WORLD
THEORY
AN INTRODUCTION
Joanna Gavins ‘It is not often that academic books come along which change your way of s...
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WORLD
THEORY
AN INTRODUCTION
Joanna Gavins ‘It is not often that academic books come along which change your way of seeing things. But this book does just that. It offers an astonishing richness of texts, combining genuinely innovative theory and insight with readable, usable and practical analysis. Joanna Gavins shows Text World theory to be a way of understanding and engaging with texts that will continue to push back frontiers for many years to come.’ Professor Ronald Carter, University of Nottingham
TEXT WORLD THEORY
Features • An accessible and enabling course book which includes suggestions for exploration and further reading. • Draws on linguistics, cognitive science, psychology, philosophy, poetics and stylistics, and will be attractive to students and researchers working in all of these disciplines. • Each chapter provides a reader-friendly introduction to an aspect of Text World Theory and includes at least two practical applications of these ideas to real discourse examples.
AN INTRODUCTION
Text World Theory is a cognitive model of all human discourse processing. In this introductory textbook, Joanna Gavins sets out a usable framework for understanding mental representations. Text World Theory is explained using naturally occurring texts and real situations, including literary works, advertising discourse, the language of lonely hearts, horoscopes, route directions, cookery books and song lyrics. The book will therefore enable students, teachers and researchers to make practical use of the text-world framework in a wide range of linguistic and literary contexts.
Joanna Gavins
TEXT
Joanna Gavins is a lecturer in English language and literature at the University of Sheffield, UK, where she teaches courses in stylistics, cognitive poetics, linguistics and contemporary literature. Her innovative work in Text World Theory continues to advance the evolution of this powerful and exciting approach to human language and cognition.
TEXT
AN INTRODUCTION
Cover design: River Design, Edinburgh
www.eup.ed.ac.uk ISBN 978 0 7486 2300 6
barcode
Edinburgh
Cover image: Bethlehem 2005 © Banksy Edinburgh University Press 22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF
WORLD
Joanna Gavins
THEORY
‘Text world theory has long been awaiting a comprehensive and comprehensible introduction. Joanna Gavins’ engaging book draws on the rich insights now available in the many strands of cognitive linguistics and discourse studies, and weaves them into her illuminating explanations, analyses and often witty commentary. This work is an excellent textbook. But it is more than that: it is a unified theoretical synthesis which at the same time provides usable tools for practical analysis.’ Paul Chilton, Lancaster University
In memory of Professor Paul Werth 1942–1995
Text World Theory An Introduction Joanna Gavins
Edinburgh University Press
© Joanna Gavins, 2007 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh Typeset in Ehrhardt 11/13 pt by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain by Cromwell Press Ltd, Trowbridge, Wilts A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 2299 3 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 2300 6 (paperback) The right of Joanna Gavins to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publisher will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.
Contents
List of figures Acknowledgements
viii ix
1 Conceptualising Language The world in the mind Language in the mind Some history Text World Theory The structure of this book Further investigation Further reading
1 3 4 6 8 13 15 16
2 Participating in Discourse Key issues in this chapter Interacting through language Communicating in context Making connections Exploring context Further investigation Further reading
18 18 18 21 24 25 31 33
3 Scenes Key issues in this chapter Building a text-world World-building in practice Shifting text-worlds Further investigation Further reading
35 35 35 38 45 51 52
vi : 4 Processes Key issues in this chapter Advancing the text-world Textual functions Enactor relationships Further investigation Further reading
53 53 53 59 64 71 72
5 Layers Key issues in this chapter Hierarchies Transcending boundaries Fictionality Further investigation Further reading
73 73 73 81 83 88 90
6 Attitudes Key issues in this chapter Modality and desire Obligation Instruction and self-implication Further investigation Further reading
91 91 91 96 103 107 108
7 Distances Key issues in this chapter Knowledge and belief Perception Hypotheticality Further investigation Further reading
109 109 109 113 118 123 125
8 Narratives Key issues in this chapter Focalisation Enactors and focalisation Narrative deception Further investigation Further reading
126 126 126 131 135 143 144
9 Double-vision Key issues in this chapter Understanding metaphor
146 146 146
Extended metaphor Understanding double-vision Double-vision and self-implication Further investigation Further reading
vii 149 152 156 162 164
10 Futures Key issues in this chapter Obscurity Resistance Performance Text Texture
165 165 165 170 172 174 175
References Index
178 189
List of figures
Figure 3.1 Figure 3.2 Figure 3.3 Figure 3.4 Figure 4.1 Figure 4.2 Figure 4.3 Figure 4.4 Figure 4.5 Figure 5.1 Figure 5.2 Figure 6.1 Figure 6.2 Figure 7.1 Figure 8.1 Figure 8.2 Figure 9.1
The perception of space and time World-building elements World-builders and their attributes Temporal world-switches The developing text-world Function-advancing propositions Active enactors: BBC radio commentary Active enactors: Stevenage Borough web report Active enactors: Northampton Town web report Multiple text-worlds The spatial conceptualisation of knowledge Boulomaic modal-worlds Deontic modal-worlds Embedding and lack of confidence Fixed focalisation Double-focalisation Metaphor
37 40 43 47 55 58 66 67 70 80 82 93 100 114 134 139 158
Acknowledgements
My first contact with the text-world approach to discourse study came almost ten years ago to the day, when I encountered an article on extended metaphor by Paul Werth. Over the course of just a few thousand words, Werth permanently changed the way I think, and the way I think about the way I think in particular. His work has had a similar effect, I know, on many people around the world and there is no possible way to begin this book other than with an acknowledgement of the incredible impact Werth’s ideas have had, and continue to have, on individual academics, the development of theoretical frameworks, and even entire disciplines. I am truly grateful for the originality and clarity of his ideas, and the inspirational legacy he left behind him. My own work on text-worlds over the last decade has benefited immeasurably from the support, appraisal and guidance which has been so generously offered by my friends and colleagues in the Poetics and Linguistics Association. In particular, the insight and enthusiasm of Joe Bray, Michael Burke, Ulf Cronquist, Tracy Cruickshank, Don Freeman, Margaret Freeman, David Gill, Keith Green, Christiana Gregoriou, Laura Hidalgo Downing, Lesley Jeffries, Ernestine Lahey, Sara Mills, Rocio Montoro, Elena Semino, Paul Simpson, Gerard Steen, Michael Toolan, Katie Wales, and Jean-Jacques Weber have been indispensable at various points throughout this project. A number of PALA people have been especially instrumental in the development of Text World Theory and are worthy of special acknowledgement for this. None of the academic interest that the text-worlds approach has generated over recent years would have been possible at all without the meticulous editing of Paul Werth’s (1999) manuscript for Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse and the limitless passion for any form of innovation in stylistics which continues to be the trademark of Mick Short. Peter Verdonk demonstrated great prudence many years ago when preserving some of Werth’s other unpublished work, and great generosity in his gift of these to me while I was still green enough to interpret incredible luck as a sign of my predestination to be a
x
:
text-world researcher! Cathy Emmott has lent her precious time, careful reflection, and thorough feedback, as well as whole swathes of her own Contextual Frame Theory to the improvement of the text-world framework. Ron Carter continues to prove himself to be just about the most supportive and helpful person I have ever had the good fortune to meet. My thanks go also to the members of the text-worlds email discussion list for the encouragement offered by their sheer number. The students of the BA in English Language and Literature at the University of Sheffield deserve a special thank you for their willingness to act as guinea pigs for many of my text-world ideas over the last few years. The swiftness with which they have grasped the complexities of text-world analysis and the originality they have shown in their own use of the framework are the inspiration behind the student-focused format of this book. I would particularly like to thank Rebecca Wilson for bringing Alex Garland’s (2004) novel The Coma, analysed in Chapter 8, to my attention. My doctoral students, Alice Bell, Alison Gibbons and Sara Whiteley have agreed and disagreed with me in all the right measures and sharpened my thinking incalculably as a result. I am fortunate to work amongst both students and teaching colleagues in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics whose magnanimity and liberality of thought have provided me with greater support than they probably realise. Special acknowledgement must be reserved for Jane Hodson, who accommodates my idiosyncrasies and reminds me of my political responsibilities on a daily basis, and has been content for me to pilfer her teaching materials for my own gain in various sections of this book. Richard Steadman-Jones’ expertise in classical rhetoric was also generously shared in Chapter 7, and Cathy Shrank provided essential guidance on Renaissance poetry and music in Chapter 9. Finally, Sarah Edwards, my editor at Edinburgh University Press, deserves a medal for her seemingly infinite capacity for patience and flexibility. I am also grateful to Banksy for the kind permission given to reproduce the Bethlehem 2005 image on the cover of this book, from Wall and Piece © Banksy 2005. The gratitude I find almost impossible to articulate is that which I owe to my family. My parents and my sister have always provided me with vital and unerring support – emotional, financial, gastronomic, alcoholic. My husband, Peter Stockwell, gave me Paul Werth’s article on extended metaphor in the first place and is ultimately responsible for everything which has happened in my life since then. He is my most careful editor, my sharpest critic, my most vocal supporter, and my dearest friend. Our daughter, Ada, takes after her dad and fills each day with unfathomable joy. Joanna Gavins Sheffield, 2006
Conceptualising Language
Old cockerel seeks hen to scratch around new pastures. Ex-farmer, 57, seeks lady, 45–55, without ties to move to Hants/Dorset & develop a natural, self-sufficient lifestyle. SE. Call 0905 123 4567. Voicebox 20ABC. ‘Soulmates’, The Guardian, 15 January 2005 It is highly unlikely that your first intention when opening this book was to find yourself an old cockerel with whom to settle down in Dorset. Nevertheless, having now read his advertisement, you will have formed in your mind a particular impression of this lonely heart seeking a hen. Likewise, the first intention of Old Cockerel (let us call him) is unlikely to have been to make contact with the readers of Text World Theory: An Introduction. Nevertheless, he has succeeded in communicating, however indirectly, a picture of his needs to you. In the limited number of words available to him, he has been careful to specify his age (57), occupation (ex-farmer), and geographical location (South East England). Each of these linguistic details enables Old Cockerel’s intended audience (of single female Guardian readers aged 45–55) to construct a picture of him in their minds despite being separated from him in both time and space. It is a mental picture which Old Cockerel hopes will be sufficiently impressive to attract a response from his ideal mate. To help him achieve success, he employs poetic devices alongside the personal details he provides. Most obvious, of course, is the farming metaphor which extends throughout the advertisement and through which he chooses to present himself as an ‘old cockerel’, his potential mate as a ‘hen’, and their new life together on the south coast of England as a ‘scratch around new pastures’. Further metaphors can also be found in his request that his respondents be ‘without ties’ and in his promise of a ‘natural’ future lifestyle. Finally, both the literal and metaphorical features of Old Cockerel’s advertisement are presented in a style which readers familiar with lonely-hearts columns might expect from this type of communication:
: a limited number of words; an eye-catching typographical emphasis of the opening phrase; a contact telephone and voicebox number; the description of personal details and emotional needs. So, what does your mental picture of Old Cockerel look like? How much of it is based on the information supplied in the advertisement and how much extra detail have you added of your own accord? How tall is Old Cockerel, for example? What colour hair does he have? Does he look like anyone you know? The answers to these questions will vary from person to person and are very much dependent on the previous experiences of whoever is being asked. In my mind, Old Cockerel is a red-haired, rugged-looking man with freckles. He is about six and a half feet tall and of muscular build, has something of a paunch as the result of his liking for beer, and is also deeply sexist. This image is partly built on the basic description Old Cockerel provides. However, his use of metaphor has also influenced my mental picture to some extent and he has red hair in my mind, I think, entirely because of the cockerel comparison. The very fact that I have been able to take a physical attribute of a particular species of male bird and add it to my image of a human being is evidence that at least part of the process of constructing a mental picture is based on elements outside the advertisement’s immediate text. My understanding of Old Cockerel’s metaphors is built on my previous experiences of farmers, farming and farmyard birds. I can use these experiences to construct an image of Old Cockerel’s ideal mate in the same way: she is rather fat, also red-haired, has rosy cheeks, likes to cook and keeps a tidy house. Not all the detail I have added to this mental image and that of Old Cockerel is so obviously linked to the metaphorical constructions found in the language of the advertisement. My choice of personality traits, in particular, for these two is significantly influenced by people I know or have known in the past. I happen to know quite a few farmers and their partners, but I have also read books with farming characters in them and seen other fictional and non-fictional representations on television and in film. The picture I have built in my mind is thus something of an amalgamation of the characteristics of several real and fictional people, which I have assigned to Old Cockerel and Hen in much the same way as I assigned them some physical similarity to chickens. The important point to emphasise here is that the mental picture I have constructed from Old Cockerel’s advertisement is peculiar to me. It is greatly influenced by my personal knowledge and experiences, just as your mental picture of the same piece of text will be individually shaped according to your own background. While the distinct pictures we create of language in our minds may vary in their precise constitution, all linguistically competent human beings process all language in this way. We construct mental representations, or text-worlds, which enable us to conceptualise and understand every piece of language we encounter. How these text-worlds are formed, their conceptual configuration, and how we as human beings make use of them are the focus of Text World Theory.
T H E WO R L D I N T H E M I N D
The notion that language is understood by a process of mental representation has been in existence for several centuries now. Recently, in a number of academic disciplines concerned with either language or mental processes (or both), the conceptual structures human beings construct in order to understand one another have been given a variety of names: scripts, schemata, mental models, cognitive models, frames, mental spaces and conceptual frames, as well as worlds. Although originating in different fields of study, and proposed for quite different purposes, all these terms refer generally to the mental representations through which we conceptualise language. Some of the most important recent advances in our understanding of how human beings process language have been made as a direct result of research begun in the 1960s into Artificial Intelligence (AI). Scientists aiming to replicate human cognition and language quickly realised that, in order to produce and understand even the most basic sentences, computers would need to refer to a vast store of knowledge. Just how this knowledge would be organised and deployed presented AI researchers with a significant challenge. Some of the most promising solutions were presented in what has since become broadly known as schema theory, where it was proposed that human cognition is structured around scripts: knowledge stores containing information about familiar types of events and situations. Schema theorists suggested that human beings cope with unfamiliar situations by comparing them with stereotyped sequences of events associated with more familiar contexts held in memory. The most famous example is the script, which contains information about how to behave in this situation and our expectations of service, ordering, eating, paying, and so on. This kind of schematised knowledge is determined both by individual experience and cultural practice. A first visit to a sushi bar, for example, presents quite a challenge to most English people, since the norms of behaviour in Japanese restaurants differ significantly from those in most European cultures. The script most new customers will be running on arrival will not prepare them for the numerous likely divergences from their expectations: from how they are greeted, to the process of ordering, to the content of the menu, to the style of cooking. This does not mean, however, that they will be left unable to cope with this new situation. With a few adjustments and additions to the script, the novel context can be negotiated successfully and will provide a broader base of expectations for the next time the script is needed. At around the same time as the boom in AI research, a number of important advances were also being made in the field of Cognitive Psychology. Like schema theorists, cognitive psychologists are interested in how the human mind stores the knowledge it receives as the result of everyday interactions in the real world. However, the psychological approach to human cognition
: differs from the AI approach in two important ways. Firstly, where the goal of AI scientists and schema theorists is to produce a machine which will replicate human behaviour, the primary focus of Cognitive Psychology is on human, rather than artificial perception and experience. Secondly, and more importantly, cognitive psychologists are centrally concerned with exactly how human experience is represented in the mind. One theory is that human beings construct mental models of their everyday existence. These models take an analogue form. This means that they are holistic in nature, rather than acting like a filestore of knowledge in separate, fixed mental folders. They bear a direct resemblance to the real-world situations they represent and are often explained in Cognitive Psychology by comparison with a common example, a map. Maps are essentially analogue representations of a particular piece of terrain. They can be as abstract or as detailed as required, but for every point in the real-world territory, there is a corresponding point on its map. In terms of human psychology, our memories of faces, locations, sensations and complex actions are good examples of how our minds store perceptual wholes in this way. Mental models allow us to represent all these aspects of our everyday lives in our minds in the same detail as they exist in the real world. Consequently, we are able to make inferences and predictions, to understand the world around us, and to make decisions about how to act in certain situations. Crucially, our ability to construct analogue mental models also enables us to experience events by proxy. Through our everyday linguistic interaction, we constantly and effortlessly create mental representations of situations we have never even experienced, based on the details other people provide for us during the process of communication.
L A N G UAG E I N T H E M I N D
The ideas from AI research and Cognitive Psychology discussed so far form part of the basic foundations of much of the work recently developed in another discipline, Cognitive Linguistics, which focuses entirely on the relationship between language and the human mind. Until very recently, the principled study of the conceptualisation of language was an area completely neglected within the discipline of linguistics. For most of the twentieth century, the majority of linguists were interested solely in the structure of language, rather than in the mental processes by which it is produced and understood. The evolution of Cognitive Linguistics is entirely a result of the advances made in cognitive science in the latter half of the twentieth century. Following what is now often referred to as the cognitive revolution, cognitive linguists committed themselves to making their account of language accord with what is known about the workings of the human mind and brain. Like Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Linguistics attributes primacy to human experience and was
ground-breaking in its recognition of the vital interaction between our physical encounters with the everyday world and the linguistic and conceptual activity through which we understand our existence. A number of different cognitive linguists have talked about the mental representation of human experience in a number of different ways. Perhaps the most influential adaptation of cognitive science into linguistic theory in recent years argued that human knowledge is organised around structures known as idealised cognitive models (ICMs). ICMs correspond in many ways to the idea of scripts outlined in the previous section of this chapter. They are the knowledge structures by which we negotiate our way through life, evaluating new experiences by means of comparison with idealised models of reality. They also bear some resemblance to mental models, taking an analogue structure which is also image-schematic. This is to say that ICMs are simplified mental representations of complex physical phenomena which are essentially visualisable (such as pulling, pushing, containers, surfaces, and so on). ICMs are the building-blocks of human cognition: our most basic embodied experience stored as mental representations in memory. Much of the early work in Cognitive Linguistics was based on the notion that human beings make use of ICMs whenever they encounter new situations in a mental process which centres around conceptual metaphors. Conceptual metaphors have been identified as underlying much of our basic conceptual activity and are most easily explained through example. For instance, the conceptual metaphor LIFE IS A CONTAINER is the means by which we often understand the abstract concept of LIFE (here, the target domain). This understanding is achieved by comparing LIFE with the more concrete ICM of a CONTAINER (the source domain, in terms of which the target is restructured). In all conceptual metaphors, relevant features from the source domain, it was argued, are mapped onto the target domain, creating a new knowledge domain with its own image-schematic structure. Evidence for the existence of the conceptual metaphor LIFE IS A CONTAINER in our everyday lives can be found in such surface expressions as ‘my life is empty’, ‘he leads a very full life’, ‘getting the most out of life’, and so on. One of the central achievements of early Cognitive Linguistics was the realisation that these familiar expressions and idioms, far from being ‘dead’ metaphors, mark the existence of the complex mental processes through which we conceptualise our everyday experiences in the world. All human reasoning is essentially embodied in this way. At the beginning of the cognitive revolution, cognitive linguists argued that we follow the same conceptual-metaphorical process each time we encounter an abstract target domain, mapping our physical experience onto unfamiliar situations and concepts. (Later developments of this theory are discussed in Chapter 9 of this book.) These basic principles of cognition shed a particularly illuminating light on how we comprehend language, and the human propensity to mentally represent,
: categorise and map experience has been found to extend throughout all communicative behaviour. A significant component of Cognitive Linguistics continues to be dedicated to understanding our ability to construct and maintain mental representations not just of simplified image-schematic phenomena but of complex linguistic structures. When we talk, listen, write and read we are only able to understand one another through the creation of not just one mental representation of the language we are using but often many dozens at once. The precise structure and content of each conceptual structure will depend greatly on the type of language being used. We also connect our multiple mental representations to form a coherent and meaningful whole in a variety of ways, responding to and evaluating individual language features differently. The massive range of creative cognitive ability shared by the majority of human beings allows us to mentally represent and understand everything from the most simple description of physical activity, to elaborate hypothetical arguments about possible future events; from the brief descriptions of personal characteristics offered in lonely-hearts columns, to stories and novels hundreds of pages long populated with dozens of characters each with their own complex personality and multifarious interrelationships. Regardless of the type of language being examined, exploring linguistic capability from a cognitive perspective necessarily involves a commitment to understanding how language, just like any other aspect of our day-to-day existence, is processed by human beings in all its psychological complexity. Most importantly, this means recognising the crucial role played by the contextual factors which surround every act of communication. The mental representations through which we understand one another are based not just on the language we use, but on our wider surroundings, our personal knowledge and our previous experiences. They are both as individual as we are and as socially and historically interconnected as we are. These cognitive and experientialist assumptions are the primary foundations upon which Text World Theory is built.
S O M E H I S T O RY
Text World Theory is firmly situated within the tradition of Cognitive Linguistics. It is based on the same fundamentally experientialist principles and takes human communicative processes as its central focus. It was originally the brainchild of Paul Werth, who began formulating a text-world framework in the late 1980s and early 1990s, publishing its outline in a series of articles during this period. Throughout this body of work, Werth claimed to have devised a methodological approach capable of accounting for the cognitive processes behind the production and interpretation of all forms of human communication; from telephone conversations to dramatic performance, from church sermons to newspaper reports. Such ambitious theoretical objectives
are rarely encountered within any field of linguistic study and the project Werth proposed was wide-ranging even by Cognitive Linguistics’ standards. However, Werth’s development of his all-encompassing model was sadly cut short by his untimely death in 1995. By that time, Werth had set down only the basic foundations of Text World Theory in published form, though he had also managed to complete a manuscript for his monograph on text-worlds prior to his death. Although not in the camera-ready form that had been requested by Werth’s publishers on their original acceptance of the text, Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse was considered to be of such academic importance as to warrant the extensive further editing work needed to bring the volume to a publishable state. This task was undertaken by Mick Short at the University of Lancaster between 1995 and 1998 and involved a number of changes to Werth’s draft. Alongside numerous missing and inaccurate references, some of the examples Werth had used for analysis (including an unreferenced satirical extract on former president of the United States, Ronald Reagan) were deemed potentially libellous and were duly removed and replaced with similar, though less legally problematic extracts of Short’s devising. Several of Werth’s diagrams were also removed in order to reduce costs. With this painstaking work complete, Werth’s text-world monograph was finally published in 1999. The overwhelmingly enthusiastic response the book received from other linguists who had long waited to see it confirmed the faith originally placed in the potential of the text-world approach by those who worked to bring Werth’s project to fruition. Despite the death of its creator, Text World Theory has aroused and sustained the interest of the academic community far beyond Werth’s own lifetime. Countless undergraduate and postgraduate courses in linguistics, stylistics, cognitive poetics, narratology and literary theory now include the text-world approach as part of their curriculum, with increasing numbers of dedicated courses on Text World Theory developing in tandem. The continuing expansion of the new generation of text-world theorists ensures that the theoretical boundaries and practical applicability of Text World Theory are subject to a constant process of scrutiny and renewal. In particular, Werth’s impressive claims about the framework’s adaptability to all forms of communication have naturally attracted close inspection. In actuality, Werth’s own use of Text World Theory was limited to the analysis of relatively short extracts from literary texts, aimed at exemplifying rather than evaluating the text-world approach. Werth was never able to carry out a large scale application of the framework to the wide range of communication types he had proposed. Following his death, much of the immediate further development of Text World Theory has been concerned with broadening the application of the framework. The flexibility of Werth’s model has now been tested against a variety of discourse types: from personal ads to poetry, from recipes to radio
: programmes. The result is a newly expanded and refined Text World Theory for the twenty-first century. It is important to stress, however, that the development of Text World Theory is by no means complete. This book invites you to participate directly in the continuing progression and enhancement of the text-world approach. The chapters which follow present practical analyses and discussion which are intended as a further contribution to the development of Text World Theory. However, they also include suggestions for independent work and classroom discussion and the results of your activities will also constitute an important input to this newly emergent field. Text World Theory: An Introduction is aimed very much at giving you the opportunity to involve yourself in the cutting-edge of cognitive discourse study.
T E X T W O R L D T H E O RY
So far, we have established that Text World Theory is a model of human language processing which is based on the notions of mental representation found in Cognitive Psychology and which shares the experientialist principles of Cognitive Linguistics. But what does this mean in practical terms? And what sets Text World Theory apart from other cognitive-linguistic frameworks? In fact, these two questions can be answered simultaneously, since what makes Text World Theory unique is its comprehensive application of cognitivist principles in analytical practice. First and foremost, Text World Theory is a discourse framework. This means that it is concerned not just with how a particular text is constructed but how the context surrounding that text influences its production and reception. Earlier in this chapter, I mentioned briefly that the consideration of contextual factors is a necessary part of any study of language from a cognitive perspective. However, in the day-to-day practice of Cognitive Linguistics, this has not always proved to be the case. Despite making an explicit commitment to understanding human communication in all its experiential complexity, many cognitive linguists have still fought shy of dealing directly with context. Perhaps the most obvious reason for this is the fact that its unwieldy nature at first appears incompatible with rigorous linguistic analysis. Consider, for example, the contextual factors which might play a role in our processing of a simple face-to-face exchange: S1: excuse me – sorry – I’m new round here – I’m looking for the Hollies Medical Centre – is this St Andrews Road? S2: oh – er – yes love – yes it is – if you just follow it round and up the hill it’s on the right hand side at the top of the hill – opposite where the old church used to be – where they’ve built the new flats – it’s a big old house on the right hand side
This is a transcript of a conversation I (S1) had with an elderly woman (S2) when I first moved to Sheffield. As you would expect in such a situation, both the woman and I make several references to our immediate surroundings during the course of the exchange. Our differing ages, the fact that we are strangers, and the fact that the conversation is taking place in the north of England, all inform the linguistic choices that I and the elderly woman make. I give the woman some information about myself, particularly the fact that I am new to the area, with the aim of eliciting detailed directions to a place I have never been before. In so doing, I am making predictions about the knowledge the elderly woman has of the area, as well as signalling to her the extent of my own background knowledge. The elderly woman in turn provides a description of a route to the Hollies Medical Centre, based on her own previous experiences. In this instance, some of my contextualising cues are actually missed by my coconversant and my construction of a mental representation of how to reach the medical centre is complicated when the woman says that my destination is opposite where an old church used to be. This information, of course, does little to help me, since the church was demolished long before I arrived in Sheffield. However inefficient, this conversation nevertheless required both me and the elderly woman to make reference to an array of contextual factors in a very short space of time. If such a brief and apparently simple exchange can in fact involve such cognitive complexities as speculating about the content of someone else’s knowledge structures, imagine what the proper consideration of the context surrounding an extended political argument might entail. Looked at from this perspective, it is perhaps no wonder that context has been so carefully avoided by the majority of both traditional and cognitive-linguistic approaches in the past. Even those cognitivists who have most enthusiastically embraced the notion of context in theory have in practice limited their analyses to decontextualised single sentences, fabricated examples of language, and only notional gestures towards the pragmatic and psychological intricacies of human interaction. Text World Theory, on the other hand, takes its commitment to experientialism seriously. It aims to provide a framework for the study of discourse which is fully sensitive to all the situational, social, historical and psychological factors which play a crucial role in our cognition of language. This is not to say that dealing with context is an easy task, but the key to a properly comprehensive examination of discourse is to recognise its complexity from the start and to formulate an appropriate analytical structure through which this complexity can be made more manageable. Text World Theory sets about achieving this by separating every discourse into a series of distinct conceptual levels. The first of these, the discourse-world, deals with the immediate situation which surrounds human beings as they communicate with one another. The conscious presence of at least one speaker or writer and one or more listeners or readers is essential for a discourse-world to exist. This is because the discourse-world contains not only those sentient beings participating in the
: discourse and the objects and entities which surround them, but all the personal and cultural knowledge those participants bring with them to the language situation. The first level of Text World Theory, then, offers a means of exploring how a range of contextual factors have the potential to impact upon both the construction and comprehension of a given discourse. As the human beings in the discourse-world communicate with one another, they construct mental representations of the discourse in their minds, in which the language being produced can be conceptualised and understood. As already mentioned earlier in this chapter, these mental representations are known as text-worlds. The second level of Text World Theory concentrates on this area of conceptual activity and provides a framework through which the precise structure and cognitive effects of individual mental representations can be examined. Central to the text-world approach is the appreciation that the textworlds we construct in order to understand discourse are often as richly detailed as the discourse-world from which they spring. Text World Theory retains the emphasis first placed by cognitive psychologists on the essentially analogue nature of mental representations. While some discourses may require only simple and short-lived text-worlds to be constructed, others may involve many dozens of complex conceptual structures, built and sustained over an extended period of time. Our experience of these worlds can be as real to us as our experience of the everyday world in which we live. The feeling of being so immersed in a text-world as almost to lose sense of who and where we are is familiar to just about anyone who has ever read a novel. We can populate our text-worlds with living, breathing, thinking characters, carrying out complex physical and mental activities, in authentic material surroundings. We are able to predict and replicate human behaviour, while at the same time remaining susceptible to having our own behaviour affected by the text-worlds we create. The emotional and physical responses our text-world experiences can induce, may reduce us to tears, provoke laughter, even start revolutions. A considerable part of the discourse-comprehension process involves organising incoming linguistic information according to certain logical and perceptual rules. Complex discourses of the sort described above, for example, normally require a series of distinct but interconnected text-worlds to be established. For example, have a look at the following text: By now the fields of Glastonbury will be full of Kate Moss wannabes stalking a muddy catwalk in Hunter wellies, Topshop’s oversized sunglasses, and some hideous, faux-hippy kaftan from Kookai. If you didn’t manage to commit to this festival fashion show in time, fear not. There’s no reason to miss out on the beauty benefits of a couple of days spent in a muddy field, thanks to All Made Up’s At Home Glasto Day Spa programme. Start with a clay cleanser (mud, clay, whatever, it’s all muck), then move on to a good old-fashioned mud mask. Barielle’s foot thingie gives the ultimate
festival experience, except that you can rinse it off in a clean bathroom. Eating greasy noodles and swigging warm beer while doing all of this is, as ever, your call. (The Guardian Weekend, 25 June 2005) This is an extract from All Made Up, a regular beauty advice column in The Guardian Weekend magazine, a weekly glossy supplement to the same newspaper in which Old Cockerel placed his lonely-hearts advertisement. The writer here creates two connected but independently formed scenes: the first, a muddy music festival; the second, a home beauty treatment. Neither scene actually exists in the real-world. The description of the music festival is the author’s conjecture about what might be happening in Glastonbury, England, at the time of her writing. The home beauty treatment is merely a suggested activity, as is the proposal of warm beer and noodles as an accompanying snack, which the reader of the text may or may not decide to follow in his or her realworld. The column is also characterised by its outspoken opinions and evaluative descriptions of certain people and their habits: ‘Kate Moss wannabes . . . in Hunter wellies, Topshop’s oversized sunglasses, and some hideous, fauxhippy kaftan from Kookai’ is not a flattering description of festival-goers. Each time the author of All Made Up describes a new scene, creates a possibility, or offers an opinion, the reader of the text must alter his or her mental representation of the text in order for the dynamism of the incoming information to be accommodated and understood. The same applies in all discourses. The content of the multiple worlds created by complex texts and the relationships between them depend to a great extent on, for example, who is speaking, how reliable we think they might be, what time-zone the discourse relates to, and so on. Changes in these sorts of variables cause new worlds to be created, and human beings often need to monitor and evaluate multifarious text-worlds concurrently in order to make complete sense of a particular piece of language. This view of communication as essentially rule-governed is by no means new and the component of Text World Theory which enables us to examine how the tricky process of discourse-management is achieved draws considerable influence from the logic of possible worlds. Indeed, any theory which makes reference to world-creating properties of language is necessarily indebted to the primary investigations of alternative worlds undertaken by possible-worlds theorists. As far back as the eighteenth century, possible-worlds theorists have been making use of the ‘worlds’ metaphor to explore numerous theological, logical, philosophical and semantic problems. The central notion underlying all possible-worlds theories is that the world we recognise as our actual world is only one of a multitude of possible-worlds. An example often used to illustrate the far-reaching implications of this basic premise is the sentence ‘The present King of France is bald’. This sentence contains a denoting phrase ‘the present King of France’ which has no referent in the real world. Traditional logic would argue that, as result, the phrase denotes nothing and any positive predication
: made about it (that is, ‘is bald’) cannot be assigned a truth value. However, if we take an alternative possible-worlds approach, accepting the notion that the actual world is only one of a multitude of possibilities, we can easily imagine that ‘the present King of France’ might exist in one of them. The truth value of the predication made about him (that is that he is bald) may then be assessed in relation to that world. Where traditional logic does not allow for the extension of truth values to the human ability to speculate and hypothesise, the multiple-world perspective proposed by possible-worlds theory accommodates the existence of non-actual states of affairs and enables the extension of truth values to hypothetical entities and situations. Such an approach has obvious appeal for those whose central interests lie in the investigation of mental constructs and the unrealised situations to which they frequently relate. For instance, the adoption in recent years of possible-worlds methods and terminology by literary theorists, particularly in the area of narratology, has dramatically revitalised interest in this area of philosophy. Among other subjects, narratologists have used possible-worlds theory to explore the nature of fictionality and the relative possibility (also known as accessibility in possible-worlds terms) of different literary worlds. How close or how far away we perceive an unrealised world to be from our actual world is often measured against a taxonomy of common elements which may be shared between the two. Some worlds will be highly realistic and may contain some of the same objects, landscapes and even people which exist in the actual world. Others may be fantastical and relate to distant planets and other time-zones, sometimes with completely different natural and logical laws from those of our own reality. In the case of literary texts, precisely where along this scale of accessibility a particular world is positioned can affect how readers respond to its content. In line with cognitive approaches to discourse-comprehension, however, possibleworlds theorists recognise that in all cases readers will begin processing a text with the assumption that its textual world has an identity with the actual world until they are presented with information to the contrary. This assumption is known as the principle of minimal departure. When reading the All Made Up column, then, we apply many of these logical principles to our conceptualisation of the text. We assume that the worlds described by the author resemble our own real world in the first instance, making adjustments to this mental representation only when directed to by the text. For example, it is no longer June 2005 and I am not in Glastonbury, surrounded by Kate Moss wannabes. However, other real-world similarities and rules still exist in my mental representation of the scene presented in the beauty column: I am in England, I know who the supermodel Kate Moss is, I have met some ‘Kate Moss wannabes’ before, I have been to Glastonbury in the past and can imagine it easily now, despite being in a different location in time and space, and so on. The world I create in my mind is a re-creation of a real place based on these aspects of my existing knowledge and previous experiences. It is populated with
living, breathing human beings, many of whom bear some resemblance to people I have known previously in my real life. These people are subject to the same laws of gravity and existence as those which govern my everyday world. However, I am also able to recognise the differences between my experiences of the real world and the worlds I create in my mind. I have a definite sense of what is real and what is not, what is possible and what is not. I am able to evaluate the text of All Made Up as containing fictions, speculations and personal opinions which, while not realised in my world, are nonetheless conceivable in another world.
T H E S T RU C T U R E O F T H I S B O O K
The coming chapters aim to demonstrate how Text World Theory can help us to track the process of human communication from the initial production and reception of discourse, through its mental representation, to the complex management of multitudinous conceptual structures in the human mind. Text World Theory draws on a wide range of cognitive, psychological and philosophical approaches to language and conceptualisation in order to present a unified and comprehensive framework for the exploration of communication and the mind. It provides both a valuable practical synthesis of previously disparate theoretical ideas and a user-friendly point of access to individual areas of cognitive study. Some of the key aspects of the disciplines which have had greatest influence on the formulation of the text-world approach to discourse study have been outlined in this chapter, but many others are introduced and examined in detail in later chapters. Throughout this book, guidance is provided on where specific theoretical ideas originate and what further reading might be undertaken in order to explore these areas in depth. However, unlike in many other academic texts, and to allow a greater ease of reading in the main body of the chapters, these references and guidelines are given at the end of each chapter in the Further Reading section. Each chapter of this book opens with a summary of the key issues it discusses. In Chapters 2 to 9, the basic components which make up the text-world framework are explained and demonstrated through their practical application to a range of different discourse examples. These examples have been deliberately selected to be as diverse and as broad-ranging as possible within the necessary confines of the present book. Text World Theory: An Introduction aims to be as experimental as it is explicatory and each individual analysis undertaken here is intended to contribute to the future evolution of the framework through its rigorous testing against a variety of discourse types. Of course, an exhaustive trial of Text World Theory and all its mechanisms is impossible within these pages and, for this reason, the reader of this book is invited to participate actively in the ongoing text-world project and undertake new and original analyses of his or her own. I cannot emphasise enough that the development of
: the text-world approach is still in progress and that all interested academics and students have the opportunity to share in the ownership of the insights into language and the human mind it can offer. The version of the theory presented in this book is itself the result of ten years of preceding experimental applications and investigations. In the time which has elapsed since Paul Werth’s death, I and several other text-world theorists have worked to fine-tune the original text-world framework and to facilitate its applicability to as many different discourse environments as possible. It is important to stress that Text World Theory as it is described and demonstrated in this book has been transformed in many details from Werth’s initial formulation as a consequence. Wherever necessary, however, the Further Reading sections in this book provide references to the relevant areas of Werth’s work should readers wish to track the evolution of the framework for themselves. The forthcoming chapters are organised so that the conceptual processes which underpin human communication are described as they might occur in an everyday language event. Chapter 2 begins with an exploration of the discourse-world environment, the context surrounding the production and reception of language. The discussion here focuses on the existing knowledge and previous experiences human beings make use of during their interaction with one another. To illustrate these ideas, the contextual factors which might influence the conceptualisation of an obituary are examined in detail in this chapter. Chapters 3 and 4 move on to look at the text-world level of the discourse and offer an explanation of the conceptual processes which enable a world first to be established and then advanced. Chapter 3 includes analyses of an audio guide and some extracts of literary prose fiction in order to explore the different ways that text-worlds are constructed in a text and in the mind. Chapter 4 looks at what might happen in these text-worlds once they are created and how worlds begin to develop and change as a discourse progresses. Some extracts of football commentary and some song lyrics form the basis of the practical analyses in this chapter. Chapter 5 begins the exploration of how the human mind manages multiple text-worlds and investigates some of the reasons why separate conceptual layers can come to emerge from a discourse. Contrasting examples of second-person address, in a parenting manual and in a contemporary novel, as well as readers’ possible reactions to them are examined here. Chapter 6 and Chapter 7 explore the precise nature of the different text-worlds which might develop in a multiworld discourse. Chapter 6 includes analyses of a celebrity gossip magazine and a car maintenance book and looks at how distance, in its various forms, is conceptualised in the discourse-world. Chapter 7 investigates the conceptual effects of the expression of knowledge and belief in discourse. A transcript of a political debate and the text of a political speech are examined in this chapter. Chapters 8 and 9 broaden out the focus of the discussion to look at how extended texts and their complex conceptual structures are realised in the
human mind. Chapter 8 returns to literary prose fiction to investigate the role of narrative structures in our management of extended discourses. Some examples of the sorts of narrative tricks often played in contemporary literature are examined, as well as their effects on our world-structures. Chapter 9 concludes the explication of Text World Theory with a discussion of metaphor and the text-worlds it creates. This chapter retains the focus on extended texts and extended text-worlds and takes advantage of the discourses encapsulated in their entirety in the same sort of lonely-hearts advertisements with which the present chapter opened. Text World Theory: An Introduction ends with an outward look at some of the possible directions text-world theorists might take in their future explorations. In Chapter 10, the current state of Text World Theory is assessed and summarised and the trajectory of its further evolution is speculated upon. Practical suggestions are made, and example texts provided, for the continuation of the innovative and principled investigation of the true complexities of language, world, and mind.
F U RT H E R I N V E S T I G AT I O N
• Try showing Old Cockerel’s advertisement to a group of your friends or colleagues and ask them for details of his appearance and personality not given in the text. How tall is he? What colour hair does he have? What are his hobbies? And so on. Compare their answers with my description of Old Cockerel and with your own mental image. How similar are they and at what points do they differ? How far do you think these differences and similarities are the result of individual experience and how far do you think they are the products of shared culture? Consider how you might go about testing your theories more rigorously. • Here is another personal advertisement to show your colleagues: Fit, athletic young-looking female seeks new home. Likes country walks, Mozart and relaxing by the fire. (The Guardian, 18 June 2005) Ask them the same questions about their mental representation of this text as you asked them about Old Cockerel. This advertisement did not appear in the ‘Soulmates’ column of The Guardian. It appeared on the front page of the newspaper above a picture of an old greyhound. Here is the complete text: Fit, athletic young-looking female seeks new home. Likes country walks, Mozart and relaxing by the fire.
: All of our retired greyhounds deserve their own personal ad. But as the RGT re-homes around three thousand dogs a year, it’s just not possible. We always need more people to adopt our dogs, so perhaps you could help? Retired greyhounds are gentle, intelligent animals and now need some TLC in a loving family home. They ask very little in return. So if you’re looking for a devoted companion to share happy times, look no further. Simply send in the coupon, log onto our website or phone us on: 0870 1234567 How did your colleagues respond when they learned that the advertisement was for the Retired Greyhound Trust? Can you use any of the cognitive theories discussed so far to help to explain the techniques the RGT are using to get their message across? Look at both parts of the advertisement and try to pick out the features which correspond with your expectations of a lonelyhearts column. • Consider the mental representations you have of non-linguistic concepts as well as those you have formed from your encounters with the texts looked at so far. How, for example, do you envisage the days of the week in your mind? Is a week a line or a circle, or does it take some other shape? Are you in it or above it? What about the months of the year? Perhaps your mental models of these concepts even take a particular colour, sound, or taste. Are certain days or months clearer or emphasised more than others? If so, why do you think this is? Compare your answers to these questions with those of your colleagues and consider again how you might go about testing the reasons for any similarity or difference in a rigorous way. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G
The texts recommended as further reading in this chapter are included either as accessible introductions to a particular field or as exemplary key texts in a certain area of study. More topic-specific reading will be recommended in later chapters as precise areas of other disciplines become relevant to the explication of related components of Text World Theory. The key text on scripts and schemas is Schank and Abelson (1977). These terms and their relation to Artificial Intelligence are also explained in full in Schank (1982a, 1982b, 1984, and 1986). Schema theory has been applied in the analysis of literary texts in Cockcroft (2002), Culpeper (2001), Gladsky (1992), Mandler (1984), Rumelhart (1975), Semino (1997), and Thorndyke (1977), and to advertising discourse in Cook (1994). The notion of analogic mental models as the basis of human cognition was introduced and developed most extensively in Johnson-Laird (1983 and 1988).
Schmid and Ungerer (1996) and Croft and Cruse (2004) provide useful introductions to Cognitive Linguistics. The opening chapters of Lakoff (1987) also give a good overview both of the principles of Cognitive Linguistics and the Cognitive Psychology which informs them. This text was one of those at the heart of the cognitive revolution, along with Fillmore (1982 and 1985), with whom the concept of frames originates; Gibbs (1994); Lakoff and Johnson (1980 and 1999), who were responsible for the development of Conceptual Metaphor Theory and the related notion of ICMs; Langacker (1987, 1990 and 1991), from whose cognitive grammar the notion of image-schemas was developed; and Talmy (2000a and 2000b). Further useful introductions to Cognitive Psychology can be found in Anderson (2005), Bechtel and Graham (1998), Friedenberg and Silverman (2006), Glass et al. (1979), Groome (1999), and Holyoak and Morrison (2005). Mental spaces form the basis of Fauconnier’s (1994 and 1997) framework for the cognition of discourse. Fauconnier and Sweetser (1996) and Semino (2003) give examples of the practical applications of this theory. Text World Theory is also closely related to the Contextual Frame Theory developed by Emmott (1992, 1994, 1995, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2002, 2003a and 2003b). Aspects of both mental spaces and contextual frames will be discussed in detail in later chapters of this book. Bradley and Swartz (1979) remains the most accessible introduction to the logic of possible worlds. Other key texts on this subject include Allén (1989), Goodman (1978), Kripke (1972 and 1985), Lewis (1973 and 1986), Pavel (1986), Plantinga (1974) and Rescher (1975). Ryan (1991) provides a comprehensive application of possible worlds theory to narrative fiction (see also Ronen 1994). Ryan (1998) also presents an assessment of the usefulness of the ‘worlds’ metaphor in relation to the exploration of literary discourse in general. The text-world approach to discourse study was first outlined by Paul Werth in a series of journal and book articles (Werth 1994, 1995a, 1995b, 1997a, 1997b) before his final monograph on the framework was published (Werth 1999). Since Werth’s death, the framework has been applied and tested in a range of different discourse environments, but particularly in the area of Cognitive Poetics, where the findings of cognitive science are used in the analysis of literary texts. Stockwell (2002) provides a comphrehensive introduction to this field (see also Hogan 2003), while Gavins and Steen (2003) and Semino and Culpeper (2002) contain a range of examples of practical applications. Further developments of the text-world approach within this and other areas of linguistic study can be found in Bridgeman (1998, 2001, 2005a and 2005b), Chilton (2004 and 2005), Gavins (2000, 2001, 2003, 2005a, and 2005b), Hidalgo Downing (2000a, 2000b, 2000c, 2002, and 2003), Hoover (2004), Inchaurralde (2005), Lahey (2003, 2004, and 2005), and Margolin (2000) and Stockwell (2000, 2002: 135–49, and 2005).
Participating in Discourse
KEY ISSUES IN THIS CHAPTER
Text World Theory begins its exploration of communication and the mind at the immediate level of discourse production and reception. In keeping with its cognitivist principles, it attributes primacy to the human experience of language and takes the face-to-face interaction between living, thinking human beings as the prototype for all other aspects of communication and cognition. The content of this interactivity, as well as the context surrounding it, is the subject matter of the discourse-world level of Text World Theory. This chapter examines the associated elements which make up a discourse-world: from the expectations and constraints which govern communicative behaviour, to the cultural and personal knowledge structures which influence our linguistic and conceptual choices. Of particular interest here are the notion of communication as a fundamentally wilful endeavour, the processes by which human beings make inference from particular discourses, and the principles by which the impact of context on a discourse can be systematically examined and understood. These subjects are investigated in relation to an example of a face-to-face conversation and a newspaper obituary in order to explore how the contextual and conceptual factors involved in the processing of language vary in accordance with the type of communicative situation.
I N T E R A C T I N G T H R O U G H L A N G UAG E
It may seem like a statement of the blindingly obvious to say that the involvement of human beings is necessary for an act of linguistic communication to occur. However, the consequent complexities of this apparently simple fact are all too easily overlooked. After all, human beings co-exist in all kinds of
physical situations – in the workplace, in the home, on the street – but language does not occur in all instances all of the time. It seems reasonable to assume, then, that some other prerequisite has to be in place before we can and do communicate with one another. Crucially, communication can be brought into being only through a conscious act of human will. Understanding the volitional aspect of communication is key to understanding the discourse process as a whole. Except in atypical cases, such as talking in one’s sleep, hallucination, and certain mental illnesses, all language is created deliberately. In speakers and writers, a conscious employment of cognitive and physical faculties is required in order for meaningful sounds or marks on the page to be produced. In hearers and readers, a similar deliberate engagement is necessary to make sense of incoming linguistic information. Of course, the noise of other people’s conversation and a wealth of written language form the background to all our everyday lives, but the content of these accidental discourses often barely registers in our minds. Our active participation in communication, on the other hand, is entirely wilful. When this happens, a discourse-world comes into being and the communicators who initiate it are known as the participants in Text World Theory terms. Whenever we enter into a discourse-world situation with another human being, through either written or spoken means, it is always for a purpose. Whether that purpose be to share, to learn, to argue, or even to confuse, it will be necessarily driven by human volition. This volition not only determines our own behaviour and influences our conceptualisation of a discourse, but it is also what we expect from our co-communicators. We shape our own language and assume the language of others to be shaped by deliberate human choice as a default assumption. Consider, for example, the following exchange: S1: I’ll have a chicken sandwich please. S2: Sure. What kind of cheese? This is another real-life conversation. Once again, I am participant S1, this time attempting to buy a chicken sandwich in an outlet of a well-known multinational chain of sandwich stores in Madison, Wisconsin, USA. My participation in the conversation was highly purposeful and motivated by that most basic of human sensations, hunger. Having spotted the sandwich of my choice on the brightly coloured menu board, I produced what I considered to be the most efficient language to help me obtain it. However, in her response (S2), the assistant did not seem to have understood my request as far as I could tell. So, I tried again: S1: No, a chicken sandwich. S2: Sure. What kind of cheese?
: The important thing to note here is my persistence with a conversation which I perceive to be developing along illogical and unsatisfactory lines. I do not give up my attempts to buy a sandwich, neither after the first apparent misunderstanding, nor the second. This is because I am assuming throughout the exchange that my co-participant is as purposeful in her contribution to the conversation as I am in mine. This basic expectation is the driving force behind both our behaviour, causing us to pursue the conversation until a point of mutual understanding can be reached: S1: S2: S1: S2: S1: S2: S1: S2: S1:
I don’t want cheese. It’s included. You mean I have to have cheese? No, you don’t have to have it, but you’re paying for it. But I can have a sandwich without cheese? I guess. OK. I’ll just have chicken on its own, then. No cheese? No cheese.
In this particular case, the faltering start to the conversation comes from the fact that both participants are lacking certain knowledge structures as the result of a cultural mis-match. How this mis-match is resolved is explored later on in this chapter. All discourse-worlds operate according to the assumption that all participants are communicating wilfully. Obstacles far greater than those I encountered in the sandwich shop must be met before an attempt at communication is likely to be abandoned by those involved. Whenever we speak, listen, read or write, we do so in the expectation that our co-participants are engaging with us in a mutual communicative endeavour. Where the language we receive does not make immediate sense, we may question the participant responsible for it, search for meaning through re-reading, and generally invest whatever effort is necessary to make the language concerned cohere. Where the language we produce is met with confusion, we can repeat, re-structure, clarify and explain until we are satisfied that our communicative aims have been successful. The discourse-world, then, can be seen as an act of negotiation in process. And what is being negotiated between the participants in that discourse-world is the precise nature of the text-world they are constructing in their minds in order to process and understand the language at hand. The perspective Text World Theory takes on communication is thus a highly dynamic one. Meaning and understanding are not pre-determined or fixed in any way, they are continually evolving concepts, negotiated on-line by all those involved in the discourse-world.
C O M M U N I C AT I N G I N C O N T E X T
Look again at the sandwich shop exchange, but this time consider the circumstances in which it took place rather than just the language being used. To be more specific, consider what differences might exist between S1 (a 32-year-old English academic, visiting both the USA and the well-known sandwich chain for the first time) and S2 (an adolescent American sandwich-shop assistant). Although a common language is shared here, a considerable knowledge gap still exists between me and my co-participant. It is clear from our conversation that, at least to begin with, I am lacking crucial knowledge which might help me achieve my aims. Similarly, my co-participant lacks knowledge which might help her understand my behaviour. Knowledge, or the lack of it, plays a critical role in all discourse. In Text World Theory, the need or desire to impart or gain some kind of knowledge is seen as the common motivating factor behind all acts of communication. Indeed, communication in general would be impossible without the human knowledge which enables both its production and comprehension. Because Text World Theory takes the commitment to experientialism seriously, it aims to provide a framework which is fully context-sensitive. This means recognising the potential that both the immediate physical surroundings and the participants’ background knowledge have to affect the discourse process. But what is the specific nature of this knowledge, and how can we examine the impact of such an apparently abstract notion on everyday discourse in a systematic way? In fact, the participants in any given discourse-world will normally be making use of several different types of knowledge at once. Understanding what those different types are is the first step towards understanding their effect on the discourse process. At the beginning of the sandwich-shop conversation, for instance, there are some aspects of knowledge that are available to both me and the shop assistant, and some that are available to only one or the other of us. However, the ownership of knowledge shifts as the discourse progresses, as the participants use language to share knowledge with one another. This transfer of knowledge from private to public ownership, which forms the primary basis of all discourse, is known as incrementation. As they communicate, the discourse-world participants increment a variety of different knowledge structures. They may, for example, exchange facts, specify goals or, more broadly, express emotional states, argue opinions, or simply offer a point of view. All of these communicative acts, and more, are seen from the Text World Theory perspective as forms of knowledge incrementation. Before looking at the transfer of knowledge through language, let us first look at the body of knowledge which may be shared by the participants from the outset. Communication always takes place in some kind of context, a situation of use. The whole notion of the discourse-world in Text World Theory is devoted to the complexities of that situation of use. Part of the
: discourse-world, but only part, is made up of the physical setting which surrounds the discourse participants: the time and place in which language is being used. In face-to-face communication, that time and place is shared by the participants, although we will see later that this is not the case with all discourse. What the participants can see around them, the objects and other entities which inhabit the same physical environment, constitutes shared perceptual knowledge. In the discourse-world of the sandwich shop, for example, a menu board, a cabinet of fresh ingredients, a cash register, some tables and chairs and a drinks dispenser are just a few among many objects mutually manifest to both participants. Other sensory input will also be shared in a discourse-world and the smells, sounds and temperature of the immediate environment are often just as important in the development of a discourse as those objects and entities which can be visually identified. All these kinds of mutually distinguishable elements have the potential to impinge upon a discourse at any time since, at any time during the course of their communication, the participants may choose to refer to any one them. Indeed, most of the conversations which ever take place in the sandwich shop will make use of the perceptual knowledge shared by the participants at the time, since the primary purpose of the shop is the buying and selling of goods which exist in the immediate environment. Attached to all the perceivable elements which surround us in our day-today lives, such as the menu board in the sandwich shop, is another kind of knowledge which relates to the relative familiarity or novelty of the items concerned. As we saw in Chapter 1, we store our experiences of the everyday world as knowledge structures (known variously as scripts, schemas or frames) in our minds so that we can refer back to them when we encounter new situations and concepts. Even though I had never seen the menu board in the sandwich shop before, I was nonetheless able to identify it as a menu board and knew how to make use of it based on my previous experiences of similar items in other situations in the past. This experiential knowledge helps us to negotiate our ways through all kinds of novel occurrences on a daily basis, expanding and adjusting our personal knowledge stores as we go. In many discourse-worlds, the participants will share a good deal of experiential knowledge and will have a common understanding of what the elements that surround them are and what functions they have in the everyday world. This can be said of the participants in the sandwich-shop conversation in relation to much of their immediate environment. Despite having considerably less experience of the well-known sandwich chain than my co-communicator, none of the elements that were mutually manifest to us both were unfathomably new to me. We must look elsewhere, then, for the key to the communicative difficulties experienced by both participants in this discourse-world. The degree to which the participants in a discourse-world share experiential knowledge structures often correlates with the extent to which they can
be recognised as sharing a common cultural identity. The notion of cultural belonging is a complex one. Most people’s understanding of ‘culture’ will probably relate to some degree of integration within a particular community, as well as to the sorts of everyday practices and traditions that are commonplace and acceptable in that community. Consider your own sense of culture, though. Can you identify yourself as part of one culture? Or do you find an identity with more than one? Is your culture just your nationality, your religion, your race, or a combination of these and other factors? How many separate aspects of one person’s culture can we identify before we are simply describing an individual? The important point here is that our sense of culture is influenced by far more than just where we were born. It is not simply the accumulation of experiential knowledge structures as the result of everyday interaction with the world. It is, more importantly, how we as individuals make connections between those separate knowledge structures in order to define ourselves in relation to others and how others define us in return. The subtleties of this process of self- and otheridentification can have surprising results on discourse produced across cultural boundaries. In the sandwich shop, despite having a functioning script for fast-food restaurants, a definite idea of my role within such a scenario, familiarity with all the objects in my immediate surroundings and shared linguistic knowledge with my co-participant, the mis-match in cultural knowledge between me and the shop assistant was significant enough to cause real communicative problems. My cultural understanding was not detailed enough to prepare me, having asked for a chicken sandwich, for being offered a selection of cheese. I knew neither that all sandwiches sold in these sandwich shops come with a choice of different cheeses, nor that just about all sandwiches in the state of Wisconsin (the ‘dairy state’ of America, as I later learned) come with cheese as a standard ingredient. Similarly, my co-participant was unprepared for a customer who did not want an ingredient included in her sandwich which she had already paid for and which forms such an integral part of the Wisconsin diet. Crucially, the cultural differences which existed between the participants in the sandwich shop are also connected very closely to differences in ideology. At the heart of the difficulties experienced in this discourse-world is my failure to understand the value-added culture of the United States, in which competitive advantage and the maximisation of profit are achieved in business through the provision of services which consumers perceive as ‘extra’, despite having paid a premium for their inclusion in a basic product. Common perceptual, experiential and linguistic knowledge was not sufficient to bridge this gap in my understanding of the ideology of the community I was visiting. A lack of knowledge about the importance of something as apparently innocuous as cheese in American society was enough to create real difficulty in this particular discourse-world.
: MAKING CONNECTIONS
I did eventually leave the sandwich shop with the chicken sandwich – no cheese – that I wanted. The essentially negotiated nature of the discourse-world meant that the cultural knowledge gap between me and my co-participant did not, in the end, prevent the fulfilment of my communicative aims. Because I assumed throughout the conversation that my co-participant was communicating wilfully, and because she assumed the same of me, we both invested the extra effort required in this situation to make the conversation work. In this discourse-world, this effort was both linguistic, taking the form of repetition and clarification, and cognitive, in the attempts made by both participants to work out some sense from the language being used. The process of deducing meaning from language, and other factors, in this way is known as inferencing. Text World Theory is fundamentally based on an understanding of discourse as a dynamic cognitive process. Specifically, this means that communication is not simply the transmission of a particular message from participant A to participant B through a fixed linguistic code. From a Text World Theory point of view, communication is both the means by which knowledge is transferred between human beings and the process by which those human beings interconnect the new knowledge structures they encounter through communication with existing beliefs, immediate perceptions and previous experiences. As already mentioned earlier in this chapter, everything we encounter in our everyday lives, both new and familiar, is understood in terms of our existing knowledge structures. Our very survival in the real world is dependent on a constant process of cognitive comparison and development. Language is just one of the myriad of sources of informational input we experience daily, and our reception of that information is far from passive. We do not simply gather knowledge through communication, we actively construct it. Through the process of inferencing, we make use of existing knowledge structures – linguistic, experiential, perceptual and cultural – in order to make sense of new sensory and linguistic input. In turn, new experiences alter our understanding of the world by expanding, clarifying, or even disproving previously held beliefs, or by creating entirely new frames of knowledge. For example, in the sandwich shop my existing linguistic knowledge enabled me to produce the language I thought would be most effective in achieving my aims, and to understand the language my co-participant produced in return. My perceptual knowledge allowed me to identify the food I wanted and told me that my co-participant would be able to identify it too. Standing face-toface, we both varied our intonation and made gestures and facial expressions in the delivery of our chosen language. The aspects of cultural knowledge we shared helped us both to interpret this non-linguistic communication and to use it in the construal of meaning. My experiential knowledge, and specifically my previous experiences of take-away restaurants, meant that I knew roughly
how I should behave in the shop: how to make an order, how to pay, what to expect of my co-participant. However, when these expectations were not met, I did not simply abandon the conversation, but immediately began to accommodate the new experiences I was having, adjusting and expanding my existing knowledge structures in accordance with the developing discourse-world. Since it was quickly apparent that my co-participant and I had common linguistic and perceptual knowledge, from the fact that we were speaking the same language in a shared physical environment, it was easy for me to identify variation in cultural and experiential knowledge as the probable root of our communicative difficulties, rather than assuming some pathological disorder on the part of the shop assistant. In our individual day-to-day existences, I and the shop assistant had accrued different experiential knowledge frames from the different previous life experiences we had had. Crucially, I had never been in the sandwich shop before, while she had worked there for some length of time. More broadly, because my day-to-day existence is ordinarily lived out in a separate country from that of my co-participant, within a different cultural ideology, the scripts according to which we were both structuring our behaviour in the discourse-world were not wholly compatible. Like the majority of human beings on the planet, however, I also have knowledge frames for US society and its population as the result of multiple exposures through films, television, literature and music, as well as in face-to-face situations in the real world. The activation of this cultural knowledge allowed me to rationalise the communicative difficulties I faced and reframe my linguistic contribution to the conversation for a successful outcome.
EXPLORING CONTEXT
In order to explore the ideas presented so far in this chapter a little further, here is another culturally- and ideologically-situated discourse: HOPLEY – DOM. MICHAEL O.S.B. died 24th August 2001. Loved and missed by brother, sisters, cousins, nieces, nephews, great nieces and nephews, his many friends far and wide and his community at Ealing Abbey. (Daily Telegraph, 24 August 2005) This text appeared in the ‘In Memoriam’ section of the ‘Announcements’ page of the Daily Telegraph. This part of the newspaper also includes announcements of births, deaths, marriages and anniversaries, all of which report the personal experiences of particular family and other small social groups in a public format. The Daily Telegraph is, of course, not the only newspaper to have a section for these kinds of announcements, and similar columns can be found in the majority of both national and local UK press. Such
: announcements are fascinating to discourse analysts for a number of reasons. They occupy a curious position in British society, where the details of otherwise private events, often concerning some of the most taboo areas of experience (such as death and childbirth), are made available to complete strangers. The communicative act which such announcements constitute is all the more interesting from a Text World Theory point of view because, despite being publicly conducted, it often obscures the identities of the intended discourseworld participants. As with the majority of written texts, the discourse-world of the above announcement is split, with the participants occupying separate spatial and temporal locations. Discourse-worlds can be split for a number of other reasons too. In telephone conversations, for example, the participants are communicating at the same temporal point but are normally at some physical distance from one another. In recorded discourse, such as a ‘speaking book’ or a prerecorded radio programme, the participants share neither their physical space nor a common time. In the majority of written communication, a similar disjunction means that certain comprehension aids available to the participants in the here and now of face-to-face communication, such as the intonation and gestures used in the sandwich shop, are either inaccessible or irrelevant. Commonly in written communication the immediate material environment of the discourse becomes of secondary importance to the textual elements which form the main point of contact between the participants. Some written texts, particularly those with an instructive function (such as recipe books or car manuals), will of course make reference to elements within the immediate vicinity of the reader. On the whole, however, the impingement of an object or other physical discourse-world element on the discourse itself becomes less likely in split discourse-worlds, since such elements cease to be mutually perceivable by the participants. Only the text remains as a source of information from which knowledge can be incremented. The discourse-world of the Daily Telegraph announcement is split specifically between the spatio-temporal environment of its author and the spatio-temporal environment of its reader. As already mentioned, the wide distribution of the newspaper means that there are many possible readers of the text and thus many possible environments on the readerly side of the equation. I am only one of these possibles, located in the discourse-world of my kitchen in Sheffield, where my copy of the Daily Telegraph is lying next to my laptop on top of my kitchen table several months after its original publication. My only access to my co-participant is through the text of the announcement, which I am able to read thanks to the linguistic knowledge structures we share. However, despite having less information upon which to build my understanding of my co-participant’s communicative purpose than I might have in a face-to-face conversation, I nevertheless assume that the same wilfulness motivates the production of this discourse. The announcement in the Daily
Telegraph has been made by someone who has something they wish to communicate and I am similarly engaged in a wilful endeavour to understand them. However, once again, the assumption of wilfulness which motivates my participation in this discourse does not make the language at hand any easier to understand. Despite its position as a public announcement in a national newspaper, my incrementation of knowledge from this text is by no means straightforward. A number of features of the announcement create obstacles to my understanding. First of these is the absence of information about the announcement’s author. I have no real idea who my co-participant is in advance of my active participation in the discourse process. This is due in part to the split nature of the discourse-world, in which I do not have access to the perceptual knowledge which might normally impact upon my understanding of a discourse in a face-to-face situation. I do not know what my co-participant looks like, what gender or age they are, even if I may have already met them in another situation. All of these real-world factors might ordinarily influence my understanding of the discourse-world, and my subsequent behaviour within it, before any language has even been exchanged. In written communication, however, such perceptual cues are generally reduced and the text becomes the main focus of the communicative act. This particular text further complicates my incrementation of knowledge by not providing even a name for its author, as one would expect in a news report or piece of literary fiction, for example. This may seem a minor omission, but names can communicate a great deal of information in discourse. We may be familiar with the author named, either through personal contact, through exposure to their previous written work, or just through their reputation in the wider community. Varying degrees of this kind of experiential knowledge carry with them similarly varying expectations of how a new contact with the writer concerned is likely to develop. Even if the participant named is unfamiliar to us in our everyday lives, the gender-specificity of their name, their title (if any), and even whether their name is popular in contemporary society or not, can affect how we perceive and evaluate our co-participant and the language they produce. Here, as in many announcements made in similar circumstances and concerning similar events, no such external clues are given and the knowledgeincrementation base is narrowed yet further to the words which make up the announcement itself. However, the author is not the only discourse-world participant to be obscured in this announcement. The second major obstacle to my understanding of the discourse occurs when trying to deduce whether or not I am part of its intended audience. Since no direct address is made, no coparticipant is specified. Deciding one’s own position within the discourse-world thus becomes a further part of the puzzle to be solved with the help of the text. Of course, I already have some ideas about the author of this text and its intended readers before I even open my copy of the Daily Telegraph. I know with some certainty that I am not the ideal discourse-world participant in the
: mind of the writer either of this particular announcement or indeed of any of the various articles, commentaries and advertisements which make up the paper as a whole. I am not, by my nature, ‘a Telegraph reader’, a cultural category of which most British adults will have some pre-conceived ideas, in the same way as they will have pre-conceived ideas about ‘Guardian readers’ like myself, or similarly ‘Sun readers’ and ‘Daily Mail readers’, to name a few other British newspapers. In British culture, your choice of newspaper can signify a great deal to other people and is one of the ways in which many people perceive our society to be divided politically and socially. For me, parting with 60p for my copy of the Daily Telegraph was a somewhat painful experience, since I perceive the newspaper to represent social and political opinions which I find objectionable on the whole. I assume the authors of its contents to be similarly opposed to my left-wing political ideals and I carry a stereotype of them in my mind as right-wing, predominantly male, predominantly white, and predominantly middle-aged. These kinds of pre-conceived stereotypes may or may not be accurate, but the important point is that most of us harbour them about most national press in most cultural contexts. A Guardian reader like me, then, is to some extent immediately alienated from the discourse-world of the Daily Telegraph and is thus positioned in rather an awkward participatory role as a kind of eavesdropper on the discourse. This does not prevent me from making sense of the language at hand, but it does make my experience of the discourse process markedly different from those of the participants who regularly engage in the Telegraph’s discourse-world. The wilful participation of regular Telegraph readers has the potential to extend beyond the simple comprehension of the text and into some degree of emotional involvement or identification with the events described in the newspaper. My own participation, while still wilful, is somewhat more resistant and sceptical of the paper’s contents. Considering my estranged position in the discourse-world, the fact that the capitalised words which open the text, ‘HOPLEY – DOM. MICHAEL O.S.B.’, have no immediate resonance for me is perhaps unsurprising. I am at least able to recognise these words as a name, due to my experiential knowledge of similar announcements in the press and the syntactic form they normally take in this genre of discourse. ‘Hopley’ is a recognisable English surname and ‘Michael’ is a similarly unremarkable male Christian name in British culture. From these words I am able to infer that the named man belonged to the same national community as me. Note the past tense here; I can also deduce, of course, that this man is dead from the fact that his name appears at the beginning of an announcement in the ‘In Memoriam’ section of the newspaper. At this point in my processing of the text, my stereotyped image of a white, middle-class man with right-wing politics is also still running, since no information to the contrary has yet been presented to me. I am processing the text according to the principle of minimal departure discussed in Chapter 1. However, a shift away
from these purely stereotypical inferences is caused by the other capitalised letters given alongside Michael Hopley’s name. ‘DOM.’ and ‘O.S.B.’ add rather more detail to my emerging picture of the dead man. The inference I draw from these letters is that Michael Hopley was a religious man of some standing in his community. Although I did not know, on first reading, what ‘O.S.B.’ (Order of St Benedict) actually meant, the immediate co-text within which these letters appeared led me to assume that they must signify some kind of religious office in the same way I already knew ‘DOM.’ to function. (‘Dom.’ is actually a short form of the Latin ‘Dominus’, and is the male equivalent of ‘Dame’). My encounter with this text has an immediate and direct impact on my store of cultural knowledge, as I am able to add ‘O.S.B.’ to my existing knowledge frame of religious categories. It is important to note here how my description of my processing of the opening few words of this announcement has underscored the frequent overlaps which exist between different areas of human knowledge: perceptual, linguistic, experiential and cultural. Within the discourse-world, I perceive the black marks on the page of the newspaper while simultaneously recognising their membership of the linguistic knowledge frame I hold. I can identify the textual and generic conventions the announcement follows because of my experiences with similar texts in other contexts. In fact, I am familiar with the structure of ‘In Memoriam’ columns in general and the contents of this example in particular not only as things which I as an individual have seen before but as traditions carrying significance for the wider cultural community to which I identify myself as belonging. Indeed, my recognition of these significances is, in part, what defines me as a member of my cultural community in the first place. The process by which all our encounters with discourse activate selected areas of our existing knowledge is governed, in Text World Theory terms, by the principle of text-drivenness. This principle provides a manageable route into the systematic examination of context by acting as a control valve on the massive sum of personal knowledge which each participant carries with them to each discourse-world and which, in theory, has the potential to impact upon our production and reception of language in any number of ways. The principle specifies that, from the vast store of knowledge and experience available to the participants, it is the text produced in the discourse-world that determines which areas are needed in order to process and understand the discourse at hand. When reading a novel by Thomas Hardy, for example, I need only activate those areas of my personal knowledge specifically required by that text (farming in the nineteenth century, the nature of the Dorset/Wessex countryside, human relationships, for example). My experiences of football matches, or my knowledge of how to reboot a computer remain redundant, since they are not specifically referred to in the course of the text. In the opening few words of the Daily Telegraph announcement, my knowledge of
: British names, Christianity, the typographical conventions of broadsheet newspapers, and the typical readership of the Daily Telegraph itself have so far been activated by the text. The knowledge required to understand the announcement remains broadly cultural as the text continues beyond the capitalised heading to ‘died 24th August 2001. Loved and missed . . .’ Once again, the choice of lexis and the order of the details provided by the announcement are very much in line with what one might expect from its genre. As those people who love and miss Dom. Michael Hopley O.S.B are listed, the focus of the discourse narrows to a precise group of people with direct real-world connections to the dead man. Although I do have knowledge frames through which I am able to conceptualise the family roles included here (‘brothers, sisters, cousins, nieces’, and so on), the inferences I draw from these references are, of course, very different from those which might be drawn by one of the people listed. It is in this section of the text that the precise constitution of one side of the discourse-world relationship seems to become clearer. The list of Dom. Michael Hopley’s family and friends specifies that these are the co-participants with whom the text’s author intended to share a discourse-world in the publication of the announcement. I am unable to identify myself even with the broadest category offered here (‘his many friends far and wide’) and, as a result, have my estrangement in the discourse-world confirmed by the final section of the text. I can now assume that the authorial participant in this communicative act is one among the listed close associates of the dead man and that the announcement itself is a means of forming a remote emotional connection with other relatives and friends on the anniversary of Dom. Michael Hopley’s death. Although those relatives and friends listed in the announcement are likely to have a far more detailed picture of the person who placed it than I am able to infer from the text alone, I am nevertheless only one among many unintended participants who will have become involved in this discourse-world through their reading of the Daily Telegraph. Once again, what places each one of these ‘eavesdropping’ participants in an uncomfortable position in the discourse-world is a mis-match in cultural and experiential knowledge between author and reader. Despite being publicly expressed, ‘In Memoriam’ announcements are often in fact very private acts of communication intended for a small group of participants which, one might assume particularly for the loved ones of a deceased Benedictine monk, may also have deep spiritual significance attached to them. What perhaps really makes these kinds of discourse-worlds an unsettling place to be for anyone who cannot identify themselves as a member of their intended audience is the presence, perhaps comforting for those who once knew them, of a further, rather ghostly discourse participant. Since the friends and family of the deceased presumably already know their loved one is dead, one might reasonably question what other communicative needs are met by ‘In Memoriam’ announcements. As
well as providing a prompt for remembrance for the close associates of the dead, the act of remembrance itself, of course, also invokes the dead. The final participant involved in the discourse-world of the announcement above, then, might be Dom. Michael Hopley O.S.B himself.
F U RT H E R I N V E S T I G AT I O N
The discourse-world structure examined in this chapter is not one which is necessarily limited to communication between religious Daily Telegraph readers and their families. Similar communal yet simultaneously estranging discourse-worlds can be found in the ‘In Memoriam’ sections of most national and local newspapers, where a diverse range of communities express their private feelings about bereavement publicly. • Consider the announcement below: ELLIS Graham Died November 27th 2004. Memories of dear Husband, Dad and Grandad. Your smile has gone forever, Your hand we cannot touch, Still we have memories, Of the one we loved so much, If tears could build a stairway, And memories a lane, We would walk right up to heaven, And bring you home again. From your loving wife Freda, son and daughter-in-law Paul and Penny and daughter and sonin-law Dawn and Graham, grandchildren Lyndsey, Kimberley, Kieran x x x (Doncaster Free Press, 27 November 2005) Make a list of all the participants you think are involved in the discourseworld of this text. Try to pinpoint which linguistic elements specify their inclusion in the discourse-world. What preconceived ideas do you have about the participants? Consider, for example, the inferences you may have drawn from their names alone. Consider your own processing of the text. Which aspects of your background knowledge did you activate in order to understand the discourse and which textual features caused their activation? How easy is it for you to separate the knowledge you used into perceptual, linguistic, experiential and cultural categories? Did any overlaps between these categories occur? To what extent are you able to identify yourself as a member of the same culture as the author of this text? Do you feel estranged or included in the discourse-world? Compare your answer to this question and the questions above with those of one of your classmates and discuss the possible reasons for any differences of opinion. Do you consider yourselves to be members of the same culture?
: • Here is another public announcement, made in an Illinois newspaper in 1950: Baptist Women at Klatt Home A meeting of the Women’s Missionary society of the First Baptist church was held recently at the home of Mrs H.B. Klatt. Mrs J.R. McDaniel, president, conducted the business session. Mrs David Leer, program chairman, presented the program of the evening: Mrs W.D. Milliken giving devotions; Miss Virginia Klatt played a piano selection, and Mrs Green reviewed the Missions Magazine. Mrs Charles Wallace reviewed a portion of the study book ‘Near East Panorama’. Refreshments were served by the hostess and her committee: Miss Lucille Miller and Miss Erna Hoelzen.(Dixon Evening Telegraph, 21 November 1950) Who do you think are the participants in this discourse-world? Think, in particular, about the possible motivations behind the publication of the announcement and the intended participants in the communication. Are there any eavesdroppers in this discourse-world? Who are they and how might their conceptualisation of the discourse differ from that of the intended participants? Once again, consider the assumptions you make about their characters and backgrounds from the information given in the text. What aspects of your personal knowledge have you used to make these inferences? Consider also how this announcement differs from the others looked at in this chapter. Do you recognise them as belonging to different genres of discourse? What role does knowledge play in your decisionmaking? • Below are two descriptions found on the sides of two bottles of bubble bath produced by the same luxury cosmetics company. One of the bottles is intended for women and one is aimed at men. Can you guess which is which? BATHE THE SENSES WITH EXOTIC GINGERLILY. RICHLY MOISTURISING OILS LEAVE THE SKIN REFRESHED, LUXURIOUSLY SMOOTH AND INFUSED WITH AN INTOXICATING AROMA. OILS OF TAMANU AND MACADAMIA NUT HAVE BEEN USED FOR THEIR NOURISHING AND MOISTURISING PROPERTIES. GET READY FOR AN AROMATIC ADVENTURE. THIS SPICY INFUSION HEIGHTENS YOUR SENSES AND RE-AWAKENS YOUR ENERGY BANKS WHEN YOU MOST NEED IT.
STEEPED IN DETOXIFYING BLACK PEPPER OIL, THE GEL FORMULATION HELPS TO BOOST CIRCULATION, AND LEAVES THE SKIN FEELING DEEPLY CLEANSED, WARMED-UP AND READY FOR ACTION. BLACK PEPPER OIL IS ANTI-OXIDANT, ANTISEPTIC AND MUSCLE STIMULATING. The intended market for each of these products may seem very obvious to you, but consider why this is the case. Of what kinds of deep-seated cultural knowledge frames are the separate descriptions taking advantage? Do the broad assumptions being made about different gender roles fit with your individual experiential knowledge frames? Have a look through some recent newspapers and magazines and try to find as many different examples as you can of advertising and marketing which you think are tapping into cultural knowledge of some kind. In what ways are your personal knowledge frames being manipulated in each case? How successful is each advertisement, in your opinion? Why do you think some advertisements have a stronger impact upon you than others?
F U RT H E R R E A D I N G
The principles by which face-to-face discourse is managed and its meaning negotiated by discourse participants have traditionally been the subject matter of pragmatics. Useful introductions to this area of linguistics can be found in Cutting (2000 and 2002), Grundy (2000), Leech (1983), Levinson (1983), Mey (2001) and Verschueren (1999). Brown and Yule (1983) provide insights on discourse management from within the field of discourse analysis, along with Jaworski and Coupland (1999), Johnstone (2002), and Renkema (2004). Cook (1989, 1992 and 1994) provides a useful bridge between discourse analysis and cognitive approaches to discourse study, as do Edwards (1996), van Dijk (1977 and 1980), van Dijk and Kintsch (1983), Kintsch (1998) and O’Halloran (2003). The importance of a properly context-sensitive approach to discourse analysis is emphasised in much work within integrationalist linguistics, for example Harris (1981, 1998a and 1998b) and Toolan (1996). Werth (1999: 94–116) provides a further explanation of the role of different types of participant knowledge in the discourse process. His text-world account of experiential knowledge structures and their influence on mental representations draws particular influence from Clark and Marshall (1981) and Fillmore (1982 and 1985). Schank and Abelson’s (1977) notions of scripts and schemas also inform this area of Text World Theory (see also Schank 1982a, 1982b, 1984 and 1986), as does Lakoff’s (1982 and 1987) concept of Idealised Cognitive Models (see also Lakoff and Johnson 1980 and 1999). Introductions
: to all of these key areas of Cognitive Linguistics can be found in Schmid and Ungerer (1996) and Croft and Cruse (2004). There is a mass of information on human perception and knowledge within Cognitive Psychology. Key examples include Armstrong (1961 and 1973), Dember and Warm (1979), Gibson (1950), Ginet (1975), Haber and Hershenson (1980), Hamlyn (1994), Heil (1983), Schwartz (2004). Cultural knowledge and human notions of self and culture are the subject of the developing field of social cognition. Useful introductions to this field include Fiske and Taylor (1991), Kityama and Markus (1991), Mackie and Hamilton (1993), Marsella et al. (1985) and Wyer and Srull (1994).
Scenes
KEY ISSUES IN THIS CHAPTER
In Chapter 2 we saw how the participants in a discourse-world are wilfully engaged in an act of communication which is greatly dependent on various kinds of knowledge. We saw how different aspects of discourse require us to access different areas of our perceptual, linguistic, experiential and cultural knowledge in a process which is essentially text-driven. Our existing knowledge frames enable us to conceptualise and understand discourse and we use them as the basis for the mental representations we create of the language we encounter. This chapter examines how the process of constructing these mental representations, or text-worlds, is facilitated. It begins the exploration of the precise conceptual structure of the worlds we create in our minds, which will form the focus of the coming chapters of this book. Of central interest in this chapter is the relationship between our conceptualisation of real-world experiences and our mental representation of discourse. In particular, this chapter investigates how our understanding of physical space and the progress of time in our everyday lives has a direct influence on how we create text-worlds from discourse. The processes by which we begin to conceptualise the spatial and temporal setting of a text-world are examined in relation to an internet audio-guide and some extracts from literary prose fiction.
B U I L D I N G A T E X T- W O R L D
Consider for a moment your immediate surroundings. Whether you are inside or outside, standing or seated, alone or in company, consider how you perceive your own position within your environment. What can you see around you? What objects or entities are in front of you? Which are close and which are distant? Is any of them in motion? Unless your vision is in some way impaired, you are
: unlikely to find these questions difficult to answer. If I were to ask you to reach out and touch the object you perceive to be nearest to you, unless you have a physical disability, you are unlikely to have any difficulty carrying out that task. The ability to sense and respond to external stimuli in this way is something which the majority of able-bodied people take for granted most of the time. However, this basic facility has a fundamental influence on our cognitive behaviour and shapes not only how we function physically but also how we operate mentally. Before we can fully understand how we perceive the world around us, we need first to recognise how we perceive our inner selves in relation to that environment. Twenty-first century humans have a strong notion of self and subjectivity, the result of thousands of years of evolution both of our physical capacities and our ability to rationalise our own existence in the world. The philosophy of the self which informed the cognitive revolution in linguistics (discussed in Chapter 1) recognises our mental reasoning, as well as the linguistic expression of that reasoning, as being largely based on our physical experiences of the real world. All cognitive approaches to discourse study are founded on the basic assumption that the mind and the body are inextricably linked. Some of the most salient evidence for this link can be found in the language we produce to express our position in the world and our relationships with the objects and entities around us. This area of language is known as deixis (from the Greek for ‘showing’ or ‘pointing’). The frames of knowledge we accumulate as a result of our everyday bodily experiences as upright mammals form the basis of our understanding of the physical space in which we exist, the passing of time, and even the societal structures and constraints which govern our behaviour. This is because each one of us has a notion of self which forms the basic reference point from which we evaluate our relationship with all the other elements which make up our environment, as well as the relationships which exist between those elements. This zero reference point of subjectivity (I, here, now) is known in deictic theory as the origo. In day-to-day communication, we regularly make use of a range of deictic terms which express our embodied conceptual system and enable us to communicate our experience of the world to others. These terms form the basic buildingblocks upon which we construct representations of discourse in our minds. In Text World Theory terms, they are known as world-building elements. The world-building elements of a discourse can be seen firstly to set the spatial boundaries of the text-world. They locate the discourse in a particular place, which may be real or imagined, novel or familiar. Our notion of the space in which a discourse is situated comes from our use of deictic terms such as locatives (for example, in Sheffield, downstairs, abroad), spatial adverbs (for example, here, there, far away), demonstratives (for example, these, those, that), and verbs of motion (for example, come, go, run away). We conceptualise all of these terms with reference to the origo, illustrated in Figure 3.1, based on our frame knowledge of spatial relationships in the real world. What this figure also
up
behind past
CLOSE
DISTANT
in front future
‘origo’ present down
Figure 3.1 The perception of space and time
usefully shows is the close link between our understanding of space and our understanding of time. Although the passing of time is an integral part of our daily existence, it is also an abstract and complicated concept for human beings to grasp fully. Research in Cognitive Linguistics has uncovered extensive evidence of the human tendency to conceptualise time as a spatial phenomenon in a wide range of idiomatic linguistic expressions. Phrases such as ‘putting the past behind you’, ‘the coming year’, ‘looking forwards’, ‘back in the early days’, ‘in the here and now’, show how we understand events in the past as being behind us, events in the future as being in front of us, and current events as being at the same physical point as we are. How we understand a particular discourse to be temporally situated will again vary according to the deictic terms used. World-building elements which help to set the temporal parameters of the text-worlds we construct include locatives (for example, in ancient times, three months ago, in future years), temporal adverbs (for example, today, yesterday, tomorrow), and variations in tense and aspect (the differences between, for example, I’m still getting cravings now, and, even though I gave up smoking years ago, will be discussed later in this chapter). Deixis is by no means limited to expressions of time and space, and there are many other deictic elements in discourse which can aid the participants in their initial construction of a text-world. These world-building elements may nominate objects and entities, or give further information about the social relationships between them. Personal pronouns (for example, I, she, you, it), definite articles and definite reference generally (for example, the dog, Fido) can all be used to specify who or what is present in a text-world. Such referential information, of course, comes with experiential and cultural knowledge frames attached, which is of particular use when the discourse does not relate directly to the discourse-world. For example, if a dog called Fido shares the immediate situation with the participants in a discourse-world and is referred to during the course of their communication, the participants will share perceptual knowledge
: of the dog’s existence and appearance. The need for world-building deictics is often slight in such face-to-face conversations, where the spatial and temporal setting of the text-world remains consistent with that of the discourse-world and where the objects and entities involved in the discourse are manifest to the participants already. However, if participant A is describing an absent Fido to participant B, who has never met him, it is unlikely that a direct correspondence will be achieved between the real-world dog and participant B’s text-world representation of him. Conceptualising these kinds of remote text-worlds is a far more complex process and is based on a combination of the world-building deictics provided in the discourse and the inferences the participants draw from such information according to their existing knowledge frames. As we have already seen in Chapter 2, the precise nature of these kinds of inferences is greatly influenced by the cultural background of the discourse participant involved. As well as simply nominating objects and entities as present in the textworld, deictic world-builders can also give information about the personal and social relationships which exist between them. For example, a range of linguistic terms is potentially available to anyone wishing to talk about me (Dr Joanna Gavins, Joanna, Jo, Mammy, her, and so on). The choice of one of these forms of address over all other possibilities can express a particular social attitude or personal relationship. Again, this is because of the experiential and cultural knowledge frames such terms carry with them and the resulting inferences drawn from their use by the participants in the discourse-world. Finally, the participants’ existing knowledge of generic conventions can also impact upon the world-building process as we make use of our previous experiences of other discourse-worlds every time we enter a new communicative situation. We have differing expectations, for example, of the textual structure of a novel (written text, a title, an author, page numbers, chapters, and so on) compared with that of the performance of a stand-up comedian (spoken text, limited interaction, comic content, and so on). These expectations often form an important part of the world-building process before a book has even been opened or the first joke has been told.
WO R L D - BU I L D I N G I N P R AC T I C E
The passage below is a transcription of a section of pPod (NYKRIS 2004), a guide to public toilets in London made by an internet company specialising in downloadable MP3 files. In this particular extract, the guide is providing details of the men’s toilets in Leicester Square. In the transcription below italicised words denote emphasis and dashes denote pauses: okay here we are leicester square – leicester square london – walking down the steps – ooh – quite modern – very big loos – okay we’ve got automatic
hand driers – always a good sign – erm – urinal area – a bit smelly – baby changing facilities – ah that’s new let’s have a quick look in here – it’s locked – never mind – okay sinks are a bit dirty – errr – but are functioning – cubicles – all seem to be operational – erm – bit smelly in here though – errr – lots of urinal space – very big loos – there is a parent and baby room – that looks locked – attendant’s office – once again locked – generally not too bad (NYKRIS 2004) The aim of the producers of pPod is to provide a portable guide to the public toilets closest to London’s main tourist attractions. Listeners can download sound files to an MP3 player in advance of their visit to the capital and then access the information as needed during their stay. The usefulness of the sound files, then, is dependent on the clarity of the information they provide about each toilet. The whole idea behind pPod is that listeners have a detailed picture in their minds of what to expect from each one of the facilities reviewed so that they can make an informed decision about which one to use. Detailed textworld building is key to this discourse. The guide opens by drawing the listener into the location being described with his use of the proximal deictic adverb ‘here’. The listener’s virtual inclusion in the unfolding scene is further emphasised by the use of the personal pronoun ‘we’, which we can assume is being used to refer to the listener in their remote half of the discourse-world since no other voice is heard on the recording, nor is any reference made to another entity in the immediate environment. This pronoun could also be argued to signify that the guide is assuming an equal social relationship between himself and his co-participant in the discourse. He does not, for example, choose to introduce himself formally at the start of his guide, nor does he address the listener directly at any point during the extract. The pronoun ‘we’ here would seem to suggest that the participants share a social as well as a physical space. The opening utterance also positions the text-world temporally, since it includes a present tense verb ‘are’. Of course, the prototypical tense for narrated texts describing scenes and events at spatial and temporal distance is the simple past. The present tense used in pPod, then, is marked but remains consistent throughout most of the rest of the discourse, helping to retain a sense of the immediacy of the text-world for both guide and listener. The precise geographical location of the text-world is then provided with a refinement of the definite reference to ‘leicester square – leicester square london’. As with all such references, this triggers the listener’s existing knowledge, if any, of Leicester Square and London, upon which their mental representation of the scene being described to them is likely to be founded. Based on just a few opening words, listeners to the pPod audio-guide are already beginning to construct quite a detailed mental picture of the guide’s location, combining the world-building information provided in the text with
:
TEXT-WORLD World-building elements time: location: objects:
enactors:
present Leicester Square, men's toilets steps, loos, hand driers, urinal area, baby changing facilities, sinks, attendant's office male guide
Figure 3.2 World-building elements
their own existing frame knowledge. In Text World Theory, the emerging textworld can be represented in a diagram, such as that in Figure 3.2. These kinds of diagrams can provide a useful overview of a discourse and give an immediate sense of the conceptual structure of the developing mental representation concerned. They can prove particularly illuminating when analysing a complex discourse involving many text-worlds, as we will see in some of the later chapters of this book. Since the purpose of text-world diagrams is to aid the analysis of a discourse, rather than to fully represent it, they can be as detailed or as basic as the analyst requires. Figure 3.2 summarises only the world-building elements of the audio extract but, as we will see later in this book, far more detailed diagrams are also possible. Perhaps the most interesting thing to note about this text-world diagram is how the present-tense verb forms translate into a present time setting for the text-world. This is perfectly common for present-tense discourses, but it has an interesting cognitive effect for the reader or listener. Whenever a discourse participant constructs a remote text-world, one which does not correspond to the spatial and temporal parameters of the discourse-world, their coparticipant is required to conceptualise a new deictic structure in which the origo has shifted away from their sense of the here and now. In Cognitive Psychology this process is known as projection. Rather than using their own real-world perspective to understand the language being used, the listening or reading participant in the discourse-world must project their notion of a zero reference point onto someone or something else in the text-world. Readers and listeners often report a sense of being completely immersed in a particular text-world, a phenomenon which is particularly common in literary discourses but which occurs to a greater or lesser extent in all remote text-worlds. This is due entirely to the fact that these sorts of text-worlds must necessarily be experienced from someone else’s point of view. The projected deictic
centre becomes the only means by which the temporal, spatial and social structure of the text can be understood. I am not in Leicester Square men’s toilets and the time at which this section of pPod was recorded has now passed. However, because my text-world for this discourse is experienced entirely from the point of view of the guide, as I listen to his description I feel as if I am there with him. The present tense of the narration is simply another example of the sorts of involving deictics the guide uses to aid this imagined transportation of his co-participant into the text-world of Leicester Square men’s toilets. Figure 3.2 also shows how the guide himself is not only a discourse-world participant but functions as a character in his own text-world as well. Again, this is a common occurrence in discourse, particularly in texts with a firstperson narration like this one. The guide character in the text-world can be seen as an enactor of the real-life guide in the discourse-world. Enactors are simply different versions of the same person or character which exist at different conceptual levels of a discourse. We will be seeing lots of different enactors throughout the course of this book. For the moment, however, and in a brief detour from the pPod example, here is an example of the usefulness of the concept of enactors, particularly when dealing with very complex worldstructures: Thursday, June 7, 1973 (Henry is 27, and 9) HENRY: I am standing across the street from the Art Institute of Chicago on a sunny June day in 1973 in the company of my nine year-old self. He is traveling from next Wednesday; I have come from 1990. We have a long afternoon and evening to frivol as we will, and so we have come to one of the great art museums of the world for a little lesson in pickpocketing. ‘Can’t we just look at the art?’ pleads Henry. He’s nervous. He’s never done this before. ‘Nope. You need to know this. How are you going to survive if you can’t steal anything?’ ‘Begging.’ ‘Begging is a drag, and you keep getting carted off by the police. Now, listen: when we get in there, I want you to stay away from me and pretend we don’t know each other. But be close enough to watch what I’m doing. If I hand you anything, don’t drop it, and put it in your pocket as fast as you can. Okay?’ ‘I guess. Can we go see St. George?’ ‘Sure.’ We cross Michigan Avenue and walk between students and housewives sunning themselves on the museum steps. Henry pats one of the bronze lions as we go by. I feel moderately bad about this whole thing. On the one hand, I am providing myself with urgently required survival skills. Other lessons in this
: series include Shoplifting, Beating People Up, Picking Locks, Climbing Trees, Driving, Housebreaking, Dumpster Diving, and How to Use Oddball Things like Venetian Blinds and Garbage Can Lids as Weapons. On the other hand, I’m corrupting my poor innocent little self. I sigh. Somebody’s got to do it. (Niffenegger 2005: 50–1) This is an extract from Audrey Niffenegger’s novel, The Time Traveler’s Wife, which tells the story of Henry and his wife, Clare. Henry is a CDP – a Chrono-Displaced Person – and has been travelling in time within the boundaries of his own life-span since he was nine years old. In this particular extract, Henry-aged-twenty-seven has travelled backwards in time from 1990 to 1973. Henry-aged-nine has also travelled backwards in time, but only by one week, to meet his other self in an art gallery. These kinds of occurrences happen throughout this novel and are a common feature of the genre of science fiction in general. As readers, we understand that The Time Traveler’s Wife contains one character, Henry, who exists in the form of many different textual versions, or enactors. Henry-aged-nine and Henry-aged-twenty-seven are connected yet entirely separate individuals, with different life experiences and consequent personal knowledge. In this extract, Henry-aged-twenty-seven is in the process of giving his younger enactor training in skills which will prove indispensable in his future life as a CDP. Each time Henry travels through time he does not know where or when he is going and arrives at his destination completely naked. The nine-year-old enactor of Henry has only a few experiences of time travel so far, whereas the twenty-seven-year-old enactor of Henry has perfected the art of chrono-displacement and related survival skills. The real complexity of this text comes from the fact that Henryaged-twenty-seven’s knowledge of pickpocketing, shoplifting, and so on, exist only as a result of the meeting he is now having with his nine-year-old enactor! Let us return now to non-fictional discourse and the example of the pPod guide. In everyday communication, if the participants in the discourse-world have existing knowledge of one another, they can use their knowledge frames to predict and evaluate the behaviour of their enactors in the text-world. For example, if a friend tells you a story about finding a spider in her bathroom, and you know she is afraid of spiders in the real world, you can predict the behaviour of her enactor in the text-world of the story based on that knowledge. In the case of the pPod audio-guide, I know little about either the real-world guide or his text-world enactor. However, it is important to note that I still assume the text-world version of him to be a living, breathing, thinking entity with the same kinds of emotions and reactions as any real-world human being. Again, this is the result of my psychological projection into a text-world which, because of the essentially analogue nature of mental
representation, I assume to operate in the same way as my real world until the text tells me otherwise. Once the spatial and temporal location of the text-world has been established, the guide goes on to provide more detail about the men’s toilets. A series of nouns specify the features of this particular facility: steps, loos, hand driers, urinal area, baby changing facilities, sinks, and an attendant’s office. The knowledge frames attached to each of these items enables a detailed mental representation of the scene to be built, helped by the additional detail the guide includes about many of them. Figure 3.3 shows this added information. In a text-world diagram, horizontal arrows are normally used to signify what are known in Systemic Functional Linguistics as relational processes. There are three different types of relational processes: intensive, possessive, and circumstantial. As the term suggests, all relational processes specify how two or more elements exist in a text-world in some sort of relationship with one another: intensive relational processes describe an x is y relationship; possessive relational processes describe an x has y relationship; and circumstantial relational processes describe an x is on/at/with y relationship. Each of these three types of process can also occur in one of two modes: attributive or identifying. In the attributive mode, one text-world element is described as an attribute of another. These types of relational processes consist of a carrier and an attribute. In the identifying mode, one text-world element identifies another, and these processes consist of an identifier and an identified. For
TEXT-WORLD World-building elements loos → quite modern, very big, operational hand driers → good sign urinal area → bit smelly, lots of space baby changing facilities → locked sinks → bit dirty, functioning attendant's office → locked
Figure 3.3 World-builders and their attributes
: example, in the pPod extract the sinks (the carrier) have the attribute of being ‘a bit dirty’ and the loos (the carrier again) are ‘quite modern’. Both of these are examples of intensive relational processes in the attributive mode. Elsewhere, the guide states that ‘automatic hand driers . . . [are] a good sign’. This is another intensive relational process, but this time one element (the hand driers) is identified by another (‘a good sign’). The order in which such objects are introduced into a discourse can have a significant effect on the structure of the text-world. The close relationship between our conceptualisation of space and that of time means that we are likely to assume that the objects mentioned first are closest to the deictic centre of the text-world, while those introduced later are farther away. For example, in my own mental representation of Leicester Square men’s toilets, the hand driers are closest to the entrance, the baby changing facilities are further away, and the attendant’s office is further still. Our experience of the real world also has an influence on how we perceive some elements in a developing text-world to be more prominent than others. Research in both Stylistics and Cognitive Psychology has found that individual aspects of a text often become foregrounded for readers and listeners as they attempt to construct a mental representation. The most recently introduced elements of a discourse not only seem closest to the deictic centre, they also figure most prominently in our perception of the text-world. Elements occupying the subject position, and particularly those identified with a definite reference, also tend to be foregrounded. So, as the guide in pPod makes reference to the toilet’s individual facilities, each one becomes the centre of our attention in turn. The stylistic devices a text employs, such as repetition, parallelism, or rhyme, can help draw further attention to a specific element. For example, the repetition in the pPod guide of ‘very big loos’, ‘a bit smelly’, and ‘locked’, as well as to ‘urinal area’ and ‘urinal space’, mean that these aspects of the toilet are foregrounded in my own text-world representation. Cognitive psychologists have also found that human perception operates according to a scale of empathy, with human beings and then animals at the positive attention-grabbing end of the spectrum and objects and abstractions at the negative end. Motion or other evidence of wilfulness also attracts attention, with active agents featuring more prominently in a text-world than passive ones. (Chapter 4 deals with action in the text-world in more detail.) Finally, brightness, fullness, and noise have also all been identified as key attributes of those elements which typically attract attention in human perception. Correspondences have been found to exist in our conceptualisation of texts, where the articulation of these phenomena also draw readerly attention.
