Supra-phrasal Unity as a Minimal Unit of Text Analysis
The minimal unit of text analysis was first singled out by the Russian linguists N.S. Pospelov and L.A. Bulakhovsky. N.S. Pospelov called the unit in question 'a complex syntactic unit' (cjiooKHoe cunmaKcuHecKoe i$enoe\ L.A. Bulakhovsky - 'a supra-phrasal unity' (ceepx(ppa3oeoe eduncmeo).
A supra-phrasal unity has three distinguishing features: topical unity, coherence, and cohesion. Topical unity manifests itself in the fact that each supra-phrasal unity has its own micro-topic. Coherence refers to the continuity of meaning that enables others to make sense of the supra-phrasal unity. Cohesion refers to different devices for linking the components of a supra-phrasal unity.
The boundaries of supra-phrasal unities are signalled by a weakening of cohesion at their junction. The first sentence of a supra-phrasal unity, according to L.M. Loseva, is characterized by the following features.
1. It generally introduces a new micro-topic.
2. It is generally a complete sentence.
3. It has no deictic words that have correlates in the preceding
part of the supra-phrasal unity.
4. It has very loose connection with the last sentence of the
preceding supra-phrasal unity.
5. In oral texts, the first sentence of a supra-phrasal unity is
marked by a rise in tone, the last sentence - by a fall in tone and by
a long pause.
Since it is very difficult to gauge the degree of cohesion, the boundaries of supra-phrasal unities remain obscure. Very often, they are identified with the boundaries of paragraphs in spite of the fact that one paragraph can comprise several supra-phrasal unities, while one supra-phrasal unity can be expressed by several paragraphs.
The components of written supra-phrasal unities are usually sentences. The components of spoken supra-phrasal unities can be sentences, 'sentence representatives', sentencoids, and 'communicatives'. Although supra-phrasal unities, as a rule, consist of predicative syntactic units, predication cannot be considered their distinguishing feature. The supra-phrasal unity is primarily a topical unity. That's why supra-phrasal unities are often excluded from the sphere of syntax [R. Huddleston; G. Kolshansky].
Textual Cohesive Devices
A text is a coherent stretch of speech of writing. Textual coherence finds its expression in different kinds of cohesive devices.
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By semantic cohesion, we mean topical integrity. For example, the following text is united by the topic The Germanic influence on Old English1:
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The Anglo-Saxons, who invaded England in AD 350, came from Germany, Denmark and Holland. They spoke a Germanic language which became the basis of Old English. Even today, words used in Modern English for ordinary objects are mostly Anglo- Saxon, or Germanic, in origin. Words of Germanic origin are usually short (often just one syllable) and tend to be informal in modern English (M. Vaughan-Rees et al.).
The communicative cohesion finds its expression in certain theme-rheme sequences. M.I. Otkupshchipkova mentions a number of theme-rheme sequences found in texts.
1. The rheme of the first sentence becomes the theme of the
second sentence (R — T), e.g.:
A Mercedes was parked in the street. The car looked new (D. Crystal).
2. One theme has a number of rhemes (T - Rj - R2...), e.g.:
Ralph shook his head and increased his speed. Then he
tripped over a branch and came down with a crash (W. Golding).
3. One rheme has several themes (R- T; - T2 ...), e.g.:
This noise is giving me a headache. - Me, tool (R. Quirk et al.), etc.
Lexical cohesion is also very important. A simple example of lexical cohesion is repetition proper. Repetition proper is recurrence of the same elements). Thus, the following brief news item represents a cohesive unit solely through the repetition of the word Utopia:
John Maynard Keynes, the century's most influential economist, once said that in his Utopia members of his profession would be like dentists - useful but humble people. Utopia may be arriving with the administration of President-elect Bill Clinton (International Herald Tribune).
Lexical linkage by repetition proper is generally avoided since recurring lexical items can easily seem obtrusive. As a rule, synonymic or modified repetition is preferred to repetition proper, e.g.:
Europeans began slaughtering wolves from the moment they arrived in America. Indeed, the kitting of wolves, like the killing of
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Indians, was perceived as a moral duty, a symbol act in the subjugation of godless wilderness (The Independent Magazine).
