204 Advances in spoken discourse analysis
the data can broadly be characterized as creating relations of equivalence,
opposition and inclusion (with obvious parallels in the synonymy, antonymy
and hyponymy of semantics) and subcategories of scalability, reversibility,
etc. No special claim is made for the terminology proposed here: the data
largely speaks for itself and the labelling is secondary. The realization of
these existential relations is clearly observable where relexicalization takes
place in the data, i.e. any occasion where content is repeated (including
identical lexical form), whether prominently or non-prominently, together
with surrounding evidence in the discourse.
It was stated above that central to Brazil’s theory of prominence is
the notion of projection of context and signalling of selection or non-
selection paradigmatically. SSE data bears this out: as well as the many
non-prominent ‘grammar-words’ which are found in any discourse, we
find non-prominent relexicalizations of lexical items where second occurrence
is signalled as synonymous with the first. In a discussion of a lecturer’s
timetable we find:
8 A: are THEY in fact conducted by HIM
C: HE does this five fifteen on a WEdnesday one......
C: HE gives some of them in this ROOM
(143:882–8)
(Relevant reiterated items are indicated in bold; the letters before speakers’
turns are those used in Svartvik and Quirk (1980); reference figures refer
to page numbers, then to tone unit numbers; dotted lines indicate intervening
tone units.)
What is significant in this example is the way that a second speaker
relexicalizes an item and then re-relexicalizes the item signalling re-occurrences
as synonymous by making them non-prominent. The kind of equivalence
that occurs is discourse-internal; semantic potential that may be exploited
in other situations to create differences of meaning is not realized. Semantic
and discourse synonymy can coincide:
9 A: AGatha CARter of WHOM you may have HEARD
A CLARKE knows of HER SHE’s a meDIEvalist (90:437–40)
Hear of and know of are componentially near synonyms. Examples such as
(8) and (9) reveal the need to separate the structural-semantic account of
synonymy from pragmatic relations of equivalence. Conduct, do and give
might not be predicted to occur adjacently in a thesaurus and operations to
‘squeeze’ them into a componential account of meaning would have to be
laborious and analytically counter-productive.
‘Scalable’ adjectives are also an area where data yields rich illustrations
of the significance of prominence in the signalling of lexical relations.
Items such as want, pleased, willing and longing (to do something) are not
necessarily used in the straightforward scale-of-intensity way in which dictionary
definitions might suggest: