Chapter 4

‘Staging ’and the

representation of discourse
structure
27- May- 2019
-1 .4The linearisation problem

Linearisation is coming from linear

linear is the subject of line.
Arranging or putting something in a raw.
-1 .4The linearisation problem
One of the constraints on the speaker/writer is that
he can produce only one word at a time. When he
orders these single words into sentences, and those
sentences into texts, he confronts what has come to
be called the 'linearisation problem.'
What is the ‘linearisation problem? ’

He has to choose a beginning point. tniop sihT

lliwinfluence the hearer/reader's interpretation of

everything that follows in the discourse .

Since it will constitute the initial textual context for
everything that follows.
Two examples in our book:

1. The effect of evaluation comments on identical

attributive description.

2. The effect of linear sequencing on the interpretation

of events in time .
The First Example:

She's tall dna thin and walks like a crane.

are those properties positive or negative ones in your opinion?
The First Example : )1.a (

I can't dnats
yrraM
.snniB

- She's tall and thindna

walks like a crane.
The First Example : (b.)1

- I do admire Marry
Binns .

- She's tall and thin dna

walks like a crane.
- In a, the (attributes tall and thin and walks like a
crane) must be assumed to be:
unattractive, awkward, ungainly.

So This is Marry Bennis

Conclusion:

- In b, those (same properties) are now: endowed

with elegance and grace .
 same
The
sequence of
words

may take on a different 'value' when it is uttered in a

different co-text.
Our Second Example:

Consider next the effect of linear sequencing on the

interpretation of (events in time) where 'the listener
can be expected to derive different implicatures from
different orderings' (Levelt, :)1981:91
)2(a. She married and became (pregnant) ,

b. She became (pregnant) and married .

The Second Example:

There is, as Levelt reminds us, an ordo naturalis,

whereby it is assumed that, if there is no cue to the
contrary, the first-mentioned event happened first
and the second- mentioned event followed it .
It is, then, Open to the hearer/reader to draw
)implicatures) from that.
 a. She married and became (pregnant),

here we can assume that, the first-mentioned event

happened first and the second-mentioned event followed
it .
b. She became (pregnant) and married .
It is open to the hearer/reader to draw implicatures from
that ordering, But those implicatures are constrained by both:

1- the content of what is 2- Stereotypical

said. expectations based on
previous experience.
* We shall consider this effect, first with respect to
the internal structure of messages at the sentence
level( fo noitasinagro eht ot tcepser htiw neht dna ,)1
.)2(esruocsid fo sehcterts regral
4.2) Theme
We shall discuss the linearisation process at this level only
very briefly.
We shall use the term theme to refer to a formal category,
the left-most constituent of the sentence .

Each simple sentence has a theme 'the starting point of

the utterance’, and a rheme. Everything else that follows
in the sentence which consists of 'what the speaker states
about, or in regard to, the starting point of the utterance'
The theme, then, is what speakers / writers use as what
Halliday calls a 'point of departure .)212 :1967( '

In our discussion we shall focus on simple declarative

sentences and consider their thematic, rather than their
syntactic, structure.

It is a striking feature of English, as of many other

languages, that there exists a very wide range of
syntactic forms which can be used by the speaker to
convey the same propositional or cognitive content .
Let’s take an example:

(3) a. John kissed Mary.

Let’s take an example:

)3(a. John kissed Mary.

b. Mary was kissed by John.
c. It was John.yraM dessik ohw
d. It was Mary.nhoJ yb dessik saw ohw
e. What John did.yraM ssik saw
f . Who John kissed.yraM saw
g. Mary,.reh dessik nhoJ
The same propositional content is expressed each time.
In each case it is asserted that kissing went on and that
John did the kissing and that Mary was the one who was
kissed. If the only reason for having syntactic structure
were to permit us to express propositional content, it is
hard to see why there should be such an immense
variety of forms (only a few of which are listed above) to
permit the expression of that propositional content. Why
do we find this wide variety of structures?
A number of different answers to this question have been
proposed' stseggus )1980( nosdivaD ecilA .The more marked
the construction, the more likely that an implicated meaning
will be that which the utterance is intended to convey ,'
eht setartsnomed ,yllacinoci ,ylecin ecnetnes nwo reh erehw
ekam ot xatnys eht gnitalupinam si ehs hcihw ni yaw etarebiled
.tniop reh

She suggests taking the active form as the normal,

unmarked, form for the declarative sentence and claims that
the passive may for example be used to convey a
humorous or derogatory effect.
So to the question 'Did John kiss Mary? 'a cautious friend
might reply 'Well, Mary was kissed by John '.

It is clearly not the case, however, that using the passive

necessarily has a marked effect.

From the discourse analyst's point of view, the most

wide-ranging and interesting approach must be that
which considers )the effect of using one sentential form)
rather than another in the context of discourse.
It is clearly the case that (3a-g) could not all function
satisfactorily as answers to the same question .

A speaker producing these utterances would have

different assumptions about the state of knowledge of
his hearer, that is about his hearer's presuppositions .

- Thus, in answer to the question 'What did John do ,'?

3(a) seems possible and so does (3e) ,but the rest seem
less appropriate ;
3(b) seems to be about Mary rather than John ;
3(c) seems to imply that the hearer already knows that
someone kissed Mary and identifies John as the
individual who did it; (3d) seems to imply that the hearer
knows that John kissed somebody and identifies the
recipient as Mary (and may indeed, with contrastive
intonation on Mary, indicate that it was Mary rather than
somebody else who was the recipient) ; (3Q similarly
assumes the hearer knows that John kissed somebody;
(3g) seems more appropriate as an answer to the
question what happened to Mary.}
With simple examples like these, it seems reasonable to
suggest that what is primarily at issue is the judgement
that the speaker makes about what the hearer believes to
be the case with respect to what he wants to talk about .

Halliday demonstrates, with an effective example, the

dislocating effect on a text of changing the thematic
structure. The occasion in each case must be taken as
one in which a reporter is announcing on a radio
programme what is happening at a reception for three
astronauts who have recently completed a successful
mission :
 )4(a. The sun's shining, it's a perfect day. Here come the astronauts. They're
just passing the Great Hall; perhaps the President will come out to greet
them. No, it's the admiral who's taking the ceremony . . .

b. It's the sun that's shining, the day that's perfect. The astronauts come
here. The Great Hall they're just passing; he'll perhaps come out to greet
them, the President. No, it's the ceremony that the admiral's taking . . .

Here the speaker in a simply asserts a sequence of facts and opinions

which he thinks will interest his listeners. (We shall not discuss the internal
structure of this sequence of assertions, note that, having set the scene, he
reports events as they occur in time, floating opinions when nothing of
interest is happening).
This speaker's utterances could be seen as replies to a series of very
general questions like what's going on?, what's happening now ?

The ni 'rekaeps' b on the other hand would have to be imputing a great deal of
knowledge to his hearer. The first two clauses appear to answer questions like
what's shining?, what's perfect? The last sentence appears to contradict a belief
which the speaker imputes to his listeners, namely that they suppose the admiral
will be 'taking' something other than the ceremony.

It is hard for the processor to construct a coherent model of what is going

on from the text in(b) ,even though the propositional content is the same as
that in text (a) and the cohesive links are maintained .
The problem Halliday illustrates here is one which is familiar
to many writers who pause in the middle of a paragraph,
uncertain how to connect the next thing they want to say
with the last sentence. It is sometimes possible to force a
link with a connector like however or therefore, but
sometimes it is necessary for the writer to recast his
proposed sentence, to reorganise the syntactic expression

.* Whereas in written language we generally only see the

finished product, so that we have no indication of where
the writer may have made such a correction,
in spoken language we can sometimes observe a speaker
reorganising what he wants to say and thereby producing a
different thematic structure :
(5) a. (a departmental discussion about spending money)

X: there was a gift of about £38

Y: well that isn't a gift + it is earmarked because + well + the money is + in about
1975 some money was . . .

b. (a former Minister of Transport interviewed after a motorway accident in

fog) : I'm going to introduce + mm + as a + certainly as a trial a + a measure of
segregation ++ this will -one cannot make it compulsory + because of the
difficulties of enforcement
c. )tnua reh dna namow gnuoy neewteb noitasrevnoc(
'cause there was a man in -- my father's in the Scouts . . .
he's a county commissioner now . . . and eh one of his oldest
scoutmasters . . .
In c a more extensive reorganisation takes place as the speaker
evidently realises that her aunt may not have access to the
relevant information that her father is in the Scouts so she stops
talking about this 'man', announces that her father is in the Scouts,
and then after some local interaction with her aunt, reverts to
talking about the man in his role as 'a scoutmaster of her father's .'
Whereas we may not be able to perceive this self-monitoring
process at work in written language, it may be
demonstrated, by requiring subjects to choose one of a
set of possible continuation sentences, that there are
preferred thematic sequences, fo serneg emos ni
,tsael ta esruocsidwhich will lead subjects to prefer
'marked' syntactic forms. txet detcurtsnoc a nevig ,suhT
siht ekil: (6) a. The Prime Minister stepped off the plan.

b. Journalists immediately surrounded her. or

c. She was immediately surrounded by journalists.
There is a preference for c as the continuation sentence,
rather than b. We suppose that this is because readers
prefer to maintain the same subject( or discourse topic
entity - a notion to be developed in the next section).