The use of antonyms serves the purpose of lexical cohesion, too:
The popular family game of snakes and ladders originated as a system for the moral instruction of young people in India. Virtues, in the shape of ladders, allowed players to reach their goal ~ heaven, or nirvana - quickly. The vices, represented by snakes, forced players backdown towards earth {or, in some versions, hell} (Independent Herald Tribune).
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Sometimes, lexical cohesion is supplemented by syntactic cohesion. Here one can refer the use of space/time adverbials and of degrees of comparison of adjectives/adverbs. Cf.:
We left Paris on Monday morning. By the same evening we were in Rome (D. Crystal).
Six children took part in the sack race. Jill was easily the fastest (D. Crystal).
To purely syntactic cohesion, we refer the use of connective conjunctions4, parallel constructions, question-answer sequences, and sentencoids with syntagmatic zeros which mostly occur in reacting moves of question-answer sequences.
The linking function is common to all conjunctions. The use of coordinators generally creates textual cohesion, e.g.:
We owe everything to him. And we will never forget him (L. Untermeyer).
Syntactic parallelism is a variety of repetition; only it is a repetition of syntactic constructions, not of lexemes, e.g.:
The cock is crowing,
The stream is flowing.., (W. Wordsworth).
The syntactic parallelism between sentences is more transparent and, hence, the connection between the sentences is more strongly indicated, if the word order is not the normal one. The unusual order of the first sentence makes us expect a similar and related one to follow [S. Greenbaum]. Cf:
M. Pfutze regards conjunctions as a morphological cohesive device. As a class of words, the conjunction is certainly a morphological phenomenon. But in ibm it performs a syntactic linking function.
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In New York it is hot and humid during the summer. In Los Angeles it is hot and dry (R. Quirk et al.).
My paintings the visitors admired. My sculptures they disliked (R. Quirk et al.)-
Question-answer sequences are closely connected because questions are primarily used to seek information [M. Pfutze]. Cf.:
Wliat's Dr. Patterson's daughter like? - In medical terms, she's a fruitcake. — I'm not a doctor. What does that mean? - It means that she really believes she's innocent. - Isn 't that possible? - The sheriff in Cuperinto showed me the file on her. Her DNA and fingerprints are all over the murder scene. - What are you going to do now? — I've called Royce Salem. He's a psychiatrist that Jesse Quiller's office uses. I'm going to have him examine Ashley and turn the report over to her father (S. Sheldon).
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Answers often represent sentencoids whose syntagmatic zeros turn the question-answer sequences into even more closely integrated wholes [W. Dressier], e.g.:
How long have you worked there? - Four years (S. Sheldon).
Deixis involves the use of expressions to refer directly to the situation within which an utterance is taking place, and their interpretation is therefore dependent on features of that situation. For example, the reference of the pronoun / shifts according to who is speaking. Deictic expressions typically refer to persons and objects in the situation and to temporal and locational features.
The concept of deixis is sometimes extended from situational deixis (the use of expressions to point at some feature of the situation) to textual deixis (the use of expressions to point at other expressions in the text). Textual deixis contributes to cohesion because of its linkage to previous or subsequent words in the text. References to what comes earlier in the text are anaphoric, whereas references to what conies afterwards are cataphoric.
The most common referring expressions are drawn from pronouns, determiners, and pronominal adverbs [M. Pfutze; H. Weinrich]. Pronouns, determiners, and pronominal adverbs are more often used anaphorically than cataphorically, e.g.:
My cat, a ginger male, is lost. If you have seen him, please phone me (S. Greenbaum) — anaphoric reference.
Cataphoric reference usually occurs at the beginning of a narrative, e.g.:
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He's sitting on the sofa locked into a strange match with the television set as he digests his deli sandwich and daily dose ofanti-inflammatories. There's a channel changer to fill the void in his racquet hand, and whenever he gets tired of watching golf, he can retire to the four-poster bed in a room he keeps as cold as Dracula 's vault, the better to get his beauty sleep. Or, in his case, his power sleep.
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"This is it, this is my life; it's like being a retired person,' said Pete Sampras, the world's top-ranked tennis player and the defending champion of the U.S. Open (International Herald Tribune).