S H I F T I N G T E X T- W O R L D S
Communication is, of course, a highly dynamic process and any given discourse has the potential, for example, to introduce new information, switch topic, or change scene at any time. For this reason, the text-worlds we construct from discourse are in a similar state of flux. They are active spaces, the constantly evolving contents of which reflect the shifts and changes of the discourses they represent. In terms of the world-building elements of a text-world, the spatial and temporal parameters set at the beginning of a text may alter countless times during the process of the entire discourse. Similarly, the objects and enactors which capture our attention at one point in a discourse are often neglected or even completely forgotten at other points. Consider the following extract of literary narrative: Mma Ramotswe had a detective agency in Africa, at the foot of Kgale Hill. These were its assets: a tiny white van, two desks, two chairs, a telephone, and an old typewriter. Then there was a teapot, in which Mma Ramotswe – the only lady private detective in Botswana – brewed redbush tea. And three mugs – one for herself, one for her secretary, and one for the client. What else does a detective agency really need? Detective agencies rely on human intuition and intelligence, both of which Mma Ramotswe had in abundance. No inventory would ever include those, of course. But there was also the view, which again could appear on no inventory. How could any such list describe what one saw when one looked out from Mma Ramotswe’s door? To the front, an acacia tree, the thorn tree which dots the wide edges of the Kalahari; the great white thorns, a warning; the olive-grey leaves, by contrast, so delicate. In its branches, in the late afternoon, or in the cool of the early morning, one might see a Go-Away bird, or hear it, rather. And beyond the acacia, over the dusty road, the roofs of the town under a cover of trees and scrub bush; on the horizon, in a blue shimmer of heat, the hills, like improbable, overgrown termite-mounds. (McCall Smith 2003: 1) These are the opening paragraphs of Alexander McCall Smith’s novel The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. Like the openings of many realist novels, this part of the text functions as an introduction to the text-world of the story, providing a detailed description of the protagonist and her surroundings. Although the exact temporal location of the text is not specified, readers of the novel may be able to infer from the presence of a white van, a telephone and a typewriter, that the setting of the novel is fairly contemporary. The story is narrated in the third person and the majority of this passage is in the simple past tense. In contrast to the deliberately marked and involving use of present
: tense in the pPod, the simple past used here describes a situation which exists at a temporal distance to the reader in the discourse-world in a prototypical fashion. Third-person narration is also normally considered in literary criticism to offer a less intimate relationship between reader and character than a first person narration (such as that of the pPod) might allow. However, cognitive-psychological experiments to test the extent of reader projection into a text-world and any consequent identification with its characters have found evidence to the contrary. In empirical tests, readers report that they are still able to project their sense of an origo to the main focaliser of a text, immersing themselves in the perspective through which the events of a narrative are portrayed. This projection happens whether the text concerned has a first person narration or not and readers’ identification with the characters and events portrayed in literature appears unaffected by the novel’s narrative structure in this sense. In this particular literary extract, although the unfolding scene is presented by a separate omniscient narrator, the contents of the textworld are focalised through Mma Ramotswe’s perspective and, as a result, she becomes the deictic centre of the text-world. (A more detailed discussion of focalisation can be found in Chapter 8. The Free Indirect Discourse in this extract, which also aids identification with a character, is discussed in Chapter 8 too.) Despite the fact that the text-world has a past time-zone and third-person narration, readers nevertheless experience the story through the projected origo of the novel’s protagonist. The spatial deictics of this text are far more specific than its temporal deictics. They include an initial definite reference to Mma Ramotswe, a less precise reference to ‘her secretary’, and a still further under-specific reference to ‘the client’. This contrastive range of address forms helps to establish Mma Ramotswe as the main focus of attention in the text-world as she is the most definite presence of the three. ‘The client’, by comparison, is a ghostly semipresence in the text-world; the combination of the definite article here with the broad term ‘client’ brings all Mma Ramotswe’s clients past, present and future together as one perpetual enactor. While the inventory of Mma Ramotswe’s detective agency (‘a tiny white van’, ‘two desks’, ‘two chairs’, ‘a telephone’, ‘an old typewriter’, ‘a teapot’, ‘three mugs’) is given in brief list form, far greater detail is provided about the surrounding Botswanan countryside. Fleshing out the initial locative ‘in Africa, at the foot of Kgale Hill’ is a series of other world-building elements (for example, ‘an acacia tree’, ‘the dusty road’, ‘the roofs’, ‘the hills’). The precise spatial relationships between these items are set by a variety of spatial adverbs and other locatives (for example, ‘to the front’, ‘in its branches’, ‘over the dusty road’, ‘under a cover of trees’, ‘on the horizon’). The conceptual structure of the opening of the novel is shown in Figure 3.4. To the left of the diagram is the text-world created by the third-person, simplepast narration which makes up the majority of the extract, labelled in the
hills
roofs
trees and scrub bush
road
worldswitch
worldswitch
recent present Mma Ramotswe, secretary detective agency, Kgale Hill, Botswana worldwhite van, two desks, switch two chairs, telephone, typewriter, teapot, three mugs worldswitch acacia tree
Figure 3.4 Temporal world-switches
objects:
time: enactors: location:
TEXT-WORLD 1
time: location: objects:
objects:
objects:
time:
late afternoon (continuous) acacia tree, Go-Away bird
TEXT-WORLD 5
present (continuous) the Kalahari acacia trees → dot the edges, white thorns, delicate leaves
early morning (continuous) acacia tree, Go-Away bird
TEXT-WORLD 4 time:
perpetual detective agency, Kgale Hill the client
TEXT-WORLD 3
enactors:
time: location:
TEXT-WORLD 2
: diagram as ‘Text-World 1’. Its time-zone is the recent past and its enactors are Mma Ramotswe and her secretary. This text-world has Mma Ramotswe’s detective agency as its setting and contains its inventory of belongings, as well as the acacia tree, the road, the hills and other features of the surrounding countryside. These features are shown in the diagram in the order in which they appear in the text. Note that their description is given in the text from the point of view of Mma Ramotswe standing in the front doorway of the agency. From this viewpoint, the acacia tree is nearest to the projected deictic centre, with the dusty road beyond it, then the roofs beyond that, and finally the hills in the distance. In the text-world landscape I construct for this scene, the acacia tree and the hills are particularly foregrounded; the tree because of the detailed description of its attention-grabbing white thorns, the hills because of the shimmering motion associated with them. The ghostly figure of ‘the client’ does not appear in this first text-world. Unlike Mma Ramotswe and her secretary, this enactor does not belong to the recent past time-zone, but rather seems to cross the temporal boundaries of the text. As already discussed, the definite article gives this faceless, genderless, nameless figure a perpetual quality. ‘The client’ represents all clients past, present and future and, as such, belongs within far broader temporal parameters in which all these time-zones are rolled into one continuous whole. In Text World Theory terms, the reference to ‘the client’ creates a world-switch into a new time-zone, labelled ‘Text-World 2’ in Figure 3.4 and shown emerging from the initial Text-World 1. World-switches like this one occur whenever the temporal boundaries of a text-world shift, causing the discourse participants to construct a new text-world through which the distinct time-zone can be conceptualised. In this case, the spatial location of the new text-world remains the same as its originating text-world. The focus of the text is still on the detective agency at the foot of Kgale Hill, but readers are now aware of the presence, however vague, of another temporal setting containing a different set of enactors. A second, more clear-cut world-switch occurs later on in the extract. When the text specifies that in front of the detective agency is ‘an acacia tree, the thorn tree which dots the wide edges of the Kalahari’, the change in the tense of the passage from the simple past (‘had’, ‘were’, ‘was’) to the present continuous (‘dots’) causes another shift in the temporal parameters of the text-world. A world-switch occurs to another new time-zone, labelled ‘Text-World 3’ in Figure 3.4. Where the originating text-world (Text-World 1) related to a specific scene in a past time-zone, and Text-World 2 related to a timeless perpetual zone, Text-World 3 describes a situation which is present and continuous. This description of white-thorned acacia trees in the Kalahari desert signals that the immediate landscape outside Mma Ramotswe’s detective agency is more broadly typical of this part of Africa and situates the text firmly in this geographical and cultural context. In this world-switch, both the temporal and spatial boundaries
of the text-world have altered. Text-World 3 not only shifts the narrative from the recent past into a present and ongoing time-zone, it also shifts the deictic centre of the text-world from the narrow focus of Mma Ramotswe in the doorway of her detective agency to a much broader view of the ‘edges of the Kalahari’ in general. Two further brief world-switches also occur in the second paragraph, where the text describes how Go-Away birds might be found in the branches of Mma Ramotswe’s acacia tree ‘in the late afternoon, or in the cool of the early morning’. The two separate time-zones specified here establish two new text-worlds, labelled Text-World 4 and Text-World 5 in Figure 3.4. Each text-world has its own distinct temporal deictics, although both worlds describe the same ongoing possibility in the same spatial environment. In the space of just two paragraphs, readers of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency must construct at least five separate text-worlds in order to conceptualise the shifting time-zones of the text. However, while this text-world structure may appear complex under analysis, it is important to remember that the participants in a discourse-world have the ability to create multitudinous text-world networks in an instant and without significant cognitive effort. The majority of discourses which extend beyond a sentence or two will contain multiple world-switches, and discourse participants are normally able to monitor and manage their varying deictics without difficulty. The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, for example, is a popular novel and by no means a ‘difficult’ read for the majority of competent adult readers. It is, however, populated with countless dozens of world-switches. For example, just a few more paragraphs into the introductory chapter the following passage occurs: She held her father’s hand and looked into the eyes of the man she loved beyond all others, her Daddy, her wise Daddy, whose lungs had been filled with dust in those mines and who had scrimped and saved to make life good for her. It was difficult to talk through her tears, but she managed to say: ‘I’m going to set up a detective agency. Down in Gaborone. It will be the best one in Botswana. The No. 1 agency.’ For a moment her father’s eyes opened wide and it seemed as if he was struggling to speak. ‘But . . . but . . .’ But he died before he could say anything more and Mma Ramotswe fell on his chest and wept for all the dignity, love and suffering that died with him. (McCall Smith 2003: 4) Here Mma Ramotswe is remembering the final moments of her father’s life and the reader is transported from the front doorway of the agency to his deathbed. Notice how the shift in spatial and temporal deixis is also aided by
: the choice of social deictics here, as Mma Ramotswe’s father is referred to as ‘her Daddy, her wise Daddy’. This familiar address form situates the text-world firmly in its new co-ordinates in an intimate family scene. Flashbacks such as this one are common causes of world-switch in literary narrative. Enactors in a text may re-live past events while remaining in the same spatial environment, or the flashback may shift both the temporal and spatial parameters of the text-world. In this instance, Mma Ramotswe’s flashback alters both sets of conceptual co-ordinates as the new text-world describes a different time and a different place. Once the reader of this section of the novel has entered the new time-zone established by the flashback, a further change in tense causes another worldswitch. The text-world in which Mma Ramotswe is at her dying father’s side is distinguished from his more distant past life in the mines by a shift in tense from the simple past (‘she held’, ‘she looked’) into the past perfect (‘had been filled’, ‘had scrimped and saved’). The old man’s hard graft for his daughter’s sake is positioned in a distinct text-world of its own. The text then returns to Mma Ramotswe’s position by her dying father as she begins to speak to him. The speech exchange reported here is an example of Direct Speech representation, which is normally characterised by the inclusion of speech marks and a reporting clause (for example, ‘she managed to say:’). In this type of speech representation, the actual words spoken by the enactors will reflect their own deictic centre. This means that the tense of the speech, the pronouns, locatives, and other deictic markers used will all express the speaker’s perspective in their here and now. When Direct Speech occurs in a past tense narration, such as that of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, a shift in tense from past to present and the distinct point of view it represents generates a new text-world. Each time an enactor speaks, a world-switch transports readers of the text directly to that enactor’s origo for as long as the speech is ongoing. To make matters even more complicated, the content of Mma Ramotswe’s speech relates to yet another time-zone. She does not refer to her current situation but instead tells her father about her plans to set up a detective agency in Gaborone in the near future. This means that the temporal world-switch caused by the Direct Speech in the passage is immediately followed by a further worldswitch which shifts both the time-zone and the spatial location of the text. Readers must first project themselves to Mma Ramotswe’s origo in order then to conceptualise how she sees her own future developing from this deictic point. The verb forms she used to express her future plans (‘I’m going to’ and ‘It will be’) establish a future text-world with new spatial co-ordinates too (‘Down in Gaborone’). Readers are thus able to imagine, from Mma Ramotswe’s point of view at her dying father’s bedside, an unrealised text-world in which her future intentions are carried out. Of course, at the point at which her father dies, Mma Ramotswe’s detective agency is only a pipedream. The texture such enactor speculation lends to a text-world is discussed in Chapter 7.
F U RT H E R I N V E S T I G AT I O N
• Consider this extract from Iain Banks’ thriller novel Complicity: The Mercedes estate comes grumbling down the drive, splashing in the dark puddles under the dripping trees. The car draws up by the blank gable end of the dark cottage. As the headlights are switched off, you turn the night sight on. He gets out of the car carrying a large leather flight bag and walks to the front of the cottage. He is balding and of medium build, though with a paunch and rather a fat face. You watch him unlock the front door to the cottage. He enters, turning on the hall light and closing the door. You hear the alarm delay beep briefly before he turns it off. The rain patters down in front of you, and heavier drops from the overhanging trees plop all around. A light comes on at the back of the cottage, in the kitchen. You give him a couple of minutes while you put the night sight away and take out a pair of thick, wire-rimmed glasses, then you go to the front porch, put the glasses on and bang urgently on the solid wooden door. (Banks 1993: 101) Start by trying to draw a diagram of the world-building elements of this text-world. Remember to include the time and location of the text-world as well as any objects and enactors present. Are any of the elements you identify foregrounded in your mental representation of the text? If so, why? Now think about the deictic centre of the text-world: From where in the text-world is the unfolding scene being described? Which world-builders are close to the origo and which are distant? Is there anything odd about the narration of this text? Consider in particular how much identification you feel with each of the characters present in the text-world. Think about the genre of the novel. What does a second-person narration add to, or perhaps take away from, the description of murder in a thriller? Try rewriting the text with a third-person narration and then again with a first person narration. Try also switching the point of view from which the text is narrated. Can you rewrite the story from the perspective of the balding fat-faced man? What effect do these changes have on the position of the origo in the text-world? Do your feelings of identification alter in any way? There are no world-switches in this passage. Try adding some of your own. You could write three different versions of the text: one containing a temporal world-switch, one containing a spatial world-switch, and one containing a combined spatial and temporal world-switch.
: How did you construct each world-switch? What changes did you have to make to the text? Which world-switch was the most difficult to create? Why? F U RT H E R R E A D I N G
The notion of the origo was originally set out by Bühler (1982) and later developed by Lyons (1977) and Levinson (1983). Other key work on deixis, in both literary and non-literary contexts, can be found in Green (1992 and 1995), Jarvella and Klein (1982) and Rauh (1983). Duchan et al. (1995) collect together a range of work on cognitive deixis and projection in narrative, and Stockwell (2002) presents practical applications of cognitive-deictic theories to literary texts. Fillmore (1982 and 1997) puts forward a frame-based approach to cognition and deixis. Other interesting empirical experiments on reader projection and identification can be found in Gerrig and Rapp (2004), Kuiken et al (2004), Kuiken, Miall and Sikora (2004), Miall and Kuiken (2001 and 2002) and Oatley (1999 and 2002). The construction of foreground and background in language forms a key component of Langacker’s (1987, 1990 and 1991) Cognitive Grammar. The psychology of attention is explored in Baddeley and Weiskrantz (1993), Dember and Warm (1979), Haber and Hershenson (1980), and Styles (1997), and is used in the analysis of literary discourse in Stockwell (2002: 41–57) and van Peer (1986). Werth (1995a) is a useful summary of the world-building properties of deictics. A more comprehensive explanation of world-building elements can also be found in Werth (1999: 158–90). The relationship between spatial experience and our understanding of time in Figure 3.1 is adapted from Werth (1997a: 249). The notion of enactors was developed by Emmott (1997) as part of her Conceptual Frame Theory (see also Emmott 1992, 1994, 1995, 1998, 1999, 2002, 2003a and 2003b). Ryder (2003) provides a more detailed analysis of some of the tricks played with enactors in science fiction texts. Systemic Functional Linguistics was originally developed by Halliday (1985 and 1994). Further useful introductions to the theory can be found in Berry (1977) and Thompson (2004). The term ‘world-switch’ is a development of Emmott’s (1997: 147) notion of a ‘frame-switch’, and was originally put forward in Gavins (2001 and 2005a). In Werth’s original version of the text-world framework (Werth 1994, 1995a, 1995b, 1997a, 1997b, 1999), he argued that any changes to the spatial or temporal parameters of the initial text-world would create a sub-world. However, in Gavins (2001 and 2005a), I argued that the prefix ‘sub’ is misleading here because it suggests that newly created worlds (which are often numerous and extensive in discourse) are always and necessarily subordinate in some way to the first text-world. Gavins (2005a) proposes that the term ‘sub-world’ be replaced with ‘world-switch’ to avoid this confusion, and this modified category is applied throughout this book.
Processes
KEY ISSUES IN THIS CHAPTER
This chapter explores how text-worlds develop in the human mind. Once the spatial and temporal parameters of a text-world have been established by the world-building elements of the discourse, how does that text-world evolve and progress? What kinds of textual features cause a text-world to advance and in what ways? This chapter is particularly concerned with how we conceptualise the actions, events and other processes described in a discourse. The relationships which exist between these discourse elements and the background of world-builders against which they take place are also explored. Three different reports of a football match taken from three contrasting sources are examined here in order to demonstrate the basic mechanics by which text-worlds evolve. These analyses also investigate how the manner in which an action is described in the discourse-world can affect the participants’ perception of the relationships between enactors in the text-world. The range of possible language choices available to the reports’ varying speakers and writers are compared and the effects of their final selections on the overall texture of the text-world are discussed. This chapter also explores how the text-worlds related to different genres of discourse advance in distinct ways.
A DVA N C I N G T H E T E X T- W O R L D
We saw in Chapter 3 how the deictic and referential elements of a discourse are responsible for establishing the spatial and temporal setting of a text-world, as well as providing information about some of the social and personal relationships which might exist between its enactors. We also saw how alterations in the world-building parameters of a text-world cause new worlds with their own spatial and temporal co-ordinates to be created. However, world-switches are
: not the only way in which a text-world can develop and change. Even when they remain within the same time-zone and spatial location, text-worlds are subject to a constant process of evolution. Consider the transcript below of an extract from a live radio commentary on a football match. Once again, dashes signify pauses in the commentary and italics signify emphasis: it’s bordering on the bitter here at the sixfields stadium – the modern home of the cobblers – and northampton of league two start favourites here against their non-league rivals – from down the M1 – but stevenage are one of the top teams in the conference at the moment – and they’re very keen on that third round trip to crystal palace – which is the prize for the winners of this replay – we are underway the referee is darren deadman – and it’s stevenage in their – changed colours of all blue who kick-off playing in this first half from right to left – towards the dave bowen stand here – at this ground which is still looking pretty modern even though it’s been around for – eleven seasons now (BBC Radio Five Live 2005) Stevenage Borough, currently in the bottom division of the English football league, are playing Northampton Town, a league-two club, in a replay of the second round of the 2006 FA Cup competition. In their previous match, the teams drew 2–2. The transcript is taken from the opening seconds of the replay and the commentator spends most of his time setting the scene for his listeners in this part of the game. A number of objects (for example, ‘sixfields stadium’, ‘the M1’ motorway) and entities (for example, ‘stevenage’, ‘darren deadman’) are nominated as present in the text-world. Notice, in particular, how the home team Northampton Town are referred to by their familiar nickname, ‘the cobblers’. This suggests a closer social relationship between the Cobblers (and their fans) and the commentator than between the commentator and Stevenage Borough. In much the same way as the narrator of the pPod guide in Chapter 3, the commentator also uses an abundance of proximal deictics to establish which world-building elements are close to him (‘here at the sixfields stadium’, ‘here against their non-league rivals’, ‘at the moment’, ‘this replay’, ‘this first half ’, ‘the dave bowen stand here’, ‘at this ground’) and which are more distant (‘that third round trip’, ‘from down the M1’). One of these distal deictics, ‘that third round trip’, is part of a brief world-switch in which the commentator explains that the winners of the match will play Crystal Palace football team in the next round of the competition. Because the winners have yet to be established, this is a future event with its own time-signature. The commentator’s use of the demonstrative ‘that’ is simply a means of emphasising the temporal distance between the current text-world and the future match. His narration is nevertheless predominantly in the present tense, the only exception being the past continuous tense he uses to provide
TEXT-WORLD World-building elements time: location:
present Sixfields stadium → cold, modern, home of the Cobblers, Sixfields stadium → eleven seasons old
objects:
a football
enactors:
commentator Darren Deadman → referee Northampton → Cobblers, league two, favourites Stevenage → non-league, top team, keen, blue colours ↓ kick-off towards Dave Bowen stand
Figure 4.1 The developing text-world
information on the stadium (‘it’s been around for – eleven seasons now’). Even here, the previous history of the building is connected directly to the present moment with the temporal adverb ‘now’. The temporal, spatial and social deictics of the text-world are summarised in Figure 4.1. As in previous diagrams, the predominant time-zone of the text-world (the present), its location (Sixfields stadium), and the enactors present (Northampton, Stevenage, the commentator) are each listed separately in the diagram. A number of intensive relational processes are also shown in Figure 4.1. For example, Sixfields stadium has three attributes: it is cold, modern, and eleven seasons (years) old. It is also described as ‘home of the cobblers’, an intensive relational process in the identifying mode, also signified by the horizontal arrow in the diagram. Darren Deadman has an identifying intensive process connected to him too, since he is the referee. Northampton Town are similarly identified as ‘the cobblers’ and carry the further attributes of being a league-two side and the favourites to win the match. Stevenage Borough, on the other hand, are described as the top team in the non-league Conference and as being keen. They can also be identified by their blue strip. Amongst all the world-building elements present here, certain items in particular may catch the attention of listeners. Fans of either football team are likely to focus on any mention of their own side’s players, with whom they will have the greatest empathy, as well as other references to familiar places and names. The animate entities present are foregrounded in general in the text-world, but Stevenage in particular stand out in my own
: mental representation of this discourse. Despite having no allegiance to either club, the attribution of a colour to Stevenage’s strip, coupled with their reported keenness (a strong indicator of human will), foregrounds them over Northampton in my text-world. At the bottom of Figure 4.1 is a vertical arrow which shows how this textworld begins to advance beyond its initial world-builders when the first real action to occur in the match is reported by the commentator. Stevenage Borough ‘kick-off . . . towards the dave bowen stand’. In Systemic Functional Linguistics, this type of action belongs to the category of material processes. Material processes relate to any type of action or event in discourse, and they are characterised by the inclusion of some kind of Actor. Where an action is described, the Actor responsible for it will normally be an animate entity. Under a systemic-functional framework, actions can then be further divided into those which are intention processes and those which are supervention processes. Material intention processes are, as the name suggests, those actions which occur as the result of an Actor’s will. The Cobblers’ kick-off is an excellent example of this kind of deliberate process. Material supervention processes, by contrast, have no deliberate will behind them and can be seen as relating to actions which seem to take place by accident. For example, if the commentator were to report that ‘Darren Deadman just fell over’, this would be a material supervention process since no deliberate intention can be identified behind the action. Where an event is described in discourse, an inanimate Actor rather than an animate one will normally be involved. Systemic Functional Linguistics categorises these types of occurrences as material event processes. For example, if the commentator reported that ‘the ball exploded in mid-air’, this would be an event process, since the Actor (the ball) is an object not an animate entity. Material processes of all types often include a Goal component: an object or an entity which in some way receives or is affected by the process being described. Neither of my invented examples (‘the ball exploded in mid-air’ and ‘Darren Deadman just fell over’) contain a Goal. However, when the commentator on the real match reports that Stevenage kick off, the Goal of this action is the football match itself. ‘To kick off’ is, of course, a commonplace verb in modern English in which the football receiving the action is normally omitted. The football exists as an inferred text-world object even though it is ellipted in the speech itself. Vertical arrows are always used in text-world diagrams to signify some sort of material process, whether that process be an intentional action, a superventional action, or an event. In Text World Theory terms, all these processes are types of function-advancing propositions. Set against the deictic background constructed by the world-building elements of the text, functionadvancing propositions can be seen in many ways to be the items which propel a discourse forwards. Material processes almost always convey a change in
state, modifying the established relationships between text-world elements in some way. For example, the world-building items which make up the majority of the opening minutes of the football commentary specify the existence of a particular set of objects and entities in the text-world in a particular spatial and temporal arrangement. The material process of the kick-off modifies this situation, changing the physical position of the football in particular (which moves ‘from right to left . . . towards the dave bowen stand’), but also changing how we imagine the players to be positioned on the pitch and in relation to the ball as a result. Not only do we know that at least one of the players is now in contact with the ball, we can also infer that most of the other players on the pitch, as well as the referee, are probably in motion as well. Our mental representation of the discourse changes from one of a static arrangement of objects and entities to one of dynamic physical movement. The world-builders which may have caught the attention of listeners at the start of their text-world construction process are now likely to fall into the conceptual background as the active players in subject position in the discourse become the central focus of the text. Here is another extract from a few minutes later in the same match commentary: [northampton] under a – an early bit of pressure here as the ball drops to dannie bulman – on the edge of their area – he heads it across – nerves can’t quite control it for stevenage – and northampton get the ball away as we rise to our feet – to see over the lines of spectators in front of us – and it’s josh – low – I believe – who’s attacking down the nearside for northampton he’s run off the ball but has fouled the defender – and that’s going to be a free kick at the back to – stevenage – did you see any of that leroy? (BBC Radio Five Live 2005) The same spatial and temporal world-building elements which opened the discourse continue to form the conceptual background to the functionadvancing material processes described here. Certain new world-builders are introduced in this section (Dannie Bulman, Josh Low, the spectators), but crucially all of these are animate entities and two of them take on the role of Actor in material intention processes in the discourse. Dannie Bulman is both the Goal of a material supervention process (‘the ball drops to dannie bulman’) and the Actor in his own material intention process (‘he heads it across’). Josh Low, meanwhile, is the Actor in two material intention processes (‘attacking down the nearside’ and ‘fouled the defender’) and the Goal in a passivised material intention process of an opposing player (‘he’s run off the ball’). Most of the other world-builders introduced here are also linked to the function-advancing propositions in the text, specifying how and where processes occur (for example, ‘on the edge of their area’, ‘down the nearside’). The role of the spectators too is deictic, since they are mentioned only in their capacity as a barrier to the
: commentator’s view of the match. As such, they spatially situate the material intention process of the commentator and his companion standing up to see. Indeed, the question the commentator directs at his companion, Leroy, at the end of the extract (‘did you see any of that leroy’) makes one wonder whether his detailed description bears any resemblance to the actual events of the match at all. (The consequences this kind of realisation can have on the participants in the discourse-world are explored in more detail in Chapter 8.) Note too that this extract also contains a brief world-switch as the commentator creates a future time-zone in his observation that ‘that’s going to be a free kick at the back to – stevenage’. The text-world diagram for this part of the match commentary, Figure 4.2, looks very different from the one drawn to summarise the opening few minutes of the text in Figure 4.1. Because the majority of this section of the text relates to material processes, the function-advancing component of the text-world outweighs its world-building elements. The detailed description of the stadium and the contextual information provided by the commentator to set the scene TEXT-WORLD World-building elements present Sixfields stadium a football Northampton, Dannie Bulman, Stevenage, Josh Low, spectators, commentator, Leroy
time: location: objects: enactors:
Function-advancing propositions ball
Josh Low
↓ drops to Dannie Bulman
↓ attacks down the nearside
↓ heads it across
↓ runs off the ball ↓ fouls the defender
Northampton ↓ get the ball away
commentator and Leroy ↓ rise to their feet
Figure 4.2 Function-advancing propositions
at the beginning of the commentary have given way to his reports of the players’ actions and other unfolding events. This is by no means unusual in text-worlds created by narrative texts like this one. Whenever the main focus of a discourse becomes a series of events or actions, such as in a novel or a news report, the world-building elements of the text-world are frequently reduced to only those items fulfilling the roles of Actors or Goals in the material processes concerned. For this reason, it is common for the text-world diagrams relating to these and other kinds of discourse to be divided into two sections. World-building elements are normally summarised at the top of the diagram and show the deictic items which form the background of the text-world. They maintain a presence in the text-world while the function-advancing propositions, shown in the bottom section of the diagram, progress in the foreground of the mental representation, acting upon and developing relationships with the world-building components of the world.
T E X T UA L F U N C T I O N S
When discussing the function-advancing propositions of a text-world, it is important to be clear about what is meant by ‘function’ in this context. All texts, produced in all discourse-worlds, can be seen to have a function or purpose in that discourse-world environment. Whenever a speaker or a writer uses language, he or she will do so with particular communicative objectives in mind. As discussed in Chapter 2, in typical circumstances human communication is a fundamentally wilful endeavour, the central role of which is to fulfil the personal or social needs of the discourse-world participants in some way. A participant may use language as a form of creative expression, to inform, to question, to deceive, to argue, to command, to request, or to fulfil some other objective from a multifarious range of possibilities. In all cases, the specific motivations of the speaker or writer will greatly influence the nature of the language they produce. However, there is no guarantee that the speaker’s or writer’s perspective on the aims and purpose of a discourse will be shared by their co-participant in the discourse-world, the listener or reader. As we have already seen in Chapter 2, all discourse-worlds are a complex blend of language and context. The immediate physical surroundings, the previous experiences of the participants involved, as well as their position within a wider cultural community, have as great a role to play in the communicative process as the content and structure of the language at its core. Human communication is not simply the transmission of a predetermined message from participant A to participant B by means of a fixed linguistic code. It is a dynamic, context-driven process involving the on-line negotiation of meaning and purpose by all those involved. This means that the function of a text is not decided by one of the discourse-world participants only; functionality is a constantly evolving
: concept, negotiated and sometimes renegotiated by all participants as the discourse progresses. It is also important to stress that, as analysts of discourse, our involvement in a text’s originating discourse-world is of a different nature from the involvement of the other participants. The easiest way to think of this is as a difference between two people having a private conversation and an eavesdropper on that situation. Although the eavesdropper is present in the discourse-world, can identify the contextual elements it contains, and can hear the language the participants produce, he or she has no direct involvement in the negotiated component of the discourse. An eavesdropper cannot speak out, question, or contribute to the discourse process in any way and remains a passive observer of unfolding events rather than an active participant in them. Crucially, the analyst’s notion of the function of a text can be arrived at after the fact, at which point it will normally remain fixed. The discourse can be examined and assessed in its entirety and an informed judgement can made about the purpose or purposes different aspects of the text have served. This is not to say that discourse-analysts do not experience an on-line processing of a text on their first encounter with it. It is important, however, to separate this initial raw reception of discourse from any judicious analysis of its components which might be undertaken at a later stage. By contrast, the participants for whom the first experience with the text is their only experience must situate the language they encounter within a functional context as it happens. Their ideas of the probable motivations behind a discourse, the direction in which they perceive the communication to be heading, and their own pragmatic role within the discourse-world remains an on-line formulation. As a result, these ideas are more likely to shift and develop as the discourse progresses and more and more information is incremented. As an example, imagine that your mobile phone is ringing. The caller’s name and number are displayed and you know who is trying to contact you before you answer the call: your mother. At this point in the discourse process, the range of possible purposes for the call are multitudinous, although you might already be guessing, based on your existing knowledge, that your mother wants to speak to you about your plans to meet the coming weekend, or to remind you about a family birthday, or to ask you a crossword clue. We saw in the analysis of the ‘In Memoriam’ announcement in Chapter 2 how our previous experiences of the participants involved in a discourse-world, as well as the wider cultural context surrounding the discourse, can affect how we represent the contents of a text mentally. The same applies in all discourse situations; both the active participants in a discourse-world and its passive analysts will have pre-conceived ideas about the function of a text before the discourse process is even under way. As soon as you answer the telephone call, the range of possible purposes for the communication starts to decrease still further, as the language you and your mother produce narrows the focus of the discourse-world. The
structure and content of the evolving text signal to the participants what the discourse is about, what areas of their existing knowledge are needed in order for them to make sense of it, and what function the discourse may be fulfilling in the real world. Imagine your mother begins the conversation, ‘Seven letters, beginning with A and ending in O’. While the declarative structure of her speech might suggest she is trying to inform you of something here, your existing knowledge of crossword puzzles and of your mother’s liking for them is likely to lead you to predict a different function for this text. Should the initial information be followed by, ‘What is the capital of Corsica?’, your perception of the text as having an interrogative function would be confirmed with this question. Of course, discourses may have more than one function and your conversation with your mother may continue to include a reminder of a family birthday and a discussion of plans for the weekend. However, the key point is that the shifting functions of a discourse are signalled by associated shifts in the structure and content of the text. The essentially text-driven nature of the discourse process means that such shifts directly affect the nature of the textworlds we construct as well as our analytical perspective on them in retrospect. Our identification of the function-advancing elements of a text-world is thus entirely dependent on what we perceive the purpose of the text as a whole to be. Earlier in this chapter, function-advancing propositions were defined as those items in a text which can be seen to propel the discourse forwards in some way. The material processes examined in the football commentary above are perhaps the most obvious example of how this can happen. They represent easily identifiable modifications to the text-world, often including changes in the physical situations of text-world elements and the relationships between them. However, the advancement of a text-world can in many discourses be a lot more subtle. Actions and events need not necessarily be depicted for the discourse-world participants to perceive progress in an unfolding text-world. For example, poetic texts also have a function to advance in their text-worlds, but normally have a very different ‘feel’ from those texts which follow a narrative line. Consider the following song lyrics, extracted from ‘Cherry Blossoms’ by the pop group Tindersticks: A black television screen, Snow white and black, Deep and open, Splashing against the windows. Looking out onto a three-terrace town There’s a garden, grey-green And cherry blossoms. Get in in the morning (all seasons here, saved for a rainy day), Climb in beside you (a part of a hole), Watch the clock for half an hour (an orange and its peel).
: It’s cold on the outside, There’s steam on the windows (a star in a night sky) And I put myself there all the time (a gentle beauty). You let me forget again. (Tindersticks 1995) There are a total of fourteen separate processes represented explicitly in this text. However, their precise nature and overall function in the discourse is markedly different from the processes identified in the football commentary earlier. Four of the processes here are material intention processes (‘Get in’, ‘saved’, ‘Climb in’ and ‘I put’). All of these seem to have the first person narrator of the song as their Actor, although the omission of a pronoun from all but one of the verb phrases leaves this unclear. It is also interesting to note that all the material intention processes happen around the middle section of the text and all relate to the narrator getting into bed. In the final two lines, another process, ‘You let’, is attributed to the ‘you’ mentioned earlier in the text. The verb concerned here, ‘let’, is rather ambiguous and could be interpreted as either an intention process or a supervention process. Three further processes, ‘Looking out’, ‘Watch’, and ‘forget’, are also attributed to the narrator of the song. In the first two of these a perception (like seeing, listening or feeling) is being described; in the second, a process of cognition (like thinking or remembering). In Systemic Functional Linguistics, both of these fall into a category called mental processes. A further subcategory of reaction (for example, liking or hating) is also included under this label. The role of the participant in each type of mental process is not as Actor but as Sensor. The occurrence of mental processes in a discourse can have dramatic effects on the structure of the text-world, but these are discussed in detail in Chapter 7. For the moment, it is sufficient to note that looking, watching and forgetting do not involve the same level of deliberate physical activity as the material processes, such as climbing and putting, depicted in the text. They are activities in the mind rather than physical actions of the body. The remaining six processes in the text include another material event process (‘Splashing’) and three existential processes (‘There’s a garden . . . And cherry blossoms’, ‘It’s cold’, and ‘There’s steam’). Existential processes simply describe the existence of an element in a text-world (for example, ‘There’s a garden’). They are also often characterised by the inclusion of a dummy subject, particularly when the weather is the focus of a particular clause (for example, ‘It’s cold’). The important thing to note in the context of the song lyrics is that neither the material event process of the television ‘Splashing against the windows’, nor any of the existential processes in the text have an animate Actor. The final three, like all existential processes, actually function as world-builders in the text-world, since they simply nominate certain items as present. However, in sharp contrast to the often vague and ambiguous material processes described in the song, the world-building
elements of the text are on the whole presented in clear detail. Although the precise time and location of the text-world are not specified, some of the objects which populate the scene have further detail attached to them in the form of relational processes. The television screen, for example, is ‘black . . . Snow white and black, Deep and open’, the garden is ‘grey-green’ and contains cherry blossoms. Notice, in particular, the colours which make up most of these descriptions. This text-world contains many contrasting light and dark elements: the snow white against the black of the television screen; the brightness of cherry blossoms against the grey-green garden; the attention-grabbing appearance of an orange and its peel; the star in the night sky. It is also interesting to note the high concentration of other deictic information provided around each process in this song. The majority of all processes here – material, relational and mental – are anchored to some specific physical location: ‘Splashing against’, ‘Looking out on to’, ‘Get in in the morning’, ‘Climb in beside you’, ‘It’s cold on the outside’, ‘There’s steam on the window’, ‘I put myself there’. On the whole, then, the emphasis in this text-world falls on description rather than action. The majority of the text is given over to meticulous worldbuilding, as a picture of a gloomy bedroom scene is painted. Within that scene, the only material intention processes which occur happen together and are all related to the narrator reaching a motionless state (lying down) where he can engage in a mental process (watching a clock). In all but one material intention process, the Actor is deleted entirely from the clause, adding to the sense of a lack of action in the scene. The text-world is further characterised by light and dark contrasts, as the strong colours of particular stationary objects (an orange, a star, a television tuned to white noise) become foregrounded against a peculiarly grey background. The development of the text-world happens along a descriptive, rather than actional line. Its overall function is to portray a static scene and as the text progresses more and more detail is added to our mental representations in this regard. Analysing this text post-processing reveals that those components with a vital world-building role to play in the text-world (for example, the text’s noun phrases, their attributes, their deictic relationships) are also in fact making an equally important contribution to functionadvancement in this case. Similarly, the processes expressed in these lyrics act upon and further define the world-building elements already established. This is a common phenomenon in descriptive texts such as this one. Where a text’s central function can be identified as the description of a particular scene or the exposition of a particular character, certain textual elements can be seen to take on a dual world-building and function-advancing role in the text-world. In summary, the writer or speaker in a discourse-world will produce a text containing the function-advancing propositions which he or she thinks will best realise his or her communicative goals. The reader or listener in the discourse-world will formulate a separate interpretation of those propositions,
: which may or may not match the discourse function intended by their producer. Passive analysts of a discourse will have a different experience of the text-world building process. Where the active participants in a discourse-world negotiate the structure and content of their mental representations on-line, post-processing analysis can take a broader view of the discourse process which enables the analyst to formulate a stable interpretation of the overall function, or functions, of the language produced. This function will greatly affect the structure of the unfolding text-world. We have seen in the analysis of the song lyrics above how world-building elements can also contribute to the functionadvancing component of the text-world of a heavily descriptive text. In other examples, instructional texts (such as car manuals, or recipes) are likely to contain a large proportion of goal-advancing imperatives; narrative texts (such as a football commentary, or a piece of prose fiction) are likely to contain a large proportion of plot-advancing material processes, and so on.
