«The functional/cognitive principle of information structure in texts: discourse pressures and syntactic devices for English as L2 learners»

Adriana Maria Tenuta and Ana Larissa Adorno Marciotto Oliveira
«The functional/cognitive principle of information structure in texts: discourse pressures and syntactic devices for English as L2 learners»
Revista Linguagem em (Dis)curso, vol. 15, n.º 1, janeiro-abril 2015

Revista Linguagem em (Dis)curso | Universidade do Sul de Santa Catarina | Programa de Pós-Graduação em Ciências da Linguagem | Tubarão | Santa Catarina SC | BRASIL


Extracto del apartado 2, en páginas 118 a 123 del artículo en PDF

«The information and thematic structures in the clause

»Pieces or chunks of information in a written text are organized in terms of new and old elements. Information structure, in the functional theoretical framework to language studies, is seen as a process of interaction between what is known and what is new to language users (Prince, 1981; Halliday, 1985, 2004). The concepts of old and new, in this context, relate, respectively, to information that is recoverable from the context (verbal or non-verbal), and information that is not recoverable. These concepts were also discussed in Rutherford (1987) to explain possibilities for learners‟ discourse, as a means to better reach specific communication goals.

»In this framework of analysis, information structure is related to thematic structure. The elements of the thematic structure are theme, the starting point of the sentence, and rheme, the rest of the sentence. Considering Halliday’s (1985, 2004) notion of theme as the ‘starting point of the message’, whatever theme is chosen for a sentence is a signal of how we would like people to understand what we mean. The theme is, then, a frame for understanding, inside which we should make sense and construct meaning. Moreover, language users choose to be theme of a clause or sentence the element that is most informationally appropriate at a specific moment in discourse, therefore, the thematic structure tends to reflect informational demands.

»For a text to be fluent and well elaborated, it must follow an information distribution principle: there has to be some kind of alternation between old and new information in order for the communication flow to be established. The non-observation of this principle can negatively impact the text‟s communicative potential. Consequently, a text is considered well elaborated and easier to grasp, therefore more fluent, when old and new data flow smoothly in discourse. Rutherford (1987) gives the following example of a passage produced by a student:

»1a) (1) My father’s house had four bedrooms and two sitting-rooms. (2) A large garden was in front of the house. (3) My father had planted a lot of flowers in the garden. (4) These flowers were roses and tulips, etc... (Rutherford, 1987, p. 69)

»Comparing this passage with a second attempt by the same student, in which the only difference in relation to the first is the order of the information in (2) and (3), we have:

»1b) (1) My father’s house had four bedrooms and two sitting rooms. (2) In front of the house was a large garden. (3) In the garden my father had planted a lot of flowers. (4) These flowers were roses and tulips, etc... (Rutherford, 1987, p. 69)

»The author argues that passage 1(b) is “more felicitous” in that it provides the reader with better ways to process the information conveyed, since the elements presented as rheme of a sentence almost always appear as theme of the next one. Consequently, in this passage, the flow of information is well-structured from the standpoint of the opposition between old and new data.

»In this context, judging the adequacy of the information arrangement of a sentence on the discourse level does not mean judging its grammaticality. For example, in 1(a) sentences (2) and (3) are grammatical, but they are not the best links between (1) and (4).

»As we have argued previously, meeting the cognitive/functional principle of information distribution means providing an alternation of old and new information in texts. This interplay between old and new information in texts requires knowledge of varied syntactic structures for making adequate choices of theme and rheme elements. From this perspective, the study of Clifton and Fraizer (2004) suggests that the presumed given-before-new preference may not be general, but can be limited to certain constructions, being also very biased on the language comprehension system and very sensitive to the requirements of language production, for example, doubled object and shifted noun group constructions. Similarly, Arnold et al. (2000) suggest that both grammatical complexity and discourse status influence constituent order, as they are both affected by constraints on planning and text production.

»Overall, meeting this principle of information impacts the communicative potential of the text (Prince, 1981; Halliday, 1985, 2004), since it results in texts that are more fluent and easier to comprehend.

