Towards an analysis of discourse 11The girl’s mistake lay in misunderstanding the situation not the sentence,
and the example demonstrates the crucial role of situation in the analysis of
discourse. We can at the moment make only a rudimentary attempt to deal
with situation. We suggest four questions one can ask about the situation
and depending on the answers to these questions and the grammatical form
of the clause, propose three rules which predict the correct interpretation of
teacher utterances most of the time. The questions we ask are
1 If the clause is interrogative is the addressee also the subject of the
clause?
2 What actions or activities are physically possible at the time of utterance?
3 What actions or activities are proscribed at the time of utterance?
4 What actions or activities have been prescribed up to the time of
utterance?
Figure 1: The classification of an interrogative by situation