FG and the dynamics of discourse 233The process of discourse production and comprehension has been por-
trayed as involving attentional framings superimposed on structural domains,
following the shifts of the S’s and A’s focus of attention. The progression of
this viewing movement is realized incrementally, or in chunks, through cog-
nitive-structural directions or instructions to focus attention on what is felt to
be prominent in discourse. We have seen that very high on the scale of dis-
course prominence are the notions of Topic, Focus and Theme. It is to be
hoped that, its conciseness notwithstanding, this piece of work – part of cur-
rent research – may at least act as a catalyst for further discussion.
Notes
- I am grateful to Lachlan Mackenzie, Knud Lambrecht, Ronald Langacker
and Francisco Gonzálvez-García for contributing data, comments, and/or
suggestions to this chapter. The research reported here was supported by the
Xunta de Galicia, grant number pgidt00pxi20402PR, research project
‘Análise do discurso na lingua inglesa: Aspectos sincrónicos e contrastivos
con referencia ó galego o mailo castelán’. - WCF can be taken to align with the functional paradigm insofar as (a) it
admits that the primary function of the language is to serve as a vehicle of
communication and (b) it strives to account for those aspects of grammar
that are non-arbitrary in terms of functional principles, that is, relating them
to language use (for details see Butler 2003). - Carroll et al. (1971) and Goldberg, Sethuraman and Casenhiser (forthc.)
show that children begin to learn the associations between form and mean-
ing on two levels, i.e. verb-centred categories and abstract argument-
structure constructions (especially with such recurrent verbs as do, make,
get, go, etc.). Likewise, Bencini and Goldberg’s (2000) experimental re-
search suggests that individuals are likely to sort out sentences in terms of
argument-structure constructions rather than basing themselves on the lexi-
cal semantics of the matrix verb, which gives evidence for the psychological
or cognitive reality of constructions in language users’ minds. - An intonation unit can be characterized as being typically demarcated by
pauses or breaks in timing, by acceleration and deceleration, by changes in
pitch level and terminal pitch contours, and as being constrained to a length
of four words in English, oftentimes coinciding with clauses, though many
others are parts of clauses (Chafe 1994: 69). This characterization suggests
a cognitive constraint on how much information can be fully active in the
mind at one time. Givón (1995: 358) calls this the ‘one new or informative
chunk-per-clause constraint’, and he argues that in many cases it is often
sufficient to mention only this chunk (Givón 1989: 209; cf. Du Bois 1987: