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richness, complexity and multiplicity of pragmatic and discourse meaning which conversational analysis allows, whilst retaining the predictive and explanatory power of pragmatics. 7. REASSESSING GRICE’S CO-OPERATIVE PRINCIPLE Attempts at applying pragmatic theory to stretches of naturally-occurring discourse have led to a general reassessment of Grice’s account of conversation, and of the status of the maxims in particular. Many commentators have noted that Grice’s maxims of Quality, Quantity, Relation and Manner frequently overlap and are certainly not all of the same order. Assessments of truth or falsity (the maxim of quality), for example, can only be made in relation to the real world, whereas the maxim of Manner is textual (judgements regarding its observance or non-observance are made on the basis of linguistic criteria). It relates, in Grice’s terms: ‘…not to what is said but, rather, to how what is said is to be said.’ Observance of the maxim of Quality is a yes/no proposition, whereas the observance of the maxims of Manner and Quantity is usually a matter of degree. How well-ordered is ‘orderly’? How prolix is ‘prolixity’? How much information is ‘enough information’? The ways in which a speaker can observe or fail to observe the CP (‘infringing’, ‘flouting’, ‘violating’, ‘opting out’, etc.— see section 1.3 above) vary greatly from maxim to maxim. The maxim of Manner, in particular, is frequently infringed unintentionally and (unlike the maxims of Quality and Quantity) it is difficult to violate it unobtrusively: speakers cannot disguise, for example, the fact that they are being muddled or repetitious (although an obscure or ambiguous expression may be used in order to mislead). ‘Opting out’ of the CP presents a particularly interesting case. When speakers explicitly opt out of observing a maxim, they provide privileged access to the way in which speakers do, as a rule, attend to the maxims. This in turn offers prima-facie evidence for Grice’s contention that there exists on the part of interactants a strong expectation that, ceteris paribus and unless indication is given to the contrary, the CP and the maxims will be observed. The frequency with which speakers explicitly opt out of observance of the maxim of Relation, and the comparative infrequency with which they opt out of the other maxims, suggests that it is of a different order from (and more important than) the others. But it is the status of the maxim of Relation which has excited most interest. Many writers (Bach and Harnish 1979, Bird 1979, Dascal 1977, Holdcroft 1979, Wilson and Sperber 1981) have commented on the over-arching importance of the maxim of Relation and several have gone on to argue that the CP itself should be replaced by a re-defined ‘Principle of Relevance’ (Dascal 1977, Holdcroft 1979, Swiggers 1981, Wilson and Sperber 1981): ‘…Grice’s maxims can be replaced by a single principle of relevance. In interpreting an utterance the hearer uses this principle as a guide, on the one hand towards correct disambiguation and assignment of reference, and on the other in deciding whether additional premises are needed, and if so what they are, or whether a figurative interpretation was intended. The principle of relevance on its own provides an adequate, and we think rather more explicit, account of all the implicatures which Grice’s maxims were set up to describe.’ (Wilson and Sperber 1981:171) The arguments most frequently proposed in favour of replacing the CP are: (1) that the CP already is, in essence, a Principle of Relevance. It is argued that it is not possible to find instances of implicatures being generated where the maxim of Relevance is not invoked; (2) that a redefined Principle of Relevance, unlike the CP, is not trivially true: although relevance can be shown to be an extremely powerful factor in utterance-interpretation, in that hearers will look very hard for relevance, there are occasions on which interactants will conclude that an utterance is not relevant (e.g. that a speaker is ‘talking past’ them) and that no conversation is taking place; (3) that forms of relevance (unlike ‘co-operation’) can, in principle, be specified and defined fairly precisely. Dascal (1977), Sanders (1980) and Thomas (1986) argue that it is necessary to distinguish different types of relevance. Sanders (1980:91–92) argues that there are at least four ways in which an expression can be relevant to an antecedent expression or expression-sequence (not counting word-play). Dascal argues that interactants operate with at least two quite distinct notions of relevance, including: AN ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF LANGUAGE 109 …a ‘pragmatic’ and a ‘semantic’ one. The former has to do with the relevance of speech acts to certain goals…the latter concerns the relevance of certain linguistic, logical, or cognitive entities, say, ‘propositions’ to others of the same type: its characterization,…involves concepts such as reference ‘aboutness’, meaning relations, entailment, etc…. (Dascal 1977:311) 8. RELEVANCE THEORY: SPERBER AND WILSON Perhaps the most significant development in pragmatics over the past few years has been the extensive treatment by Sperber and Wilson (1986) of relevance theory. Their book Relevance: Communication and Cognition (1986), while drawing on earlier work by the same authors, presents in effect a new paradigm for pragmatics, and more ambitiously, a new theory of communication. Their relevance theory is meant to account not only for the interpretation of individual utterances in context, but for stylistic effects, including given and new information, and the ‘special effects’ of metaphor and irony. (One of the claims of the theory, however, is that metaphor is not ‘special’, but requires for its interpretation no more than is required for a general approach to communication.) Communication is described as ostensive-inferential, since it is founded on the complementary concepts of ostension (the signal that the speaker has something to communicate) and inference (the logical process by which the addressee derives meaning). Grice’s intentional theory of meaning (see section 1.3) is recast in terms of: (a) An informative intention: the intention to make manifest or more manifest to the audience a certain set of assumptions. (b) A communicative intention: the intention to make mutually manifest to audience and communicator the communicator’s informative intention. Ostensive-inferential communication is described as follows: ‘…the communicator produces a stimulus which makes it mutually manifest to communicator and audience that the communicator intends, by means of this stimulus, to make manifest or more manifest to the audience a certain set of assumptions {I}.’ (Sperber and Wilson 1986:63) It will be noticed that the theory makes use of the term ‘manifestness’ (rather than the stronger term ‘knowledge’) in referring to information processed in the course of communication. An assumption may be ‘manifest’ to a person to varying degrees, and hence by saying that differing assumptions are manifest of different degrees, one allows for the phenomenon of ambivalence in communication (see section 5). Similarly, the term ‘assumption’ (rather than the term ‘proposition’) is used in referring to units of information. Assumptions, unlike propositions, allow for varying degrees of commitment to the truth. This retreat towards a weaker theory of communication is welcome when one considers the importance of ambivalence in the process of communication, and the difficulties which philosophers and pragmaticists have found in the seeming circularity associated with the concept of ‘mutual knowledge’. At the same time, Sperber and Wilson adhere to a rigorous conception of logical inference in explaining the ‘inferential’ aspect of communication. This means that they have the problem of explaining how, in spite of the recursive properties of logical inference, audiences in general are able to arrive at apt decisions about other meanings of utterances. The means of restricting the number of inferences drawn from an utterance, Sperber and Wilson argue, is the Principle of Relevance: Principle of Relevance: Every act of ostensive communication communicates the presumption of its own optimal relevance. The audience’s presumption of optimal relevance is explained as follows: (a) The set of assumptions I which the communicator intends to make manifest to the addressee is relevant enough to make it worth the addressee’s while to process the ostensive stimulus. (b) The ostensive stimulus is the most relevant one the communicator could have used to communicate I. From this definition, it is clear that relevance is a matter of degree: a position which is clarified by Sperber and Wilson’s ‘extent conditions’ on the nature and degree of relevance: Extent condition 1: an assumption is relevant in a context to the extent that its contextual effects in that context are large. 110 LANGUAGE, MEANING AND CONTEXT Extent conditions 2: an assumption is relevant in a context to the extent that the effort required to process it in that context is small. From these ‘extent conditions’, we learn that relevance is basically a trade-off between informativeness (cf. Grice’s maxim of Quantity) and processibility (cf. Grice’s maxim of Manner). It is necessary, however, to grasp that ‘contextual effects’ are basic to Sperber and Wilson’s theory of communication. If we think of contextual effects as information, we shall not go far wrong. More exactly, there are three types of contextual effects: (a) new assumptions (contextual implications); (b) strengthening of old assumptions; (c) elimination of old assumptions in favour of new assumptions which contradict them. Sperber and Wilson claim that ‘the Principle of Relevance applies without exception’—which is to say that human nature abhors a vacuum of sense— and that the ‘Principle of Relevance does all the work of Grice’s maxims and more…’ It is too early for an evaluation of Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory, but we can perhaps hazard the assertion that Sperber and Wilson have made the grandest possible claim for pragmatics: that pragmatics is to be equated with the general theory of communication, in which linguistics, conceived of as a theory of linguistic code (semantics, syntax, phonology) plays a relatively minor part. As the title of their book announces, theirs is a ‘cognitive’ theory of communication, which gives prominence to the psychological, rather than the sociological, perspective on communication. This brings a certain return to rigour, at the same time as it largely disregards the advances and insights into social description which have characterised the development of pragmatics in other areas. Nevertheless, relevance theory as propounded by Sperber and Wilson will no doubt be a major focus for future investigations into the nature of pragmatic meaning. In pragmatics, as in semantics, we need to strike a balance between the psychological and the sociological perspectives on the meaning of human language. If one may hazard a guess about the future, it is that the struggle between the linguistic psychologist and the linguistic sociologist will continue here, as elsewhere in the study of linguistic meaning and language use. REFERENCES Altieri, C. (1978) ‘What Grice offers literary theory: a proposal for “expressive implicature”,’ Centrum, 6 (2):90–103 Apostel, L. (1979) ‘Persuasive communication as metaphorical discourse under the guidance of conversational maxims’ in Logique et Analyse 22:265–320. Austin, J.L. (1962) How To Do Things With Words, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Bach, K. and Harnish, R. (1979) Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. Baker, C. (1975) ‘This is just a first approximation, but…’, Papers From the Chicago Linguistics Society, 11:37–47. Bar-Hillel, Y. (1970) Aspects of Language, North-Holland, Amsterdam. Bar-Hillel, Y. (1971) Pragmatics of Natural Language, Reidel, Dordrecht. Bird, G. (1979) ‘Speech acts and conversation—II’ Philosophical Quarterly, 29:142–52. Brockway, D. (1981) ‘Semantic constraints on relevance’, in Parret, H. et al. (eds) 1981:57–78. *Brown, P. and Levinson, S. (1987) Politeness: some universals in language usage, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. (Reissued and extended version of 1978 monograph.) Candlin, C.N. and Lucas, J.L. (1986) ‘Modes of counselling in family planning’, in Ensink, T. et al. (eds) Discourse in Public Life, Foris, Dordrecht. Carnap, R. (1942) Introduction to Semantics, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. Carnap, R. (1955) ‘On Some Concepts of Pragmatics’, Philosophical Studies, 6:89–91. Cole, P. (ed.) (1978) Syntax and Semantics, 9: Pragmatics, Academic Press, New York. Cole, P. and Morgan, J.L. (eds) (1975) Syntax and Semantics, 3: Speech Acts, Academic Press, New York. Dascal, M. (1977) ‘Conversational relevance’, Journal of Pragmatics, 4:309–28. *Dascal, M. (1983) Pragmatics and the Philosophy of Mind I: Thought in Language, Benjamins, Amsterdam. Edmondson, W.J. (1979) ‘Harris on performatives’, Journal of Linguistics, 15:331–4. Fairclough, N.L. (1985) ‘Critical and descriptive goals in discourse analysis’, Journal of Pragmatics, 9:739–63. Fotion, N. (1971) ‘Master speech acts.’ Philosophical Quarterly, 21:232–43. Fotion, N. (1981) ‘I’ll bet you $10 that betting is not a speech act.’, in Parret, H. et al.: 211–23. Fraser, B. (1978) ‘Acquiring social competence in a second language’ in RELC Journal 9 (2): 1–21 Fraser, B., Rintell, E. and Walters, J. (1981) ‘An approach to conducting research on the acquisition of pragmatic competence in a second language’, in Larsen-Freeman, D. (ed.), Discourse Analysis. Newbury House, Rowley, Mass.: 75–81. Frege, G. (1952) ‘On sense and reference’, in Geach, P.T. and Black, M. (eds) Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, Blackwell, Oxford: 56–78. (Original 1892.) AN ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF LANGUAGE 111 Gazdar, G. (1979) Pragmatics: Implicature, Presupposition and Logical Form, Academic Press, New York. Gordon, D. and Lakoff, G. (1975) ‘Conversational postulates’, in Cole, P. and Morgan, J.L. (eds): 83–106. Grice, H.P. (1957) ‘Meaning’, Philosophical Review, 66:377–88. Grice, H.P. (1975) ‘Logic and conversation’, in Cole, P. and Morgan, J.L. (eds): 41–58. Grice, H.P. (1978) ‘Further notes on logic and conversation’, in Cole, P. (ed.) 113–27. Grice, H.P. (1981) ‘Presupposition and conversational implicature’, in Cole, P. (ed.) Radical Pragmatics, Academic Press, New York: 183–98. Hancher, M. (1979) ‘The classification of cooperative illocutionary acts’, Language in Society, 8:1–14. Harris, R. (1979) ‘The descriptive interpretation of performative utterances’, Journal of Linguistics, 14, 331–4. Harris, S.J. (1980) Language Interaction in Magistrates’ Courts, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Nottingham. Holdcroft, D. (1979) ‘Speech acts and conversation—1’, Philosophical Quarterly, 29:125–41. Hughes, J. (1984) ‘Group speech acts’, Linguistics and Philosophy, 7:379–95. Kasher, A. (1976) ‘Conversational maxims and rationality’, in A.Kasher (ed.) Language in Focus, Reidel, Dordrecht: 197–216. Kasher, A. (1977a) ‘Foundations of philosophical pragmatics’ in R.E.Butts and J.Hintikka (eds) Basic Problems in Methodology and Linguistics: 225–42, Reidel, Dordrecht. Kasher, A. (1977b) ‘What is a theory of use? Journal of Pragmatics 1 (2):105–20. Kempson, R.M. (1975) Presupposition and the Delimitation of Semantics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Kess, J.F. and Hoppe, R.A. (1981) Ambiguity in Psycholinguistics, Benjamins, Amsterdam. Kiefer, F. (1979) ‘What do the conversational maxims explain?’ Linguisticae Investigationes 3 (1):57–74. Labov, W. and Fanshel, D. (1977) Therapeutic Discourse, Academic Press, New York. Leech, G.N. (1977) ‘Language and tact’, LAUT Series A Paper 46, University of Trier. Leech, G.N. (1980) Explorations in Semantics and Pragmatics, Benjamins, Amsterdam. *Leech, G.N. (1983) Principles of Pragmatics, Longman, London. Levinson, S. (1979) ‘Activity types of language’, Linguistics 17 (5/6):365–99. Levinson, S. (1981) ‘The essential inadequacies of speech act models of dialogue’, in Parret, H. et al. (eds): 473–89. *Levinson, S. (1983) Pragmatics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Martinich, A.P. (1984) Communication and Reference, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin. Mey, J.L. (1985) Whose Language: A Study in the Pragmatics of Language Use, Benjamins, Amsterdam. Milroy, L. (1984) ‘Comprehension and context: successful communication and communication breakdown’, in Trudgill, P (ed.) Applied Sociolinguistics, Academic Press, London: 7–31. Morgan, J. (ed.) (1979) Syntax and Semantics: Volume 9. Academic Press, London/New York. Morris, C.W. (1938) Foundations of the Theory of Signs, Chicago University Press, Chicago. *Nuyts, J. and Verschueren, J. (1987) A Comprehensive Bibliography of Pragmatics: 4 vols, Benjamins, Amsterdam. Ohmann, R. (1972) ‘Instrumental Style: notes on the theory of speech as action’, in Kachru, B.B. and Stahlke, H.F.W. (eds). Current Trends in Stylistics. Linguistic Research, Edmonton, Illinois: 115–41. Parret, H., Sbisa, M. and Verschueren, J. (eds) (1981) Possibilities and Limitations of Pragmatics, Benjamins, Amsterdam. Pratt, M.L. (1977) Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse, Indiana University Press, Bloomington. Prastt, M.L. (1981) ‘The ideology of speech-act theory’, Centrum (New Series): 5–18. Pyle, C. (1975) ‘The function of indirectness’, Paper read at N-WAVE IV. Georgetown University. Rintell, E. (1979) ‘Getting your speech act together: the pragmatic ability of second language learners’ in Working Papers in Bilingualism 17:97–106. Ross, J.R. (1970) ‘On declarative sentences’, in Jacobs, R.A. and Rosenbaum, P.S. (eds) Readings in English Transformational Grammar, Blaisdell, Waltham, Mass.: 222–72. Sadock, J.M. (1974) Towards a Linguistic Theory of Speech Acts, Academic Press, New York. Sadock, J.M. (1978) ‘On testing for conversational implicature’, in Cole, P. (ed.): 281–98. Sampson, G. (1982) ‘The economics of conversation: comments on Joshi’s paper’, in Smith N.V. (ed.) (1982) 200–10. Sanders, R.E. (1980) ‘Principles of relevance: a theory of the relationship between language and communication’, Communication and Cognition: 77–95. Searle, J.R. (1969) Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Searle J.R. (1979a) Expression and Meaning, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Searle, J.R. (1979b) ‘A taxonomy of illocutionary acts’, in Searle, J.R. 1979a:1–29. (Original 1975.) Searle, J.R. (1979c) ‘Indirect speech acts’, in Searle, J.R. 1979a:30–57. (Original 1975.) Searle, J.R. (1979d) ‘Speech acts and recent linguistics’, in Searle, J.R. 1970a:162–79. (Original 1975.) Searle, J.R., Keifer, F. and Bierwisch, M. (eds) (1980) Speech Act Theory and Pragmatics, Reidel, Dordrecht. Smith, N.V. (ed.) (1982) Mutual Knowledge, Academic Press, London/New York. *Sperber, D. and Wilson, D. (1986) Relevance: Communication and Cognition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Stampe, D.W. (1975) ‘Meaning and truth in the theory of speech acts’, in Cole, P. and Morgan, J.L. (eds): 1–39. Strawson, P.F. (1952) Introduction to Logical Theory, Methuen, London. Swiggers, P. (1981) ‘The supermaxim of conversation’, Dialectica 35:303–6. Thomas, J.A. (1981) ‘Pragmatic Failure’, unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Lancaster. Thomas, J.A. (1983) ‘Cross-cultural pragmatic failure’, Applied Linguistics, 4:91–112. 112 LANGUAGE, MEANING AND CONTEXT Thomas, J.A. (1984) ‘Cross-cultural discourse as unequal encounter’, Applied Linguistics, 5: 226–35. Thomas, J.A. (1985) ‘The language of power: towards a dynamic pragmatics’, Journal of Pragmatics, 9:765–83. Thomas, J.A. (1986) The Dynamics of Discourse: a pragmatic approach to the analysis of confrontational interaction, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Department of Linguistics, University of Lancaster. Walters, J. (1979a) ‘The perception of politeness in English and Spanish’, in On TESOL ’79: 289–96. Walters, J. (1979b) ‘Strategies for requesting in Spanish and English—structural similarities and pragmatic differences’, Language Learning 9 (2):277–94. Wilson, D. (1975) Presupposition and Non-Truth Conditional Semantics, Academic Press, New York. Wilson, D. and Sperber, D. (1981) ‘On Grice’s theory of conversation’, in Werth, P. (ed.) Conversation and Discourse—Structure and Interpretation. Croom Helm, London: 155–78. FURTHERREADING The items marked with an asterisk in the list above will be found especially helpful for further exploration of the subject. AN ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF LANGUAGE 113 7 LANGUAGE AS A WRITTEN MEDIUM: TEXT JÁNOS S.PETÖFI 1. WHAT IS A TEXT? Anyone who can read and write also has an idea about what usually can be called a ‘text’. If, however, we try to define (or at least explicate) the notion text, we are faced with the following questions: What should be called a ‘text’ (i) a physical semiotic object or a relational semiotic object (i.e. the manifestation of a signifier-signified relation)? (ii) a unimedial or a multimedial object? (iii) an object that is an element of a semiotic system or an object that belongs to the domain of applying such a system? (iv) only a totally autonomous or also a partially autonomous semiotic object? Finally, depending on the answers given to the questions (i)–(iv) what should be declared as criteria of textuality?—It is only possible to understand the history and the present state of text research if the problems involved in the questions formulated above are clearly recognised. The first question is a specification of a more general question discussed in semiotics: What should be called a ‘sign’ or a ‘sign-complex’? These terms are used inconsistently in the literature: sometimes they refer to the signifier itself (to a physical object or a state of affairs), sometimes to the relation between the signifier and the signified. Applied to texts, this question can be reformulated as follows: Do we call a hand-written or printed string of words that forms a physical object a ‘text’ or is it only a hand-written or printed object, together with a meaning assigned to it, that deserves the name text? From a semiotic perspective the second question deals with two aspects. On one hand, with the text-constitutive role of verbal and non-verbal elements; on the other hand, with the relationship between hand-written or printed verbal objects and their possible acoustic manifestations. As to the verbal and non-verbal elements, the question arises to what extent illustrations, tables, diagrams, pictures etc. can be used in a semiotic object constructed out of lexical elements if one still wants to call this semiotic object a ‘verbal text’. It would perhaps be more expedient to introduce a term like dominantly-verbal text and to investigate what criteria have to be fulfilled for dominantly-verbal textuality. (In the past two decades the term text has also been used for non-verbal or not dominantly-verbal semiotic objects; however, I do not want to deal with this question here.) As to the relationship between hand-written or printed verbal objects and their possible acoustic manifestations, we have to ask ourselves whether it is possible at all to disregard the acoustic manifestations. Does a reader or a theoretically- trained interpreter rely on the hand-written or printed text (as a physical object) during text processing or does the potential acoustic manifestation, even if it is not read aloud, also play any role? In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, for instance, on the one hand many of the illustrations form organic parts of the work; on the other hand, many language puns cannot be understood unless the acoustic manifestation of the words in question is realized. In connection with the second question I would also like to make the following remarks: (i) In linguistics the term written text in many cases does not refer to a hand-written or printed text as a physical or relational semiotic object. What is really meant by this term is the way of producing a text, the fact that the text producer can correct, edit or revise his work before he declares it to be finished. In this sense the written text is the counterpart of the impromptu speech or conversation, (ii) In discussions about so-called ‘concrete poetry’ the term visual text is sometimes used to refer to handwritten or printed texts without linear order or to texts where the linear order is not the only rule for text organisation. Acoustic manifestations can be assigned to some visual texts but not to others. The description of Alice’s idea about the mouse tale/tail in chapter III of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is an example of a case where an acoustic manifestation can be assigned to a picture-like text part. The third question listed above relates to the distinction between langue and parole, as introduced by Saussure, or competence and performance, as Chomsky called an analogous pair of notions. In principle, the question is whether we consider texts as elements of the language system (i.e. langue or competence) along with the elements morphemes, words, clauses, sentences, and sentence chains, or whether texts are to be regarded as elements of language use (i.e. parole or performance). As to Saussure, in his conception not even the sentence is an element of the language system (langue), while for Chomsky the sentence is the largest unit of competence (see chapter 4, above). (Later, other members of the Chomsky school made the sentence chain the largest unit of competence.) If we consider verbal (or dominantly-verbal) texts as units belonging to the domain of language use, the question of size becomes irrelevant because linguistic units of any size can function as texts. The question of the autonomy of (dominantly-verbal) texts tackled in the fourth question above provokes considerations such as whether, for instance, The Tales of The Thousand and One Nights as a whole should be regarded as an autonomous text or whether the individual tales could be regarded as autonomous texts as well. Is a collection of sonnets such as Dante’s Vita nuova an autonomous text or are the individual sonnets autonomous texts as well? Is the whole of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland an autonomous text, or can the Prefatory Poem or the passage ‘You are old, Father William’ in chapter V (together with its illustrations) be counted as autonomous texts? The problem arises how to explicate the terms totally- autonomous text or partially-autonomous text. The question of the interrelationship between texts of the same author with an identical main character like, for instance, Alice in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Alice in Through the Looking Glass is, to my mind, a question of intertextuality and not a question of text autonomy. After discussing these questions we have arrived at the basic question of how the inherent and the external properties of (dominantly-verbal) texts can be defined, if it is possible to define them at all, or how we can arrive at a consensus about these properties. The formulation of this question implies that a certain subjectivity may be involved in the notions text and textuality apart from further interference from historical and socio-cultural considerations. In concluding these introductory ideas I would like to point out that the term text is used in the following sense in this contribution: (i) a text is a dominantly-verbal relational semiotic-object with a hand-written or printed physical manifestation; (ii) in the dominantly-verbal relational semiotic-object text the lexical elements are the dominant meaning-bearing elements; even though the hand-written or printed physical manifestations are the primary objects of text processing, potential acoustic manifestations have to be considered as well; (iii) texts are elements of language use, not of the language system; (iv) there is a distinction between totally-autonomous texts and partially-autonomous texts; (v) a dominantly-verbal relational semiotic- object fulfils the criteria for textuality if the following expectations are met: in a given or assumed communication-situation this object expresses a connected (and complete) configuration of states of affairs and fulfils a given or assumed communicative function; it has a connected and complete verbal constitution, where the connectedness and completeness of the constitution can depend on the type of the given object. 2. ELEMENTS OF TEXT CONSTRUCTION By the term text, as I explained it in the first section, I am referring to a dominantly-verbal relational-object,—in terms of semiotics, to a signifier-signified relation. In this relation the following four entities play a relevant role: (i) the configuration of the physical objects constituting the signifier and their mental image (called the vehiculum and the mental image of the vehiculum), (ii) the formal organisation of the vehiculum and of its mental image or, more precisely, the knowledge about this formal organisation (called the formatio), (iii) the sense-semantic organisation of the vehiculum and of its mental image or, more precisely, the knowledge about this sense-semantic organisation (called the sensus), and finally (iv) the state-of-affairs configuration constituting the text-external signification and its mental image (called the relatum and the mental image of the relatum). In the sign-model underlying this presentation, the vehiculum (plus the mental image of the vehiculum) and the formatio together are called the signifier (significans), while the sensus and the relatum (plus the mental image of the relatum) together are called the signified (significatum). The organisation of the vehiculum (and of its mental image) is indicated by the term constitutio, while the organisation of the significans-significatum relation is indicated by the term constructio. As to the organisation, it is necessary to distinguish between the inherent-organisation of the text assumed by us and the representation of this organisation produced by us. On the basis of the distinction between the static and the dynamic aspect of the organisation, we can call the theoretical construct produced as the representation of the static aspect of the organisation structure, and the theoretical construct produced as the representation of the dynamic aspect procedure. Only if we distinguish between the inherent-organisation and its representation is it possible to understand how different structural and procedural descriptions can be assigned to one and the same text. In particular, the structure and the procedure are entities which always depend on the interpreter and/or on the theory applied. In addition, it is necessary to make a distinction between the two main aspects of text constitution: the textural aspect, in short the texture, and the compositional aspect, in short the composition. In metaphoric terms the texture is the horizontal aspect of text constitution, i.e. the pattern manifest/displayable in the text which is brought about by text constituents recurring on different compositional levels. The composition, on the other hand, is the vertical aspect of text constitution, i.e. the architecture manifest/displayable in the text which arises through the organisation of the text constituents into higher and higher hierarchic-units until the whole text results as the highest-grade hierarchic-unit. (This explication of course does not exclude the possibility that one single word—as an element of the language system—can constitute a text, i.e. can function as a unit of language use called ‘text’; let us think for example of the exclamation ‘Fire!’ in a given context.) AN ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF LANGUAGE 115 The elements of text-construction and their aspects will be discussed under the headings of the terms for the four sign components, and illustrative material will be taken mainly from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (in the following: AAW) and also from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass (in the following: TLG). Although both are literary works, the aspects demonstrated (or their analogues) can also be found in texts of other text types. (All references to AAW and TLG will be, for convenience’s sake, to the recent (1982) Oxford publication; cf. References.) 