only possible because of fossil fuel resources. As they are fast running out, so energy-gorged Homo sapiens will inevitably perish. (vii) Summary. This is a more radical option, to recast someone else's words into a new and shorter form that may contain no more than traces of the original phraseology or lexical choices here and there. In the following extract from a book review, the Summary option dominates, interspersed with brief bits of Direct representation and a final Act Report. [The writer] dismisses John Gummer's (and, yes, God and Prince Charles') injunction - that we have a responsibility to behave as stewards for future generations - as little more than a "top-level value judgment". In a chapter of his excellently titled book, Small is Stupid, he argues that it is "far from obvious" that future generations should have any rights whatever. "How long is that time period? How much capital should we leave intact for future generations?" he asks. It could mean the end, say, of mining, he concludes. (viii) Translation. Translation is also a form of interpretive use (see Gutt 1991). An illiterate Bangladeshi, interviewed by the Guardian, is unlikely to speak English, and so any direct quotation must be via translation, no doubt with some paraphrasing as well. "We are landless and illiterate, but since forming the group we have learned a little bit" says Bhola. "Still, we can't speak that much, we can't articulate our feelings. But we hope that people will understand." It is to be expected that choices among these kinds of Interpretive mode will depend on many factors, some of which may be culture-bound; different languages may have different preferences or tolerances, different degrees of constraining conditions of use. To cite just one example: Faulkner's novels contain a great deal of Free Indirect speech and thought in their stream-ofconsciousness presentation. When these novels were first translated into Finnish, in the 1940s, this choice of Interpretive mode was unfamiliar in literary Finnish and felt to be unacceptable. The translation solution adopted was to shift from Free Indirect to Direct. Translations of later decades however, when the Free Indirect mode had become more widespread in Finnish writing, opted to preserve the stream-of-consciousness style of the original (Randell 1986). The change of attitude thus reflected a change in the Finnish cultural preferences or range of tolerance among these modes. As argued earlier, contrastive functional rhetoric is

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interested both in the culture-specific conditions governing such text-semantic choices and in the language-specific formal realizations of these choices. 4. 7.5. Status Relations

Corresponding to the commentators (sentence level) and appeals (text level), at the interaction level a category can be set up labelled status relations, having to do with interpersonal meaning and the relations between the participants. (Compare Bruner' s proposal (1984) to add an affiliative felicity condition to Searle's preparatory, essential and sincerity conditions for the successful performance of speech acts: the affiliative condition specifies that the speech act must also take participant relations into account.) The category probably denotes an open set; three of the central concepts are given here. (a) Face. This is a well-established category in pragmatic research, especially since Brown and Levinson's ([1978] 1988) classic study of politeness, developing Goffman's original notion of face. Mao (1994) argues that the notion derives ultimately from a Chinese origin, from a term meaning something like 'public reputation'. I will follow western precedent and distinguish two main subclasses here, but a more delicate taxonomy would be needed. (i) Positive Face. This expresses the speaker's/writer's respect towards the hearer' s/reader' s positive self-image. (ii) Negative Face. This expresses the speaker's/writer's wish to minimize the degree of imposition on the hearer's/reader's personal territory or privacy. For a brief example on a no-smoking theme, compare these signs on a restaurant table: -THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING - PATRONS ARE KINDLY REQUESTED TO REFRAIN FROM SMOKING AT THIS TABLE

The first is an appeal to customers' Positive Face, and the second expresses Negative Face in minimizing the presumed imposition on the customer's individual rights. (There are also obvious differences of Angle and Affect here.) There is a considerable literature on the contrastive expression of Face in different cultures, i.e. using Face or one of its subtypes as a similarity constraint (see for instance the papers in Blum-Kulka et al. 1989). Much of this research has looked at levels of directness or mitigation (e.g. House and Kasper 1981; Laver 1981 ): the more directness, the less respect for Negative Face. Some cultures (e.g. the American) are often said to prefer the Positive Face option and

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others (e.g. the Japanese, Finnish, British) some expression of Negative Face (see e.g. Yli-Jokipii 1994). There has also been some critic,ism of the assumed universality of the two kinds of Face (e.g. Matsumoto 1988). Mao (1994) argues that a more adequate conceptualization would be in terms of a person's "ideal individual autonomy" versus "ideal social identity". Hiraga and Turner (1995) suggest that in cultures with less emphasis on individual subjectivity, the concept of "place in society" is more important than that of Face; however, I think this highlighting of hearer status could simply be seen as one manifestation of Positive Face (unless this status is socially undesirable, or distinctly lower that that of the speaker). In my view, the general notion of Face is broad enough to cover many manifestations, and yet clear enough to be of contrastive use. Another form of manifestation of Face has to do with what Hinds ( 1987) called reader versus writer responsibility: this is one way of interpreting different norms concerning explicit or implicit coherence, for instance. Hinds suggested that in some cultures (such as the US) the norm is that the writer is responsible for a text's comprehensibility, and thus feels a need to write as clearly and explicitly as possible and minimize the reader's effort; in other cultures (such as Japan) it is felt that this responsibility is the reader's, so that the reader needs to make more inferences and do more "interpretive work" (Brown and Yule 1983: 269). A writer-responsible culture thus respects the reader's time: this could be seen as a form of Negative Face, of non-imposition. A reader-responsible culture, on the other hand, respects the reader's intelligence: surely a form of Positive Face. (See also Mauranen 1993.) In fact, branding cultures as "Positive-Face-preferring" and others as "Negative-Face-preferring" is an oversimplification. Rather, we should be interested in looking at the ways in which both Positive and Negative Face are expressed in different cultures. In so doing, we would of course be following precisely the general contrastive functional view. Alongside Face, two other aspects of status relations can be mentioned: (b) Solidarity, and (c) Power. Both terms come from Brown ·and Gilman's study of second-person pronoun usage in different languages (1960). From the functional point of view, Power and Solidarity can be seen as aspects of interpersonal meaning, and the contrastive interest is in how these aspects of meaning are expressed in different cultures in different conditions: exactly the approach taken by Brown and Gilman. Another line of contrastive study builds on research in animal behaviour (cf. e.g. Morris 1967; and also Ferguson, [1976] 1981), looking at how Power and Solidarity are expressed via gesture, proxemics, kinesics, eye-movements