E N A C T O R R E L AT I O N S H I P S
It is important to emphasise that the Actors and Sensors which participate in all kinds of processes in a text are not considered in Text World Theory as mere grammatical operators. When analysing the world-building elements and function-advancing propositions of a text-world, we are not simply engaged in a component-labelling exercise. Just as in many other approaches to discourse analysis, such as Critical Discourse Analysis, or Stylistics, the identification of linguistic features through the application of a particular grammatical framework is only the beginning of our exploration. Of far greater importance in Text World Theory are the effects that different discourse items have on their related conceptual representations. Furthermore, of central interest in every text-world analysis is how these representations are experienced by the human beings who create them. The text-world entities that fill the various participant roles in Systemic Functional Linguistics are all enactors in Text World Theory terms. Where the systemic-functional framework provides a means by which the varying functional roles of discourse elements can be identified, Text World Theory describes the experiential significance of these functions in the discourse as a whole. The analogic nature of all text-worlds means that enactors are conceptual representations of real human characteristics, and we endow them with the same abilities, emotions and reactions as we would expect from the human beings we encounter in the real world. The inclusion of enactors in a text-world always results, to varying degrees of intensity, in an empathetic identification on the part of the discourse-world participants. The relative positivity or negativity of that reaction depends to a great extent on the manner in which relationships between enactors and their text-world environment is presented by the text.
In order to explore these effects in more detail, we return to the football match between Stevenage Borough and Northampton Town again. Have a look at the following extract: mcgleish waits – around the penalty spot – back towards ian taylor again – high ball into the penalty area it’ll come all the way towards smith who goes for goal – is beaten away by julian – mcgleish has a great chance – and scott mcgleish – has opened the scoring for northampton town – he’s a real goal poacher – and that was a real goal poacher’s goal (BBC Radio Five Live 2005) Here, the commentator is describing the first goal of the match, which was scored by Northampton Town forty-three minutes into the game. The commentator accurately predicts the key role to be played by Northampton Town player Scott McGleish early on in this sequence, foregrounding him in the text-world by the mention of his name in the subject position of a sentence, as well as providing deictic detail about his dangerous position in the penalty area. McGleish is also the Actor in two material intention processes (‘mcgleish waits’, and later ‘scott mcgleish – has opened the scoring’). Ian Taylor, by contrast, is a static landmark toward which the ball (the Actor in a material supervention process) travels. Taylor does not play an active textual role in the unfolding events. Although he provides the ‘high ball into the penalty area’, his Actorly role is not realised in the text. Instead, the motion of the ball is the focus of attention. Martin Smith and Alan Julian, on the other hand, are both given explicit participatory roles to match McGleish’s agency in the scene (Smith goes for goal and Julian beats him away). McGleish’s crucial presence in the text-world continues to be emphasised as his name is repeated twice following the goal and both he (‘he’s a real goal poacher’) and the goal itself (‘that was a real goal poacher’s goal’) have additional intensive relational processes attached to them. The text-world of this extract is shown in Figure 4.3. The diagram illustrates how the majority of function-advancing propositions in this textworld are plot-advancing material intention processes. Compare the radio commentator’s description of the events as they happened to a later interpretation of the match: Scott McGleish fired a double to book Northampton an FA Cup third round tie at Crystal Palace. The Cobblers’ leading marksman took his season’s tally to 14 as the Nationwide Conference side saw their tilt for glory fade with a disappointing whimper. But there was almost a sting in the tail for McGleish, who became one of seven first-half bookings from referee Darren Deadman for an illadvised celebration in the net after his opener, a 43rd minute tap in after Alan Julian had parried Martin Smith’s rasping drive.
: TEXT-WORLD World-building elements time: location: objects: enactors:
present Sixfields stadium a football Scott McGleish, Ian Taylor, Alan Julian, Martin Smith, spectators, commentator
Function-advancing propositions McGleish → goal poacher
Smith
↓
↓
waits
goes for goal
↓
↓
has a great chance
beaten away
↓ scores a goal → goal poacher’s goal
Julian ↓ beats Smith
Figure 4.3 Active enactors: BBC radio commentary
There was some ill feeling between the sides after the 2–2 draw at Broadhall Way and Stevenage were forced to use some strong arm tactics in the first 45 minutes. They tried to stem the home side but there was [sic] bookings to Robert Quinn, Michael Brough, Dannie Bulman and Ollie Berquez for the visitors as well as Luke Chambers, Pedj Bojic and McGleish for Northampton. McGleish virtually sealed the tie in the final minute of the first half when Smith was allowed to find him unmarked just a few yards from goal and he headed the ball into an unguarded net. (Footymad 2005) Perhaps the most obvious difference between this match report from an unofficial Stevenage Borough supporters’ website and the radio commentary is that the highly involving present tense of the live report has been replaced by a past-tense narration in the internet report. The two texts, of course, originate from two separate discourse-worlds: the first shares the same temporal and
TEXT-WORLD World-building elements time: location: objects: enactors:
past Sixfields stadium a football McGleish, Deadman, Julian, Smith, Quinn, Brough, Bulman, Berquez, Chambers, Bojic, Cobblers, Stevenage
Function-advancing propositions McGleish → marksman → unmarked
Stevenage ↓
↓ fires double
see glory fade ↓
↓ books a place
are forced
↓ takes his tally to 14
↓ use strong arm tactics
↓ becomes a booking
↓ try to stem home side ↓
↓ seals the tie
allow Smith to find McGleish
↓ Darren Deadman
heads the ball
↓ celebration → ill-advised
makes bookings
goal → tap in net → unguarded
↓ forces Stevenage to cheat?
Figure 4.4 Active enactors: Stevenage Borough web report
spatial co-ordinates as the enactors and events described, the second is written presumably in a different location and after the match has taken place. The hindsight available to the writer in the latter of these discourse-worlds has quite a significant impact on the text-world he creates. The structure of the Stevenage Borough website report is shown in Figure 4.4. The first thing to note is that the world-building elements of
: the text-world have changed. The time is now the past and a different set of enactors is represented in this text. The web report is taking a broader view of the whole match, not just the first goal, so the inclusion of more detailed information on the whole is to be expected. As usual, the bottom section of the diagram represents the function-advancing components of the text-world. Notice, first of all, how Scott McGleish is described in the web report not as a goal poacher, but as a ‘marksman’. The text also points out that he was left unmarked at a crucial point in the match. Just as in the radio commentary, McGleish’s key actional role is prominent in the text-world. Here he is responsible for five material intention processes (firing, booking, taking, sealing, and heading) and one material supervention process (becoming a booking). More interestingly, Stevenage Borough themselves, having been absent from the radio commentary except for the poor defending of Alan Julian, are given far more major participatory roles in this report. The processes attributed to them convey a mixture of heroic struggle (they try to stem the home-side, are forced to use strong arm tactics, and ultimately see glory fade) and incompetence (they also allow Smith to find McGleish unmarked). This text-world also includes retrospective reflection on some other selected aspects of the match. McGleish’s goal is described in rather unflattering terms as ‘a tap in’ and the net has the attribute of being ‘unguarded’. Both of these intensive relational processes suggest that Northampton’s win was a result of poor play on the part of Stevenage, rather than any outstanding talent on the part of the home side. The author also seems to agree with Darren Deadman’s yellow card for Scott McGleish, describing his celebration of his goal as ‘illadvised’. Note that Deadman is an active participant here, making bookings of numerous players and perhaps also being blamed, at least in part, for Stevenage’s ‘strong arm tactics’ (Stevenage’s bookings outnumbered those for Northampton four to three in this match). The text places Stevenage in a passive position in this particular part of the report. They are ‘forced’ to cheat, and the Actor responsible for the forcing is deleted from the construction. This could leave either Deadman or Northampton Town, or both, in the frame as responsible for Stevenage’s actions, rather than any member of the Stevenage Borough side! As might be expected, the report of the match provided on Northampton Town’s unofficial website tells a rather different story: Thanks to on-form Scott McGleish, firing two goals narrowly before half time that effectively killed any chance of Borough claiming the third round tie with Crystal Palace, and taking his tally to 14 in the season, the Cobblers had a clear passage to look forward to the Christmas fixtures . . . Throughout the first half, in which referee Darren Deadman decided to show yellow cards to seven players in six different incidents, Town
gradually imposed themselves on the game, and demonstrated a different tactic from the corner in the way of Josh Low’s near post flick-ons! Low was also causing problems down the right and failed to make his good work count when he fired over. Crowe, Jess and Mendes all wasted fair chances before the deadlock was deservedly broken. Martin Smith stroked a effort which’ keeper Alan Julian brilliantly stopped, but had no chance to deny McGleish from sticking home the rebound on 44. McGleish was booked when he mocked Lionel Perez’s ‘poke in the eye’ antics from the first match between the teams, and it dared to go further when Ollie Berquez took out Ian Taylor that on another day may have seen red. The right response to this sideshow was to send in a second goal. Julian was hopelessly out of his ground as a Smith corner from the right was curled in, McGleish rising to nod home completely unmarked with Julian flapping behind him, capping a superb month so far for the 31-year-old. (Sidwell 2005) The text-world for this report is summarised in Figure 4.5. Once again, the world-building elements have changed. A different set of enactors is now in focus, the majority of them Northampton Town players. Scott McGleish continues to be the central figure in the text-world and this time is the Actor in six material intention processes. Once again, he is also involved in a material supervention process, his booking. Notice, however, how Darren Deadman’s agency in this process is reduced. In the earlier Stevenage report, the booking is described as a material intention process, with Deadman as the Actor. In this text-world, Deadman is the Sensor in a mental cognition process and simply decides to make a booking. Certain players and events which were not mentioned at all in the previous two reports also receive attention here. Josh Low’s failed attempts to score are praised and the author is keen to emphasise other active contributions made by the whole team (the Cobblers ‘imposed themselves’ and ‘demonstrated a different tactic’). Not included in the function-advancing section of the diagram, but listed as world-building enactors are Crowe, Jess and Mendes, all of whom are Northampton Town players and all of whom ‘wasted fair chances’. A tackle by Ollie Berquez, a Stevenage player, is also described in negative terms. There is a striking contrast too between the descriptions of goalkeeper Alan Julian in the three reports. He does not appear at all in the radio commentary, but ‘parried Martin Smith’s rasping drive’ in the Stevenage report. Interestingly, in the Northampton Town version of events Julian’s role is further inflated. According to this narrative he ‘brilliantly stopped’ the ball from Martin Smith, ‘had no chance to deny’ McGleish, and is then ‘hopelessly out of his ground’ and ‘flapping’ as the second goal is scored. The focus placed upon him here is far from an expression of admiration for Julian or his side. More likely, the description of his brilliant stop is there to
: TEXT-WORLD World-building elements time: location: objects: enactors:
past Sixfields stadium a football McGleish, Stevenage, Cobblers, Deadman, Low, Crowe, Jess, Mendes, Smith, Julian, Perez, Berquez, Taylor
Function-advancing propositions McGleish → on form → unmarked ↓ fires two goals ↓ sticks ball home
Julian → out of ground → flapping ↓ brilliantly stops the ball ↓ no chance to deny McGleish
↓ mocks Perez ↓ gets booked ↓ sends in second ↓
Low ↓ causes problems
Deadman ↓ decides
↓ fires over
rises up ↓ nods the ball home
Cobblers ↓ impose ↓ demonstrate
Figure 4.5 Active enactors: Northampton Town web report
emphasise the skill of Northampton’s shot on goal rather than Julian’s goalkeeping abilities. Although they all describe the same real-world events, these three separate match reports manage to construct three distinct text-world structures. Each author chooses to focus upon different world-building entities and represent actions and events using different types of process. This places the enactors in each of the consequent text-worlds in different transitivity relationships, both with their own actions and with each other. This means that while all three texts share a common connection with the same real-world episodes, the
varying motivations and previous experiences at play in their originating discourse-world environments result in markedly different text-world experiences for their readers and listeners. F U RT H E R I N V E S T I G AT I O N
News discourse almost always provides productive ground for the further exploration of variations in the function-advancing component of text-worlds. • On the same day select four different newspapers, two tabloid and two broadsheet. Have a look at the front page of each newspaper and consider the following questions: Do any of the newspapers report the same real-world events? If so, try to summarise the world-building elements and functionadvancing propositions included in each version. Draw a text-world diagram for each newspaper’s version of events. Are there any variations in which world-building enactors are nominated as present in the text-world? Include all the different processes described in the function-advancing section of your diagrams. Do you notice any patterns in the types of processes used to report the story? Which enactors are responsible for which processes? Are there variations across the different newspapers? Think about the discourse-world environments surrounding both the production and the reception of each report. What kinds of discourseworld factors do you think might have an influence on how the story has been told in each newspaper? How might different audiences interpret the different transitivity relations constructed in the texts? • The following news item was taken from the front page of the BBC News website. It reports on a news story from another source, the tabloid and frequently sensationalist British newspaper, News of the World. MoD to probe Iraq ‘abuse’ video The Ministry of Defence has launched an investigation into video images which appeared to show UK soldiers brutally beating a group of Iraqi teenagers. The News of the World has published pictures from a video the newspaper says was shot in southern Iraq in 2004. Chancellor Gordon Brown said the abuse, if true, was ‘unacceptable’. A military spokesman in Iraq condemned ‘all acts of abuse and brutality’ by British troops, saying the allegations related to a ‘tiny number’ of soldiers. (BBC News 2006)
: Try rewriting this report as: the original News of the World news story an item on a children’s television news programme an email from Chancellor Gordon Brown to Prime Minister Tony Blair, informing him about the discovery of the video for the first time. What changes have you made to the BBC version in each case? Why? Think in particular about the discourse-worlds of each new version. What impact have these had on your creative choices? How do different transitivity relations also alter the assignment of blame and responsibility in a text-world?
F U RT H E R R E A D I N G
The systemic-functional framework which underlies the analyses in this chapter is set out in Halliday (1985 and 1994). Useful introductions to Systemic Functional Linguistics can also be found in Berry (1977) and Thompson (2004). Much work in Critical Discourse Analysis makes use of Halliday’s functional grammar as a means of uncovering political and other covert power structures in discourse. Key publications include CaldasCoulthard and Coulthard (1996), Fairclough (1995a, 1995b, and 2001), and Fowler (1981 and 1991). Chilton (2004 and 2005) offer a fascinating amalgamation of Critical Discourse Analysis with insights from Cognitive Linguistics and Cognitive Psychology (see also Charteris-Black 2004; Edwards 1996; Lakoff 1992, 2002 and 2004; and O’Halloran 2003). The nature of function-advancing propositions is summarised in Werth (1994, 1995a, and 1995b), Gavins (2000, 2003, 2005a, and 2005b), Hidalgo Downing (2000a, 2000c, 2002 and 2003), Lahey (2003 and 2004), and Stockwell (2002:135–49). More detailed discussions of this area of Text World Theory can also be found in Gavins (2001), Hidalgo Downing (2000b), Lahey (2005), and Werth (1999: 190–202).
Layers
KEY ISSUES IN THIS CHAPTER
In Chapter 3 we saw how some texts require multiple mental representations to be constructed in the minds of the discourse participants. The worldswitches created by alternations in the deictic parameters of a text-world were considered in an introductory analysis of the shifts in time and space contained within an extract of literary narrative. This chapter examines multiple worldcreation in more detail and looks in particular at the conceptual processes which enable us to manage several text-worlds in our minds at once. The relationship between the discourse-world and the text-world is also revisited over the coming pages. Specifically, the conceptual status of the different entities which populate these worlds is explored through contrasting analyses of the text-worlds constructed by a parenting manual and those constructed in an extract of literary fiction. Of central interest in this discussion are the processes by which participants assess the reliability of their co-communicators in the discourse-world, and how this assessment subsequently impacts upon their perception of the text-world. This chapter investigates the boundaries which exist between worlds and the ability certain entities have to transcend them.
H I E R A RC H I E S
Texts which require only one text-world for their comprehension are far more rare in discourse than those which require multiple mental representations. New text-worlds can be created for numerous reasons in a discourse, not just as the result of a deictic shift, and each different type of world will generate a different experiential effect for the discourse participants. Chapters 6, 7, 8 and 9 explore the precise nature of the diverse worlds created by a variety of textual features. First, this chapter concentrates on the conceptual management of
: multiple mental representations and the means by which human beings are able to juggle several text-worlds in their minds at once. To begin this investigation, consider the following discourse extract: I’ve found that toilet troubles are caused, at least in part, by parents’ lack of follow-through. They start (in my opinion, too late) and then at the first sign of resistance, stop and start again, and they continue to stop and start again and before they know it, they’re into a battle of wills. You’ll see that theme in many of the following cases: ‘Shows No Readiness at Twenty-two Months’ My almost 22-month-old son, Carson, started saying ‘pee-pee’ last week. I asked him did he have to go pee-pee or has he already done peepee? I didn’t really get a response one way or the other. He has not shown any readiness for toilet training. He could be in a nappy ready to explode from urine and BM [Bowel Movement] and not care . . . I don’t know if he’s saying pee-pee just because it is a new word he knows or if he has figured out what it means. Should I try putting him on the potty when he says pee-pee? He has seen both me and my husband in the bathroom plenty of times and I tell him, ‘We are going potty’. I’m trying to lay some groundwork. Also, when do you start putting your child in pull-ups? He is still in ordinary nappies. I don’t think I need to bother with pull-ups until he is ready for toilet learning. At his age, Carson understands everything. He might be one of those boys who couldn’t care less about sitting in pee and poo, but he is certainly capable of knowing that pee and poo belong in the toilet, especially if he’s been observing his parents. I also don’t agree that he ‘hasn’t shown any readiness’. He very likely knows what ‘pee-pee’ is and what it means. (Hogg and Blau 2005: 255–6) This extract is taken from a parenting manual called The Baby Whisperer Answers All Your Questions By Teaching You How To Ask The Right Questions. The ‘baby whisperer’ of the title is Tracy Hogg, a British former paediatric nurse who went on to enjoy a hugely successful career as a parenting advisor on television and in print, first in the United States and later in the United Kingdom and Australia. In this section of her third publication, Hogg addresses the problems associated with training toddlers to use the toilet. Hogg employed a co-author, Melinda Blau, for all her books and, as a result, there are three participants in the discourse-world of this text: Hogg, Blau and the reader. However, it is important to note that much of the success of the babywhisperer empire is founded upon the strong emphasis which is placed throughout the baby-whisperer books and associated childcare products upon Hogg’s own Northern-English upbringing and no-nonsense personality.
References to Hogg’s Yorkshire childhood are frequent in all her texts and, in the introductory chapters of all her books, she emphasises that her choice of Blau as a co-author was based entirely on her ability to capture Hogg’s ‘voice’. No explicit mention of Melinda Blau is made beyond the first few pages of any of the baby-whisperer books. In the split discourse-world of this text, then, Hogg is the strongest authorial presence. The overall function of the text is to advise parents (the intended co-participants in the discourse-world) on aspects of their private family lives and the construction of a highly empathetic relationship between Hogg and the reader seems to be key to the authors’ communicative objectives. Like the majority of Hogg and Blau’s books, the extract above constructs an amicable and familiar text-world relationship between an enactor of Hogg and an enactor of the reader. The text is written in the first person, but also includes a second-person reference, ‘You’ll see that theme . . .’, which makes the reader’s inclusion in the text-world explicit. Other enactors appear and disappear, and other time-zones are briefly visited, but underlying the whole discourse is a text-world exclusively containing enactors of Hogg and the reader in a present time-zone. This phenomenon is common in texts written in the first person and can be seen to allow the re-creation of face-to-face discourseworld relationships in what is actually a split discourse-world situation. In this particular extract, Hogg begins by using the present perfect tense (‘I’ve found’) to establish a world-switch through which her previous experiences of parents’ toilet-training problems can be summarised in a separate textworld. This text-world has a timeless quality to it; the problems Hogg identifies have happened in the past, but continue to happen now and, it would seem, will happen to some parents in the future. The various personal pronouns used in the opening paragraph of the extract are particularly interesting. Alongside the first- and second-person pronouns used to identify Hogg and her parentreader, the third-person is also used to refer to a separate group of parents who have been unsuccessful in their attempts to toilet-train their children (for example, ‘They start’, ‘they continue’, ‘they’re into a battle of wills’). Crucially, Hogg’s ideal reader (also a parent, remember) is not included in this group, despite the fact that he or she is presumably reading the book in order to obtain advice on the subject. The exclusive relationship between the reader and Hogg is instead maintained by the direct address made using the more intimate second person pronoun. The text switches back to the reader-Hogg text-world with the sentence ‘You’ll see that theme in many of the following cases’. Hogg, of course, is present in both text-worlds. She shares her experiences with her reader in one world and is also present as a disapproving observer of other parents’ behaviour in the other. The text goes on to present an extract of correspondence from a ‘real-life’ parent, and the graphological differences between this paragraph and those which precede and follow it help to establish another new text-world
: and emphasise its separation from its originating text. The content of the paragraph is directly reported discourse and, as such, it creates another worldswitch. The tense of the text shifts to the simple past and the personal pronouns and other deictic markers (for example, ‘My . . . son’, ‘the bathroom’, ‘the potty’) all correspond with the shift in perspective from Hogg’s point of view to that of an unnamed mother in this new text-world. A set of new accompanying enactors is present too (a child and a husband) and the mother narrating the story includes a lot of her own opinion on a very personal situation (for example, ‘I don’t know’, ‘I’m trying’, ‘I don’t think’). This helps the reader to follow the projection to a new origo in this part of the text. As soon as the quoted text ends, the reader is returned to the exclusive text-world shared with the enactor of Hogg, where a starkly contrasting view of the correspondent’s situation is presented through a series of Hogg’s own opinions. Where Carson’s mother is uncertain about her son’s level of understanding and the possible motivations behind his language choices, Hogg has no such doubts and is forthright in her disagreement with Carson’s parents. The conceptual structure of this text is key to the creation of a close alliance between Hogg and the reader. Hogg is established as both an authoritative expert in her field and a confidante for her reader. The reader is flattered and reassured by the distance the text places between him or her and the other parents represented in a separate text-world, whose parenting skills clearly do little to impress Hogg. These effects are due to the hierarchical configuration multiple text-worlds take in our minds as we process them. Whenever a text requires us to build more than one text-world, an assessment of each new textworld’s status in relation to those which have preceded it becomes an essential part of our processing of the discourse. Not all new text-worlds have an equal status in our minds and there are a number of reasons why we perceive some text-worlds to be more familiar, more trustworthy, more reliable than others. Of primary importance in our management of multiple text-worlds is our understanding of the essential differences which exist between the entities which populate the discourse-world and those which populate a text-world. These differences are differences in ontological status. Ontology is the term given to the study of the nature of being and existence. Discourse-world entities are real people, belonging to the same domain of existence as we do. In faceto-face communication, we are able to ask questions of other discourse-world entities, clarify information and negotiate the contents of our text-worlds openly. In the discourse-worlds of written communication, where we are unable to question and clarify directly, we nevertheless understand our coparticipant to be a real person. Although that real person may not share our spatial or temporal co-ordinates, he or she still exists in the same ontological domain as we do. Crucially, the wilful nature of all communication leads us to expect, as a norm, that our co-participants in the discourse-world are telling the truth. Lying is considered pathological behaviour in most discourse-world
environments and our expectations of how our co-participants will behave are based on a model of co-operation rather than deliberate deception. This is not to say that deception does not take place in discourse, but it is not our prototypical expectation of the motivating force behind an act of communication. Whether that communication is taking place face-to-face or through a written text, the text-worlds created by the participants in the discourse-world are open to verification by the other entities who exist at the same ontological level. These worlds are, in Text World Theory terms, participant-accessible textworlds. This means that when a participant in the discourse-world establishes a text-world, or creates a new world within that text-world (for example through a world-switch), the other participants in the discourse-world will accept the contents of those text-worlds as reliable and true, and a corresponding degree of responsibility for them is assigned. So, when Tracy Hogg describes her experiences with and opinions of parents’ attempts to toilet-train their children, her readers assume that her account of these events is accurate. We have no reason to believe that she would lie about her experiences and a number of other discourse-world factors alongside her ontological status add to her reliability. Our previous knowledge of Hogg is extremely important in our assessment of the trustworthiness of her discourse. The fact that her ideas appear in print under the name of an international publishing house, the fact that she is a trained nurse, has an international reputation of her own, and has developed a successful multi-national baby-care business, all add to our perception of her as a reliable co-participant in the discourse-world. Perhaps the most influential factor of all, however, is the exclusive and intimate relationship established between Hogg and her readers by the text from its outset. By contrast, consider your perception of Carson’s mother in the text of The Baby Whisperer. Do you find the content of the text-world she creates as convincing as those created by Hogg? Is she a more or less authoritative figure than Hogg? I would imagine that you perceive this entity to be considerably less reliable than Hogg and that you are probably somewhat dubious about the accuracy of her interpretation of her family situation. There are a number of very good reasons for this. Most importantly, Carson’s mother is not a participant in the discourse-world. She exists only at the text-world level, embedded within Hogg’s discourse. Although she may in fact be a real-world person as well, one who has been involved in a discourse-world with Hogg on some other occasion, Hogg’s readers have had no direct contact with her in the discourseworld themselves and, as such, she remains only a textual entity for us. In all discourse, enactors like Carson’s mother exist in an ontological domain which is distinct from that of the discourse-world participants. The text-worlds created by text-world enactors who do not occupy the discourse-world as well are processed differently as a direct consequence of this. In Text World Theory terms, these worlds are only enactor-accessible text-worlds.
: Our mental representations of enactors in the text-world are, of course, based on our experiences of real people in the real world, and we expect both types of entity to have the same emotions, reactions, abilities, and general behaviour. However, we also retain our understanding of text-world enactors as entities which exist outside the ontological parameters of our real world. Not only are we unable to question or negotiate directly with enactors who are confined to the text-world level, but our knowledge of their backgrounds and personalities is similarly limited to information provided by the text. When a discourse-world participant creates a text-world, we can assess the reliability of its content based on discourse-world factors. In split discourse-worlds we can rely for this process on our previous personal experiences of the participant as well as information which might be available about them in the wider realworld environment. In face-to-face discourse-worlds additional indicators are available in our immediate surroundings, such as tone of voice and other physical behaviour. When a text-world enactor creates a text-world, on the other hand, we can only make use of other text-world elements in our evaluation of its reliability. Any previous knowledge of the enactor involved will have been established from other aspects of the same text and we are unable to make use of knowledge and evidence from our own ontological environment in our assessment of the truth-value of the text-world at hand. The principle of accessibility between text-worlds is sometimes also explained as analogous to the rules which surround a court of law. In the discourse-world of a court case, we can identify a set of participants sharing the same immediate and ontological environment. The judge, jury, lawyers and any witnesses who appear in person are all co-participants in the discourse-world. The court process itself relies entirely upon the free-flow of information between these entities. Witnesses in the case are questioned directly, but only some of the evidence they may potentially have to offer is admissible in the jury’s decision-making processes. If a witness says he or she has seen something or someone connected to the case, then that information is considered valuable and admissible to the court. However, if a witness reports what he or she has heard from someone else, this information is categorised as hearsay and is not admissible as evidence. This is because the other participants in the discourseworld of the court do not have sufficient information available to them in their own ontological environment to assess whether the content of the hearsay evidence is true or not. Exactly the same applies in the discourse-world of The Baby Whisperer. Because we share a world with Tracy Hogg as her coparticipants, we can evaluate the reliability of what she tells us she has seen using other information from the discourse-world. We can believe, for example, that Carson and his mother do exist, since Hogg is responsible for nominating them as text-world enactors. We can similarly accept Hogg’s analysis of their family’s problems, since this is the opinion of a reliable coparticipant offered at the same discourse-world level. What Carson’s mother
reports in her text-world, however, is inaccessible to us. We have no way of assessing whether her reports of her family’s behaviour and speech are accurate and her own appraisal of the root causes of their problems is less convincing than Hogg’s as a direct consequence. The ontological structure of some of the multiple worlds created in the extract from The Baby Whisperer is shown in Figure 5.1. The participantaccessible text-world to the far left of the diagram is the exclusive world shared between an enactor of Hogg and an enactor of her reader. From this text-world, Hogg creates a participant-accessible world-switch (shown in Figure 5.1 as world-switch 1, and abbreviated in the text-world as ‘w-s’) as she recalls her past experiences with other parents in the present perfect tense. Only the text-world and world-switch 1 are participant-accessible textworlds. The directly reported communication from Carson’s mother forms another world-switch, but this time the resulting new text-world, worldswitch 2, is only enactor-accessible. Its time-zone correlates with the time at which the communication was made and this is shown as the ‘speech time’ in Figure 5.1. The new enactors inhabiting this world are listed as Carson, his mother and his father. Their text-world is the first of a series of enactoraccessible worlds created by Carson’s mother. She specifies that Carson’s use of a new term ‘pee-pee’ began last week and, in doing so, she creates a worldswitch (world-switch 3) containing her and her son which is also only enactoraccessible. When Carson’s mother explains that Carson ‘has seen both me and my husband in the bathroom plenty of times’, her use of a past continuous tense establishes yet another enactor-accessible world-switch (world-switch 4), this time located in the family bathroom and containing her, her son and his father. Finally, Carson’s mother’s direct report of speech in the bathroom, where she tells Carson, ‘We are going potty’, creates a fifth world-switch, the deictic parameters of which correspond with the time and place of the original speech. Figure 5.1 shows at a glance how the considerable information contained within the four enactor-accessible text-worlds to the right of the diagram remains inaccessible to the participants in the discourse-world. Because the contents of these worlds are embedded within Carson’s mother’s correspondence, the reader of the text is unable to verify whether they are accurate and true representations of a real-life situation. The information provided by Hogg, by contrast, is only one ontological step away from the real-world and contains enactors of discourse-world entities in a re-creation of a face-to-face situation. It is thus easily accessible by the reader. Carson’s mother’s opinions can only be stored in a kind of conceptual suspended animation until some form of participant-accessible confirmation of their accuracy becomes available. Hogg’s version of events, on the other hand, can be immediately incremented into our mental representations of the discourse and forms the basis of our understanding of Carson’s parents’ problems and their root causes.
Figure 5.1 Multiple text-worlds
W-S
time: enactors:
W-S
W-S
speech time Carson, mother, father
WORLD-SWITCH 2 (enactor-accessible)
time: present perfect enactors: Hogg, parents ↓ start, stop, start again
time: present enactors: Hogg, the reader
W-S
WORLD-SWITCH 1 (participant-accessible)
TEXT-WORLD (participant-accessible)
time: location: time: enactors:
W-S
past continuous bathroom speech time mother, father, Carson ↓ sees
WORLD-SWITCH 4 (enactor-accessible)
time: last week enactors: mother, Carson ↓ started saying ‘pee-pee’
WORLD-SWITCH 3 (enactor-accessible)
enactors:
Carson, father, mother ↓ ‘we are going potty’
WORLD-SWITCH 5 (enactor-accessible)
T R A N S C E N D I N G B O U N DA R I E S
The text of The Baby Whisperer constructs a clear hierarchy of mental representations in order to establish a specific relationship between one of the book’s authors and each of its individual readers. At the top of this hierarchy is the face-to-face discourse-world, a world which does not actually exist in this particular communicative situation. However, because the aim of the authors of The Baby Whisperer is to create an exclusive and trusting relationship between two entities who are unlikely ever to have met, they re-create a face-to-face discourse-world situation at the text-world level. This re-creation is crucially participant-accessible, while many of the other text-worlds which surround it in the discourse remain only enactor-accessible. The discourse sets up and then emphasises impassable ontological boundaries between the worlds shared by the participants and those inhabited by text-world enactors only. The further text-worlds created by enactors at the text-world level, many of which present a view of the real world which is contrary to that of Tracy Hogg, are kept deliberately separate from the text-world shared exclusively by Hogg and her reader. Hogg’s status as a reliable expert and trusted confidante is amplified as a direct consequence of the ontological structures established by this discourse. What The Baby Whisperer exemplifies very well is how the creation of certain ontological boundaries in a discourse can have a direct effect on its consequent epistemological structure. Epistemology is the name given to the study of knowledge, its nature and its limits. We have already seen in the case of The Baby Whisperer how the participants’ assessment of the reliability of a textworld is based greatly on knowledge in the discourse-world. Before we can process the content of any text-world, we must first evaluate the trustworthiness of its creator. We do this according not only to our own existing knowledge of that creator (for example, of their entity-status, or their behaviour in any previous encounters), but also to our perception of their levels of knowledge. Tracy Hogg is a highly reliable text-world creator because she is an unproblematic participant in the discourse-world, whose personal knowledge is also more widely recognised in the form of professional qualifications and publishing success. Hogg’s co-participant in the discourse-world is therefore likely to accept the content of any worlds she creates as true. It is important to note, however, that while we may make near-instantaneous discourse-processing decisions based on our evaluation of an entity’s knowledge, knowledge itself is another abstract concept which is difficult for human beings to grasp in isolation. Our perception of knowledge is based, therefore, on the same spatial model which informs our understanding of time (see Figure 3.1). In the same way that we conceptualise present time as physically close to our own deictic centre and future time as distant, we also conceptualise what is known definitely to us as spatially closer than that which is uncertain or completely unknown. Figure 5.2 illustrates the spatial basis of our
:
actual and definite
CLOSE
DISTANT
most certain
least certain
unknown
Figure 5.2 The spatial conceptualisation of knowledge
understanding of knowledge. In the discourse-world, as we assess the reliability of participants, enactors and their text-worlds, we conceptualise their relative trustworthiness in spatial terms. The knowledge we accumulate as a result of our own day-to-day physical experiences in the real world is an essential component of our notion of our self. This knowledge defines what is actual and definite for us and is an intrinsic part of our perception of our deictic centre. It is therefore closest to us in our spatial conceptualisation of knowledge. The information that other human beings present to us through spoken and written language exists outside of that deictic centre. We conceptualise this information as closer to or further away from us according to our evaluation of the reliability of both its origins and its content. For example, we often express our understanding of knowledge, and particularly our notions of what is true and what is not, through a conceptual metaphor of perception. Phrases such as ‘I can see what you mean now’, ‘It’s clear he knows what he’s talking about’, and ‘My senses tell me you’ re lying’, show that we understand the abstract notion of truth in terms of our bodily senses. In each of these examples, things known are positioned close enough to be within the perceptive range of the speaker. Under this model of knowledge, truth and definiteness are normally tangible and concrete, whereas uncertainty and falsehood are abstract and intangible. When we evaluate a particular world-creator as highly trustworthy, we conceptualise the text-worlds he or she creates as both proximal and material. The more doubt we have about the reliability of a given text-world, the further away from the origo it will be positioned in our minds. Thus, the epistemological structure of the text-worlds contained within The Baby Whisperer actually helps to narrow the physical and ontological gap which exists between the discourse participants in reality. The strong emphasis the book places on Tracy Hogg’s reliability as a world-creator positions the text-worlds she constructs at close proximity to the reader in his or her mental representation of the discourse. In particular, the participant-accessible nature of the text-world Hogg and
Blau use to re-create a face-to-face discourse situation bridges the spatiotemporal split between author and reader and adds to the intimacy of their discourse relationship.