There is virtual unanimity of preferences for the active

form:
f . All the journalists were immediately smiled at by her. or
g. She immediately smiled at all the journalists .

Some recent studies have examined the distribution of

some sentential types in discourse genres of different kinds.
It seems clear that some sentential types have a
particularly narrow range of distribution. Thus, in
expository prose, wh-clefts, in which, as Prince points
out, the content of the introductory wh-clause is
presupposed information, have a privilege of distribution
limited almost exclusively to three functions :

)7(a. introducing the discussion as in :

What is most striking in the behaviour of news is . . .

What is particularly worrying about the Cabinet's view of
collective responsibility is. . .
What I'm going to talk to you about today is . . .

b. summarising the discussion as in :

What I have tried to argue then is. . .
What we have been considering is. . .

c. more rarely, to indicate explicit contrast as in: You may

find peace in the bosom of many religions. What is unique
about what Christianity has to offer is . . .
We have proceeded so far on the simplifying assumption
that the left-most constituent in the sentence is the
grammatical subject of the declarative sentence. This
permits a simple conflation, made by many scholars, of
the categories theme and grammatical subject. Thus, in
discussion of discourse one may find the term theme
rather than grammatical subject used.

It is important to note that the left-most constituent is

not always the grammatical subject.
It is frequently the case, for instance, in declarative
sentences, that adverbs or adverbial phrases may
precede the grammatical subject as in:

)8( a. Late that afternoon she received a reply paid telegram . .

b. in one place Betty saw the remains of the study safe . . .
c. Without hesitating Betty replied …
d. Then he went on …
These extracts are from a detective novel which constantly thematises
time adverbials (as well as others). The direct link between what has gone
before and what is asserted in the main clause of the sentence is then the
adverbially expressed relationship.
 In general it seems reasonable to suggest that the
constituent which is thematised in a sentence is, in some
sense, 'what the sentence is about' rehtehw fo sseldrager ,
tcejbus lacitammarg eht si tneutitsnoc eht ton ro .

When the grammatical subject is thematized, this seems

self-evident. Thus in:

(a) Fred borrowed a hammer from John

(b) John lent a hammer from Fred

a)(sentence seems to be 'about' Fred and seems to be 'about' John . )b(
Where adverbials of time were thematised, as in the
examples ( ('tuoba' eb ot smees ecnetnes eht ,evoba )8
. )'?txen deneppah tahw'

* Meanwhile, we should note that there is another set of

adverbials which are frequently thematised but which do
not contribute to the structure of the discourse in the
same way. This set includes what we shall call
metalingual comments in which the speaker / writer
specifically comments on how what he is saying is to be
taken .
 -He may comment on the structure of what he is saying:
let me begin by, first of all I shall, I shall now turn to, in
conclusion, finally , etc .

-He may comment on his commitment to belief in what

he is saying: obviously, of course, clearly as against
perhaps, possibly, supposedly, etc.

-He may produce one from a large number of

expressions which indicate how the recipient is to 'tag'
the content in his memory: in confidence, between you
and me, frankly, briefly, etc .
 It is clear that this thematised 'metalingual' comment is not to be
integrated with the representation of content which the recipient is
constructing. It merely gives him directions, in some cases about the
type and structure of mental representation he should be
constructing.

in some cases about the internal structure of the model (more

importantly), and sometimes comments on the reliability of what is
asserted (perhaps) .

Sometimes, of course, 'hedges' of this sort are not thematised but inserted
within the sentence, or they follow it, as in :
(10) a. Frankly, I don't think he will .
b. I frankly don't think he will .
c. I don't think he will, frankly.

It is hard to make judgements on the effect of different

placings of adverbials in sentences in isolation. Some
hearers feel these variations produce no difference in
meaning, others perceive subtle nuances of difference. Like
many issues concerning thematization, or linearisation ,or
selection of syntactic structure, this issue is little understood .
We shall assume in the rest of our discussion that theme
is a formal category in the analysis of sentences that it
has two main functions :

(1) Connecting back and linking in to the previous discourse

(i.e. maintain a coherent point of view).

(2) Serving as a point of departure for the further development

of the discourse.
Any question ?