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and so on; an early classic on human non-verbal behaviour in different cultures is Hall ([ 1959] 1970). A further contrastive area in which Power and Solidarity are either implicit or explicit starting points is the study of silence, and what is expressed via silence in different cultures. Liebe-Harkort (1985) discusses the use of silence by the Apache Indians, for instance as an expression of greeting, even apparently on the phone as an opening move. Apaches apparently make a point of not using the addressee's name when greeting, in contrast to some other cultures. SallinenKuparinen ( 1986) looked at the functions of silence in Finnish interaction, as compared mostly with Anglo-American silence. Saville-Troike (1985) surveys a good deal of contrastive research on silence, as does Jaworski (1993) in his book on "the power of silence".

4. 7.6. Controls Interactional coherence is maintained via what can be called controls (cf. Chesterman 1993), whereby participants in an exchange regulate the progress of the discourse in general and the turn-taking process in particular (a turn is understood as a continuous sequence of moves by the same speaker). Controls are obviously linked to the status relations of Power and Solidarity. Whereas the latter concern the interpersonal function of discourse, controls concern the interaction process itself; the use of controls is thus one way in which status relations can be manifested. I suggest three subclasses. (a) Turn Control. This has to do with requesting, starting and finishing turns and with interrupting. Contrastively, the interest is in how this control is expressed and under what conditions; who interrupts, how, and when, for instance; or what happens at Transition Relevant Places, which offer an opportunity for a turn-change. (b) Time Control. This has to do with the control of the length of a turn, claiming the right to continue a turn, and also with interrupting, since a successful interruption obviously shortens potential turn length. (c) Topic Control. This has to do with the ways in which new topics of discourse are introduced, and by whom, under what circumstances. All three control types are closely bound up with interaction rights (cf. especially Ebeling 1971 ), the most basic of which is simply the right to speak (or write). Porter (1993) also stresses the need to justify the speaker's right to change the state of mind of the addressee - recall the notion of meaning-asintervention (1.5.1). Contrastively, we can look not only at how these rights are claimed (via the expression of controls) but also at how such rights are distributed, or how they are felt to be contravened. This is of course a wellploughed field in conversation analysis.

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A good example of a contrastive study which takes controls as similarity constraints is Faerch and Kasper (1984). They looked at what they defined as "gambits" in Danish and German, by which they meant precisely the various ways in which speakers maintain and regulate discourse coherence between or within different turns of speech, and how these turns are distributed. They were also interested in the use of gambits in the interlanguages of German learners of Danish and Danish learners of German. Significantly, one of their conclusions concerns the difficulty of formulating an adequate language-neutral tertium comparationis for contrastive discourse research. Edmondson and House (1991) studied one aspect of what I have called Time Control: the phenomenon they call "waffle". In a study of learners' interlanguage as compared with native usage, they found that at a relatively advanced level of proficiency, learners' turns tended to be rather longer than those of native speakers under similar conditions, so that the non-native speakers seemed to be rather overdoing the communication. Appropriate turn length thus seemed to be understood differently, with non-native participants presumably also tolerating longer turns by non-native speakers. We can also investigate what happens when control rights are felt to be contravened. Blum-Kulka and Sheffer (1993) compared the ways native Americans, native Israelis and Israeli immigrants to the US responded to breaches of turn-taking rights (and some other norms). One finding was that, in family dinner situations·, native Americans talk more about such breaches when they occur. The occurrence of a breach in a particular communication situation also raises questions concerning the Event-class specifier introduced above (4.7.4). Awareness that a right has been contravened- e.g. that someone has spoken out of. turn, or interrupted unfairly- constitutes part of the knowledge state of other participants, but (presumably) not that of the speaker who has actually contravened the right. It is thus a kind of B-event. There may well be cultural differences in the extent to which such B-events may form legitimate topics of discourse. L. Miller (1991) reported that Japanese listeners tend to provide much more phatic vocal feedback than Americans, and are more tolerant of overlapping turns. Bargiela and Harris (1995) have found that Italians in business meetings tend to interrupt a lot, as compared with British counterparts, but that this does not prevent speakers from holding the floor and completing their turn, with the result that there is plenty of overlapping; this is nevertheless interpreted as facilitative rather than disrupting. The textual and interactive categories introauced in this chapter are not proposed as closed sets covering the whole of text or discourse structure. The aim has been : a more modest one: simply to illustrate how the basic functional framework we

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have been developing can in principle be usefully applied to the contrastive study of textual and interactive phenomena beyond the level of the sentence. It would need another book, or several, to show how these extensions work out in practice.

