Advances in Spoken Discourse Analysis

(C. Jardin) #1
Interactive lexis: prominence and paradigms 199

on semantic ‘richness’ of the verbs involved, and whether it is ‘things’ or
‘processes’ that are being talked about. Bolinger admitted a pragmatic
dimension, though, in accepting ‘enough mutual understanding’ between
speaker and interlocutor as sufficient condition for a non-prominent verb,
even in situations where the verb is semantically ‘rich’ and unpredictable
(as the verb emphasize could be in certain situations). Nonetheless he still
concluded that ‘semantic and emotional highlighting’ not syntax, were the
main determinants of stress.
The problems in handling anomalies encountered by linguists whose view
rests on a marked/unmarked distinction is a predictable corollary of the
inherent slipperiness of the definitions of ‘given’ and ‘new’ information.
‘Given’, defined as that which has already formally occurred in a discourse
(i.e. repeated words, etc.) cannot be necessarily relegated to non-prominence
on re-occurrence, as Oakeshott-Taylor (1984) demonstrates in discussing
(apparent) anomalies such as:


1 A: What d’you think of JOHN?
B: Oh, JOHN’S all right


Conversely. Brown et al., who accept Halliday’s position partly but reject
the notion of an unmarked placement for ‘new’ information, observe that
new ‘is not merely a question of formal occurrence either, but may be any
element not recoverable in the discourse, or a mood shift’ (1980:160).
Nor are there fewer difficulties, it would seem, in non-formal approaches
to the given/new question. Chafe, recognizing the limits of equating given
and new with old and new knowledge, prefers to talk in terms of matter
‘already activated’ and ‘newly activated’ and moves towards a broader,
almost mentalist position where speakers and hearers share ‘the perception’
of given and new, and where givenness is a status decided on by the
speaker and therefore ‘it is fundamentally a matter of the speaker’s belief
that the item is in the addressee’s consciousness, not that it is recoverable’
(1976:32). The difficulties phonologists have in reconciling a label for
discourse content such as given/new with anomalous data is paralleled by
a lack of a clear tradition of thought, outside of strictly phonological
studies, on a number of overlapping questions such as theme/rheme structures
(both as formal and content issues), prepositional structure and cognitive
questions (e.g. speech planning), a situation that has reigned for well over
a quarter of a century, and which is usefully summarized in table form in
Allerton (1978).
The entanglement of the various notions that cluster round the question
of given and new and its relation to tonicity is attacked and somewhat
clarified by Taglicht (1982), who sees the question as a wider one encompassing
the placement of all accents in tone groups, not just nuclear ones. Tone
groups consist of ‘focal’ items (marked by accent, after O’Connor and
Arnold 1973) and ‘residual’ items (no accent). This is the ‘intonation structure’
of tone groups. What is ‘new’ (i.e. being presented as ‘newsworthy’) is now

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