Global coherence, narrative structure, and expectations of relevance--论文代写范文精选

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Abstract 
A topic for both literary studies and discourse analysis is the global structure of texts. Studies of global text structure have largely been focused on narrative structure, where a major strand of research has been devoted to the role which grounding (sometimes called information staging or foreground-background articulation) has for discourse structuring. It is often claimed that grounding is an important aspect of the notion of global coherence, that the overt realisation of grounding effects in texts depend on their genre and that this is generally reflected in the verbal system of natural languages (e.g. Caenepeel 1995; Hooper 1998; Hopper 1979; Fleischmann 1985; 1990; Longacre 1983; 1989). 

However, the notions of foreground and background are notoriously vague. In this paper I will argue for an alternative account of grounding effects based on the relevancetheoretic claim that the fine-tuning of the addressee's expectations of relevance is an essential part of the on-line processing of complex ostensive stimuli such as texts (Unger 2001). Linguistic and non-linguistic clues can be used to point the addressee to gradations in information grounding within a text in ways which far extend the coding resources of natural languages. This account may provide an explanatory account for Gumperz' (1992) "contextualization clues" and thus open up a new line of interdisciplinary interaction of relevance-theoretic pragmatics with some strands of research in ethnomethodology. It also suggests the idea that the emergence of literary form may be facilitated by the relevance-orientedness of cognition and communication which suggests that the more clues the communicator can give for fine-tuning the addressee's expectation of relevance in complex stimuli, the better chance of successful communication he has, which in turn motivates the use of communicative clues far beyond the coding resources of given natural languages as well as adherence to cultural conventions regarding the form of texts.

The global structure of texts: grounding 
Two important theoretical questions which are asked both in pragmatics (or discourse analysis) and literary studies are: (a) what makes a text more than a string of sentences, and (b) what makes a text into a good and effective one? These questions lie at the heart of research in "global coherence". This notion has been approached in number of different ways. In this paper I want to focus on that strand of research which regards as crucial differences in importance of the information conveyed in the sentences of a text, or in other words: distinctions in information grounding in text.

Theories of foreground and background 
First, we need to look at the notions of grounding, i.e. foreground and background, in more detail. At least eight approaches to defining the notions foreground and background can be traced in the literature. This quote seems to suggest that an account of foreground and background should in the end be given in a framework of pragmatics following broadly Gricean lines. Notice that this account relies on undefined pragmatic notions such 'communicative goals' and 'relevance'. A clear account of the notion of 'relevance' would be crucial here, since 'foreground' is linked to that information which is 'more relevant than others' in the sense of contributing more crucially to the speaker's goal. Notice further that the notions of 'foreground' and 'relevance' are closely linked, if not equated. This in turn suggests that the notion of grounding may actually be subsumed under that of relevance. To see where this direction might lead let me now turn to the theory of relevance of Sperber & Wilson (1995), which gives a cognitive substance to the notion of relevance.

Complex stimuli and expectations of relevance 
A's question makes it manifest that B's answer will most likely extend over many utterances. In other words: at the point were B begins the answer, the expectations of relevance raised concern among others the complexity of the stimulus which is about to be produced. Recall that the presumption of optimal relevance is communicated by ostensive stimuli. Ostensive stimuli can differ in terms of complexity: a single gesture or the utterance of a single word such as Telephone! may constitute an ostensive stimulus. However, if I want to explain to my son how to use a certain toy, I may say This part goes on top of the other one like this and demonstratively put the parts in place at the same time. 

This is a more complex stimulus involving verbal and non-verbal parts. 6 Finally, consider the case of a master explaining to his apprentice how to exchangethe shock-absorbers of a car. In this case the complexity is not only that the stimulus contains verbal and non-verbal aspects, but also that from the beginning it is clear that it will extend over quite some time. My proposal is to view texts as complex ostensive stimuli in this sense. Expectations of relevance are raised by ostensive stimuli as a whole. For ostensive stimuli that means that no single part of the stimulus has to meet strong expectations of relevance so long as the whole stimulus does. Applied to texts, this means that utterances which do not achieve a lot of cognitive effects, may be tolerated - so long as they do play a role in establishing the relevance of other parts of the text in an economic way. Furthermore, economy considerations of processing predict that some such low-effect utterances may even be necessary to enhance overall relevance, if placed in the right spot (Blass 1990). 