»Information structure, thematic structure and syntactic arrangements relate to our cognitive structure in terms of our processing capacities (Chafe, 1990), as well as our capacity of attention. Patterns of attention distribution have been explained by cognitive linguists in terms of different degrees of salience or prominence of an element in discourse. The notions of focus and salience of perception are at the basis of the concepts of figure and ground. These concepts come from the Gestalt Psychology, and are found, in linguistics, in Hopper (1979), Langacker (1987; 2008), Talmy (2000), and many other authors. Figure is regarded as the most salient entity in a given configuration, while ground has secondary prominence.

»Whatever use we make of sentences, we naturally foreground certain clause elements for attentional purposes. There are linguistic mechanisms for assigning attentional focus to certain elements, and the thematic structure constitutes one of the language systems or phenomena that reflect this interrelation between language and the cognitive capacity of attention [NOTE 2]. The relation between the cognitive capacity of attention and language is pointed out and/or investigated by many authors, among others, Givón (1992); Landau e Jackendoff (1993); MacWhinney (1977); Osgood and Bock (1977); Langacker (1987; 2008), and Talmy (2000), who share the comprehension that the linguistic structure (syntactic positions) related to a certain scene will be influenced by the way the speaker distributes his/her attention among the elements that compose that scene. [NOTE 3].

»In this perspective, attention and salience are intrinsically related to the thematic choice made by the speaker or the writer. In writing, MacCarthy (1991) has identified three different patterns of thematic structure. Writers very frequently compose texts that naturally fit one of these patterns. This happens due to the fact that people produce language that, from the cognitive point of view, is more adequate for processing purposes, since we have attention and memory limitations. The three patterns of text organization identified by MacCarthy (1991) are presented here:

»(a) the theme of a sentence contains an element that becomes the rheme of the following sentence:

»theme 1 ____________________rheme 1

»theme 2 = theme 1 ___________ rheme 2

»theme 3 = theme 1 ___________ rheme 3

»(b) the theme of a sentence has the same theme of the next sentence:

»theme 1 ____________________rheme 1

»theme 2 = theme 1 ___________ rheme 2

»theme 3 = theme 1 ___________ rheme 3

»(c) the rheme of a sentence contains two elements that are taken as themes in the two subsequent sentences:

»theme 1 ___________________ rheme 1(a+b)

»theme 2 = rheme 1(a) ________ rheme 2

»theme 3 = rheme 1(b) ________ rheme 3

»As one can see, there is a very significant interplay between thematic structure and information structure. Old and new elements, which structure the text informationally, are intertwined in the text flow via the participants of the verbal processes encoded in the message. The theme is usually a given element, and new information tends to appear as rheme. Therefore, when choosing the theme element for his/her proposition, the writer follows discourse principles for structuring information, i.e., he/she meets discourse pressures for the distribution of given/new information that makes the text more fluent, more easily comprehended. This discourse pressures are, thus, many times, translated into those thematic patterns presented by McCarthy.

»There is a variety of syntactic resources available to writers and speakers of English to meet discourse pressures. Even though English is typologically considered an SVO language, there are several possibilities of rearranging the basic elements of the sentence (S, V, O/C, A). MacCarthy (1991) exemplifies various clausal arrangements involving fronting, i.e. various ways through which one can place different elements in the initial position of a clause. The author states that some of these structures are rarely found in pedagogical material or grammar books, for example:

»3a) The Guardian, Joyce reads. OSV. Object-fronted

»3b) Sometimes Joyce reads The Guardian. ASVO. Adverbial-fronted

»3c) It is The Guardian Joyce reads. It + be + C/O + SV. It-theme, or cleft

»3d) What Joyce reads is The Guardian. Wh + SV + b + C/O. Wh-pseudo-cleft

»3e) She reads The Guardian, Joyce. S (pronoun) VOS (noun). Right-displaced subject

»(McCarthy, 1991, p. 51-52)

»Differences in clause structure reflect different discourse demands in terms of information structure. Not all of the sentences above fit the same discourse contexts.