2.1 Vehiculum: the physical manifestation of the text In dealing with written media (hand-written or printed texts) the physical manifestation is the visual manifestation. The visual manifestation is characterized by the type of elements it consists of, by the form, the size, and perhaps the colour of these elements, and by the global arrangement of the manifestation. In AAW in Carroll (1982) we encounter the following types of elements: words, punctuation marks, brackets, Roman numerals, configurations of asterisks, and pictures. Beyond these, TLG also contains the representation of a chess- configuration arranged on a chess-board, two adjoining lists (Carroll 1982:114), and also a mathematical formula (Carroll 1982:190). The Arabic numerals which in Carroll (1982) are used to refer to foot-notes are left out of consideration here. The words are set partly in normal type, partly in italics, by using different types of letters. In TLG (Carroll 1982:134) we also find a text-part set in mirror writing; the asterisk-configurations are always arranged in the same way; the pictures are partly vertically, partly horizontally arranged, of square form or L-shaped, partly with a frame, partly without, partly between text parts, partly between and beside text parts; only the frontispiece of Carroll (1982) is coloured. As to the global organisation of AAW and TLG, the following can be said: both texts are divided into twelve well- distinguishable main-sections (disregarding here the text parts which are separate from the so-called ‘chapters’); the word- strings are either arranged according to conventional prose-setting or conventional verse-setting, except for one place (in AAW Ch. III, Carroll 1982:28) where the organisation of a word-string is different from both conventional setting forms; the text parts set in prose form and in verse form as well as the text parts and the pictures alternate with each other without any visually recognisable system. Since the physical manifestation of the texts is in most cases meaning-constitutive and thus may facilitate or hinder the understanding of the texts, the physical manifestation is of interest both in itself and from the viewpoint of its perception (bringing about its mental image). (Let us think here not only of literary texts but also of texts in school-books and manuals.) To discuss questions of text perceptions in detail would go beyond the limits of my presentation; however, I want to point out that an explicit description of text processing (text analysis) also requires an explicit representation of the mental image arising in the interpreter. This especially applies to the acoustic mental-image assigned to written or printed texts. (This question will be handled in sections 2.2 and 2.3.) 2.2 Formatio: the formal organisation of the vehiculum When we investigate the formal organisation, the vehiculum can, on the one hand, be considered as a physical object in the full sense of the word (a visual picture and/or an acoustic sound-configuration, concerning which it is not even necessary to know which semiotic system or which language supplies its/their elements); on the other hand, it can be considered as a semiotic object (a configuration consisting of elements of a known semiotic system). In the first case we concentrate on the organisation of the (visual and/or acoustic) physical manifestation-form of the vehiculum (the figura), while in the second case we concentrate on the formal semiotic-organisation of the vehiculum as a sign-configuration (the notatio). To indicate the formal organisation we use the terms connexity and completeness and distinguish, according to the notions introduced at the beginning of this chapter, textural and compositional connexity and completeness. 2.2.1 Figura: the formal organisation of the vehiculum as a physical object The visual figura plays an especially relevant role in the calligrams and in the products called ‘visual texts’ in ‘concrete poetry’; however, it also may have relevance in other types of texts. If we analyse the visual figura of AAW, we have to analyse the connexity and the completeness of the visual figura both in the text parts consisting of words and in the pictures, as well as in the entirety of the text constituted by words and pictures. In the text parts consisting of words the analysis of the textural connexity must register the recurrent application of the type-faces which are different from the basic type-face of the text (verse-insertions, italics, capitals) as well as the recurrence of certain elements (words, text parts, asterisk-configurations), since we assume (indeed expect) that they are meaning-constitutive. As we will see in 2.3, they are in fact to a great extent 116 LANGUAGE AS A WRITTEN MEDIUM meaning-constitutive. Among the text parts consisting of words we find a text part which has a compositionally connex and complete visual figura: it is the Mouse tail (Carroll 1982:28) referred to previously. When analysing the textural connexity of the pictures, it is important to recognise figures representing one and the same person and/or animal. In AAW in Carroll (1982) for example, there is on each of the pages 12, 13, 16, 18, 20, 22, 24, 33, 38, 40, 52, 56, 57, 61, 71, 74, 80, 85, 89, 103, and 109 a girl-figure representing Alice, even if these figures differ from one another both as to their internal proportions and as to their proportion with respect to one and the same objects/persons; another example may be the picture of the Cheshire Cat on pages 57, 59 and 77, the first picture showing the whole figure, the second one mainly its head, and the third one only its head. Limitations of space do not allow me to treat the compositional connexity of pictures, and the connexity and completeness of the visual figura of the full text consisting of pictures and words, but I wish to mention an example: the visual figura of the autonomous text-part ‘You are old, Father