Chapter 5. Closing Comments

5.1. Applications It seems fitting to close a book on functional analysis with a brief response to the question: what for? The question is raised most provocatively by Janicki (1990), at the conclusion of his "brief falsificationist look at contrastive sociolinguistics". Janicki argues that if Contrastive Analysis accepts Popper's falsificationist view of science (cf. 1.5 above), the following conclusions hold (1990: 9): (1) For universally valid hypotheses to be tested no systematic comparisons

of languages (or fragments thereof) are necessary. Some (or many) contrastive linguists may have realized that for quite some time they have been doing more than was necessary. The time may have come to stop doing this. (2) Some linguists may have realized that contrasting languages should not be an end in itsel[ If (I) and (2) are accepted there is not in fact much, at least from the falsificationist point of view, that the contrastive linguist is left with.

In support of this depressing conclusion, Janicki cites examples such as the following. We propose the falsifiable, spatia-temporally restricted hypothesis that "in German and Polish, in private telephone conversations the distant caller identifies himself/herself'. To test the hypothesis, we need do no more than observe that although the hypothesis is corroborated in German it does not hold for Polish. Hence the hypothesis is falsified. Do we need a detailed contrastive analysis to show this? Answer: no. Although I agree entirely with Janicki's falsificationist approach, I find his conclusion flawed. True, a detailed contrastive analysis is not necessary to test this hypothesis (and others of a similar kind cited by Janicki), but it does not follow that therefore Contrastive Analysis is altogether redundant. For the crux of the matter lies in the nature of the hypothesis to be tested. Some hypotheses can indeed be tested very quickly, particularly if they are fonnulated in all-or-nothing terms (in situation X, all speakers do Y). A single counter-example will suffice to falsify such hypotheses. Janicki's example is of what I called an initial identity hypothesis: an assumption of identity (identical sociolinguistic behaviour in this

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case) is easily disproved. But interesting, non-naive hypotheses in linguistics a,re seldom of this kind. In Contrastive Functional Analysis the kinds of hypotheses that are the centre of attention tend to be probabilistic. The real contrastivist challenge lies not in rejecting the initial identity hypothesis but in proposing and testing more sophisticated, relativist hypotheses. With respect to Janicki' s example, we might be interested in exploring the conditions of use governing the expression of a given meaning (a meaning we could specify as "calleridentification" - an aspect of initial Turn Control), and about the conventional forms which this expression of meaning tends to take in different cultures. For instance, we might propose contrastive hypotheses about the stage of a telephone conversation at which the receiving participant becomes aware of the other's identity, how this comes about, whether the information is volunteered or requested, whether and how such behaviour patterns vary with age, sex, education, relationship, physical distance and so on. All such hypotheses will be relative rather than absolute, and thus be formulated as tendencies. They can therefore be tested in terms of probabilities of occurrence, and are not falsifiable by single counter-examples. But before such hypotheses can even be sensibly proposed there must be some preliminary contrastive analysis, and more will be required to test them. Such meaningful research into cross-cultural behaviour patterns provides one obvious motivation for Contrastive Analysis in general, and for CFA in particular. An instance of cross-cultural behaviour par excellence is of course translation, and I suggest that CFA is of great relevance here. It is interesting to compare the general approach of CF A with what has been called the variational approach to translation teaching (Hewson and Martin 1991). This approach is based on the idea that rewording lies at the centre of all translation activity. What a translator needs to know are the options available, plus the conditions matching each option. Hewson and Martin outline a method which starts with establishing a set of paraphrases in the source language for a given source-language sentence. (Compare: CFA seeks to establish the paradigm of options with the same semantic structure.) Then, a similar set of paraphrases is established in the target language. The constraints on similarity are, obviously, less stringent here than in CFA, but both approaches emphasize the initial search for a range of similarities rather than equivalences. Finally, when the distinguishing characteristics of each option have been specified (conditions of use), one is selected for insertion into the target text, being the one whose conditions of use best match the target situation etc. In Hew son and Martin's method the translator "filters" the set of paraphrases in order to find the most appropriate option; similarly, CFA "filters" potential members of the paradigm in order to select those which can be assigned the same semantic structure.

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In this context, recall Pym's (1992) neat definition of translation competence (already mentioned in 1.3.2). He suggests that this comprises two skills: first, the ability to generate a range of possible target-language versions for a given source-~anguage item; and second, the ability to select from this range one that is appropriate to the translation situation, fitting into the context. In establishing its paradigms of variants, CFA exploits this same first skill, albeit within a more stringent similarity constraint. And in specifying different conditions of use it exploits part of the second skill. CFA would therefore seem to be of considerable relevance to translation studies and translator training. Of all contrastive models, I think CFA is the one that would be of most benefit to translator trainees. CFA might also yield results that would be relevant to research in machine translation, insofar as programs have a capability for semantic analysis. A third area of application is in foreign and second language teaching. Communicative notion-based syllabuses already incorporate much of the basic approach of CF A, and it seems obvious that research in CFA on a particular pair of languages would be of considerable use to writers of text -books for learners of either language who are native speakers of the other. Such information is of course already used in this way, albeit not always very systematically. On the borderline between contrastive studies proper and second-language-learning studies, interlanguage studies could also make use of the semantic model and its extensions. Interlanguage studies, after all, are basically also contrastive, between the target language and the learner's interlanguage version of it. (For a recent collection of interlanguage pragmatic studies that use approaches very similar to CFA, particularly with regard to speech acts, see Kasper and BlumKulka 1993.) A fourth application is to be found in language awareness education in a single language. Here, the approach adopted by CFA links up with stylistics, particularly of the kind developed in the Firthian tradition. Broadly speaking, this sees style as a relation between language and situation, so that stylistic variation is governed by situational variables (a classic example is Crystal and Davy 1969). As suggested in the previous chapter, CFA has much in common with variation analysis in general, particularly with regard to its aim of specifying the conditions of use of each option in a given paradigm.

