16.2153, Review: Pragmatics/Discourse: Gonz àlez (2004)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-2153. Wed Jul 13 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.2153, Review: Pragmatics/Discourse: Gonzàlez (2004)

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1)
Date: 13-Jul-2005
From: Annamaria Cacchione < enfatica at tin.it >
Subject: Pragmatic Markers in Oral Narrative 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2005 17:14:12
From: Annamaria Cacchione < enfatica at tin.it >
Subject: Pragmatic Markers in Oral Narrative 
 

AUTHOR: Gonzàlez, Montserrat
TITLE: Pragmatic Markers in Oral Narrative
SUBTITLE: The case of English and Catalan
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2004
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-2775.html


Annamaria Cacchione, Dipartimento di Studi Filologici Linguistici e Letterari,
Università di Roma "La Sapienza"

The book "Pragmatic Markers in Oral Narrative" is the account of an 
experimental research about the actual use of the most common pragmatic 
markers (henceforth PM) made by native speakers of English and Catalan in 
their oral narratives of personal experience. Its point of interest comes 
from the fact that it represents a good example of meeting between 
theoretical issues, field research and methodological problems, making the 
book interesting even for scholars and researcher not directly involved in 
the specific themes carried out by the author.

The book is divided in two main parts: the former deals with the most 
important theoretical features of the issue -- like definitions, the 
relationship with the previous literature, the most suitable models to 
make reference to, the practical means by which the analysis is carried 
out -- in order to set up the proper theoretical framework and deal with 
the research provided with all the needed instruments; the latter shows 
the research findings, analysing them and coming to conclusions.

After a brief introduction that summarises the aims and the main 
hypothesis of the work, the author opens the book with the second chapter, 
in which defines the theoretical approach to discourse -- "at the 
interface between pragmatic functions of discourse markers and their 
repercussion in narrative discourse structure, so it [the study] takes 
both a functional and a formal approach" (p. 38) -- and presents the 
theoretical framework of the study, that is Labov's narrative model. The 
main aim of the study is to prove that PM have a very important role in 
the textual organisation of oral narratives, fixing a precise relationship 
between text genre and function, that are not generic but text-genre 
specific. But we have to consider that the study deals with a very 
particular kind of text, i. e. oral narrative of personal experience, 
representing both one of the most common type of oral texts and one of the 
most complex and interesting. According to Labov claims (see in particular 
Labov 1972 and Labov and Waletzky 1967, that are the main reference points 
of the study), PM play an essential  role in presenting events, not 
because they have any important referential meaning but because they fill 
one of the most important narrative functions: proving that the event is 
worth telling (and listening to) and  showing the hearer that the narrator 
was really in that situation. The author comes after to define some kind 
of narrative elements that are particularly important for the study. The 
most important category, introduced by Labov, is that of intensifiers, 
evaluative means used by narrators to show their perspective: the author 
proposes that some PM act as lexical intensifiers, "by selecting an event 
and highlighting its force" (p. 118).

In the third chapter PM are related with the notion of source of coherence 
and with the illocutionary potential force of the segment. Making a useful 
review of the main models of PM analysis -- made, more or less directly, 
by authors like Schiffrin, Redeker, Grosz and Sidner, Sperber and Wilson, 
Roulet -- it comes out that PM have the essential functions to organise 
and structure the developing of narratives, and are necessary for the 
correct interpretation of what is narrated. So the author identify 23 
different functions of PM grouped under 4 discourse components: rhetorical 
(related to the speaker intentions), sequential (related to structural 
features), ideational (related to the ideas of the text) and inferential 
(related to the cognitive context).

Chapter four is the hinge between the theoretical part and the 
experimental one, and it explains how the research has been made. The 
author specifies in fact what she means with oral narrative: while most of 
the studies on discourse markers are based on conversational discourse and 
text, she worked on monologue discourses, since they are part of a 
elicited text with minimum of speaker-hearer interaction, because the 
hearer/interviewer does not interrupt the speaker until the narrative is 
ended, so what comes out is a long textual piece that can be assimilated 
to a monologue discourse. These discourses (40 in all, 20 in English and 
20 in Catalan) were elicited following the pattern of sociolinguistic 
interview, choosing the Danger of Death question (Labov 1972) in the 
form:  "Have you ever been in a situation where you thought you were in a 
serious danger?". In so doing, the aim is to get over the problems related 
to the "principle of formality" and the "observer's paradox", that is 
obtaining spontaneous language in spite of the formal context and of the 
presence of an observer. 

Making a comparison between English and Catalan, the study has a 
contrastive approach, related mainly to the lack of data about Catalan 
markers, while about English ones there is a wide literature that can help 
to enlighten the different aspects of the elements investigated. 
Accordingly, the author carefully examines all the aspects related to 
these issues, due to their importance in achieving valid and meaningful 
findings, but her choice not to give so much importance to the fact that 
the interviewers of the English informants were not native speakers of 
English, while the ones of the Catalan informants were, is not so 
persuasive, since there are many important potential negative effect due 
to the foreigner talk that non-native interviewers can generate in their 
interviewed/informants, even the author herself pinpoints that there are 
no evidence of affecting the structure of the narrative coming from this 
kind of interference.