William’ (Carroll 1982:42–5) is a compositionally connex and complete picture-and-verse text-unit: it begins with a picture on the bottom of page 42, which is followed by four strophes and an adjoining picture on page 43, and then by a picture and four adjoining strophes on page 44, and finally closes with a picture at the top of page 45. The acoustic figura plays an eminently relevant role in verse; however, like the visual figura, it may have a meaning- constitutive role and/or may facilitate understanding in other types of texts as well. The acoustic figura has a different status according to whether texts received by listening or text received by reading (seeing) are concerned. In the first case the acoustic figura is the object of the perception of the receiver, while in the second case the receiver must construct it. In the latter case the receiver, of course, must know the semiotic system (language), out of the elements of which the text has been brought about, because he can construct the acoustic figura only in interaction with the revelation of the syntactic and sense- semantic organisation of the text to be received. After these remarks let me consider some examples in connection with the acoustic figura of AAW: (i) the acoustic figura (the metric-rhythmic and the rhyme pattern) of the verse-insertions in AAW will be constructed in the same way as is usual with verse; only one example should be mentioned here concerning the rhyme pattern: the second strophe of the song of the Mock Turtle (Carroll 1982:95): ‘Beautiful Soup! Who cares for fish, Game, or any other dish? Who would not give all else for two p enny worth only of beautiful Soup? Pennyworth only of beautiful soup? Beau—ootiful Soo—oop! Beau—ootiful Soo—oop! Soo—oop of the e—e—evening, Beautiful, beauti—FUL SOUP? The organisation of the third and fourth line of this strophe (the way in which the word ‘pennyworth’ is printed in these lines) is a very unusual way of ensuring that the rhyme pattern of this strophe remains identical with that of the first strophe; and the visual image of the last four lines of the second strophe can be understood as a kind of score for the acoustic image to be produced; (ii) the dashes of different length in the verse-insertions and also in prose-parts indicate pauses of different length (and/or character); (iii) in the text-parts in prose the text-pieces in italics which are not between quotation marks always indicate stressed elements and thus they influence the production/construction of the acoustic figura; (iv) one part of the language puns (cf. the tale/tail-example already mentioned which can be explained by the homophonic nature of this non- homographic pair of words) can only be understood in the light of both the visual and the acoustic figura. To illustrate the connection of the visual and the acoustic figura, in TLG we find an even more complex example—an example of iconic character—(Carroll 1982:150): Alice couldn’t see who was sitting beyond the Beetle, but a hoarse voice spoke next. ‘Change engines’ it said, and there it choked and was obliged to leave off. ‘It sounds like a horse,’ Alice thought to herself. And an extremely small voice, close to her ear, said ‘You might make a joke on that—something about “horse” and “hoarse,” you know.’ (The petite setting always recurs when the ‘extremely small voice’ is speaking.) AN ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF LANGUAGE 117 2.2.2 Notatio: the formal organisation of the vehiculum as a semiotic object When analysing the notatio, it has to be established first how many notatio-systems the elements of the text to be interpreted belong to, then the analysis of the connexity and the completeness of the element-configurations belonging to the individual systems should follow. There are notatio-systems which differ from each other also figurally, e.g. hand-written/printed text vs. pictures, sound-text vs. music, and, within the verbal written medium, writing in Latin vs. writing in Arabic letters. There are also notatio-systems which cannot—or not so easily—be differentiated from each other formally; these systems include all languages using Latin letters. Let us see some examples from Carroll’s works to illustrate the different verbal notatio-systems: in AAW we find a French utterance ‘So she began again: “Où est ma chatte?”, which was the first sentence in her French lesson-book’ (Carroll 1982: 21). As a matter of fact, in the verse-insertion Jabberwocky in TLG, elements of two different notatio-systems have also been mixed: those of the real and those of a potential English language. Let me demonstrate this mixture by the first strophe (Carroll 1982:134): ‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre andgimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. It is to be mentioned that the setting-form in mirror characters of this strophe can again be considered as belonging to another notatio-system: ‘she turned over the leaves, to find some part that she could read, “—for it’s all in some language I don’t know,” she said to herself.’ (Alice’s comment on it in Carroll 1982:133.) The analysis of the connexity of the notatio is, as a matter of fact, the analysis of the syntactic organisation. With respect to the aspect of the composition, this means primarily the analysis of the syntactic organisation of the individual utterances/text- sentences, secondarily the investigation of what can be said about the syntactic organisation of the higher level hierarchic units (paragraphs and chapters)—if it is at all possible to tell anything about the syntactic organisation of these units without taking the sense-semantic aspect into consideration. With respect to the aspect of the texture, connexity is carried by the recurrence of units of the same syntactic organisation at any hierarchic level. Syntactic composition-units are syntactically-connex word-configurations, syntactically-connex formulaic-patterns, and syntactically-connex configurations of syntactic categories. For example, the formulaic pattern of the strophe quoted from Jabberwocky is the following: Twas_____, and the _____ y_____ s Did _____ and _____in the_____: All____ y were the____s, And the _____ _____s _____. In the strophe quoted the slots of this pattern are filled by potential English words. Hockett demonstrates the syntactic connexity (syntactic well-formedness) of this pattern by constructing sentences in real English fitting this pattern. One of these sentences is the following: ‘Twas morning, and the merry sunbeams did glitter and dance in the snow; all tinselly were the treetops, and the happy fairies frolicked.’ (Hockett (1958:262); the italics are mine; cf. also Sutherland (1972:208ff.).) Hockett’s sentence is a syntactically-connex word-configuration, and thus we can also consider the original strophe as a syntactically-connex word-configuration, despite the fact that its lexical elements do not belong to one and the same notatio system. If we substitute the constituents of this wordconfiguration by functional syntactic-categories, we obtain a syntactically-connex configuration of syntactic categories. One can easily understand that syntactically-connex (syntactically well-formed) category-configurations of paragraphs (and chapters) cannot be defined in the same sense as they can be defined for clauses or for simple sentences. Consequently, it is reasonable to ask whether we can speak at all of text syntax, and if we can, in what sense. While it is obvious that pronominalisation, use of conjunctions, use of tenses —all relevant factors of the text organisation—also have a syntactic aspect, the crucial point remains that it is not the syntactic aspect which dominates in the organisation of texts. However, in TLG we encounter a syntactic organisational factor (occurring twice) which should be mentioned. This factor is the chapter-connecting function of a text-sentence pattern: (i) the title of Chapter IV is an organic constituent of the closing sentence of Chapter III (Carroll 1982:158–9): 118 LANGUAGE AS A WRITTEN MEDIUM [...]... special configuration is of no particular relevance 2.3 Sensus: the sense-semantic organisation of the vehiculum The sense-semantic organisation of the vehiculum can/should be investigated from two points of view: from the aspect of the language, out of the elements of which the text is constructed (let us call this aspect ‘language-specific organisation’), and from the aspect of the world-fragment (presumably... (Ochs 1979) (Sankoff & Brown 1976) (Sankoff & Brown 1976) Many scholars have pointed to additional differences between spoken and written language (recent treatments include Givón 1979, Tannen 1982, and Redeker 1984), but many of these can be regarded as contingent rather than necessary Most of them can ultimately be derived from the ephemerality of the speech signal and the rapidity of speech production,... article: The second volume of the Handbook of Discourse Analysis (in the subsection ‘Introductions’ in the References), Dimensions of Discourse, provides a rather detailed survey of the aspects of the research object ‘text’ The first volume of this AN ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF LANGUAGE 133 Handbook (Disciplines of Discourse) presents a good survey of the text-specific problems/methods of the disciplines involved... off the table as she spoke, and shook her backwards and forwards with all her might The Red Queen made no resistance whatever: only her face grew very small, and her eyes got large and green: and still, as Alice went on shaking her, she kept on growing shorter—and fatter—and softer—and rounder—and— CHAPTER XI WAKING —and it really was a kitten, after all The syntactic connexity of the textural organisation... making heavier use of the pragmatic aspects of language, rather than the syntactic It has been pointed out (by Givón, 1979) that these differences correlate with each other and with other contrasts in language and language use, giving the following set of dichotomies: unplanned < – > planned child language < – > adult language pidgins < – > creoles pragmatic syntactic organisation < – > organisation informal... the methodology is dominant may in some cases turn out to be problematic It can, for instance, happen that allowing a methodology to become dominant will to some extent determine the possible choice of the goal and the object to be analysed, so that one should rather speak of extending the domain of a methodology than of genuine object-orientated research AN ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF LANGUAGE 129 In textological... properties of spontaneous dialogue derive from the fact that until very recently, and for all but a minority of speakers, conversation is conducted through the medium of speech 2 CONVERSATION ANALYSIS 2.1 The origins of conversation analysis Conversation analysis—the detailed analysis of conversational data, usually in the form of written transcriptions—is one of the chief techniques used in a school of sociology... events of some subworld, she sometimes also dwells in thought in her own real world The aspects of the relatum-specific sense-semantic organisation treated earlier are (relationally, inferentially, configurationally) analogous to the aspects of the sensus called the ‘conceptual verbal-sensus’ of the language-specific sensesemantic organisation In addition, we can also find the analogue (analogues) of the... be shared by speaker and hearer; if A wishes to refer to his sister, Jane, and B is a friend of Jane, were A to refer to my sister, and not to Jane, B would probably conclude that A has another sister, or that A does not know that B knows Jane Also part of the context of utterance, of course, are objects in the surroundings, which are typically referred to by pronouns rather than descriptive expressions... description of a fictive dream in the form of a book for children, and another way if he considers it as a caricature of England in the Victorian epoch In the first case the question of compatibility arises in the form of whether the events described in AAW are accessible to the fantasy of a child or not, while the expectation concerns the connectedness of the events described in the individual chapters and of . interactants operate with at least two quite distinct notions of relevance, including: AN ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF LANGUAGE 109 …a ‘pragmatic’ and a ‘semantic’ one. The former has to do with the relevance of. also play any role? In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, for instance, on the one hand many of the illustrations form organic parts of the work; on the other hand, many language. that human nature abhors a vacuum of sense— and that the ‘Principle of Relevance does all the work of Grice’s maxims and more…’ It is too early for an evaluation of Sperber and Wilson’s relevance