5.2.

Conclusions

So why is a raven like a writing-desk? As a framework for some closing comments, here is the famous passage in full (cited from Gardner, [ 1960] 1970: 94-5).

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"Your hair wants cutting," said the Hatter. He had been looking at Alice for some time with great curiosity, and this was his first speech. "You should learn not to make personal remarks," Alice said with some severity: "It's very rude." The Hatter opened his eyes very wide on hearing this; but all he said was, "Why is a raven like a writing-desk?" "Come, we shall have some fun now!" thought Alice. ''I'm glad they've begun asking riddles- I believe I can guess that," she added aloud. "Do you mean that you think you can find out the answer to it?" said the March Hare. "Exactly so," said Alice. "Then you should say what you mean," the March Hare went on. "I do," Alice hastily replied; at least - at least I mean what I say that's the same thing, you know." "Not the same thing a bit!" said the Hatter. "Why, you might just as well say that 'I see what I eat' is the same thing as 'I eat what I see'!" "You might just as well say," added the March Hare, "that 'I like what I get' is the same thing as 'I get what I like'!" "You might just as well say," added the Dormouse, which seemed to be talking in its sleep, "that 'I breathe when I sleep' is the same thing as 'I sleep when I breathe'!" "It is the same thing with you," said the Hatter, and here the conversation dropped, and the party sat silent for a minute, while Alice thought over all she could remember about ravens and writing-desks, which wasn't much. Appropriately enough, this exchange illustrates many of the themes we have been looking at. First of all, consider the canonical form of this kind of riddle. It asks about a similarity, about the way something is like something else; it does not ask about a sameness. And this was precisely the argument of chapter 1: that contrastive analysis should be based on the concept of similarity. Contrastivists would then seek answers to the question: in what way is phenomen,on X in language A like phenomenon Y in language B? The question is initially posed, riddle-like, in response to an initial perception that there indeed does seem to be something similar between A and B, at least in the mind of the linguist. It is then the task of the contrastive analysis to specify exactly what this similarity is. In particular, the task is to show how this similarity is (usually) not in fact identity: I argued that contrastive analysis should treat the identity relation between A and B as a hypothesis, which, like the null hypothesis, the analysis seeks to reject.

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Chapter 1 also discussed the concept of equivalence at ~ome length, with respect both to translation theory and to contrastive analysis. I attempted to build a bridge between the two approaches, partly by relating tllem to different kind~ of similarity (divergent and convergent). Both fields depend on translation competence; both are concerned with how people manage to say approxJmately the "same" thing in different ways. Moreover, because both fields depend on this competence, it behoves them to pay heed to matters of psychplogical plausibility. The underlying subject matter of the conversation at the mad tea-party, quoted above is no less than the theme of chapter 2, the functional approach to language. What Alice and the others are talking about is the relation between form and meaning, the way one form can have several meanings and one meaning several forms. Alice's claim that she says what she means represents the functionalist view as espoused in this book: there is, first, a something that Alice means, and then she says this something. In other words, our model of language goes from meaning to expression. However, as the ensuing conversation reveals, the relation between the two is far from transparent. Indeed~ Alice's "meaning" is being debated and negotiated throughout the conversation, and never seems to reach a final form. Chapter 2 distinguished simply between an initial meaning and a manifest meaning, but in the light of this exchange we can see that the true status of meaning is much more complicated. A speaker may start with an initial meaning, a rough idea of what he or she wants to say; this is then expressed as a manifest meaning, but the relation between these two is not necessarily isomorphic. In Popperian terms, we might say that the manifest meaning represents a further refinement of the initial meaning, a testing of it via expression. But the testing does not stop there: the receivers can query and negotiate the meaning further, as happens in the passage quoted, so that the whole communication becomes open-ended, in the sense that no final identity is achieved between Alice's~initial meaning and the addressees' internalization of it. The initial meaning is always open to further refinement. The exchange thus highlights the fact that any attempt to formulate (and especially to formalize) an initial meaning is in a way a fiction, a theoretically necessary but artificial construct, since the initial meaning may well be fuzzy and may not stand still. We are reminded of the well-known experience that concepts and meanings may become clearer to the speaker himself as his own utterance proceeds - I only know what I mean when I have said it. The approach taken by CFA is to postulate an initial meaning as a necessary fiction, and examine how this can be expressed. It treats this as a constant, in fact as a similarity constraint, and looks at variations in expression, rather like the Hatter, the March Hare and the Dormouse offer variant expressions for what they think Alice means. A complete theory of Contrastive Functional Analysis will . have three components: a set of possible semantic structures; a set of forms

1

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whereby these are expressed in different languages; and a set of conditions governing the distribution of the various forms. Chapter 2 included an outline model for the description of semantic structures at the sentence level, at a first level of delicacy. Most of the sets of descriptive categories here are in principle open ones, and all are open to more delicate subclassifications. The approach has been influenced by prototype thinking, in that the categories proposed are assumed at least to form part of the core area in each case. As a methodology, CFA is not bound to any particular model of semantics or syntax, but I hope the model described here serves adequately to illustrate the basic method. Chapter 3 then offered five sample mini-studies, illustrating different aspects of the descriptive framework. A further illustration, also pertaining to the problem of formulating the initial meaning, is furnished by our riddle. A linguist's attention might be drawn to the rather odd use of why in the canonical form of these "similarity" riddles in English: why is A like B? How is A like B is ill-formed as a riddle. It seems that we must list English why as one way of expressing the meaning how, since the intended initial meaning is presumably 'how I in what way is A like B?'- that is, after all, what the addressee then has to discover. The riddle context is therefore a condition governing the use of this particular variant expression of this meaning. A functionalist approach would thus specify that the interrogative meaning 'in what way' is inevitably expressed in English as why under riddle conditions when the riddle is one that asks about a similarity. Contrastively, it would then be interesting to see in what other languages this form of expression is possible in such riddles. In Finnish, for instance, similarity riddles cannot be expressed as why-questions; they have the canonical form 'what is there in common between A and B ?' Other languages (e.g. German) tend to pose such riddles in terms of finding the difference rather than the similarity. Yet my formulation of the initial meaning may not be the only one. Since the form of expression is indeed why and not how in English, we might also construe the meaning as something like: 'why do you think I think there is something similar between A and B ?' The question would then be a genuine inquiry as to cause. Actually, the fuzzy initial meaning might well incorporate both these alternatives simultaneously: the riddle is both a request to provide information about a similarity and a request to provide a cause for a state of mind; both requests serve to confirm and validate this state of mind. Additionally, of course, riddles are ways of creating humour (an aspect of Affect) and promote phatic contact (comitive speech function). Data are more complex than their description. Chapter 4 outlined a way of extending the descriptive framework for sentence-level semantic structures to account for text-level phenomena (text macrostructures), and then again for interactional phenomena (discourse

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structures). One contrastive question raised by my own use of the riddle passage quoted above, and in Chapter 1, has to do with the text-semantic category of coherence: in particular, the subtype labelled intertextual coherence. In quoting from Carroll, I have alluded to another, very different kind of text, in the process of writing this book on contrastive analysis. To what extent is there crosslinguistic variation, I wonder, in the extent and ways in which academic writers tend to make such allusions? To what extent are writings of one text type (expository, non-fiction) thus linked, via intertextual coherence, with writings of another type (narrative, fiction)? What are the conditions favouring such linkages? How do cultural conventions differ with respect to the degree of compartmentalization of genres and text types? These are kinds of questions that could be explored within the framework of contrastive functional rhetoric given in Chapter 4. The passage also raises contrastive interactional issues, for which we need a conceptual framework such as the one sketched in 4. 7. For instance, most riddles have traditional or otherwise acceptable answers, so that a well-formed riddle exchange contains an answer move. However, in the book itself Carroll provides no answer, and the exchange in which the riddle is posed is therefore · technically an ill-formed one. An interesting question is therefore raised by the incompleteness of the exchange, and its acceptability in a work of literature: to what extent, and in what ways, do different languages or cultures use ill-formed exchanges to express humour, often a brand of nonsense humour? So we do not know why a raven is like a writing-desk; or, rather, we do not know (from the text) why Carroll thought there was a similarity between the two. The question thus remains open. Hypotheses can be suggested and debated, but no final solutions are available. Like Alice and the others, after discussing and evaluating possibilities we are reduced for a time to silence; yet this itself may signify thought.

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

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Author index Adair 25 Adamec 87; 88 Agnoli 157 Alatis 40 Anderson 88 Aristotele 47 Augustine 18 Bargiela 195 Bassnett 20 Beaugrande 163; 179; 184; 185 Beretta 48 Biber 83; 89; 181 Bickner 164; 169; 174 Blum-Kulka 112; 158; 192; 195; 199 Bodelsen 128 Bondarko 65; 87; 88 Bouton 32; 33; 57 Broms 182 Brown, G. 193 Brown, P. 36; 192 Brown, R. 193 Bruner 192 Brunot 67; 86 Biihler 64; 161 Bulow-M!Illler 154; 162 Buren, van 32; 56 Burgschmidt 90 Burton-Roberts 124; 125 Cacciari 7 Carbaugh 188; 189 Carlson 134 Catford 21-23; 28; 34; 71 Chafe 89; 163; 183 Chesterman 25; 41; 58; 124; 125; 127; 134; 177; 194 Chomsky 47 Clyne 157; 164 Cohen 156 Connor 157; 158; 164; 169; 180; 182 Coseriu 28 Coulmas 112 Cowley 21 Crismore 184; 185 Crystal 199 Dali 9 Danes 63; 87

Darbelnet 155 Davy 199 Degenhart 178; 180; 182 Delin 165 Denison 105 Di Pietro 34; 37; 91 Dijk, van 151; 154; 156; 165-167; · 170; 171; 180 Dik 48; 65; 66; 86-88; 139 Dirven 87 Doherty 155 Dressier 163; 179; 184; 185 Droste 65 Ebeling 194 Edelman 44-48 Edmondson 195 Eggington 174 Enkvist 154 Erasmus 19 Faerch 35; 195 Fanshel 188 Ferguson 193 Fillmore 63; 76; 90; 91 Finegan 83; 89; 181 Fisiak 40 Foley 88 Fries, C. 40 Fries, P. 171 Gabelentz 67; 124 Galmiche 125 Galtung 164 Gardner 5; 199 Gilman 193 Giv6n 47 Glaser 162 Goffman 192 Goldstone 12 Goodman 8-9 Grabe 162 Graustein 164 Greimas 76 Grice 36 Grimes 152; 171; 178 Guillaume 127; 130; 133 Guillemin-Flescher 155 Gutt 26; 191 Gotz 90

226

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Hail 194 Halliday 50; 63; 64; 66; 73; 79; 82; 86; 87; 90; 155; 183; 185 Harris, S. 195 Harris, Z. 91 Hartmann 154; 155 Hasan 87; 155; 183; 185 Hawkins 60; 139; 149 Helkkula 32 Hewson 127; 128; 198 Hiirikoski 143 Hinds 193 Hiraga 193 Holmes 24 House(-Edmondson) 156; 192; 195 Huetius 19 Hunt 152; 157 lhalainen 126 Indrasuta 168; 180 Itkonen, E. 25 ltkonen, T. 105 Ivir 31; 51; 56; 57 Jakobsen 32 Jakobson 24; 64; 161 James 30; 34; 40; 52; 140; 155 Janicki 36; 53; 55; 197 Jaworski 194 Jerome 19 Jespersen 67; 124 Johnson 97 Joseph 65 Kachru 171; 174; 185 Kalisz 34-36; 43; 51 Kaplan 157; 164; 171 Karttunen 140; 147; 148 Kasper 35; 158; 192; 195; 199 Kaufmann 182 Keenan 47 Kelly 18 Kiefer 81 Kintsch 151; 156; 166; 180 K1eiber 126; 129-137 Koller 23 Krzeszowski 28; 30-39; 41; 43; 52; 53; 61; 91; 92 Ktihlwein 42 Kuno 175 Labov 54; 188 Lado 40; 90 Lakoff 47; 97 Langacker 47; 89; 97 Lauer 169; 180; 182

Laver 192 Lawler 126 Leech 66; 74; 83; 86; 189; 190 Lefevere 27 Leibniz 36 Levelt 66; 80 Levinson 36; 192 Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk 51 Liebe-Harkort 188; 194 Lipinska 90 Littlewood 156 · Longacre 170 Lyons 81 Mann 161; 170; 183 Mao 192; 193 Markkanen 122; 178; 185 Martin, J.R. 87; 170; 171; 186 Martin, J. 198 Marton 31; 34; 87 Matsumoto 193 Mauranen 171; 185; 193 Mclntosh 90 Medin 12 Mey 186 Meyer 157 Miller, J. 170 Miller, L. 195 Morris 193 Mustajoki 67; 72-92; 93; 98; 99; 113· 151• 159· 165· 181 Nash 155, ' ' ' Nichols 89 Nida 21 Nunberg 126 Nuyts 65; 66 Nyman 178 Oleksy 29; 35; 37; 156 Olsen 32 Olshtain 156 Ostler 164; 166; 17 4 Palmer 81 Pan 126 Peirce 61 Perec 25 Perlmutter 125 Pery-Wood1ey 153 Peyasantiwong 164; 169; 174 Pike 152 Pinker 48; 50; 55 Pitkin 166 Popper 41; 52-54; 86; 197; 201 Porter 194

AUTHOR INDEX Preston 51 Propp 76 Purves 157; 185 Putnam 46 Pym 26; 27; 39; 199 Quine 33; 49 Quirk 124; 140 Radden 87 Randell 191 Ravin 76 Reichenbach 79 Reime 47 Reiss 27 Rener 18 Rice 157 Richards 17 Riley 35; 156; 188 Rosch 47 Ross 24 Rusiecki 40 Sacks 187 Sajavaara 41; 42; 155; 158 Salkie 189Sallinen-Kuparinen 194 Saville-Troike 194 Schegloff 187 Searle 192 Seppanen 126 Shaumyan 51 Sheffer 195 Shore 30; 103 Short 189; 190 Simpson 175; 177 Smith, C.S. 124 Smith, N.V. 124; 125 Snell-Hornby 24; 35 Sovran 6; 11-16 Sperber 9; 10; 189 Steffensen 185 Steiner 21 Strevens 90 Stubbs 176-177; 187 Svartvik 86 Svindland 184 Swales 162; 165; 174; 175 Soter 163; 168 Takala 178; 180; 182 Tarasova 51 Taylor 174; 175 Thiele 164 Thompson, G. 189 Thompson, S. 183

Tingguang 174; 175 Tirkkonen-Condit 164·, 183 Toolan 175 Toulmin 168 Toury 24; 26; 27; 28 Turner 193 Tversky 7; 8; 9; 10; 15; 22 Valin 88 Vehmas-Lehto 28; 31; 182 Vendler 125 Vermeer 27; 153 Verschueren 183; 186 Vilkki 80 Vinay 155 Weinreich 42; 43 Werlich 155; 162; 163 Whorf 157 Wierzbicka 16; 36; 37; 51 Wilkins 86 Wilson 9; 10; 189 Wittgenstein 24 Yli-Jokipii 193 Yule 193 Zimmermann 140 Zolotova 87 Ostman 55; 90