F I C T I O NA L I T Y
Hogg and Blau create something of a textual illusion in their books whereby Hogg appears to transcend the ontological boundary which exists between the discourse-world and its subsequent text-worlds. The result is a piece of textual communication which in many ways bears more resemblance to a faceto-face discourse for the reader. It is important to stress that, while ontological boundaries exist in all discourses, they do not necessarily constrain every discourse in the same way. However, it is equally important to note that when a boundary is transcended this invariably has an effect of some sort on the participants’ experiences of the discourse. This kind of manipulation of our ontological reasoning and expectations for specific processing effects is particularly common in literary fiction. Consider the following extract of literary discourse: Thursday Evening April 5 Four P.M. The day the stock market falls out of bed and breaks its back is the worst day of your life. Or so you think. It isn’t the worst day of your life, but you think it is. And when you give voice to that thought, it is with conviction and a minimum of rhetorical embellishment. ‘This is the worst day of my life’, you say, as you drop a salted peanut into your double martini – on better days, you drink white wine – and watch it sink. It spirals downward more slowly, more gracefully, than your own plunging fortunes, the pretty little gin bubbles that gather around the peanut a marked contrast to the lumps and burrs and stinging things that are attaching themselves to your heart. It has been approximately four hours since the market slid off the roof, and the shocked and, at times, hysteric roar that had filled the Bull & Bear earlier in the afternoon is starting to give way to a slightly dimmer din of elaborate survival strategies and cynical jokes. You share neither in the desperate ploys nor the false mirth. You hold your prematurely graying head in your hands and repeat, ‘This is the worst day of my life’. (Robbins 1994: 2–3) These are the opening paragraphs of a novel by Tom Robbins called Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas. Perhaps the most interesting stylistic feature of this novel is that it uses the second-person pronoun throughout its narration. We
: have already seen in the text of The Baby Whisperer how such a direct form of address specifies the inclusion of an enactor of the reader in the text-world. However, The Baby Whisperer is a non-fictional text. The use of the second person in literary fiction can have quite different effects on the discourse participants. The opening paragraphs of this novel provide a substantial amount of world-building information for its readers. Although a precise year is not given, a date, day and time are: ‘Thursday Evening April 5 Four P.M.’. In my own reading, other world-building information in the text helped to narrow the possibilities for the temporal setting of the text-world to around the 1980s. Alongside the references to the stock market (including those contained within the name of the Bull & Bear pub), the text also contains a detailed description of a martini cocktail, a drink which for me has rather glamorous connotations, in keeping with a 1980s yuppie lifestyle. My existing knowledge of the author of the novel, Tom Robbins, also led me to locate the Bull & Bear pub in the United States, despite its very British-sounding name. My assumption that the Bull & Bear must be some kind of Britishthemed American bar was again confirmed by other information in the text, including the American spelling of ‘graying’ and the very existence of a martini cocktail in a pub setting (which would be incongruous in all but the most ostentatious of real British pubs). With a detailed mental representation of the spatial and temporal parameters of the Bull & Bear established, the second-person address in the novel suggests that an enactor of the reader is present in the text-world in the same way we saw such an enactor projected into the text-world of The Baby Whisperer. However, there are several crucial differences between these two texts. Firstly, the readers of Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas are aware of the text’s fictional status from the first moment they enter into its discourseworld. This awareness establishes a far more rigid ontological boundary between the discourse-world and the text-world than that which exists in the discourse-world of the non-fictional text of The Baby Whisperer. Transcending the divide between a discourse-world and a text-world is not particularly problematic for the participants in a factual, informative or instructive discourse, and this is often the only way such discourses can operate when presented through the split discourse-world of a written medium. However, in the discourse-world of a fictional text, the projection of an enactor of a real-world entity (the reader) into a fictional domain presents a far greater challenge to our ontological reasoning. This is precisely what the second-person pronoun in Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas invites the reader to do. A second key difference between The Baby Whisperer and Tom Robbins’ novel lies in the function-advancing propositions attached in each text to the second-person referent and, in particular, to the transitivity relations they
encode. In the text-world of The Baby Whisperer, the enactor of the reader is placed in the participatory role of Sensor in only one mental perception process, ‘you’ll see that theme’. The reader-enactor in this text-world does very little in the way of action and is projected into the shared text-world with Tracy Hogg’s enactor primarily to receive her wisdom and advice. By contrast, in the text-world of Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, the ‘you’ enactor not only takes the role of Actor in three material intention processes (for example, ‘you drop’, ‘you drink’, ‘You hold’), but is also associated with numerous other mental and relational processes. For example, the reader is told twice in the first paragraph that ‘you think it is the worst day of your life’ and then later that ‘You share neither in the desperate ploys nor the false mirth’ of the other drinkers in the Bull & Bear. Alongside these mental cognition processes, which function to describe the inner workings of the enactor’s mind, the second person referent here is also responsible for several verbalisation processes (‘you give voice’, ‘you say’, and ‘[you] repeat’). Most interesting of all are the personality traits and individual history the text also gives to the ‘you’ enactor. This first happens with the shift from the highly involving simple present tense which predominates in the novel to the present progressive used in ‘on better days you drink white wine’. Here, the temporal adverb ‘on better days’ establishes a world-switch to a time-zone in which the ongoing habits of the enactor are detailed. Further details about the emotional state of the enactor are given when the second-person referent takes on the participatory role of Goal in a material intention process in the metaphor of ‘the lumps and burrs and stinging things that are attaching themselves to your heart’. Finally, physical characteristics are added with the reference to ‘your prematurely graying head’. On the whole, the opening paragraphs of Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas present a detailed portrait of an active text-world entity, to whose deictic centre readers are invited to project themselves. Such invitations are common in literary fiction and experiencing the text-world from the point of view of a character in a story is an intrinsic part of countless literary discourses. However, in the vast majority of these cases, the reader and the text-world enactor who forms the focalisation of the text remain separate entities inhabiting separate ontological domains. The reader’s projected experience of the text-world is vicarious, not material. (These types of narratives are explored in more detail in Chapter 8.) In second-person literary narratives, however, the reader has two options in the construction of a text-world. The first possibility is that the second-person address functions as a reference into the reader’s discourseworld. In this case, the text-world entity who is using the second-person pronoun to address the reader (which in Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas is an enactor of the author) transcends the ontological boundaries of the text-world in order to enter the reader’s half of the split discourse-world. The authorenactor is thus making direct claims about who the reader is, what the reader
: does, how the reader feels, and what the reader looks like in his or her real life. For some readers, many of these claims may in fact match their own reality. If the reader is a stock broker with greying hair who likes white wine and has lost money on the stock exchange, some degree of identification with the ‘you’ in the text will be possible at the discourse-world level. Such identification might even minimise the ontological divide between this real-world situation and the fictionality of the text-world, making the breakdown of this barrier seem less problematic. Far more likely, however, is that the reader does not share the same history, characteristics and emotions of the ‘you’ depicted in the novel and does not process the text as some uncanny narration of their own life experiences. In this case, the reader must follow the invited projection into the text-world and inhabit the deictic centre being described by the second-person references. The effect of this projection on the reader’s literary experience will vary depending greatly on that reader’s existing knowledge frames. The closer the resemblance between the life of the text-world enactor and the life of the realworld reader, the more likely it is that the reader will be comfortable inhabiting the new projected text-world persona. In cognitive-psychological terms, readers are able to implicate themselves in the text-world. For example, other members of the financial services industry are more likely to have sympathy for a text-world enactor who has just lost a fortune in a stock market crash than I had on reading the text (having had no experience at all of this in my own life). In fact, I found it very difficult to implicate myself in this text-world and inhabit the deictic centre of the second-person enactor. For the most part, I think this may be down to the low regard in which I hold those involved in the financial services sector in my real life. I have little sympathy for those profitdriven capitalists who lose as well as gain money in their dealings on the stock market in the real world. I thus found it similarly difficult to muster much sympathy for an enactor placed in the same situation in the text-world of Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas. Added to this, my drink of choice would probably be red wine, not white, my hair has not yet turned grey, I am not American, and I am not male. This final point is an important one. On my first reading of the novel, based on my knowledge frames of both the author of the text and the male-dominated financial services industry he describes, I assumed the second person referent in the text to be a male. My initial attempts to implicate myself in the story were greatly hindered by this fact. On the second page of the first chapter, however, is this: ‘Settle down, little lady’, says Phil. ‘Now’s the time to slip into your bulletproof bra’. At the reference to your intimate apparel, you redden. It was fine and dandy for you to joke about X-rated movies, you’ve never seen an X-rated
movie, X-rated movies are unreal to you, but when a man, even a man like Phil Craddock, looks you in the eye and speaks of things personal, things private and tinged with naughtiness, your inevitable fluster paints such dollops of pimento on your olive cheeks that they would be fit to garnish a martini – in this case, the third one of the afternoon, all doubles – and when you attempt to stem the blood it makes you blush all the harder. (Robbins 1994: 4). The discovery that the ‘you’ in this novel is actually a female caused me to reappraise quite substantially the text-world I had constructed so far. In fact, on my first reading of the novel I actually went back and re-read the preceding paragraphs, now noticing certain ‘feminine’ clues, such as a stereotypically feminine choice of drink and a stereotypically feminine choice of evaluative poetic language (for example ‘pretty little gin bubbles’). Such reappraisals are discussed in detail in Chapter 8. For the purposes of this analysis, it is sufficient to note that this particular realisation did not ease the process of projection into the text-world for me. This is because a reader’s successful self-implication in a second-person fictional persona does not simply depend on a match of gender. Although female, the enactor described in the opening paragraphs of Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas nevertheless remains too distant from my own life experiences for me to be able to inhabit her text-world role comfortably. The information provided about this enactor immediately following the revelation of her gender, specifically her apparent coyness at the mention by a male colleague of underwear, only confirmed the distance I perceived to exist between us. Indeed, the fact that these kinds of stereotyped characteristics were being ascribed to a female enactor by a male author meant that my self-implication in the text-world was not just difficult, I was actively resisting it from this point in the novel. My evaluation of Tom Robbins’ reliability as a discourse-world participant was negatively affected by his attempts to convey the inner thoughts of a female character. Because I know this is not an area of real life of which he has any credible knowledge, the text-worlds Robbins creates in relation to this subject are similarly incredible and positioned at an extreme epistemic distance in my mental representation of the discourse. Being able to construct a coherent text-world from a particular discourse – making use of the world-building and function-advancing information a text provides, following any deictic projections, and so on – does not equate with enjoyment of the text-world experience. We are frequently placed in awkward communicative roles and uncomfortable text-world positions in our everyday communicative practices and human likes and dislikes are notoriously fickle, particularly when it comes to our appreciation of art and literature. Chapter 10 looks in more detail at some of the fundamental questions raised by the resistant reading described here.
: F U RT H E R I N V E S T I G AT I O N
• Advertising discourse often attempts to encourage readers to implicate themselves in the text-worlds it creates. Here is a typical example: This year come back from abroad with something to declare. Incredible sights, amazing events, and new-found friends. You’ll be talking about them all if you travel with P&O Cruises. That’s because our cruises offer a wealth and depth of experience that goes far beyond a typical holiday . . . everywhere you visit, we lay on an unrivalled choice of shore excursions that will yield rich tales as you explore each country’s culture and see its finest sights. From glacier treks to tours of hidden palaces, well-informed and entertaining guides will show you worlds you never knew existed. But it’s not just the places you’ll be telling your friends about. Your time on board will bring you a host of experiences, from being pampered in the spa with a luxurious Balinese head massage to dancing into the small hours. Whilst our New Horizons programme gives you the chance to take your life into whole new areas of interest, from wine tasting to Tai Chi. You’ll also enjoy the relaxing benefits of a flawless service. Our ships carry hundreds of highly trained, friendly crew, many of whom come from families that have been with us for generations. Whether you’re in a spacious cabin or luxurious stateroom, you’ll have a personal steward to look after your needs. Your sumptuous meals, served three times a day by attentive waiters and knowledgeable sommeliers, will be stories in themselves. As well as romantic meals with your partner, you have the choice of being in the company of fellow-travellers. (Daily Telegraph, 8 April 2006) Try to separate this discourse into its individual worlds. How many different world-levels can you identify in this text? Think about the following questions: Look at the time-zones the advertisement describes. Do you notice anything interesting about the world-switches in this text? To whom does the ‘you’ in this text refer? What assumptions are being made about the reader of the advertisement? In what kinds of textworlds are readers being invited to implicate themselves? Describe your own reading of the advertisement. How easy did you find it to inhabit the persona of the second-person enactor here? Were there any points in the text where you resisted projecting yourself into the text-world? Why do you think this happened?
• Dramatic discourse, in which text-world enactors share a physical location with discourse-world participants, presents some very interesting questions for Text World Theory. Consider the following famous soliloquy from Shakespeare’s Hamlet: O that this too too solid flesh would melt Thaw and resolve itself into a dew! Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d His canon ’gainst self-slaughter! O God! O God! How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, Seem to me all the uses of this world! Fie on’t! ah fie! ’Tis an unweeded garden That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature Possess it merely. That it should come to this! But two months dead: nay, not so much, not two: So excellent a king that was, to this, Hyperion to a satyr; so to my loving mother That he might not beteem the winds of heaven Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth! Must I remember? why, she would hang on him, As if increase of appetite had grown By what it fed on: and yet, within a month – Let me not think on’t – Frailty, thy name is woman! – A little month, or ere those shoes were old With which she follow’d my poor father’s body, Like Niobe, all tears: – why she, even she – O God! a beast that want discourse of reason, Would have mourn’d longer – married with my uncle, My father’s brother, but no more like my father Than I to Hercules: within a month: Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears Had left the flushing in her galled eyes, She married. O, most wicked speed, to post With such dexterity to incestuous sheets! It is not nor cannot come to good: But break, my heart; for I must hold my tongue. (Hamlet, I, ii, 131–61) Once again, try to separate the text into its individual worlds. As you do this, think about the following: Is there a hierarchical structure to the worlds in this discourse? If so, in which world do you think all other worlds originate? Which worlds are participant-accessible and which are enactor-accessible?
:
Who are the inhabitants of the discourse-world of this text? Name the participants in the discourse, plus any other entities you think might be present in the discourse-world. Who inhabits the text-world? Do any of these entities inhabit any other levels of the discourse? Specifically, who is Hamlet talking to in this speech? Try to name all the entities he speaks to and note which worldlevel(s) they inhabit. Is the ontological structure of this discourse stable and constant, or does it shift and change? Try to identify points in the text where you think boundaries might be established or transcended. Why do you think Shakespeare made such frequent use of soliloquy in his plays? What does this dramatic device enable him, his characters, and his audience to do, in Text World Theory terms?
F U RT H E R R E A D I N G
Chapman (2000 and 2006) provides excellent reader-friendly introductions to a range of topics in language and philosophy, including epistemology and ontology. The notion of accessibility between worlds comes from Possible Worlds Theory. Once again, Bradley and Swartz (1979) is recommended as a general introduction to this area of philosophy, and Hughes and Cresswell (1968) give further detail on accessibility in particular. Accessibility between fictional worlds is explored fully from a possible-worlds perspective by Ryan (1991). The relationship between the possible-worlds account of accessibility and that of Text World Theory is explained further in Werth (1999: 210–16). Figure 5.2 is adapted from Werth’s (1997a: 249) discussion of the conceptualisation of epistemic distance. Searle (1975) is also recommended as a fascinating and highly influential discussion of fictionality. Gerrig (1993) presents a detailed exploration of the transporting nature of the literary experience, while Barnes and Thagard (1997), Gerrig and Rapp (2004), Kuiken et al. (2004), Kuiken, Miall and Sikora (2004), Larsen and Seilman (1988) and Oatley and Gholamain (1997) all investigate the processes by which self-implication occurs in the reading process. Hidalgo Downing (2000c) presents an analysis of the text-worlds of advertising discourse. Cook (1992 and 1994) also has some interesting discussion of the role of existing knowledge structures in advertising discourse.
Attitudes
KEY ISSUES IN THIS CHAPTER
This chapter explores the text-worlds created by a range of expressions of attitude in discourse. Over the course of the next few chapters, the processes by which readers and hearers conceptualise the varying attitudes of writers and speakers will be examined in relation to a wide range of texts. To begin, this chapter looks at the ways in which wishes, wants and desires are communicated in the discourse-world and the nature of the resulting text-worlds their expression creates. The glamorous fantasy worlds contained in an interview from a best-selling celebrity magazine are analysed in order to explore the discourse features which generate them in more detail. The chapter also investigates the text-worlds which result from expressions of obligation or duty in discourse and the persuasive effects such language often has on its recipients in the discourse-world. Some extracts from a car-owner’s manual and from a magazine advice column are examined here and the fine line between different types of attitudes and their associated text-worlds is explored. The ontological boundaries and varying conceptual distances between discourse-worlds and their related text-worlds continue to be of interest over the coming pages.
M O DA L I T Y A N D D E S I R E
One of the primary functions of linguistic communication is to establish and maintain social relationships between human beings. In order to achieve this, speakers and writers have at their disposal an array of linguistic expressions which convey complex emotional states and feelings to their fellow discourse participants. Many of these interpersonal features of discourse can be grouped under the heading of modality. Modality is the term given to those aspects of language which express a speaker or writer’s attitude to a particular subject.
: Over the coming chapters, we will be examining a range of different possible attitudes, their manifestation in discourse, and the text-worlds they establish in the discourse participants’ minds. The extract below is from OK!, a best-selling magazine in the United Kingdom which has several international versions, all containing news and interviews with celebrities of various kinds: from film stars to royalty, television actors to sports people. In this extract, the developing relationship between British musicians Michelle Heaton and Andy Scott-Lee are detailed in a feature which is part-article and part-interview. Lapping up every moment of the sun-soaked break, the pair frolicked in the sea, kissed on the sand and rubbed suntan lotion into each other . . . Months before Andy popped the question, the Liberty X singer spoke to OK! and made no secret of her desire to wed her Pop Idol beau. And, when he finally got down on bended knee in front of the nation on MTV’s Totally Scott Lee, we have to say we all breathed a sigh of relief and even shed a few tears along with the duo. Much like pal Katie Andre, Michelle will certainly not be opting for a quiet wedding. She wants a day to beat all days – although we’re not sure anyone could beat Katie’s – and that involves a lot of meticulous planning. ‘My ideal wedding would be a total fairy tale,’ says Michelle. ‘I want to travel to a big church in a horse and carriage and for it to be really girlie. I want it to be traditional and fun.’ Before jetting off to Dubai, Michelle just had time to work out some plans for her wedding dress – and it certainly sounds like it’s going to be a stunner. ‘It would have to be backless because when you’re standing at the altar that’s what everyone is looking at,’ she says. ‘I’d really like to have diamonds down my spine and for it to be really tight at the top but to have a floaty skirt. I won’t wear a veil because I want to keep it simple. ‘I’ve got it in my head that I’d like to wear cream and have yellow and peach-coloured flowers. Andy would wear cream as well.’ (OK! Magazine, 11 April 2006) The article includes photographs of the couple, pictured in a variety of relaxed and intimate poses on holiday on a beach in Dubai. Graphologically and typographically, the article looks very similar to all the other articles and interviews in the magazine, the majority of which are highly complimentary about the stars they feature. OK! presents celebrity life in a very positive light, reporting to the general public on the expensive weddings, glamorous parties and love affairs of the rich and famous. However, this particular feature has an added layer of unreality, since it describes the further fantasies of someone already living a fantasy lifestyle. The conceptual structure of the discourse is shown in Figure 6.1.
boul
Figure 6.1 Boulomaic modal-worlds
dress → backless, cream, yellow flowers, etc.
wedding → traditional, fun
time: wedding day enactors: Heaton, Scott-Lee ↓ travels in horse and carriage
boul
boul
w-s
w-s
w-s
time: recent past location: Dubai beach enactors: Michelle Heaton, Andy Scott-Lee ↓ frolic, kiss, etc.
wedding → a day to beat all days
time: future enactors: Heaton, Scott-Lee
BOULOMAIC MODALWORLD (enactor-accessible)
time: before Dubai enactors: Heaton ↓ plans dress
WORLD-SWITCH 2 (participant-accessible)
time: before Dubai location: TV studio enactors: Andy Scott-Lee ↓ proposes
TEXT-WORLD (participant-accessible)
time: before proposal enactors: Heaton, reporter ↓ speaks to OK!
BOULOMAIC MODAL-WORLD (enactor-accessible)
ideal wedding → total fairy tale
BOULOMAIC MODAL-WORLD (enactor-accessible)
WORLD-SWITCH 1 (participant-accessible)
WORLD-SWITCH 3 (participant-accessible)
: In the centre of the diagram is the main participant-accessible text-world which describes the scene on the Dubai beach in the simple past tense. The majority of the other worlds created in the extract spring from this text-world. The central text-world contains Heaton and Scott-Lee as enactors engaged in a series of material intention processes (‘frolicked’, ‘kissed’, ‘rubbed’) and there are three world-switches emerging from this text-world. The first of these, world-switch 1, relates to Scott-Lee’s marriage proposal to Heaton, which the reader is told happened on a television programme at some unspecified point in time before the Dubai holiday. A second world-switch, world-switch 2, describes Heaton making plans for her wedding dress ‘before jetting off to Dubai’. Both of these world-switches, like their originating text-world, are participant-accessible, having been created by the journalist-author in the discourse-world. Also emerging from the main text-world is a world in which the same journalist reports some of Michelle Heaton’s feelings about her forthcoming wedding. The text states: ‘She wants a day to beat all days.’ The verb ‘wants’ here conveys Heaton’s inner wishes for a particular kind of wedding. It is an example of boulomaic modality, expressed through the modal lexical verb ‘wants’. There are lots of other modal lexical verbs which act in the same way as want in discourse. Verbs like wish, hope, and desire can all be used to express a degree of boulomaic commitment (which may be positive or negative in nature) to a particular proposition. The boulomaic modal system also includes modal adverbs, such as hopefully or regrettably, and adjectival and participial constructions which take a ‘BE . . . THAT’ or ‘BE . . . TO’ structure: for example, ‘it’s regrettable that she died so young’, ‘it was good to see his friends again’, ‘it is hoped that the Prime Minister will resign.’ In all these cases the use of a modal item has the effect of constructing a modal-world which is separate from its originating text-world. Crucially, the contents of these modal-worlds, the situations they describe, are often unrealised at the time of their creation. So, when OK! magazine claims that Heaton wants ‘a day to beat all days’, that day is conceptualised by the reader in its own text-world. It has its own spatiotemporal parameters which differ from those of the originating text-world. Where Heaton in her ‘wanting’ state is situated on a beach in Dubai some time in the recent past, the new modal-world has an unspecified wedding location and a future time-zone. It also contains another enactor of Heaton as an inferred participant in the wedding. It could also be argued that an enactor of Scott-Lee must be present in this modal-world in order for the ‘day to beat all days’ to take place. The boulomaic modal-world containing all this information is labelled in the bottom right corner of Figure 6.1 as a boulomaic modalworld and abbreviated in its originating text-world as ‘boul’. As I have already pointed out, the situation described in the boulomaic modal-world of the wedding day to beat all days has not yet come into being in the real world and exists only as a construction, a wish, in Heaton’s mind. As
such, it is only enactor-accessible. Despite the fact that the world has been created by a discourse-world participant (the journalist), it reports the inner thoughts of an enactor (Heaton) and the reader has no means of assessing its reliability and subsequent truth-value. This particular example of a boulomaic modal-world is also rather short-lived, since further details of Heaton’s wishes are given elsewhere in the text, mainly through the use of Direct Speech. However, boulomaic modal-worlds do have the potential to become highly detailed and elaborate. This Text World Theory category includes all kinds of fantasy- and wish-worlds, which often take on complex world-building and function-advancing structures of their own in discourse. Elsewhere in the text, a third world-switch, shown as world-switch 3 in Figure 6.1, once again transports the reader from the time-zone of the Dubai beach to an earlier point in time. Here, the resulting text-world is positioned even further back in history: before the Dubai holiday, before the wedding plans, and before Scott-Lee’s proposal. At some unspecified point in the distant past, Michelle Heaton gave an interview to OK! magazine about her developing relationship with Andy Scott-Lee. Like all Direct Speech, the reproduction of the comments Heaton made during her interview create a world-switch to the time and location where the conversation actually took place. The author of the present article takes Heaton’s comments from this earlier interview and uses them to support her discussion of the couple’s wedding plans here. She cleverly uses the simple-present tense in the reporting clauses of quotations from Heaton (for example, ‘says Michelle’, and ‘she says’). This makes the earlier interview seem far more recent than it actually was. Indeed, one lengthy quote from Heaton about her wedding dress, ‘It would have to be backless . . . Andy would wear cream as well’, is positioned in the text to make it appear to be springing from world-switch 2 (in which Heaton is described making wedding plans ‘before jetting off to Dubai’). By placing this particular segment of Heaton’s Direct Speech within the paragraph relating to her working out her plans, it sounds as if the OK! reporter was actually present with Heaton as she planned her dress. On closer inspection, however, there is nothing in the text to suggest that this comment was not in fact made, like all the other quotations in the feature, during the much earlier interview with the magazine. The content of those sections of Heaton’s interview reproduced in this article have an interesting effect on the conceptual structure of the discourse. Heaton appears to be making a distinction between an actual future wedding day and a more abstracted ‘ideal wedding day’ as she talks to the journalist. Within world-switch 3 there are two separate boulomaic modal-worlds, both of which have been created by an enactor at the text-world level (Heaton) and are therefore only enactor-accessible. The first modal-world embedded in the textworld of the interview relates to Heaton’s comment that her ‘ideal wedding would be totally a fairy tale’. What she describes rather fleetingly here is a vague fantasy situation which exists at a greater conceptual distance from her real
: world than her more concrete plans for a particular style of wedding dress, mode of arrival at the ceremony, and so on. The text-world Heaton creates to explain what she would like at her real-life wedding is still a boulomaic modalworld, but there is an added sense that she has some intention to carry out her plans in reality. In Figure 6.1, therefore, both the brief ideal-wedding-world and the more extensive planned-wedding-world are shown developing from world-switch 3. The latter boulomaic modal-world includes a series of Heaton’s desires, from her broad aim to have a traditional and fun wedding, to the remarkable precision of a tight-topped, diamond studded, cream wedding dress with yellow and peach-coloured flowers, but no veil (in order to ‘keep it simple’!). These wishes form the world-building and function-advancing elements of the text-world, which combine to produce a detailed mental representation of a specific kind of wedding day. In many ways, the Direct Speech within which Heaton’s wedding fantasies are embedded is itself already embedded within a fantasy text-world. OK! magazine is entirely founded upon the portrayal of wealth and status which is for the majority of its readers unrealised and unobtainable in the real world. In the same way that the magazine as a whole presents distant worlds of fame and glamour for its readers’ examination, Heaton herself uses boulomaic modality to construct an imaginary text-world for both the interviewing journalist and the wider reading public to examine and assess. Over the coming chapters, you will see that in cognitive terms all modality in discourse operates in this way. Speakers, writers and enactors create modalised text-worlds in which a particular remote situation is played out. That situation is conceptualised by the hearer or reader as existing at some distance from its creator’s reality. Its distance may be spatial, temporal, epistemic, or some combination of these. At the same time, the speaker, writer, or enactor also expresses his or her attitude to the modal-world which has been created. In the extract from OK! examined here, a boulomaic modal-world is constructed in which a possible scenario for a wedding is enacted in a separate location and a future time-zone. Michelle Heaton is clear about her attitude towards the fantasy wedding she invents. She uses boulomaic modals at the most positive end of the available scale to express her desires for a wedding day which might in the real world come as close as possible to her ideal world of ‘totally fairy tale’. ‘Totally’ here also functions to convey Heaton’s strong commitment to the escapism of the world she has created, expressing purity, richness and indulgence simultaneously.
O B L I G AT I O N
As I have already mentioned, a wide range of speaker, writer or enactor attitudes find their expression through different modal systems in language. The
text below provides an interesting contrast with the boulomaic modality found in the extract from OK! magazine: HOW TO DRIVE A VOLKSWAGEN With love, of course – probably the best advice I can give you – but there are certain differences from American Iron that might help you understand what this particular type of Love means. First, in the Volkswagen, you have to shift – and that requires a degree of co-ordination between your left foot (clutch) and your right foot (accelerator) that only practice will develop. There are four gears forward and you have to use them all, all the time. No short cuts like starting in second and skipping third. You must use all four gears. Second, you must get used to shifting on hills and the gradual progress that a Volksie bus makes in the mountains means one thing – start earlier! Third, don’t over-rev the engine. Later models have governors that prevent over-revving on the high side but don’t help when going down a steep hill in third. To make the engine run too fast (over-rev) at any time means stretching the engine past its ability to return to the same shape – real trouble. There are speeds you shall not exceed in each gear. Learn them and stick to them and love it. Fourth, never lug the engine – you must shift down on that hill or in town to keep the engine rpm about 2,000 or you will soon pay for your perfidy with a new engine. (Muir 1997: 36) This is an extract from John Muir’s (1997) How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step-by-Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot. The book is, unsurprisingly, aimed at the owners of classic Volkswagens, and owners of Volkswagen Beetles and camper vans in particular. The overall function of the text is both to inform and to instruct these readers about the basic vehicle maintenance and driving practices which Muir claims will prolong the driving life of a vintage Volkswagen. It differs from the countless dozens of other owner’s manuals currently on the market not just in its focus on a specific make of classic car, but in the informal and personal tone it adopts for its purpose. The lines above are taken from the opening of a chapter on how to drive a vintage Volkswagen. The chapter is made up mainly of general hints and tips, in contrast with many other chapters in the text which set out more technical maintenance procedures. There are a number of important discourse-world assumptions in operation in the text. As well as the obvious supposition being made about Volkswagen ownership, Muir also assumes that his co-participant in the discourse-world is American like him. This can be seen in his comment about ‘American Iron’, as well as in the fact that he thinks it necessary to explain how a clutch works to a reader who is otherwise assumed to have driving experience. Muir writes for a reader whose frame knowledge of cars is based on
: previous experiences with predominantly automatic transmission American vehicles. The Volkswagen is, of course, a European car and much of Muir’s text centres around the differences in driving experience which result from this for Americans. The text itself also conveys certain assumptions about the reader. For example, it carries psychedelic designs both on its cover and at the heading of each chapter. These designs key directly into the intended audience’s likely cultural frame knowledge of the 1960s hippy lifestyle and its associations with the Volkswagen buses and Beetles which were manufactured at this time and became the vehicle of choice for the dropped-out generation. Muir’s own writing style also suggests that he may himself be a hippy writing for other hippies. This is most obvious in the extract above in the opening statement that a Volkswagen should be driven ‘with love’. Muir stresses that this is the best advice he can give, the later capitalisation of ‘Love’ further accentuating this. In order for his text to function optimally in the discourse-world, for the reader to gain valuable advice and vehicle-maintenance skills, Muir constructs a discourse through which he presumably believes he can communicate most effectively with other Volkswagen owners. This involves not only signalling his understanding of a particular social and cultural background through the use of appropriate images and lexis, but also through the adoption of a suitably informal tone. Muir achieves this through his use of the secondperson pronoun, which here operates in much the same way as we saw Tracy Hogg’s intimate address to function in the text of The Baby Whisperer in Chapter 5. The use of ‘you’ specifies the inclusion of an enactor of the reader at the text-world level, along with an enactor of the author. Once again, a recreation of a face-to-face discourse situation allows the spatio-temporal divide between the participants to be bridged and an instructional discourse to take place. Once again, this text-world is exclusive to the reader-enactor and the author-enactor, exaggerating the intimacy of their relationship and allowing the same dual role of confidant and expert to operate for Muir that Hogg appropriated in the world of The Baby Whisperer. Most importantly, in the text of How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive, a shared culture is clearly signalled as existing between the discourse participants. Establishing an informal social relationship between the participants is in many ways essential to the overall function of this discourse. This is because the main function-advancing components of the text itself are actually a series of directions, the imperative structure of which might otherwise be considered impolite by Muir’s co-participant. Having an informal relationship in place in the re-created discourse-world leaves the possibility open for Muir’s imperatives to be interpreted as helpful advice rather than boorish commands. Nevertheless, the text also includes a series of expressions about the obligations of a Volkswagen owner in Muir’s eyes. These are communicated through the use of deontic modality. The deontic modal system is that which we use to express our notions of duty through language. These notions range from
permission, through to obligation and, most strongly, to requirement. A number of different linguistic expressions are available to speakers and writers wishing to convey a particular deontic commitment to a proposition. Certain modal auxiliaries, when placed before a verb, can be used to express deontic attitude, for example ‘you must do as I say’, or ‘you may have another cake’. As in the boulomaic modal system, participial and adjectival constructions are also possible, again taking a ‘BE . . . THAT’ or ‘BE . . . TO’ structure: for example, ‘it was required that they inform the authorities, ‘only authorised personnel are permitted to enter’, ‘it is forbidden to feed the animals’. Note how many of these examples sound authoritarian or official. This is because deontic modality is often associated with and made use of within discourses of control. John Muir, too, is in many ways attempting to control his co-participant in the discourse-world. The aim of his manual is to improve the behaviour of the reader in relation to vintage Volkswagen cars, and to have a direct and tangible effect in the reader’s real life. In order to achieve this, Muir sets out clearly those practices which are permitted in the real world and those which are not. The deontic modality used to express this operates conceptually in much the same way as the boulomaic system discussed in the preceding section of this chapter. A remote situation is constructed and played out in its own distinct text-world. The speaker, writer or enactor can then express his or her attitude to that situation in deontic terms. In the text of How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive, using all the vehicle’s gears, using them gradually, and staying within speed limits prescribed by Muir are all presented in positive terms. Over-revving the engine, lugging the engine, excessive speed, and taking shortcuts through the gears are all negatively framed. Figure 6.2 illustrates the contrasting attitudes expressed towards these individual scenarios in the text. All the worlds in this text are participant-accessible, since they are created by Muir and do not speculate about the thoughts or feelings of any other enactor. The largest text-world shown in the centre of the diagram is the re-creation of a face-to-face discourse situation at the text-world level. As already noted, this text-world contains an enactor of Muir and an enactor of the reader exclusively. From this central world can be seen emerging seven further worlds primarily. (These are shown in slightly less detail than the worlds in previous diagrams due to their number.) All the emerging worlds are deontic modal-worlds of one form or another. They each establish a remote situation about which some level of deontic commitment is expressed by the writer of the text. They depict certain actions that the reader, as an owner of a classic Volkswagen, either should or should not do in order to extend the operable life of their vehicle. The first direction Muir offers his co-participant in the text is ‘you have to shift’. This deontic modal construction sets up a separate world in which the suggested shifting of gears is taking place. This world has its own worldbuilding and function-advancing elements. As world-builders, it contains
imp
deo
you ↓ learn, stick to, love
imp
you (on hill) ↓ get used to shifting
you (on hill, in town) ↓ shift down
imp
you ↓ start earlier
DIRECTIVE
you ↓ start in second, skip third
you ↓ use all gears
DEONTIC MODAL-WORLD
deo
NEGATIVE DIRECTIVE
deo
left foot ↓ co-ordinates with right foot
DEONTIC MODAL-WORLD
DEONTIC MODAL-WORLD
you ↓ shift
DEONTIC MODAL-WORLD
DEONTIC MODAL-WORLD
deo
deo
deo
DIRECTIVE
Figure 6.2 Deontic modal-worlds
you ↓ exceed speeds
NEGATIVE MODAL-WORLD
you ↓ lug the engine
NEGATIVE MODAL-WORLD
deo
enactors: Muir, reader
you ↓ over-rev the engine
deo
TEXT-WORLD
NEGATIVE MODAL-WORLD
another enactor of the reader and a Volkswagen vehicle, which could be either a Beetle or a bus, depending on the reader’s own background knowledge. The spatial setting of the deontic modal-world is unspecified, beyond simply being inside a Volkswagen, and its temporal setting is also unspecified, beyond an imprecise future time-zone. It is highly unlikely that the reader of the text, even if he or she owns a Volkswagen in the real-world, will be reading Muir’s instructions inside the vehicle. It would be difficult, not to mention dangerous, to read information about changing gear while actually in the process of driving a Volkswagen. This means that the text-world which must be created in order to conceptualise the directions given will be remote in space and time from the reader’s discourse-world position. (The next section of this chapter discusses the differences between discourse-world position and text-world assumptions in more detail.) Its function-advancing component is the shifting of gears which Muir is telling his reader has to be done. However, this material intention process has not yet taken place in the real world. The situation remains unrealised in exactly the same way as the wedding fantasies we saw earlier in this chapter contained within OK! magazine’s boulomaic modal-worlds. The reader may or may not choose to follow Muir’s advice in his or her reality, but Muir’s own attitude towards the shifting of gears is clear: the unrealised in the text-world must be realised in the real world if the Volkswagen in question is to be kept alive. Muir also provides further detail on how to shift gears within this first deontic modal-world. To do this, he uses deontic modality again to state what a successful shift ‘requires’ on the part of the reader. Thus, a second deontic modal-world is embedded within the first (shown in the top right-hand corner of Figure 6.2). Once again, the new text-world has its own world-building and function-advancing components. In this case, the new world zooms in on a specific part of the body: the feet. Its main function-advancing proposition is a material intention process: the co-ordination of the right foot with the left to produce a successful gear change. Muir strongly emphasises in this paragraph the need to shift through all the gears in a vintage Volkswagen. He creates another deontic modal-world within the main text-world by repeating his directions: ‘you have to use them all, all the time . . . You must use all four gears’. His insistence establishes a world in which, once again, an enactor of the reader is shifting through the gears of a Volkswagen. This unrealised situation is conceptually separate from the textworld in which Muir is expressing his positive attitude towards the material intention process which forms the function-advancing component of the deontic modal-world. Again, a further world is embedded within this one. Muir states that there should be ‘No short cuts like starting in second and skipping third’. These kinds of imperatives, found throughout this and countless other instructional texts, operate conceptually in the same way as many deontic modal items. Imperatives construct a separate text-world in which a prescribed
: action, as yet unrealised in the real world, is taking place. The person towards whom the imperative is aimed (the reader, in this case) then has a choice over whether or not to follow the instructions given and realise the action in the real world. This particular imperative is shown emerging from its originating deontic modal-world as ‘imp’ in Figure 6.2. It has a peculiar conceptual texture, since it results from a negative construction in the text. Like all cognitive approaches to discourse analysis, Text World Theory recognises that participants still conceptualise processes even when they are negatively framed in a discourse. Despite the ‘No’ which begins the sentence ‘No short cuts like starting in second and skipping third’, the text’s readers nevertheless create a mental representation of an enactor performing precisely these actions. The contents of this text-world are foregrounded in the reader’s mind, since they must first be brought into focus in the discourse in order then to be negated. The same is true of all other forms of negation, as in ‘there was no champagne at the party’, ‘the government scheme did not reduce violent crime’, or ‘he was neither a good dancer nor a competent singer’. Each of these examples produces a negative text-world which exists separately from the text-world in which the negation has been expressed. These negative worlds allow champagne at a party, the reduction of violent crime, and a good dancer and competent singer respectively to be represented mentally before their negation can be conceptualised. It is important to note that negative text-worlds can often impact directly upon the positive text-worlds from which they spring. They may alter the participants’ assumptions about either the world-building elements (for example, removing champagne which may otherwise have been assumed to be present) or the function-advancing propositions of the originating text-world (for example, contradicting any assumption about the reduction of crime). In How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive, Muir brings a series of forbidden processes into focus in negative text-worlds in order to express their prohibition in the reader’s real world. Each of these is shown in Figure 6.2 emerging from their originating world within a dotted line. Alongside the negative imperative ‘No short cuts like starting in second and skipping third’, Muir creates three further negated deontic modal-worlds from within the main text-world: ‘don’t over-rev the engine’, ‘There are speeds you shall not exceed in each gear’, and ‘never lug the engine’. In each case, an enactor of the reader performs the prohibited action in an unrealised negative textworld. These worlds are distinct from Muir’s expression of his attitude towards the process in question, which is positioned within the matrix text-world. One of them, ‘There are speeds you shall not exceed’, contains further imperatives, ‘Learn them and stick to them and love it’. These actions are once again conceptualised in an embedded and positively-framed imperative text-world.
I N S T RU C T I O N A N D S E L F - I M P L I C AT I O N
At the bottom of Figure 6.2 are two more deontic modal-worlds created within the extract from How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive. ‘You must get used to shifting on hills’ and ‘You must shift down on that hill or in town’ establish deontic modal-worlds with explicit locations as part of their world-building elements. Muir is specific about where a particular action should take place (on hills, on that hill, and in town). Notice in particular how Muir uses the proximal demonstrative ‘that’ in ‘on that hill’. There are two possible ways of interpreting this. Either Muir is making an anaphoric reference back to the hills he discusses in the preceding paragraph, or he is emphasising a close connection between his own background knowledge and that of the reader. In my own reading of the text, I assumed the latter. This is most likely because I do share certain cultural and personal connections with Muir in my real life. I am the owner of a rusty and troublesome 1970 Volkswagen Camper and bought Muir’s owner’s manual some years ago with the aim of preserving my bus (rather than analysing the text-world structure of the text) in mind. In contrast with the second-person fictional narrative of Tom Robbins’ Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, examined in Chapter 5, I have no problems projecting an enactor of myself into the text-worlds created by Muir in How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive. Not only does my ownership of a vintage Volkswagen place me comfortably within the social bracket of Muir’s ideal audience, I have also experienced first-hand many of the difficulties associated with driving a 1970 bus on which Muir offers advice. I am able to project a version of my realworld self easily as the enactor in many of the situations described in the book and I have directly followed Muir’s directives on numerous occasions in my everyday life. Second-person address in instruction manuals has a markedly different effect on the participants in the discourse-world than that sometimes found in literary fiction. How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive does not invite the same levels of empathetic identification with the reader-enactor as, for example, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas does. We are required to project a version of ourselves into the text-world only in order to facilitate an instructional discourse, not as a means of constructing and maintaining compassionate connection with a fictional text-world entity. The re-creation of a face-to-face discourse-world situation at the text-world level is crucial to the success of instructional texts and it is important to remember that the trans-world projection here works from two directions. Firstly, the author of the text projects an enactor of him or herself into the text-world through the use of a direct second-person address. That second-person address simultaneously nominates an enactor of the reader as present in the text-world. Whether the reader also is able and willing to project an enactor of him or herself will depend on the nature of his or her real world. Just because I have no difficulties implicating myself in John Muir’s
: text-worlds, and can identify many of the objects and processes he refers to as existing in my own life, this does not mean that all readers will experience the text in the same way. Consider the following further extract from How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive as an example: Fuel Injection: Lots of wires, eh? Don’t worry about them because they only fit their proper receptacles. The multi-prong connections, MPC’s [sic], are the ones with the rubber cover over them. When you pull these MPC’s out of their sockets, please remember to pull straight on the plug, not by the wire. Just put your thumb and forefinger as close to the receptacle as you can, and pull, OK? This is so you won’t pull the wires out of the plastic base without knowing it. It’s easy to do. The MPC’s go only into their proper receptacles so they don’t need to be marked but all the single connections (without a rubber cover) should be marked with a piece of masking tape. Here we go. (Muir 1997: 251) Muir maintains his informal tone throughout this passage, and indeed throughout the book. He does this by using a number of speech-like features in his writing. He includes rhetorical questions, such as ‘Lots of wires, eh?’ and ‘pull, OK?’, which, alongside the second-person address, emphasise his recreation of a face-to-face conversation in this text-world. He nominates a number of world-building items as present in the text-world: ‘wires’, ‘receptacles’, ‘sockets’, and so on. In doing so, Muir signals not only the inclusion of these objects at the text-world level but also the fact that he assumes them to be present in the reader’s half of the discourse-world. The reader may or may not be reading the text while looking at the engine of a vintage Volkswagen, but the important point is that Muir addresses us as if we are. It is clear from the sense of immediacy he creates within the text-world that he specifically intends the reader to follow his instructions while actually in the process of overhauling an engine. Not only does he draw attention to face-to-face conversation through his use of spoken-discourse markers, his combination of the proximal spatial adverb ‘here’ with the inclusive pronoun ‘we’ and the present-tense verb ‘go’ make this a highly immediate text-world. The reader, of course, can only follow Muir’s instructions in real life if sufficient items correspond between the text-world and the discourse-world. You cannot pull straight on the plug of a multi-prong connector unless you have such an object in your real world. Even if you do have one, and are thus able to implicate yourself in the text-world Muir creates, you may yet choose not to pull it. A multitude of discourse-world factors have an impact on the relative success or failure of instructional discourses, and on the consequent probability that the reader will modify his or her real world in accordance with the
instructions given. Here is another instructional extract, this time from the advice column of the women’s magazine, Glamour: THE SCRIPT He hates your Friday nights with the girls. ‘No one has the right to ask you to stop seeing your friends, but you need to find out what is behind this,’ says Mary Balfour, author of Smart Dating. ‘His reaction might stem from having been shut out and marginalised in the past, so approach the subject sensitively and give him a chance to explain exactly what his worries are.’ THE RE-WRITE ‘Don’t take any extreme action like suddenly abandoning your social life,’ says Balfour. ‘It may be he just needs reassurance. Perhaps he has issues with trust. If so it’s time to remind him how much you love him and try not to exclude him. Why not arrange a night where he comes along too? Mix it up a bit so it’s not always either them or him,’ suggests Balfour. (Glamour, May 2006: 44) The content of Glamour magazine is very much indicated by its title. It is aimed at young women and contains sections and features on fashion, beauty, relationships and celebrities. The magazine’s advice columns appear in a section called ‘You, You, You’ which is sub-divided into ‘Work’, ‘Love’, ‘Mind’, ‘Body’, ‘Money’ and ‘Sex’. The extract above is from the ‘Love’ section. From its outset, this advice page makes obvious assumptions about the previous experiences of its reader, primarily constructing the text to address an idealised female co-participant. It takes a novel structure within the highly formulaic boundaries of its genre, normally typified by letters addressed directly to a column’s author and his or her direct replies. In contrast, this advice page uses the heading ‘THE SCRIPT’ to indicate that the problem which is about to be dealt with is considered to be a common one among the sorts of young women who read the magazine. This mode of address continues with ‘he’, ‘your Friday nights’, and ‘the girls’ acting as further generic references. In each case, the world-building elements specified (a boyfriend, Friday nights out, female friends) are assumed not only to be familiar components of the current reader’s real life, but of the lives of all readers of this magazine. The main body of each of the two separate sections in the extract (‘THE SCRIPT’ and ‘THE RE-WRITE’) is devoted to the Direct Speech of an author of a dating guide, here taking the role of expert advisor. The advisor in question, Mary Balfour, creates a number of modal-worlds within her speech. In just the first sentence of her response, she uses two negated propositions, ‘No one has the right to ask you to stop seeing your friends’. This sentence also contains deontic modality (‘has the right’). This establishes a negative deontic modal-world in which the assumed boyfriend can be conceptualised
: as having performed the prohibited speech act of asking an enactor of the reader to stop seeing her friends. The further negated action (of the reader not seeing her friends) is conceptualised in a negative text-world embedded within the negative deontic modal-world. Balfour then goes on to offer direct advice related to this situation through a second-person address. She uses the modal auxiliary verb ‘need’ to create a further deontic modal-world, which sets out what the reader should do to remedy the state of affairs described in the preceding negated world (‘find out what is behind this’). The paragraph concludes with some speculation about the possible motives behind the boyfriend’s behaviour (Chapter 7 deals with these kinds of speculations in detail), followed by two imperatives, ‘approach the subject sensitively’ and ‘give him chance to explain’. The second section of the extract has a very similar structure to the first. Some conjecture is made about the boyfriend’s reasoning, alongside a number of direct instructions (for example, ‘remind him how much you love him’), some of which are put forward within negative constructions (for example, ‘Don’t take any extreme action’, and ‘try not to exclude him’). In each case, the remote and unrealised situation toward which Mary Balfour is expressing her attitude is established in its own text-world. Just as in the texts of The Baby Whisperer and How to Keep your Volkswagen Alive, the second-person address invites the reader to project an enactor of herself into a text-world shared with the advisor. However, the generic references in the Glamour magazine advice column alter the structure of this text-world re-creation of a face-to-face conversation. Here, the reader is not positioned in an exclusive relationship with Mary Balfour’s enactor. Textual features such as the use of the definite article and the framing of the advice as a ‘SCRIPT’ and its ‘RE-WRITE’, signal clearly that Balfour’s advice is intended to be broadly applicable and that all female Glamour readers are included in her second-person address simultaneously. In this example, a shared culture and a shared set of previous experiences is indicated as existing not between Balfour and an individual co-participant, but between all those participants who exist on the readerly side of this split discourse-world. Nevertheless, the reader of the Glamour advice page is left with the same real-world decisions to make as the reader of How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive. The ease with which the reader-participant is able to follow the invited projection into the text-world will depend greatly on the extent to which that text-world corresponds with his or her real world. Just as Muir’s car maintenance instructions can only be followed in a real world containing MPCs, their sockets and receptacles, so the reader of Glamour must have the assumed boyfriend, Friday nights out, and female friends in place in order to modify reality according to Balfour’s directions. Even if the requisite compatibility between text-world and discourse-world is realised, non-compliance with the instructions contained within the text is perfectly possible.
F U RT H E R I N V E S T I G AT I O N
• Here is an extract from a different section of Glamour magazine: TAURUS (April 21–May 21) YOUR YEAR Throughout May and June you can do no wrong, so relax while you have the chance because this summer things are going to get super-stressful. Most of the year, you’re dealing with a tug-of-war between home and career. Your partner objects to the amount of time you spend working, or you’re asked to sacrifice a career dream for family duty. This lesson is about accepting responsibility for what you really want and pushing forward with it, so you’ll just have to be selfish. YOUR MONTH During May’s first fortnight you’re on a roll, and are presented with great opportunities that enable you to fly higher than ever before. For some bulls, this will mean amazing love with the perfect man, and for others, career openings you never dreamed possible. However, you will need to put some effort in yourself to pull them off. From the 15th onwards, life gets more complicated with your wants and needs competing for attention. (Glamour, May 2006: 59) Try to identify any modal-worlds that are created in this horoscope. Are they deontic or boulomaic in nature? What are their world-building and function-advancing elements? Do they have any further worlds embedded within them? Think about the following questions too: To what kind of co-participant is the horoscope addressed? What assumptions does the author of this text make about the reader’s discourse-world? How is this communicated through the text? Describe who you think is the text’s ideal reader in as much detail as possible. What occupation does that reader have? What age? What gender? Try to identify which elements in the text have led you to your conclusions. What elements of your own background knowledge have you used to construct your picture of the addressee of this text? • Here is another horoscope, this time taken from a different magazine: PISCES 20 February–20 March With your confidence surging, the world could be your oyster this week. It’s time to sort out problems that you’ve been putting up with for too
: long. Any dealings with hospitals should go well. Update your look with a change of hairstyle or a new outfit – blues and greens will do the trick. A new, more glamorous you is ready to emerge. (Real People, 13 April 2006) Perform the same analysis of this horoscope as you did for the Glamour extract above. Once again, try to identify any modal-worlds and describe their structure in as much detail as possible. Is this text addressing the same kind of co-participant as the Glamour horoscope? If not, in what ways do the separate addressees differ? In which discourse did you find it easier to implicate yourself: Glamour or Real People? Why do you think this is?
F U RT H E R R E A D I N G
Modality is an important subject in linguistics about which there is a range of different theories. Clear explanations can be found in Lyons (1977), Palmer (1986), and Perkins (1983). Simpson (1993) also presents a summary of modality as part of a broader framework for the analysis of point of view in narrative. Gavins (2005a) is a reworking of Simpson’s modal grammar of narrative fiction from a text-world perspective, which also adds detail to Werth’s (1999) original explanation of the text-world forming properties of modalised discourse (see also Gavins 2003). Once again, the version of Text World Theory presented in this chapter and throughout this book differs from that set out in Werth (1994, 1995a, 1995b, 1997a, 1997b, 1999) in that it uses the term ‘modal-world’ to refer to the text-worlds created by deontic and boulomaic modality, where Werth categorises them as types of ‘attitudinal sub-world’ (see Werth 1999: 227–39 for a full explanation of this term). Gavins (2005a) argues that Werth’s account of modalisation in general is unsatisfactory and puts forward the terms ‘deontic modal-world’ and ‘boulomaic modal-world’ as more specific alternatives. Werth (1999: 249–57) also provides an initial discussion of the text-world effects of negation in discourse, in which he draws upon Barwise and Perry (1983) and Givón (1979). This discussion is expanded upon in Hidalgo Downing (2000b), which is a comprehensive exploration of the nature of the text-worlds created by negated propositions. Hidalgo Downing provides an exhaustive explanation of the world-forming properties of all different syntactic manifestations of negation and the modifying effects they have on their matrix worlds. Again, Barnes and Thagard (1997), Gerrig and Rapp (2004), Kuiken et al. (2004), Kuiken, Miall and Sikora (2004), Larsen and Seilman (1988), and Oatley and Gholamain (1997) are recommended for their further exploration of the processes by which self-implication occurs in the reading of a discourse.
Distances
KEY ISSUES IN THIS CHAPTER
This chapter continues the examination begun in Chapter 6 of the text-worlds which relate to remote or unrealised situations. As we have already seen in the preceding analysis of instructive and informative discourses, the creation of imaginary states of affairs is not confined to literary fiction alone, but is a common feature of all types of communication in the everyday world. In Chapter 6 we saw how expressions of unfulfilled wishes and desires trigger the creation of discrete text-worlds with their own world-building and functionadvancing elements. Such boulomaic and deontic modal-worlds, whether they originate in the discourse-world or in a text-world, exist at a conceptual distance from their creators. In the present chapter, the notion of conceptual distance will be explored in more detail and the investigation of the text-worlds of modalised discourse will be extended. The discussion here concentrates on the articulation of knowledge and belief through language and the processes by which such abstract concepts are conceptually managed. Two different types of political discourse, a speech and a transcript of a television debate, are analysed in order to uncover the conceptual structures which underpin them.
KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF
In Chapter 2, the knowledge structures which enable human beings to negotiate their way through everyday encounters, both linguistic and non-linguistic, were identified and discussed. Our capacity for language means that we not only make use of these knowledge structures to process and understand discourse, but that we also have the ability to use that discourse to describe our knowledge structures to others. In Chapter 5 we saw how the discourse-world participants conceptualise their own and other people’s levels of knowledge
: based on their physical experiences in the real world. Figure 5.2 illustrated the fundamentally spatial basis of our mental representations of differing degrees of certainty. We also saw in Chapter 5 how the ontological structure of a text, whether it is participant-accessible or enactor-accessible, can have a direct effect on the epistemological structure of its text-worlds. The analysis of the discourse of The Baby Whisperer parenting manual, in particular, showed how the participant-accessible nature of Tracy Hogg’s text-worlds was used to aid the construction of an intimate and trusting discourse-world relationship between the text’s author and its readers. Whatever the type of discourse situation, speakers and writers most frequently make use of epistemic modality when articulating their knowledge and beliefs. Through this modal system, human beings are able to express varying degrees of confidence in the truth of a particular subject. Epistemic modality covers a wide spectrum of belief, from absolute certainty at one end of the scale to complete lack of confidence at the other. As in the boulomaic and deontic modal systems, there are a number of modal lexical verbs which can be used to express epistemic commitment, such as suppose, believe, know, think and doubt. A broad range of epistemic modal adverbs are also available, such as doubtfully, supposedly, perhaps, maybe, possibly, certainly, and so on. Once again, adjectival constructions are also possible within this modal system, taking a ‘BE . . . THAT’ or ‘BE . . . TO’ structure: for example, ‘it’s doubtful that I’ll pass the exam’, ‘it’s sure to be a good night out’, ‘they’re unlikely to turn up’. Just as with deontic and boulomaic modality, the use of epistemic modality in discourse establishes a distinct text-world, an epistemic modal-world, containing a situation which may be unrealised at the time and place from which its description originates. By way of example, consider the following extract from a political debate and the knowledge and belief structures it contains: DIMBLEBY We’ll go to our first question please. HOLLIS Nick Hollis. Should the Home Secretary be deported? DIMBLEBY Simon Jenkins. JENKINS I’ll be struck out of the columnist’s union for saying this but no. I think that what’s called the resignation game is out of hand now, we could have had three last week and there are many of my colleagues and possibly many people here who’d love that. But I think that simply saying whenever anything goes wrong resign, particularly when the culture of resignation now applies to people who lie or misbehave or who are idiots but never if you’re incompetent. It seems to me the much more important thing is not to have a resignation, the result of which as everybody says oh that’s sorted it out, but to say why is this a mess, how do we sort this mess out, where is the incompetence, who is the best man to rescue us from it – it’s very unlikely to be a new person who takes
six months to work themselves into the job. For goodness sake this department is in the most terrible mess and clearly so, leave the man aside, let’s get on with the job of sorting it out. It is a dreadful, dreadful department and needs reform. [CLAPPING] (BBC Radio Four 2006) This is a transcription of part of an episode of the long-running BBC Radio Four programme Any Questions?, which aired on 28 April 2006. The BBC provide transcripts of all recent episodes of the programme on their website. The show’s host is David Dimbleby, who each week conducts a live debate based around a set of questions posed by members of the audience to members of a discussion panel. The panel normally consists of half a dozen or so politicians, journalists and other key figures in British current affairs, with members of the public making up the audience. In this particular extract, Simon Jenkins, a journalist for the left-wing daily newspaper The Guardian, is responding to a question from Nick Hollis, an audience member. The question Hollis poses makes reference to a recent revelation that the then-Home-Secretary, Charles Clarke, had presided over the release of hundreds of foreign criminals into the community who should have been considered for immediate deportation from the UK at the end of their custodial sentences. Clarke was eventually sacked from his Cabinet position one week after this episode of Any Questions? was aired on BBC Radio Four. The expression of political and other beliefs forms the core of all episodes of Any Questions?, with the question-answer format designed to elicit these directly from the panel members. It is unsurprising, then, that Jenkins’ response to Hollis’ question consists for the most part of statements of his personal opinions about the Home Secretary’s situation and future. Hollis’ question itself contains a deontic modal auxiliary ‘should’, which establishes the remote and unrealised situation of the deportation of the Home Secretary in its own text-world for Jenkins and the other panel members to evaluate. To begin with, Jenkins frames his evaluation in terms of his inner thought processes, using the modal lexical verb ‘think’ to indicate this is, in ‘I think that what’s called the resignation game is out of hand now’. This report of mental processes through the use of an epistemic lexical verb can also be categorised as an instance of Direct Thought representation. Direct Thought is in many ways stylistically similar to the Direct Speech representation summarised in Chapter 3. It is normally marked by a reporting clause (such as ‘I think’, or ‘She pondered’) and in its written form may also appear in inverted commas or with other graphological emphasis. Its deictic structure normally reflects the perspective of the person responsible for the thought processes being described. This can, like Direct Speech, cause a temporal shift when occurring within a past-tense narration, as the content of the thoughts being reported takes a present tense. However, unlike Direct Speech, any temporal shift caused by Direct Thought must necessarily form part of the world-building elements of
: a new epistemic modal-world. Because it articulates the inner workings of someone’s mind, Direct Thought representation shares the same modal-world building properties of all other forms of epistemic modality. The distinct modal-worlds it creates may or may not have the same temporal and spatial parameters of their originating worlds. In Jenkins’ Direct Thought report, he constructs an epistemic modal-world in which the ‘resignation game’ carries the attribute of being ‘out of hand’. The temporal adverb ‘now’ specifies a correlation between the temporal coordinates of this modal-world and those of the discourse-world containing Jenkins, Hollis, Dimbleby and the other audience and panel members. The predominant present tense of Jenkins’ speech also continues through his report of thought, so in this instance a temporal shift is not initiated. However, the epistemic nature of the modality used to frame Jenkins’ statement positions the relational process contained within it at a conceptual distance from its originating discourse-world. Jenkins’ comment is not a statement of fact in his (and his immediate audience’s) here and now, it is a statement of opinion on that here and now. As such, it produces a distinct text-world in which a functionadvancing proposition can be played out in the minds of the participants while remaining unrealised in their immediate spatial and temporal surroundings. The text-worlds created by all forms of epistemic modality differ from deontic and boulomaic modal-worlds in one crucial respect. While all modalworlds contain situations which are in one way or another remote from their originating worlds, epistemic modal-worlds often have an added layer of unreality attached to them. Where deontic modality conveys obligation and boulomaic modality expresses desire, epistemic modality communicates the level of speaker- or writer-knowledge about the truth of a particular proposition. This level of knowledge can vary from fully verifiable certainty to complete insecurity and doubt. At various points along this scale, the reliability of the epistemic modal-world in question may seem problematic to the other discourse participants. For example, when Simon Jenkins says he thinks that the resignation game is out of hand, his use of this particular epistemic modal item draws attention to the fact that this proposition is only a mental construction and that a different state of affairs may be actualised in the real world. It is often useful when assessing the epistemic position of a text-world to consider the other modal options which were available to the world-creator at the time. For example, had Simon Jenkins said, ‘I’m certain that what’s called the resignation game is out of hand now’, the resulting text-world, although still modalised, would have had a closer affinity to its originating discourse-world. This is because the modal item selected here does not act as a direct report of mental activity in the same way as ‘I think’. It expresses a greater degree of speakerconfidence in the truth of the central function-advancing proposition. The epistemic modal-world in which it resided would thus have been positioned in closer conceptual proximity to the discourse participants’ here and now.
Jenkins actually uses ‘I think’ to frame his opinions twice in his response, but the second text-world he begins to construct in this way is never fully formed and does not make complete argumentative sense: ‘I think that simply saying whenever anything goes wrong resign particularly when the culture of resignation now applies to people who lie or misbehave or who are idiots but never if you’re incompetent’. Elsewhere, Jenkins’ other modal choices also convey hesitancy and uncertainty: ‘there are many of my colleagues and possibly many people here who’d love that’. Figure 7.1 shows the conceptual structure of this short statement in close-up and the lack of confidence which is made evident in Jenkins’ selection of particular modal items. He begins here by referring to his journalist colleagues, nominating them as enactors in the text-world shown to the far left of Figure 7.1. He speculates that these colleagues would love to see resignations from the Cabinet, establishing a boulomaic modal-world with a future and unrealised time-zone. This world is labelled ‘boul’ embedded within the first text-world in Figure 7.1. Jenkins’ colleagues are not present in the discourse-world either to confirm or deny his summary of their wishes, and so his co-participants have no means of verifying his claims. This means that the boulomaic modal-world Jenkins has constructed is only enactor-accessible. Within the same sentence, Jenkins uses the modal adverb ‘possibly’ to set up another remote state of affairs concerning the studio audience. This is an epistemic modal-world, shown in Figure 7.1 emerging from the first boulomaic modal-world as ‘eps’. Jenkins’ choice of relatively weak epistemic modality here can be explained by the fact that he has now moved his speculations on to include the boulomaic commitment of everyone else present in the room with him. He embeds another enactor-accessible boulomaic modal-world into his discourse structure, in which the remote situation of the audience also loving resignations is played out. This modal-world is shown to the far right of Figure 7.1. Like the other two modal-worlds which have preceded it, and in which it is embedded, this final boulomaic modal-world is also only enactor-accessible. Jenkins has no way of knowing for certain whether the audience really do want there to be resignations from the Cabinet, so he has hedged his statement with the modal adverb ‘possibly’ in order to position his conjecture at a considerable epistemic distance from the reality and verifiability of the participants’ discourse-world.