»3(a) could be a reply to “The Mirror, Lena reads. What about the The Guardian?” 3(c) or (d), alternatively, could be negative replies to “Joyce reads the Mirror, right? No...” Also, as we are going to point out later in this text, syntactic structures relate to attention and focus and we can see, in these examples, how distinct clause arrangements allow us to focus on different clause elements, through different degrees of salience: 3(a) says something ‘about’ The Guardian and 3(e) says something ‘about’ Joyce.

»The subject of the clause is generally related to old information and it is the syntactic element that usually constitutes the immediate basis or the starting point for further development of the message. Chafe (1995) states that syntactic subjects carry light information load, which makes them appropriate for starting points. Although according to Chafe lightness does not necessarily imply givenness, this author presents the results of a study in which only 19% of subjects as starting points did not express given information.

»From this perspective, syntactic subjects establish a starting point to which new information is added. For this reason, the information in them tends to have been active at earlier times in discourse. They are likely to be related to ideas previously active in the information exchange and are usually associated with the non-linguistic environment of the conversation (Chafe, 1995). In Chafe’s view, if a referent is identifiable, it is said to be active as a current focus of attention and awareness. If not active, it may be accessible, since it can be inferred from the situational or linguistic context, or made inactive if it is represented in long-term memory (Carroll; Shea, 2007). Subjects, therefore, tend to be active, conveying old information.

»In this framework of analysis, the choice of which element will be taken as theme, for example, whether it is the subject or not, is based on communication demands. Therefore, when choosing the theme element of a proposition, the writer is following discourse principles of information structure in order to meet existing discourse pressures. Taking this interplay into account, it becomes evident how closely syntax, semantics and discourse are interconnected. Once again, in order to be able to meet several discourse pressures, the writer is required to produce diverse clause arrangements, or to realize syntactic movements, such as fronting, raising, extraction and extraposition, as stated by McCarthy (1991). These movements allow for different arrangements in the information distribution, while the propositional content of the sentences remains unchanged.

»These different clause arrangements can be illustrated in the following examples:

»4a) Martha brought the parcel yesterday.

»4b) The parcel was brought by Martha yesterday.

»4c) It was Martha who brought the Parcel yesterday.

»4d) Yesterday Martha brought the parcel.

»4e) Yesterday it was Martha who brought the parcel.

»Though the semantic proposition remains the same in sentences 4(a) to (e), they present different elements as theme, generating different syntactic arrangements: the use of the passive voice, or the use of a cleft or a pseudo cleft, for example. Having diverse structures, those propositions do not all fit exactly the same communicative contexts. For example, in response to “What did Martha bring yesterday? Propositions 4(a) and (d) are the most suitable. In another context, ‘What about the parcel?’ choosing “parcel” as subject would be appropriate, for example, as in the passive structure 4(b).

»Canale comments on the following example in Widdowson (1978):

»5a) SPEAKER A: What did the rain do?

»5b) SPEAKER B: The crops were destroyed by the rain.

»According to Canale, B’s reply is grammatical and sociolinguistically appropriate; however, it does not attach well to A’s question, since there is violation, at the discourse level, of the normal organization of sentences in texts written in English in which the topic (shared information) precedes the comment (new information):

»This principle of discourse restricts the grammatical form of utterances that can co-occur with A’s question, filtering out compatible forms from incompatible ones, regardless of their grammaticality and sociolinguistic appropriateness. This interaction of grammatical, sociolinguistic and discourse rules is suggestive of the complexity of communicative competence. (Canale, 1983, p. 10).

[NOTES]

»[NOTE 2] A lot of psycholinguistic research that use referential priming and perceptual priming aimed at confirming the effect of visual focus on the choice of linguistic structural elements (Tomlin, 1995).

»[NOTE 3] Other linguistic phenomena that specifically relate language to our cognitive capacity of attention are, for instance, topicalization and narrative structure. See Tenuta and Lepesqueur (2011) for this discussion.

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