227

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

Subject index abduction 61 actants 76f affect 181 alternative analyses 85 angle 175 appeals 153; 179 chronology 178 cognition 26 cognitive grammar 89 coherence 153; 183 cohesion 183 commentators 82f communicative grammar 86 comparability criterion 54; 55; 70 competence, bilingual and translation 37 complicators 80f conditioned probabilites 23 congruence 34 conjunctors 83 construction grammar 90 Contrastive Generative Grammar 91 contrastive functional rhetoric 15 lf; 158f contrastive pragmalinguistics 156 contrastive rhetoric 157f controls 194f coordination 184 corpus studies 60 definiteness 56; 58; 123f delicacy 50; 51; 68; 70; 84 discourse analysis 1SS discourse bloc 166 disease 93 episodes 153; 165 equivalence contrastive analysis vs translation 69 general types 38 in contrastive analysis 27f in translation theory 16f pragmatic 35 rule 34 semanto-syntactic 32 statistical 31 substantive 34 system 31

translation 31; 56 ethos 182 event-class 188 exchange 187 exchange specifiers 188 exchange types 187 face 192 falsifiability 59; 197 figurativeness 180 functional grammars 63f gavagai 49 genericity 123f hypothesis testing 54; 57f; 71 identity hypothesis 54; 57; 69; 104; 117; 127; 197 imagination 15 inclusion 98f interaction 186f interference 42-44 interpretive mode 189f invitation 112f macrostructure 160; 165 meaning 65f access to 54f initial 67f; 73; 201 manifest 67f; 201 message 152 metadiscourse 185 metaverbs 80 methodology 52f; 158f modality 81 moves 187 neurology 44f norm 28 notation 84 notional grammar 86 P-units 152 paradigmatic analysis 67 pathos 179 point 170 polysystem 26 power 193 pragmalinguistics 74 predicates 75f profile 171 prototype theory 43 psycholinguistic fallacy 41

230

CONTRASTIVE FuNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

psychological realism 40f rationality 25 re-entry 44f relation norm 25 relevance 9 riddles 5f; 202 Role and Reference Grammar 88 salience 8 schematicity 181 semantic structure (Mustajoki) 72£; 75 semiotic invariance 51 silence 189 similarity 5f; 48; 49-50 convergent 12f; 69 divergent 12f; 20; 69 similarity assessment 6f similarity constraint 50; 54; 55; 67; 69; 70; 94; 98; 113; 124; 139 skopos 27 solidarity 193 speaker perspective 139f specifiers 79f speech representation 189 status relations 192 systemic grammar 87 tertium comparationis 8; 29; 58-59 text specifiers 153; 169 text linguistics 154 text types: 153; 161 argumentative 164; 168; 169 descriptive 167 expository 164; 168; 178 instructive 165 narrative 163; 167; 168 texts 151 translation 16f; 191; 198f translation identity assumption 17 translation theory 16f types and tokens 13 Universal Base hypothesis 48 Universal Grammar 50 worlds (Popper) 41; 55

In the PRAGMATICS AND BEYOND NEW SERIES the following titles have been published thus far or are scheduled for publication: l. WALTER, Bettyruth: The Jury Svmmation as Speech Genre: An Ethnographic Study of What it Means to Those who Use it. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1988. 2. BARTON, Ellen: Nonsentential Constituents: A Theory of Grammatical Structure and Pragmatic Interpretation. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1990. 3. OLEKSY, Wieslaw (ed.): Contrastive Pragmatics. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1989. 4. RAFFLER-ENGEL, Walburga von (ed.): Doctor-Patient Interaction. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, 1989. 5. THELIN, Nils B. (ed.): Verbal Aspect in Discourse. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1990. 6. VERSCHUEREN, Jef (ed.): Selected Papers from the 1987 International Pragmatics Conference. Vol. 1: Pragmatics at Issue. Vol. 11: Levels of Linguistic Adaptation. Vol. 111: The Pragmatics of lntercultural and International Communication (ed. with Jan Blommaert). Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1991. 7. LINDENFELD, Jacqueline: Speech and Sociability at French Urban Market Places. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1990. 8. YOUNG, Lynne: Language as Behaviour, Language as Code: A Study of Academic English. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1990. 9. LUKE, Kang-Kwong: Utterance Particles in Cantonese Conversation. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, 1990. 10. MURRAY, Denise E.: Conversation for Action. The computer terminal as medium of communication. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1991. 11. LUONG, Hy V.: Discursive Practices and Linguistic Meanings. The Vietnamese system of person reference. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1990. 12. ABRAHAM, Werner (ed.): Discourse Particles. Descriptive and theoretical investigations on the logical, syntactic and pragmatic properties of discourse particles in German. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1991. 13. NUYTS, Jan. A. Machtelt BOLKESTEIN and Co VET (eds): Layers and Levels of Representation in Language Theory: a functional view. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1990. 14. SCHWARTZ, Ursula: Young Children's Dyadic Pretend Play. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1991. 15. KOMTER, Martha: Conflict and Cooperation in Job Interviews. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1991. 16. MANN, Wiltiam C. and Sandra A. THOMPSON (eds): Discourse Description: Diverse Linguistic Analyses of a Fund-Raising Text. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1992. 17. PIERAUT-LE BONNIEC, Gilberte and Mar1ene DOLITSKY (eds): Language Bases ... Discourse Bases. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1991. 18. JOHN STONE, Barbara: Repetition in Arabic Discourse. Paradigms, syntagms and the ecology of language. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1991. 19. BAKER, Carolyn D. and Allan LUKE (eds): Towards a Critical Sociology of Reading Pedagogy. Papers of the Xll World Congress on Reading. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1991. 20. NUYTS, Jan: Aspects of a Cognitive-Pragmatic Theory of Language. On cognition, functionalism, and grammar. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1992.

