From Discourse Process to Grammatical Construction: On Left-Dislocation in English

195 Pages·1992·17.171 MB·English

by  Ronald Geluykens

FROM DISCOURSE PROCESS
TO GRAMMATICAL CONSTRUCTION
STUDIES IN DISCOURSE AND GRAMMAR
EDITORS
SANDRA A. THOMPSON
University of California at Santa Barbara
Department of Linguistics
Santa Barbara, CA 93106
USA
and
PAUL J. HOPPER
Carnegie Mellon University
Department of English
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
USA
Studies in Discourse and Grammar is a monograph series providing a forum for
research on grammar as it emerges from and is accounted for by discourse contexts.
The assumption underlying the series is that corpora reflecting language as it is actu­
ally used are necessary, not only for the verification of grammatical analyses, but also
for understanding how the regularities we think of as grammar emerge from commu­
nicative needs.
Research in discourse and grammar draws upon both spoken and written corpora,
and it is typically, though not necessarily, quantitative. Monographs in the series
propose explanations for grammatical regularities in terms of recurrent discourse
patters, which reflect commmunicative needs, both informational and socio-cultural.
Volume 1
Ronald Geluykens
From Discourse Process to Grammatical Construction
FROM DISCOURSE PROCESS
TO
GRAMMATICAL CONSTRUCTION
ON LEFT-DISLOCATION IN ENGLISH
RONALD GELUYKENS
JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY
AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA
1992
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Geluykens, Ronald.
From discourse process to gramatical construction : on left-dislocation in English I
Ronald Geluykens.
p. cm. - (Studies in Discourse and Grammar ; v. 1)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. English language-Discourse analysis. 2. English language-Grammar, Generative.
I. Title.
PE1422.G44 1992
401'.41-dc20 92-8914
ISBN 90 272 2611 3 (Eur.) 11-55619-367-X (US) (alk. paper) CIP
© Copyright 1992 - 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.
John Benjamins Publishing Co. • P.O. Box 75577 • 1070 AN Amsterdam • The Netherlands
John Benjamins North America • 821 Bethlehem Pike • Philadelphia, PA 19118 • USA
Dedicated to the memory o f my grandmother, Jeanne De Bruyn

Preface
This study could not have been written without the considerable support I have
had from three people. The debt I owe to Louis Goossens and René Collier can
hardly be overestimated; without their encouragement and advice, from my first
feeble steps as a linguist up to the present, this study would never have been
written. My debt to Steve Levinson is equally enormous, for he has supervised
this research almost from its beginning; my analyses owe a lot to the
innumerable discussions we had in Cambridge.
I am very grateful to my two editors, Sandy Thompson and Paul Hopper,
for stimulating me to write up this study in its current format, and for giving
detailed comments on the final versions of the manuscript. I am indebted to
Sidney Greenbaum, director of the Survey of English Usage, not only for giving
me access to the Survey of English Usage and providing a serene environment to
collect my data, but also for his detailed comments on earlier drafts.
I want to acknowledge the useful comments, on earlier oral or written
versions of this material, from Barbara Fox, Talmy Givón, John Haviland, Terry
Moore, Marion Owen, Peter Matthews, Jan Firbàs, Irene Warburton, David
Crystal, Laszlo Szigeti, Joost Buysschaert, Walter Daelemans, and Johan Van
der Auwera. None of the people mentioned above are of course to blame for any
remaining errors, which are entirely my own responsibility
Preliminary or related versions of this study were presented at the Second
meeting of the Pacific Linguistics Conference, University of Oregon (November
1986; cf. Geluykens 1986b), at the 24th regional meeting of the Chicago
Linguistic Society (April 1988; cf. Geluykens 1^88a), and at the Cognitive
Linguistics Symposium, University of Duisburg (April 1989; Geluykens
forthcx). Oral presentations were also delivered at the University of Cambridge
(November 1986), the University of Antwerp (UIA) (March 1987), the
University of Nottingham (February 1989), and the Institute for Perception
Research, Eindhoven (IPO) (March 1990).
I am grateful to the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research
(NFWO), to the University of Antwerp (UFSIA), and to Trinity College,
Cambridge for their material support. The final version was produced while I
was a Research Fellow at The Queen's College, Oxford; my sincere thanks go to
Queen's for allowing me to work in a serene intellectual environment.

Table of Contents
Chapter 1. Theoretical Preliminaries
1.1. A Functionalist Methodology 1
1.1.1. Introduction 1
1.1.2. Linguistic form and communicative function 4
1.1.3. DA versus CA methodology 6
1.2. Information flow in discourse 8
1.2.1. Recoverability 9
1.2.2. Topicality 14
1.3. Interactional aspects of discourse 16
1.4. Left-Dislocation as a Construction 18
1.4.1. A first appoximation 18
1.4.2. Towards a semantic characterization 19
1.4.3. On strict coreferentiality 22
1.4.4. Conversational factors 23
1.4.5. Summary 26
1.5. The Database 26
1.5.1. Discourse typology 26
1.5.2. The discourse and conversational database 30
1.5.3. System of prosodie transcription 31
Chapter 2. Referent-Introduction (1): Interaction 33
2.1. Introduction 33
2.2. Quantitative appreciation 33
2.3. LDs with intervening turn(s) 35
2.4. LDs with intervening pause 40
2.5. Pauseless LDs 46
2.6. Summary and comments 49
X RONALD GELUYKENS
Chapter 3. Referent-Introduction (2): Recoverability 53
3.1.. Recoverability revisited 5 3
3.2. Completely Irrecoverable REFs 58
3.3. REFs without Complete Irrecoverability 63
3.3.1. Inferable REFs 63
3.3.2. The non-quantifiable nature of Recoverability 66
Chapter 4. Referent-Introduction (3): Topicality 69
4.1. Topicality revisited 69
4.2. Direct topicality 70
4.3. Indirect topicality 75
4.4. Apparent absence of topicality 78
Chapter 5. Other Functions of LD 83
5.1. LD and contrastiveness 83
5.1.1. On contrastiveness 83
5.1.2. Contrastive LDs 86
5.1.3. Listing-LDs 89
5.2. Idiosyncratic LDs 91
5.2.1. Conditional clauses 91
5.2.2. Some special cases 93
5.3. Summary 96
Chapter 6. Prosodie Aspects of LD 97
6.1. Introduction 97
6.2. Prosodie boundaries between REF and PROP 97
6.3. Intonational aspects of LD 100
6.3.1. Topic-introducing LDs 100
6.3.2. Other LDs 108
6.3.3. Intonation of the PROP 112
6.4. Summary 113