Discourse and Word Order

374 Pages·016.848 MB·English

by  Olga T. Yokoyama

DISCOURSE AND WORD ORDER
Pragmatics & Beyond
Companion Series
Editors:
Jacob L. Mey
(Odense University)
Herman Parret
(Belgian National Science Foundation,
Universities of Leuven and Antwerp)
Editorial Address:
Department of Germanic Languages
and Literatures
University of Antwerp (UIA)
Universiteitsplein 1
B-2610 Wilrijk
Belgium
Editorial Board:
Norbert Dittmar (Free University of Berlin)
David Holdcroft (University of Leeds)
Jerrold M. Sadock (University of Chicago)
Emanuel A. Schegloff (University of California at Los Angeles)
Daniel Vanderveken (University of Quebec at Trois-Rivières)
Teun A. van Dijk (University of Amsterdam)
Jef Verschueren (University of Antwerp)
6
Olga T. Yokoyama
Discourse and Word Order
DISCOURSE AND
WORD ORDER
Olga T. Yokoyama
Harvard University, Cambridge
JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY
AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA
1986
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Yokoyama, Olga Tsuneko.
Discourse and word order.
(Pragmatics & beyond companion series, ISSN 0920-3079; 3)
Bibliography: p.
Includes indexes.
1. Discourse analysis. 2. Speech acts (Linguistics) 3. Pragmatics. 4. Communicative com­
petence. 5. Russian language -- Word order. I. Title. II. Series.
P302.Y6 1986 401'.41 86-26899
ISBN 90-272-5007-3 (Eur.)/l-55619-012-3 (U.S.)(alk.paper)
© Copyright 1986 - John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or
any other means, without written permission from the publisher.
CONTENTS
FOREWORD ix
PART ONE: A MODEL OF KNOWLEDGE TRANSACTIONS 1
CHAPTER 1: FOUR SETS OF KNOWLEDGE IN CONTACT 3
0. The Minimal Unit of Discourse 3
1. Communicable Knowledge 6
1.1 Seven kinds of knowledge 6
1.2 The relationship between different kinds of knowledge 15
2. Sharing Knowledge 24
3. Two Individuals in Discourse 31
CHAPTER 2: THE PROCEDURES FOR KNOWLEDGE
TRANSACTIONS 43
0. Constraining Subjectivity 43
1. Assessment and Acknowledgment 44
1.1 Assessment 44
1.2 Acknowledgment 52
2. Misassessment 53
2.1 Assessment errors and adjustment 53
2.2 Imposition and acceptance 59
2.3 Assessment and context 66
CHAPTER 3: DISCOURSE-INITIAL UTTERANCES 73
0. Sentences, Illocutionary Acts and Utterances 73
1. Directives 75
2. Statements 77
2.1 Propositional statements 77
2.2 Specificational statements 81
2.3 Existential statements 82
vi CONTENTS
2.4 Predicational statements 85
2.5 Referential Statements 87
2.6 Metinformational Statements 88
2.7 Summary of Statements 90
3. Effusions 91
3.1 Impositional effusions 92
3.2 Non-impositional effusions 95
3.3 Summary of effusions 96
4. Questions 97
4.1 Specificational questions 98
4.2 Propositional questions 103
4.3 Referential questions 107
4.4 Existential questions 109
4.5 Predicational questions 111
4.6 Metinformational questions 112
4.7 Summary of questions 115
CHAPTER 4: NON-DISCOURSE-INITIAL UTTERANCES 119
0. Responses 119
1. Obligatory Responses 119
1.1 Answers to questions 119
1.2 Acknowledgment 125
1.3 Adjustment 126
2. Voluntary Contributions 130
CHAPTER 5: GRAMMAR AND PRAGMATICS 141
1. The Model: a Summary 141
2. Between Grammar and Pragmatics 149
2.1 Deaccentuation of nouns 150
2.2 Compatibility of indefinite subjects and stative
predicates 155
3. Communicational Competence 159
PART TWO: RUSSIAN WORD ORDER 171
CHAPTER 6: HISTORY AND PRELIMINARIES 173
1. Word Order Permutations in Linguistic Theory 173
CONTENTS vii
2. Russian Intonation and Word Order 176
2.1 The problem 176
2.2 An outline of Russian intonation 181
2.2.1 Utterance intonation Type I 182
2.2.2 Utterance intonation Type II 191
2.3 Intonation types and word order 197
CHAPTER 7: DISCOURSE-INITIAL UTTERANCES - I:
ASSESSMENT 205
1. Directives 206
1.1 First person directives 206
1.2 Second person directives 213
1.3 Third person directives 216
2. Statements 217
2.1 Propositional statements 217
2.2 Referential statements and statements about the
CODE 222
2.3 Existential and predicational statements 228
3. Questions 229
3.1 Specificational questions 231
3.2 Propositional questions 236
3.3 Referential and CODE questions 242
3.4 Existential and predicational questions 243
4. Effusions 243
5. Summary 245
CHAPTER 8: DISCOURSE-INITIAL UTTERANCES - II:
IMPOSITION AND GRAMMATICAL RELATIONS 253
1. Imposition 253
1.1 Personal Empathy: imposition of referential knowledge 254
1.2 Imposition of propositional knowledge 263
2. Grammatical Relations 270
2.1 The terms: their semantic roles, case, and animacy 271
2.1.1 Unspecified propositional statements 271
2.1.2 Multiple questions 274
2.1.3 Pronominal sequences 276
2.2 The preverbal position 277
2.2.1 Imposition of anthropological Empathy? 277
viii CONTENTS
2.2.2 Epic style or a different system? 284
2.3 Non-referential items 288
CHAPTER 9: NON-DISCOURSE-INITIAL UTTERANCES 297
1. Answers to Questions 298
1.1 Specificational answers 298
1.2 Propositional answers 304
2. Voluntary Contributions Based on Links by Identity 306
2.1 Statements 306
2.2 Questions 310
3. Voluntary Contributions Based on Links by Associated
Knowledge 312
3.1 Statements 312
3.2 Questions 323
4. Summary 326
CONCLUSION 331
REFERENCES 337
INDEXES 355
FOREWORD
The objective of this book is to explore the gray area between gram­
mar proper and pragmatics, in an effort to establish a theory of what can be
called communicational competence, within which Discourse Grammar (or
Functionalism) constitutes a well-defined component.
In Part I, I develop a universal model of the smallest unit of informa­
tional discourse, and examine the regularities that govern the intentional
verbal transfer of knowledge from one discourse participant to the other.
This investigation allows us to outline a framework for the theory of com­
municational competence, which serves, among other things, to legitimize
and clarify certain nebulous but important linguistic phenomena that have
hitherto been caught in the no-man's land between formal and functional
approaches to language. Part II is devoted to the analysis of a major linguis­
tic problem, namely word order in Russian, perhaps the best-known case of
a so-called "free word order" language. I demonstrate that the solution of
this problem requires an explicit theory of just such "nebulous"
phenomena: the complex mechanisms determining the order of elements in
this language — and, mutatis mutandis, in other "free word order" lan­
guages — cannot even be described, much less understood, without a
framework of communicational competence that captures the continuum
that exists between the two poles of objective linguistic abstraction and sub­
jective real world references and attitudes.
This inquiry into interpersonal communication has an interdisciplinary
basis that requires some comment on terminology. The nature of the study
demanded the integration of various aspects of human communication trad­
itionally treated in a number of separate disciplines. For this reason the ter­
minology used in this book, especially in Part I, presents a mixture of terms
from linguistics, logic, philosophy, psychology, semiotics, mathematics,
anthropology, and the study of literature. Although I believe no actual con­
fusion will result from this terminological mixture, certain usages may
perhaps strike some specialists as "unauthorized", or may seem to disregard
the complexity of the concepts whose development these terms represent in