40 Advances in spoken discourse analysis
7 ace
two hearts
the. of clubs
. diamonds
queen spades
kin g
We can see that in creating his utterance the speaker had a limited choice of
13 possibilities for the slot occupied by ‘queen’ and 4 for the slot occupied
by ‘hearts’, but this time the limitation has, as Brazil points out, nothing to
do with the working of the language system: there is no linguistic reason why
the response should not have been, for instance, the ‘prince of tides’ or ‘the
thirteen of lozenges’. What imposes the lexical limitation is an extra-linguistic
factor, the conventional composition of a pack of playing cards.
Brazil uses the term existential paradigm for that set of possibilities that
a speaker can regard as actually available at a given moment in an interaction.
This enables him to distinguish this set of options from the general paradigm
which is inherent in the language system. It is clear that at the place occupied
in examples (6) and (7) by ‘of’; the two paradigms coincide: there can be
no possibility of selection in the existential paradigm because there is none
in the general paradigm.
From examples like these we can deduce that items are marked as prominent
in order to indicate to the hearer that the speaker is selecting from a range
of oppositions in the existential paradigm. Thus we can invent a context in
which ‘of’ could be situationally selective—for example a correction of a
foreigner’s ‘the queen in hearts’ would certainly be realized as (8), while
contexts in which first ‘queen’ and then ‘hearts’ would be non-selective and
therefore non-prominent, are exemplified in (9) and (10):
8 // the queen OF hearts //
9 Which heart did you play?
// the QUEEN of hearts //
10 Which queen did you play?
// the queen of HEARTS //In examples (9) and (10) the questioner sets up a context which effectively
removes the possibility of choice for one of the items by indicating that he
knows either the suit, (9) or the denomination of the card, (10). Thus the
answerer’s use of ‘hearts’ in (9) and ‘queen’ in (10) is not the outcome of
his making any kind of selection, a fact which would probably result, in
many circumstances, in their being omitted altogether:
11 Which heart did you play?
// the QUEEN //
12 Which queen did you play?
// HEARTS //