Discourse analysis, lecture 7 May 2012 Carina Jahani

Participant introduction Major participants Minor participants Named participants Anonymous participants Oral narratives (non-literary) Oral literary narratives Written literary narratives

Four ways of introduction Once upon a time, a donkey and a camel were left behind at the time of migration… Once upon a time there was a tiny, tiny chicken named Chicken Little… Pelle är arg, jag han är så till den grad arg… He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty- four days now without taking a fish…

Props ”non-human or human entities which are less prominent…around the scenery of the story and which do not interact in any way with the other participants.”

Activation status Active (persons, props, concepts) currently in focus, in the reader/listener’s consciousness at this very moment Accessible (persons, props, concepts) currently not in focus, but in the reader/listener’s peripheral consciousness (in the text, in the situation, common knowledge) Inactive (persons, props, concepts) in the reader/listener’s long term memory

Definite and indefinite referents a definite referent is one which the speaker assumes that the hearer will be able to identify, i.e. to be able to locate in his/her current mental representation an indefinite referent is one for which the speaker is instructing the hearer to create a slot (Chafe 1976: 55 in Roberts 2009: 68)

Further reference to activated particpants Crucial factors: semantic: indentify the referents unambiguously pragmatic: signaling the activation status and prominence of the referents processing: overcome disruptions in the flow of information

Language specific options full noun phrase (Swedish, English, German, French, Russian, Spanish, Persian, Balochi) pronoun (Swedish, English, German, French, Russian, Spanish, Persian, Balochi) enclitic pronoun (Persian, Balochi) Ø reference ([Swedish, English, Russian] Spanish, Persian, Balochi) Note however, that there is a huge difference between pro-drop and gapping.

Default encoding of subjects S1 = subject is the same as previous clause or sentence S2 = subject is the addressee of a speech reported in the previous sentence S3 = subject was involved in the previous sentence, in a non subject role and not as the addressee S4 = other roles (including when the subject is part of the subject in the previous sentence)

Heavier (marked) ecoding at the beginning of a narrative unit for highlighting

Lighter encoding For a VIP

Encoding - Pelle Global VIP – important throughout the story (discard direct speech) Default Marked

L2 applications Bohnacker-Rosén and Bohnacker. Corpus based studies. Genre important. ”pre-field” (left dislocated and fronted)

Findings in L1 corpus Subject versus adverbials (Bohnacker-Rosén 2008: 517) Information flow. ”det” subject to keep new information as comment (rheme). fronted objects adverbials

Interesting findings Cf. Table 2 and Table 6 in Bohnacker-Rosén (2008: 517, 528). ”Swedish has a stronger tendency than German to fill the prefield with a (thematic) subject or a phonologically light all-purpose element of low information value…to establish textual coherence. German also allows these options but often places rhematic subjects - as well as phonologically heavier object and adverbial constitutents, including morphologically complex thematic pronominal adverbs and a range of connective and sentence adverbials - in the prefield.”

L2 implications ”The results indicate that the learners, both at lower and higher proficiency levels, have problems with the acquisition of the German- specific linguistic means that have an impact on information structuring.”

L2 implications Bohnacker (2010) finds that the opposite problem is encountered in the production of L2 Swedish learners with L1 German. ”The learners generally produce fewer subject- initial clauses and more object-initial clauses than the Swedish native speakers.”