Exchange structure 617 erm I’m organizing the departmental Christmas party this year
(i) will you both be coming?
(ii) could you tell me whether you and your wife will be coming?
(iii) and I was wondering whether you and your wife will be coming?
(iv) and I just wanted to know whether you and your wife would be
coming?There are massive problems facing any attempt to explain in grammatical
terms both the inappropriateness of past time adverbs and the appropriateness
and instanced occurrence of ‘now’ in examples like (iiia) and (iva):
(iiia) and now I was wondering whether you and...
(iva) and now I just wanted to know whether you and...In coping with examples like this a description which sees tense selection
as potentially a realization of a functional feature such as politeness, has
considerable attraction.
From what has been said above it will be evident that we see the units
of discourse as being realized by units of grammar in exactly the same
way that grammatical units are realized by phonological ones, although
at the moment we can do little more than discuss the nature of these
discourse units; work on discovering the realization rules, or, looked at
from the decoder’s point of view, the interpretative rules, has hardly
begun.
Meanwhile, we must show how, by adopting a three-level model, we are
led to rethink the notion of competence. We have already suggested that the
extension of a linguistic description to take in interactive discourse seems
to make this rather radical step necessary.
Since 1957, competence has been related conceptually to the ability to
discriminate between well-formed and deviant sentences. The application
of the criterion of well-formedness has never been unproblematic, and
developments in transformational/generative theory have tended to make
its application more difficult rather than less so. If we consider it in relation
to each of our postulated three levels in turn, we can throw some light on
the problem.
Beginning with the phonological level, we note that any deviance can be
recognized fairly easily, perhaps unequivocally. Initial /?/, for instance, excludes
any sequence of phonemes from the set of well-formed English words, as
does final /h/, and sequences having certain specifiable combinations of
phonemes medially are similarly excluded. Whatever the basis on which we
classify the segments that enter into the phonological structures of a given
dialect of English, the membership of those classes does not vary. We may,
perhaps, relate this to the fact that there are physiological and physical
aspects to the classification and thus the distinction between allowable and
proscribed sequences is not entirely ‘arbitrary’ in the sense that it is observing
distributional privileges.