On Grounding in Discourse

[Teun A. van Dijk]

Replying to Nobuko Koyama-Murakami's posting of Wed 3 Feb on how
"grounding" is manifested in narrative discourse, this is merely to
inform those interested in this topic that Esam Khalil (from the
Catholic University in Nijmegen --KHALIL at WXS.NL) just last friday
defended his doctoral thesis, written under my supervision here in
Amsterdam, on grounding in English and Arabic news discourse. Apart from
providing a detailed analysis of linguistic grounding phenomena in
sentence initial position in Arabic, his study especially tries to
clarify the (rather vague) notion of grounding, by defining it in
semantic terms (relative importance of meanings), and distinguishing it
from its surface manifestations (salience, prominence), its pragmatic or
contextual dimension (relevance for users) and its cognitive basis
(importance of information, e.g. in terms of mental models in episodic
memory). I think that especially this theoretical part of his study may
also be relevant for those work in literary or other forms of narrative,
and not only for the study of news in the press.

Teun A. van Dijk
University of Amsterdam
Program of Discourse Studies
210, Spuistraat
1012 VT Amsterdam, the Netherlands
E-mail: teun at hum.uva.nl
Web-site: www.hum.uva.nl/~teun