The last part of the chapter shows the transcription system of data, made 
in CHAT format provided by the CHILDES project (MacWhinney 1995), by now 
the most useful and actually used system of encoding and sharing data. In 
order to categorise in the best way the data collected, the author has 
utilised several options provided by the system; in particular, she has 
coded narrative segments using Labovian labels (e.g. abstract, 
orientation, complicating action, evaluation, result, coda) as different 
kind of gem, and has introduced 3 dependent tiers: %dia, defining exactly 
the narrative segment in which the PM occur, %pra, signalling the 
pragmatic function of discourse marker (including 23 codes, corresponding 
to the functions defined in chapter 3: e.g. delaying or adding 
information, introducing direct speech, reformulating etc.) and %syn, in 
order to specify the syntactic position of the PM.

In chapters five, six and seven there are the analysis respectively of the 
English, Catalan and contrastive data. The analysis of English data 
considers the PM "well, so, then, I mean, you know, anyway" according to 
the four discourse components and to narrative segments, and the same 
thing is done for Catalan PM "bé, bueno, clar, doncs, llavors, aleshores, 
no, eh". The contrastive study shows that the two languages share the same 
high concentration of PM in the action and evaluation segments, but 
Catalan uses them three time more, probably because of the syntactic-
semantic differences between the languages. So there are several 
differences also in the distribution of PM: both English and Catalan PM 
belong most of all to the rhetorical and the sequential component, but for 
Catalan follow inferential and ideational ones, while for English the 
order is inverted. The author ends up the book setting the new hypothesis 
that this last mentioned difference means a clear relationship between 
ideational structure and referential meaning of PM, and that Catalan PM 
have undergone a longer grammaticalization process, becoming more 
semantically opaque than the English ones.

Apart from the last considerations, which certainly need more 
investigation, the main results of the study is that of clearly showing 
the real nature of PM. Far from being mere fillers without any specific 
meaning, usable in each part of each text genre, the research has in fact 
proved that they are polyfunctional elements highly specialised in some 
dominant functions, that they are deeply context-dependent and so, there 
is no kind of arbitrary use of markers within a text. We can recognise a 
clear tendency of each PM to occur in certain narrative segments and for 
certain functions: for example, "so" and "then" are frequent in action 
segments while "I mean" in evaluation ones, "bé" and "aleshores" in 
sequential units, "you know" works often as inference facilitator, as 
do "no, eh, clar" etc.

As highlighted by the author, the functioning of PM establishes 
relationships with several important general issues, from text structure 
to pragmatic language use, from lexical analysis to syntactical 
consideration, and this is the reason why PM are so interesting. In this 
sense, even if there are some passages in the book concerning the 
cognitive side of the question, it can be noted that this link is not so 
deeply developed as it should be, taking into considerations the many and 
rich implications that this kind of study could have, e. g. for language 
acquisition and the construction of the point-of-view-system. Since the 
study is based on narrative structures, maybe the reference to Bruner 
researches could have been more developed, but, anyway, this could be 
material for further studies.

REFERENCES

Bruner, J. (1986) Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, Harvard 
University Press.

Grosz, B. J. and Sidner, C. L. (1986) Attention, intentions, and the 
structure of discourse. In "Computational Linguistics" 12 (3). 

Labov, W. (1972) The Transformation of Experience in Narrative Syntax. In 
Language in the Inner City. Philadelphia, University Of Pennsylvania 
Press. 

Labov, W. and Waletzky, J. (1967) Narrative Analysis: Oral Version of 
Personal Experience. In Helm, J. (ed.) Essay on the Verbal and Visual 
Arts. Seattle, University of Washington Press.

MacWhinney, B. (1995) The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analizing Talk. 
Hillsdale, New Jersey, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers. 

Redeker, G. (1990) Ideational and Pragmatic Markers of Discourse 
Structure. In "Journal of Pragmatics" 14, pp. 367-381.

Roulet, E. (1997) A modular approach to discourse structures. 
In "Pragmatics" 7:2, pp. 125-146. 

Schiffrin, D. (1987) Discourse Markers. Cambridge University Press.

Sperber, S. and Wilson, D. (1986) Relevance: Communication and Cognition. 
Oxford, Basil Blackwell. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Annamaria Cacchione has obtained the Ph.D. in Linguistics and Second 
Language Teaching at the University of Foreigners of Siena (Italy) with a 
dissertation about reported speech in spontaneous Italian as L2 speech. 
She teaches Technical and Academic Writing at the University of Rome "La 
Sapienza". Her research interest are: reported speech, first and second 
language acquisition, written and spoken language, theory on mind and 
language.





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