Let us now say that foreground utterances in a text are those which mostly contribute to the recovery of (positive) cognitive effects. Background utterances are those that contribute to overall relevance way by making the recovery of cognitive effects of later utterances easier (e.g. by raising the accessibility of contextual assumptions or raising more determinate expectations of relevance for later utterances). This is a natural extension of Sperber & Wilson's 1995 account of foreground and background implications of sentences. Thus, the notion of grounding is no longer a theoretical primitive but a purely descriptive label for effects of processing a text for relevance. In this way, relevance theory can account for the first claim of grounding theory given in (4) immediately: ostensive stimuli whose every parts are supposed to achieve lots of cognitive effects are likely to be hard to process, because it is likely that many different contexts will have to be accessed. The use of low-effect utterances at the right time can enhance the effect-effort balance of the whole stimulus.

Notice furthermore that this characterisation of foreground and background is acontinuous one: every utterance can contribute to cognitive effects or to the fine-tuning of relevance expectations in different degrees. This is in line with several points made in the literature to the effect that the foreground-background distinction is most likely not a binary one, (Van Kuppevelt, Longacre, Fleischmann) and may even be a continuous scale (Fleischmann). The second sentence seems to be more backgrounded than the first clause of the third sentence (less important). Similarly, the last sentence has more of an auxiliary flavour than the second last one.

Explaining the linguistic realisation of foreground and background information 
Let us now turn to the question whether the suggested relevance-theoretic account of grounding can account for the connection of grounding to linguistic form (claim 2 of grounding theory in (4)). On the inferential theory of communication as adopted in relevance theory, linguistic form is one piece of the evidence from which the audience is to infer the communicator's informative intention. Linguistic form can in principle contribute this evidence by coding some information. The repetition of 'very' does not in itself encode 'emphasis' or anything else. However, since the repetition of 'very' increases processing effort, the audience will be caused to look for some further cognitive effects that would offset the processing effort incurred. These can be found by assuming that the speaker wanted to convey his extraordinary satisfaction which he got from this trip (and for which there may be no resources available to encode it). 

The form of an utterance can interact directly with it's pragmatic interpretation, not necessarily through the mediation of a level of coded representations. Consider now examples (2) and (3). It is mutually manifest that the communicator is recounting something which happened to her in the past. So the audience's expectations of relevance will include the one that the communicator will describe events. Therefore an utterance which describes a past state rather than an event will not be taken to contribute directly to the relevance of the text. This is why the audience will take the last sentence in both examples as 'backgrounded.' But the difference is that in (3) this information is presented in a linguistic form which is standardly used to encode non-event predicates, whereas in (2) the linguistic form of the predicate is neutral with respect to predicate type. In other words: in (3), there are two properties of the utterance which lead the audience to interpret it as contributing to over-all relevance in ways other than achieving cognitive effects of the mainly expected type (past events): first, the semantics of the predicate, and second, the linguistic form of the predicate, and they lead to the same direction.

In this case the event 'Our going to a museum' might easily be taken as a main event, but it is intended not to be construed in this way. This 'backgrounding' effect is achieved by using a linguistic form which does not normally encode event-type predicates. Thus, the linguistic form points the audience in a different direction from what might be expected from the semantic content alone. Assuming that not all events in a narrative are likely to be highly foregrounded (an assumption that follows from the communicative principle of relevance), the audience can more easily process this utterance in the intended way than had this pointer not been used. Notice that the linguistic form of the verb does not achieve this interpretive effect by means of coding; it encodes only aspectual information. However, in a context where manifest expectations of relevance (recounting past events) highlight the importance of predicate-type or aspectual information for processing, linguistic forms relating to these features may be exploited by the communicator to help the audience finding the intended path of interpretation.

Concluding remarks 
In this paper I have argued that grounding effects in discourse can be accounted for by the way in which ostensive stimuli are processed over time in the search for relevance. In ostensive stimuli, some parts (utterances) may contribute contribute to over-all relevance by yielding cognitive effects which satisfy the expectations of relevance raised by the whole stimulus; others may modify such expectations and make the derivation of cognitive effects easier. To the extent that utterances contribute to the overall relevance of the stimulus in the former way, they are said to convey foreground information. Since grounding is a derivative notion, and a purely processingbased (functional) one, it is not encoded in language. However, various linguistic and non-linguistic means may be used to guide the hearer's path in utterance interpretation in subtle ways.（essay代写)

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