21. SEARLE, John R. et al.: (On) Searle on Conversation. Compiled and introduced by Herman Parret and Jef Verschueren. AmsterdarniPhiladelphia, 1992. 22. AUER, Peter and Aldo Di LUZIO (eds): The Contextualization of Language. AmsterdarniPhiladelphia, 1992. 23. FORTESCUE, Michael, Peter HARDER and Lars KRISTOFFERSEN (eds): Layered Structure and Reference in a Functional Perspective. Papers from the Functional Grammar Conference, Copenhagen, 1990. Amsterdam!Philadelphia, 1992. 24. MA YNARD, Senko K.: Discourse Modality: Subjectivity, Emotion and Voice in the Japanese Language. AmsterdarniPhiladelphia, 1993. 25. COUPER-KUHLEN, Elizabeth: English Speech Rhythm. Form and function in everyday verbal interaction. AmsterdarniPhiladelphia, 1993. 26. STY GALL, Gail: Trial Language. A study in differential discourse processing. AmsterdarniPhiladelphia, 1994. 27. SUTER, Hans Jtirg: The Wedding Report: A Prototypical Approach to the Study of Traditional Text Types. AmsterdarniPhiladelphia, 1993. 28. V AN DE W ALLE, Lieve: Pragmatics and Classical Sanskrit. AmsterdarniPhiladelphia, 1993. 29. BARSKY, Robert F.: Constructing a Productive Other: Discourse theory and the convention refugee hearing. AmsterdarniPhiladelphia, 1994. 30. WORTHAM, Stanton E.F.: Acting Out Participant Examples in the Classroom. AmsterdarniPhiladelphia, 1994. 31. WILDGEN, Wolfgang: Process, Image and Meaning. A realistic model of the meanings of sentences and narrative texts. Amsterdam!Philadelphia, 1994. 32. SHIBATANI, Masayoshi and Sandra A. THOMPSON (eds): Essays in Semantics and Pragmatics. AmsterdarniPhiladelphia, 1995. 33. GOOSSENS, Louis, Paul PAUWELS, Brygida RUDZKA-OSTYN, Anne-Marie SIMON-VANDENBERGEN and Johan VANPARYS: By Word of Mouth. Metaphor, metonymy and linguistic action in a cognitive perspective. AmsterdarniPhiladelphia, 1995. 34. BARBE, Katharina: Irony in Context. Amsterdam!Philadelphia, 1995. 35. JUCKER, Andreas H. (ed.): Historical Pragmatics. Pragmatic developments in the history of English. AmsterdarniPhiladelphia, 1995. 36. CHILTON, Paul, Mikhail V. ILYIN and Jacob MEY: Political Discourse in Transition in Eastern and Western Europe (1989-1991). AmsterdarniPhiladelphia, 1998. 37. CARSTON, Robyn, Nam SUN SONG and Seiji UCHIDA (eds): Relevance Theory. Applications and implications. AmsterdarniPhiladelphia, 1998. 38. FRETHEIM, Thorstein and Jeanette K. GUN DEL (eds): Reference and Referent Accessibility. AmsterdarniPhiladelphia; 1996. 39. HERRING, Susan (ed.): Computer-Mediated Communication. Linguistic, social, and cross-cultural perspectives. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1996. 40. DIAMOND, Julie: Status and Power in Verbal Interaction. A study of discourse in a close-knit social network. Amsterdam!Philadelphia, 1996. 41. VENTOLA, Eija and Anna MAURANEN, (eds): Academic Writing. Intercultural and textual issues. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1996. 42. WODAK, Ruth and Helga KOITHOFF (eds): Communicating Gender in Context. AmsterdarniPhiladelphia, 1997.

43. JANSSEN, Theo A.J.M. and Wim van der WURFF (eds): Reported Speech. Forms and functions of the verb. Amsterdam!Philadelphia, 1996. 44. BARGIELA-CHIAPPINI, Francesca and Sandra J. HARRIS: Managing Language. The discourse of corporate meetings. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1997. 45. PALTRIDGE, Brian: Genre, Frames and Writing in Research Settings. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, 1997. 46. GEORGAKOPOULOU, Alexandra: Narrative Performances. A study of Medern Greek storytelling. Amsterdam!Philadelphia, 1997. 47. CHESTERMAN, Andrew: Contrastive Functional Analysis. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1998. 48. KAMIO, Akio: Territory of Information. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1997. 49. KURZON, Dennis: Discourse of Silence. Amsterdam!Philadelphia, 1998. SO. GRENOBLE, Lenore: Deixis and Information Packaging in Russian Discourse. Amsterdam!Philadelphia, n.y.p. 51. BOULIMA, Jamila: Negotiated Interaction in Target Language Classroom Discourse. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, n.y.p. 52. GILLIS, Steven and Annick DE HOUWER (eds): The Acquisition of Dutch. Amsterdam!Philadelphia, n.y.p. 53. MOSEGAARD HANSEN, Maj-Britt: The Function of Discourse Particles. A study with special reference to spoken standard French. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, n.y.p. 54. HYLAND, Ken: Hedging in Scientific Research Articles. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1998.