Do, do so, do it, do the same, and the like are often used as substitutes for a verb, its complements and adjuncts. Since for their interpretation they depend on an antecedent, these substitutes contribute to cohesion. Cf.:
/ always eat peas with honey. - My wife never does (M, Swan).
Eventually she divorced Stephen. It was a pity she had not done so earlier (M. Swan).
/ haven't got time to get the tickets. Who's going to do ifl (M. Swan).
So alone can be a substitute for a clause, e.g.:
Does insurance cover hotels? -1 think so (S. Greenbaum).
The negative, corresponding to the pro-clause so, is not, e.g.: It's a question of faith. - Maybe not (S. Greenbaum).
Some linguists [e.g. A.A. Akishina] refer pro-forms to lexical cohesive devices, others - to morphological cohesive devices [M. Pfutze]. In our opinion, they could hardly be regarded as lexical cohesive devices because all the pro-forms are not lexical, but function words. Function words, as has already been pointed out, are primarily a morphological phenomenon. But in text they perform a syntactic linking function. Two avenues of approach seem possible: 1) to refer pro-forms as a subclass of function words to the periphery of syntactic cohesive devices, 2) to follow S. Greenbaum and single them out into a specific group of cohesive devices.
Textual cohesion at the morphological level finds its expression in the correlation of tenses. In direct speech, alternation of past and present is a regular mode of switching from the 'then' of
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the narrative reference to the 'now' of both the narrator and the hearer (or reader):
As a child, f lived in Singapore. It's very hot there, you know, and I never owned an overcoat. I remember being puzzled at picture books showing European children wrapped up in heavy coats and scarves. I believe I thought it all as exotic as children here think about spacemen's clothing, you see (R. Quirk et al.).
In reported speech, alternation of past and present follows strict rules: the use of the past in the initial sentence generally precludes the use of the present and future in the following sentences. What is more, reported speech makes wide use of the past perfect, e.g.:
After Jim and Terry had finished their breakfast, they took their bags and went to the river to fish. They had gone there before and had caught some big fish. By 5 o 'clock they hadn 't got any fish, so they decided to go home. They had promised their mother to bring fish for dinner, so they looked for a shop where they could buy some but the shops had already closed. When they arrived home, they told their mother that they had caught the biggest fish they had ever seen but it had escaped (V. Evans).
What is more, there exist metatextual constructions. They serve three purposes: on the one hand, they concentrate the hearer's (reader's) attention on the key points and so make it easier for him to get the message comprised in the text; on the other hand, they help keep up the speaker-hearer contact; and, finally, they act as textual glue [A. Wierzbtcka, T,V. Kharlamova, O.N. Shapovalova] e.g.:
/ would like to begin by thanking you for inviting me to speak to you today- As you will appreciate - more than most people -health care is at the forefront of the many challenges that governments face today; it is a topic of great importance to my Office and me. In our report tabled in Parliament last fall, we included three chapters on the federal government's implementation of programs aimed at protecting and improving the health of Canadians. Furthermore, we are working on other audits that should be published later this year or next year.
And as many of you will know, 'Accountability' is another major issue in much of the work of our Office. A great deal of what we do deals with the issues of accountability. So, in asking me to
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speak on the 'Federal Government's Accountability to Canadians for Health Services', you hit on two of my favorite topics!
First, I will try to summarize our Office's views on accountability; how we understand the concept, and the principles we have adopted in the course of our work. Second. I will discuss how we have applied these principles in the area of health care. I will draw from our recent reports on federal support of health care delivery, and disease surveillance and the control of outbreaks.
Finally, I will speak about some of the areas from which solutions may emerge: solutions to some of the significant ~ and unique challenges to accountability in the health sector (L.D. Desautels).
Metatextual constructions stand somewhat apart from all the cohesive language devices discussed above because they do not take part in realizing the content plane of the text. They rather organize the content plane of the text into a coherent whole and give the latter a modal colouring.
Sometimes we make a link between sentences because of our general knowledge or expectations about the way the world functions [D. Crystal]. Let us take the following pair of sentences:
The summer was one of the best they had ever had. The vintage was expected to be superb (D. Crystal).
Here there are no obvious language cohesive devices to link these sentences. But anyone who knows about wine can readily supply the missing link. Such techniques as inference, deduction, and presupposition are used in these circumstances.
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