P E RC E P T I O N
Jenkins’ willingness to put forward a strong opinion on the matter raised by Hollis appears to increase as his speech goes on. His growing confidence becomes evident in the segment of his reply which begins, ‘It seems to me the much more important thing is not to have a resignation’. He is here using a form of epistemic modality which normally falls into the sub-category of perception
Figure 7.1 Embedding and lack of confidence
boul
enactors: Jenkins, colleagues, audience
TEXT-WORLD (participant-accessible)
eps
possibly many people here
many colleagues ↓ love resignations boul
EPISTEMIC MODAL-WORLD (enactor-accessible)
BOULOMAIC MODAL-WORLD (enactor-accessible)
many people here ↓ love resignations
BOULOMAIC MODAL-WORLD (enactor-accessible)
modality. This type of modalisation includes any expression of epistemic commitment which makes reference to some form of human perception. Most commonly in such cases, a speaker or writer’s confidence in a proposition is articulated through visual perception: for example, ‘apparently, she’d been waiting for hours’, ‘it seems there was a failing at management level’, ‘it was obvious some changes were needed’. As already noted in Chapter 5, our use of perception modality often provides evidence that human beings understand the abstract concepts of knowledge and certainty in terms of their physical bodily experiences. When Jenkins uses the verb ‘seems’ in his speech, he again draws attention to the fact that what he is saying is an opinion he has formulated, this time in response to external physical stimuli. In so doing, he is acknowledging that what he believes to be the case may not necessarily be the actual state of affairs in the real world. However, his use of perception modality decreases the epistemic distance between the modal-world he creates and the discourse-world in which he and his co-participants reside. As noted in Chapter 5, when we make reference to our bodily senses in order to express a particular level of epistemic commitment, things that are true and definite are often described in terms of physical tangibility. Jenkins’ modal choices here enable him to support his opinions with the strong suggestion that he has sensory evidence for their basis, adding to their perceived reliability in the discourse-world. By the end of his turn, Jenkins’ initial expressions of weak epistemic commitment to the views he puts forwards transform into highly confident assertions. He argues that it is ‘very unlikely’ that the best person to resolve the problems of the Home Office would ‘be a new person who takes six months to work themselves into the job’. His use of the epistemic modal adjective ‘unlikely’, strengthened by the intensifier ‘very’, situates the functionadvancing component of the related epistemic modal-world (a new person solving the Home Office’s problems) at a considerable conceptual distance from the participants’ discourse-world reality. As we saw in Chapter 6, the negative construction of the modal adjective (‘unlikely’), also has a foregrounding effect. It brings to the attention of the participants a mental representation of a new person resolving the Home Office’s problems, before the negation of that event can then be conceptualised. Jenkins completes his response to Hollis’ question with a final modalised statement at the most positive end of the epistemic spectrum. Again he uses perception modality to ground his beliefs in physical evidence as he comments that ‘this department is in the most terrible mess and clearly so’. Again, the reference made to tangible sensory experience (‘clearly so’) positions the central function-advancing component of the epistemic modal-world (‘this department is in the most terrible mess’) within the perceptive range of the speaker, and thus of his co-present participants in the discourse-world also. This participant-accessible epistemic modal-world exists in sharp contrast with the embedded and solely enactor-accessible modal-worlds with which Jenkins
: began his speech, speculating upon the possible desires of the audience and of his colleagues. By the end of his turn, Jenkins has abandoned unverifiable conjecture about the boulomaic commitment of others in favour of more concrete expressions of his own beliefs and evaluations. Here is another extract from a later section of the same Any Questions? debate: WYMAN Barry Wyman, leader of South Derbyshire District Council. Has a national politician’s private life and conduct had any bearing on his ability and credibility to fulfil his public role? DIMBLEBY Francis Maude. MAUDE No I don’t think so. I think – I mean it’s a question about poor old John Prescott and his [AUDIENCE NOISE] private life – his private life is no longer his private life, it’s a very public life. And politicians are flesh and blood, we stand for election not as Pope but as legislators. No one expects us to be perfect. No one’s believed John Prescott’s perfect for a long, long time. [CLAPPING] That’s all I’ve got to say on that. DIMBLEBY How extraordinary. Margaret Beckett. BECKETT I’m strongly reminded of what I remember of the Nixon era when things were going very badly wrong in the United States and it became clear that people around the then President Nixon had committed some quite serious offences and it appeared that they’d thought they had to themselves felt that this was okay because they were pure in thought, word and deed and none of them were adulterers or drunkards or anything like that. So I think like Francis my answer to your question is no. (BBC Radio Four 2006) Francis Maude is the Chairman of the opposition Conservative Pparty and is here nominated by the host, David Dimbleby, to answer a question about the ramifications of a recent sex-scandal involving John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister. Like Jenkins, Maude begins by framing his response as Direct Thought within an epistemic modal-world. He uses the epistemic modal lexical verb ‘think’ in a reporting clause to do this. He repeats the verb twice (‘I don’t think so’ and ‘I think’), but then hesitates over his reply, using the pragmatic marker ‘I mean’ to show that he is about to give further or modified information. The rest of his response is made up mainly of categorical assertions (for example, ‘his private life is no longer his private life’, and ‘we stand for election not as Pope but as legislators’). Maude also presents two sweeping reports of the inner feelings of others, but without the hedging employed by Jenkins under similar circumstances. He claims, ‘No one expects us to be perfect’ and ‘No one’s believed John Prescott’s perfect for a long, long time’. In both these cases, Maude produces a negative
epistemic modal-world relating to the opinions of the audience and the general public more broadly. Each statement can be seen to operate as a negated form of Indirect Thought. In normal circumstances, this means of reporting mental activity in discourse is characterised by the comparatively broad summary of thought processes it offers. Unlike direct forms of report, Indirect Thought is not marked by any kind of reporting clause, graphological markers, or a switch in the alignment of the deictic features of the text. Instead, its tense and overall register remain consistent with that of the speaker, who filters the beliefs and opinions of others through his or her own perspective and language. As a result, Indirect Thought establishes an epistemic modal-world which is solely enactor-accessible. The person responsible for the indirect report may be a participant at the discourse-world level (like Francis Maude in this example) or an enactor at the text-world level. In either case, the world-creator presents a set of thoughts or beliefs which are unverifiable by the discourseworld participants. In Maude’s speech, the verbs ‘expect’ and ‘believe’ convey two connected sets of beliefs, the first about the behaviour of members of parliament in general and the second about the character of one specific member of parliament. However, these mental processes are attributed to ‘no one’ in each case, negating the epistemic modal-worlds they construct. The effect of this negation is to communicate to the discourse participants Maude’s own belief that a converse state of affairs pertains in the real world: everyone expects members of parliament to be imperfect, and everyone believes John Prescott is imperfect. The turn of Margaret Beckett in the extract above (who at the time of the debate was Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) provides some interesting contrasts with the enactor-accessible modal-worlds constructed in Maude’s speech. Beckett too begins her reply to the question posed by Barry Wyman with reference to mental processes. Once again, she starts with a report of her own mental activity, not that of other people. Beckett marks her Direct Thought representation with two reporting clauses: ‘I’m strongly reminded’, and ‘I remember’. She then goes on to describe her memories of the Nixon era within the epistemic modal-world she has created. The shift from the present-tense (‘I remember’) to a past-continuous tense (‘things were going very badly wrong’) here specifies that this modal-world also has a new, past time-zone. Beckett’s reminiscences remain fully participant-accessible until she begins to employ perception modality in her speech. When she states that ‘it became clear that people around the then President Nixon had committed some quite serious offences’, and ‘it appeared that they’d thought’, she does not ascribe these mental perception processes to a specific Sensor. It remains unclear whether the things Beckett is describing became clear and appeared to her or to some other unnamed enactor. It is consequently impossible to assess whether the content of the epistemic modal-worlds she is embedding within her memories here is participant-accessible or enactor-accessible. The
: epistemic perception modality Beckett uses in this section of her speech does little to decrease the epistemic distance between the opinions she puts forwards and the real world. Rather than providing physical sensory evidence to support her point of view, the indistinct accessibility of these modal-worlds has an opposite effect of destabilising the world-structure Beckett has constructed. To make matters even more complicated, Beckett goes on to embed a further epistemic modal-world within the unassessable accessibility of the perceptions she has so far reported. When she claims that ‘they’d thought they had to themselves felt that this was okay’, she is here describing the thought processes of President Nixon’s aides to her fellow discourse-world participants through Indirect Thought representation. The resulting epistemic modal-world is only enactor-accessible, since Nixon’s aides are not participants in the discourseworld but enactors within the world of Beckett’s memories. Her speculations on their thought processes are not only unverifiable by the other participants in the discourse-world, but are already embedded within a modal-world, the truth of which itself cannot be verified since its accessibility-status remains unresolved. Indeed, Beckett constructs such a complexity of embedded, inaccessible, or otherwise unverifiable modal-worlds that she appears to lose all track of her own reasoning towards the end of her turn. After her prolonged detour around the inner thoughts of the historical political figures of 1960s America, Beckett eventually concludes her response to Wyman’s question by returning to participant-accessible Direct Thought representation and a far more simplified summary of her own thought processes: ‘I think like Francis my answer to your question is no’.
HYPOTHETICALITY
The expression of personal knowledge and belief (or speculation on other people’s knowledge and belief) is not the only way in which epistemic distance is communicated in discourse. In our everyday interactions, in all types of discourse, human beings frequently generate unrealised and remote text-worlds through language. We have the capability to imagine, describe and discuss innumerable situations which are not actualised in our own reality. When we do this, we are constructing hypotheticals, which can take numerous different forms, at both a linguistic and a conceptual level. For example, look at the following extract of discourse: If Margaret Thatcher is re-elected as Prime Minister, I warn you. I warn you that you will have pain – when healing and relief depend on payment. I warn you that you will have ignorance – when talents are untended and wits are wasted, when learning is a privilege and not a right.
I warn you that you will have poverty – when pensions slip and benefits are whittled away by a Government that won’t pay in an economy that can’t pay. I warn you that you will be cold – when fuel charges are used as a tax system that the rich don’t notice and the poor can’t afford. I warn you that you must not expect work – when many cannot spend, more will not be able to earn. When they don’t earn, they don’t spend. When they don’t spend, work dies. I warn you not to go into the streets alone after dark or into the streets in large crowds of protest in the light. I warn you that you will be quiet – when the curfew of fear and the gibbet of unemployment make you obedient. I warn you that you will have defence of a sort – with a risk and at a price that passes all understanding. I warn you that you will be home-bound – when fares and transport bills kill leisure and lock you up. I warn you that you will borrow less – when credit, loans, mortgages and easy payments are refused to people on your melting income. If Margaret Thatcher wins, she will become more a Leader than a Prime Minister. That power produces arrogance and when it is toughened with Tebbitry and flattened and fawned upon by spineless sycophants, the boot-licking Knights of Fleet Street and placemen in Quangos, the arrogance corrupts absolutely. If Margaret Thatcher wins – I warn you not to be ordinary. I warn you not to be young. I warn you not to fall ill. I warn you not to get old. (Kinnock 1993) This speech was given by the British politician, Neil Kinnock, on 7 June 1983. At this point in history, Kinnock was a member of parliament for Islwyn, South Wales, and the Labour Party of which he was a member was on the verge of a second consecutive general election defeat at the hands of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party. Kinnock was elected leader of the Labour Party four months after he delivered this speech. Anecdote has it that he wrote the speech in the back of a car on his way to the Labour rally in Bridgend, Glamorgan, where it was delivered. The address can be seen to construct a single hypothetical situation, which is then developed throughout the course of the speech to include a great deal of world-building and function-advancing detail. From his perspective in his 1983 discourse-world, Kinnock describes how he thinks the UK will be structured and how its citizens will be affected in the as-yet-unrealised event of a Conservative victory in the upcoming general election. Of course, the basic point of the speech, that Kinnock thinks that a Conservative-governed country will be a bad place to
: live, could have been expressed far more succinctly than it is here. However, Kinnock makes use of a number of rhetorical devices to expand his central theme. In classical rhetoric, this kind of development of a basic idea through rhetorical embellishment is known as amplification. Most interestingly, Kinnock’s use of repetition and parallelism as ornamentation for his central assertion also shows evidence of variatio; the eloquent and subtle variation of stylistic patterns to add weight and salience to an otherwise simple argument. Each individual scenario Kinnock puts forward as part of his broad-ranging vision of a Conservative future is not yet actualised in the discourse-world containing Kinnock and his audience at the rally. The central hypothetical explored during the course of the speech is that set out in the first clause of the opening line: ‘If Margaret Thatcher is re-elected as Prime Minister’. This clause is part of a conditional construction. In traditional grammar, conditionals are divided into two components: the protasis and the apodosis. The protasis is the part of a conditional which sets up a theoretical situation and marks it as remote from actuality. Its remoteness marker may either take the form of an if-clause or, alternatively, an inverted modal or auxiliary: for example, ‘should the meeting overrun, I’ll phone to let you know’, or ‘had we known it would rain, we would have stayed at home’. In all cases, the protasis establishes an epistemic modal-world which has its status as an unrealised possibility made linguistically evident. The apodosis component of the conditional, on the other hand, defines a situation which is consequent on the protasis. It normally contains the function-advancing information which takes the initial hypothetical situation to a further point or conclusion. For example, the apodosis clause, ‘I’ll phone to let you know’, contains a material intention process (‘I’ll phone’) which acts as the main function-advancer in the epistemic modal-world established by the protasis, ‘should the meeting overrun’. In the opening line of Kinnock’s speech, the if-clause in the protasis section of the conditional, ‘If Margaret Thatcher is re-elected Prime Minister’, operates in precisely the same way. It generates an epistemic modal-world in which the hypothetical situation of a Conservative victory has been realised. The further advancement of that modal-world begins in the immediate apodosis, ‘I warn you’. However, the development of the remote states of affairs Kinnock has constructed does not end with completion of this sentence. Kinnock goes on to add more and more detail to his imagined world of a Conservative victory throughout the rest of the speech with the repetition of ‘I warn you’ attached to a range of different and more comprehensive function-advancing consequences. In the wider context of the speech as a whole, and particularly bearing in mind the face-to-face nature of its original discourse-world, ‘I warn you’ acts not as the main function-advancing proposition of a single modal-world, but as an emphatic performative. Many of the re-occurrences of ‘I warn you’ are followed by the construction of an apparent future time-zone, for example in ‘you will have pain’, ‘you will
have ignorance’, ‘you will have poverty’, and so on. These kinds of constructions actually function as expressions of extremely strong epistemic commitment on the part of the speaker to the function-advancing propositions they contain. What Kinnock is communicating here is not some supernatural ability to look into the future, but his firm belief that no other kind of future is possible under Tory rule. Indeed, some of Kinnock’s expressions of personal belief are so strong that they seem to blur the boundary between epistemic and deontic modality. At the beginning of the address, the function-advancing propositions being put forward within Kinnock’s gradually expanding epistemic modal-world take the form of possessive relational processes. The second-person addressee is told that he or she will have a range of negative attributes under a Tory government, such as pain, poverty, and ignorance. However, as the speech goes on, the predominantly possessive relational processes of the text are joined by a number of intensive relational processes. The listener is told, for example, ‘you will be cold’, ‘you will be quiet’, and ‘you will be home-bound’. The effect of this switch, which becomes particularly evident in the case of ‘you will be quiet’, is to transform the strong epistemic commitment of Kinnock’s predictions into equally strong expressions of obligation. In his inclusion of deontic modality in these sections of the speech, Kinnock appears to be mimicking the tone of a parent scolding and controlling a child. And the parent figure here, of course, is not Kinnock himself, but the Tory government he is warning his audience against. Interestingly, Kinnock also continues to add detail to the world-building protasis side of his conditional constructions throughout his speech. He repeats his opening if-clause, with slight variation as ‘If Margaret Thatcher wins’, twice more in the course of the address. However, after the first line of the speech, Kinnock reverses the syntactic structure of the majority of his sentences so that the apodosis component of the conditional construction precedes the protasis. He begins each sentence with a different function-advancing proposition (for example, ‘I warn you that you will borrow less’), which is followed by a subordinate clause which redefines the basic hypothetical situation (a Tory victory) in some way (for example, ‘when credit, loans, mortgages and easy payments are refused to people on your melting income’). Where the repetition of ‘I warn you’ precedes each apodosis, the temporal adverb ‘when’ begins the majority of the subordinated protases, marking their essentially world-building nature. This temporal deixis denotes the unrealised nature of the world; ‘when’ specifies that the state of affairs being described has not yet come into being in the originating world. More importantly, the choice of ‘when’ over ‘if ’ as a remoteness marker adds to the sense of inevitability attached to Kinnock’s imagined situations. This sense increases as the speech continues, each repetition emphasising the inexorableness of the consequent multiple protases in the event of a realisation of the main singular apodosis. Together with Kinnock’s fervent mixture of epistemic and deontic modal
: commitment, the repetition of ‘when’ serves to close the epistemic gap between the discourse-world and the unrealised world of a Conservative third term Kinnock predicts for his audience. The depth of detail Kinnock contains within the protasis clauses includes function-advancing processes as well as deictic world-builders. For example, the protasis ‘when talents are untended and wits are wasted, when learning is a privilege and not a right’, describes two material intention processes (‘talents are untended’ and ‘wits are wasted’), one intensive relational process in positive form (‘learning is a privilege’), and one in negative form (‘and not a right’). Crucially, in this example and many others throughout the text, the Actor responsible for the material intention processes contained in the protasis clauses has been omitted. The majority of these processes take a passive structure (for example, ‘fuel charges are used’, ‘easy payments are refused’, and so on) in which the Conservative politicians Kinnock believes to be accountable are not specifically named. Only one of this kind of function-advancing process has a named human Actor: ‘benefits are whittled away by a Government that won’t pay’. Elsewhere, inanimate governmental procedures and their economic consequences occupy the Actor role, either personified (for example, ‘transport bills kill leisure and lock you up’) or in other metaphorical constructions (for example, ‘the curfew of fear and the gibbet of unemployment make you obedient’). Two clusters of negated worlds occur in the middle and at the very end of the speech. Again using deontic modality, Kinnock states that ‘you must not expect work’, embedding a negated deontic modal-world within one of his apodoses. The protasis which follows this contains a series of five further negations: ‘when many cannot spend, more will not be able to earn. When they don’t earn, they don’t spend. When they don’t spend, work dies’. As we have already seen in previous analyses, the negation process foregrounds the processes of spending and earning, already emphasised through their repetition. The syntactic structure of the non-negated process which closes this sentence, ‘work dies’, forms a sharp contrast to the negated forms which have preceded it . This contrast is reflective, of course, of the wider contrast Kinnock is attempting to establish between the possibilities of Conservative and Labour governance. The actions he foregrounds through negation – expecting work, spending, earning and, in the next line, going into the streets – will not be possible following a Tory victory but, Kinnock leads his audience to infer, would be under a Labour government. Indeed, the discourse-world inferences of Kinnock’s listeners are an essential mechanism for world-building in this address. Throughout his speech, Kinnock’s use of negation in particular means that the audience is provided not just with a detailed picture of a hypothetical Conservative-governed country, but with sufficient information to construct their own inferred representation of its Labour alternative. The ghostly presence of this parallel text-world is
made most apparent in the final cluster of negated worlds which occurs at the close of the address. Following the second repeat of the protasis, ‘If Margaret Thatcher wins’, Kinnock gives his audience four concluding imperatives, all in negated form: ‘not to be ordinary’, ‘not to be young’, ‘not to fall ill’, and ‘not to be old’. Each one of these attributes must first be mentally represented before its prohibition in the hypothetical Conservative victory world can be conceptualised. The foregrounding effect of this process also leaves a resonant converse image in its wake. The Labour voter is finally brought into focus in these closing lines, identified by one or a combination of the attributes of ordinariness, youth, illness and age. In so doing, Kinnock has left only middle-age, good health, and some form of unspecified ‘unordinariness’ as defining attributes of the Tory alternative.
F U RT H E R I N V E S T I G AT I O N
• Below is a transcription of part of a conversation between an eighty-fouryear-old woman and her twenty-year-old niece. The older woman, <S 01> in the transcription, is reminiscing about her childhood in Ireland. <S 01> [laughs] When you were living at home before you left while you were at, in Bristol and in Ireland did you erm did you erm did you have any help in the house or <S 02> Oh yes, yes, yes mind you my parents were really quite welloff when we lived in Ireland but the education in England was very expensive [<S 01> mm] and I can remember my mother had jewellery and silver and things she used to keep selling it [<S 01> really] to pay for our extra music lessons and tuition in this and that [<S 01> mm] and er I it was, must have been difficult for her husband she was brought up in affluence you know and now she had to be a very economical housekeeper we had two maids in residence [S 01 mm] erm a cook and a house parlour-maid so we didn’t really do anything ourselves in the house [<S 01> mm] I suppose we must have had a gardener I don’t remember that really we didn’t have much of a garden in Clifton anyway not like the one in Ireland (Carter and McCarthy 1997: 48) Try to draw a diagram of the conceptual structure of the conversation and consider the following questions: How many different worlds can you identify? What are their worldbuilding and function-advancing elements? Who are the enactors and in which worlds do they reside?
:
Are there any modal-worlds in the text? If so, what type are they? Are there any instances where one world is embedded within another? Who is responsible for the creation of each text-world and each modalworld you have identified? Try to decide which worlds are participantaccessible and which are enactor-accessible. Does the accessibility of a world have any bearing on the reliability of its contents, as you perceive them?
• Have a look at the following instructional text: FRESH LEMON CURD grated rind and juice of 1 large, juicy lemon 3 oz caster sugar (75 g) 2 large eggs 2 oz unsalted butter (50 g) Place the grated lemon rind and sugar in a bowl. In another bowl whisk the lemon juice together with the eggs, then pour this mixture over the sugar. Add the butter cut into little pieces, and place the bowl over a pan of barely simmering water. Stir frequently till thickened – about 20 minutes. Then cool the curd and use it to sandwich the sponges together, spreading it thickly. If you want to make this ahead, store in a clean dry jar with a screw-top lid. It is best eaten within a week. Note For orange curd replace the lemon with 1 large orange. (Smith 1994: 544) Think about the mental representations this text generates and, once again, try to draw a diagram of its conceptual structure. Make sure you note which elements of the text are world-builders, which are function-advancers, and who the participants and enactors are. There are a number of different ways of thinking about recipes and their world-building and functionadvancing properties. What is the function of the list of ingredients at the beginning of the recipe? Are they discourse-world items? Are they world-building elements at the text-world level? Do they belong in some form of modalworld? If so, what type? What kinds of mental representations are produced by the method section of the recipe? How would you categorise the processes which make up this part of the text? Are they function-advancers in a textworld? Do they have an imperative mood, and thus create a deontic modal-world? Try considering the recipe in its entirety. Does this alter your assessment of its conceptual structure in any way? Consider whether the processes described in the text are realised in the discourse-world in
particular. Is the whole recipe remote from its originating world in some way?
F U RT H E R R E A D I N G
Werth’s initial explorations of the text-world forming properties of epistemic modality and others forms of hypotheticality are presented in Werth (1999: 239–48). In his original text-world framework, Werth categorised the textworlds created by epistemic modality as ‘epistemic sub-worlds’. Gavins (2001 and 2005a) argues for a revised set of terminology for the worlds resulting from all modalised discourse (see also Chapter 6). The term ‘epistemic modalworlds’ was first put forward as part of this scheme in Gavins (2001 and 2005a). Werth (1997a) provides a detailed explanation of the text-worlds created by conditional constructions, a discussion which is further expanded upon in Werth (1999: 344–9). A cognitive-grammatical account of conditionality is given in Fillmore, Kay and O’Connor (1988) and Kay and Fillmore (1999). The description of the conceptual structures of modality and hypotheticality presented in this book are based on the applications, and subsequent reworkings, of Werth’s text-world framework presented in Gavins (2001, 2003 and 2005a). Dixon (1971) continues to be an invaluable resource for anyone interested in rhetoric, as is Burton (2006).
Narratives
KEY ISSUES IN THIS CHAPTER
Over the course of the last three chapters, we have looked in some detail at modalworlds in their various forms. We have seen that these worlds occur for one of three reasons in discourse. Firstly, the use of boulomaic modality, including any description of wishes, desires or fantasies, will generate a boulomaic modal-world in the minds of the discourse participants. Secondly, the expression of any degree of obligation, from permission through to requirement, will generate a deontic modal-world. Finally, epistemic modal-worlds occur whenever some form of epistemic commitment is expressed in discourse. In Chapter 7, we saw that this category of modal-worlds includes any articulation of personal belief or knowledge, the representation of the thoughts and beliefs of others, hypothetical constructions and conditionality. We have also seen how various factors influence the extent to which each type of modal-world can be understood by the discourseworld participants to exist at a greater or lesser conceptual distance from his or her reality. Chapter 7 concluded with an analysis of the conditional structures operating across an entire political speech. In the next two chapters, this broad view is maintained and the means by which text-worlds are managed over the duration of extended discourses are explored in more depth. The main analyses in this chapter concentrate on prototypical narrative discourse: literary fiction. Two extracts from two examples of contemporary prose fiction are examined and the discussion then extends into an exploration of the manipulation of certain narrative structures for particular effects in both literary and non-literary contexts.
F O C A L I S AT I O N
To begin the exploration of the conceptual structure of narrative in discourse, let us revisit an example of prototypical narrativity from a previous chapter. For
ease of reference, the opening paragraphs of Alexander McCall Smith’s (2003) novel, The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, which were first discussed in Chapter 3, are reproduced below: Mma Ramotswe had a detective agency in Africa, at the foot of Kgale Hill. These were its assets: a tiny white van, two desks, two chairs, a telephone, and an old typewriter. Then there was a teapot, in which Mma Ramotswe – the only lady private detective in Botswana – brewed redbush tea. And three mugs – one for herself, one for her secretary, and one for the client. What else does a detective agency really need? Detective agencies rely on human intuition and intelligence, both of which Mma Ramotswe had in abundance. No inventory would ever include those, of course. But there was also the view, which again could appear on no inventory. How could any such list describe what one saw when one looked out from Mma Ramotswe’s door? To the front, an acacia tree, the thorn tree which dots the wide edges of the Kalahari; the great white thorns, a warning; the olive-grey leaves, by contrast, so delicate. In its branches, in the late afternoon, or in the cool of the early morning, one might see a Go-Away bird, or hear it, rather. And beyond the acacia, over the dusty road, the roofs of the town under a cover of trees and scrub bush; on the horizon, in a blue shimmer of heat, the hills, like improbable, overgrown termite-mounds. (McCall Smith 2003: 1) Like the majority of novel openings, these paragraphs introduce the reader to the textual universe he or she will experience during the discourse. As already noted in Chapter 3, McCall Smith’s novel is written in the third person. The main character in The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, Mma Precious Ramotswe, is referred to either by her name or by the pronoun ‘she’. Although the opening of that text concerns the immediate surroundings of Mma Ramotswe, these are described to the reader by a narrator who seems to have a ‘floating’ perspective in the text-world. In traditional narrative theory, novels like this one are often categorised as having a heterodiegetic narration. This means that the narrator is positioned somewhere outside of the story, rather than being an enactor participating in it. We can add a further layer of detail to this classification by noting that McCall Smith’s narrative gives its readers information about the inner thoughts and feelings of some of the enactors in the text-world. In stylistics and narrative theory, a useful distinction is normally drawn between the textual entity responsible for the narration of the text, the narrator, and the entity through whose perspective the text is being filtered at any particular moment, the focaliser. In some texts, the narrator and the focaliser are the same person, in other texts they are different people, and in yet other texts the relationship may shift and change at various points in the discourse. In the No. 1 Ladies’
: Detective Agency, we occasionally see the text-world through the eyes of one of its enactors, Mma Ramotswe. For this reason, we can say that the novel also contains examples of internal focalisation. In lots of other literary texts, this kind of access to the inner workings of enactors’ minds is not granted and the narration remains within an external focalisation. However, in McCall Smith’s novel, the narrator is omniscient and occasionally seems to dip into the mind of Mma Ramotswe, periodically giving the reader access to her thoughts. For example, have another look at the questions which occur at the end of the first paragraph and at the beginning of the second paragraph of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency (‘What else does a detective agency really need?’, and ‘How could any such list describe what one saw when one looked out from Mma Ramotswe’s door?’). There is a suggestion here that these are not questions being asked by the narrator, but by the main enactor in the text-world. The sense that another voice might be present in this section of the discourse, that of Mma Ramotswe, is enhanced, for example, by the detective-like listing of assets (‘These were its assets: a tiny white van, two desks, two chairs, a telephone, and an old typewriter’), as well as by the suggestion of boastfulness in the declaration that she is ‘the only lady private detective in Botswana’. Readers are here being given a fleeting glimpse of Mma Ramotswe’s thought processes in an instance of Free Indirect Discourse. For these periods, the text is internally focalised through her point of view. Free Indirect Discourse has been a source of great fascination for literary critics and stylisticians for many decades. It is a complex means of representing the thought or speech of a particular enactor, fictional or non-fictional, in discourse. It can be summarised as the merging, to some degree, of different narrative ‘voices’ in a text. Readers of Free Indirect Discourse tend to sense that the voice of the narrator of the text has been joined by, merged with, or replaced by that of another enactor in the text-world. For the analyst, Free Indirect Discourse can be comparatively difficult to identify, since it is not normally preceded with the sorts of reporting clauses or inverted commas which mark Direct Speech and Direct Thought. The tense of Free Indirect Discourse also normally remains consistent with that of the surrounding narration. Nevertheless, the presence of the thoughts and opinions of a text-world enactor can usually be detected through certain lexical choices which may be indicative of a particular enactor’s personality, or through the use of graphological markers (such as question marks and exclamation marks) which may seem to reflect a particular kind of speech act. Free Indirect Discourse is often described by stylisticians as lending a close and sympathetic feel to a narration; the seamless movement into the inner thoughts of an enactor, or the unobtrusive suggestion of their speech, acts to draw the reader more deeply into the text-world. In Text World Theory terms, Free Indirect Discourse, like all forms of thought representation, can be seen to construct an epistemic modal-world. This modal-world may be enactor- or
participant-accessible, depending on who is responsible for its creation and whose speech or thought is being represented within it. In The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, Free Indirect Discourse appears episodically and the narrative shifts regularly from the inner thoughts or voice of Mma Ramotswe to the voice of the narrator and back again. In narrativetheoretical terms, the text has a variable focalisation. When the novel begins, the narrator presents the contents of the text-world to us and is the only voice and perspective discernible in the text. Other enactors’ voices come and go as the novel continues, but the omniscient narrator remains present for the entire discourse and is the predominant voice throughout. However, it is important to remember when examining the conceptual structure of this kind of literary narrative that the narrator of the story is a textual construct like any other. All narrators of all literary fictions are text-world entities; they are created by discourse-world authors, but they inhabit the text-world level of the discourse, along with the other fictional enactors in the text. Having said that, although fictional narrators are textual constructs, the reader-participants in literary discourse-worlds often map their knowledge of real-world authors onto these text-world beings. You may experience this sensation yourself when reading The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. Whether you have read Alexander McCall Smith’s work before or not, whether you know anything about his life and personality or not, you may nevertheless assume the narrator of his novel to be a text-world projection of aspects of himself. In literary theory, this projection is known as the implied author. Basing one’s mental representation of a narrator on discourse-world knowledge of the author of the text is a common reaction to third-person narration in particular; readers often respond to omniscient narrators as though they were discourse-world participants. This results in the same kind of conceptual effect we saw generated in the non-fictional texts of The Baby Whisperer in Chapter 5 and How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive in Chapter 6. To counteract the split nature of the discourse-world of literary prose fiction and the absence of a co-participant in their immediate environment, readers construct a re-creation of a face-to-face communicative situation at the text-world level. A text-world entity, the narrator, becomes a substitute co-participant in the discourse. Readers accept and process the world-building and functionadvancing information provided in third-person narrations as though the textworld narrators responsible for them were discourse-world human beings. Although the Text World Theory framework categorises the perspectives of all textual constructs as epistemic modal-worlds, the reader of a literary fiction will often follow and conceptualise the narrator’s version of events as though it were a text-world. Furthermore, the worlds created by omniscient narrators are conceptualised as though they were participant-accessible, rather than enactor-accessible like all other worlds generated at the text-world level. Consequently, an intimate and trusting relationship is established between the
: reader and the narrator of the text which is very similar in nature to those constructed in the non-fictional texts of The Baby Whisperer and How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive. Of course, the key difference between these texts and the text of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency is that the narrators of the parenting manual and the car-maintenance guide are textual projections of real-world human beings. As such, they produce participant-accessible text-worlds in the first instance, from which other modal-worlds and world-switches may spring. The worlds created by textual entities, such as the narrator of McCall Smith’s novel, on the other hand, have a different ontological status from those created by discourse-world beings. For example, look back in this book again at Figure 3.4 on page 47, which sets out the basic world-structure of the opening of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. All the text-worlds shown in this diagram are created by the heterodiegetic narrator. The world-building elements of Text-World 1, as well as the contents of each of the four world-switches contained within it, are all presented from a floating, omniscient perspective. While each of these worlds was labelled as a text-world for the purposes of the discussion in Chapter 3, we can now see that they are, in fact, enactor-accessible epistemic modal-worlds. The narrator of the text is a textual construct like any other at this level of the discourse and the worlds he presents are reflective of his own thoughts and opinions; the reliability of their contents cannot, strictly speaking, be verified by the participants in the discourse-world. From this point of view, one could argue that there is a key text-world missing from Figure 3.4. The text-world from which all the other worlds in the extract spring is in fact one which contains a projected enactor of the reader in communication with his or her mental representation of the narrator. As already mentioned, this mental representation will for many readers and in many texts be a version of the real-world author. The identification formed between a text-world construct and a real-world participant in this way is what leads readers to process the narration as if it were fully participant-accessible; the information it provides is perceived as reliable and its source is as trustworthy as any other discourse-world participant would be. Thus, from their shared text-world position, reader and narrator are able to tour the novel’s landscape together and the reader experiences their mental representation of the text from the same floating viewpoint as that occupied by the narrator. Of course, lots of literary texts have a third-person narrator onto whom the reader does not, or cannot, project his or her knowledge of the real-world author. Some omniscient narrators have strong personalities of their own, which are made explicit by the text itself. These narrators may have names, locations and personal histories which do not tally with those of the reader’s coparticipant in the discourse-world. Nevertheless, the worlds described by these narrative voices also occupy the text-world level of the discourse in the absence of any other participant-accessible information. Even where a heterodiegetic
narrator is very obviously a fictional entity, the reader must accept and increment all the information he or she provides if a mental representation of the text is to be produced at all. Participant-accessibility must be granted to the enactoraccessible epistemic modal-worlds created by the narrator of the text, if the act of literary communication is to be performed successfully. Different rules are applied when other textual entities create new worlds within a third-person narration. For example, each time Free Indirect Discourse occurs in the opening of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency and a sense of Mma Ramotswe’s perspective is given, the reader’s position shifts from the text-world occupied by the narrator to an epistemic modal-world containing Mma Ramotswe’s thoughts. Crucially, these enactor-accessible modalworlds are now processed as such by the reader. Mma Ramotswe is somehow a different kind of text-world entity from the omniscient narrator. Her perspective is identifiably separate and perceived of as less reliable, despite the fact that these two text-world inhabitants actually have the same ontological status. While we may be unaware of (or perhaps forget) this ontological equality as readers, and consequently privilege text-world information provided by the narrator over that provided by enactors at the same level of discourse, it is important that we bear it centrally in mind as text-world analysts. As we will see later in this chapter, some very interesting conceptual effects can be generated by authors who take advantage of our subconscious reading practices and are thus able to perform some disturbing ontological and epistemological sleights-of-hand. These narrative tricks are only possible if the reader is successfully lulled into the false sense that they are positioned within a participantaccessible text-world, when in fact they are experiencing an enactor-accessible modal-world reflecting the narrator’s perspective and inner thoughts.
E N A C T O R S A N D F O C A L I S AT I O N
Here is another example of fictional narrative: I had been sick for a long time. When the day came for me to leave the hospital, I barely knew how to walk anymore, could barely remember who I was supposed to be. Make an effort, the doctor said, and in three or four months you’ll be back in the swing of things. I didn’t believe him, but I followed his advice anyway. They had given me up for dead, and now that I had confounded their predictions and mysteriously failed to die, what choice did I have but to live as though a future life were waiting for me? I began with small outings, no more than a block or two from my apartment and then home again. I was only thirty-four, but for all intents and purposes the illness had turned me into an old man – one of those palsied, shuffling geezers who can’t put one foot in front of the other without first
: looking down to see which foot is which. Even at the slow pace I could manage then, walking produced an odd, airy lightness in my head, a free-for-all of mixed-up signals and crossed mental wires. The world would bounce and swim before my eyes, undulating like reflections in a wavy mirror, and whenever I tried to look at just one thing, to isolate a single object from the onrush of whirling colors – a blue scarf wrapped round a woman’s head, say, or the red taillight of a passing delivery truck – it would immediately begin to break apart and dissolve, disappearing like a drop of dye in a glass of water. Everything shimmied and wobbled, kept darting off in different directions, and for the first several weeks I had trouble telling where my body stopped and the rest of the world began. (Auster 2004: 1) These are the opening paragraphs of Paul Auster’s (2004) novel Oracle Night. Just like the opening paragraphs of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, they act as an initial introduction to the fictional worlds about to be realised by the text. However, Auster and McCall Smith go about their literary introductions in very different ways. Perhaps the first thing to notice about Auster’s text is that it is written in the first person. Furthermore, where McCall Smith’s text has a floating, heterodiegetic narrator who remains external to the story, Auster’s text is narrated by one of the enactors participating directly in the unfolding events. In narrative theory, Oracle Night would therefore be categorised as a homodiegetic narration. Narrator and focaliser are one and the same person here: a participating enactor in a text-world is presenting the contents of that text-world to the reader. More importantly in this case, the perspective through which all world-building and function-advancing information is filtered remains the same throughout the novel. Where McCall Smith’s omniscient narrator only periodically grants the reader access to the point of view of one of the enactors in the story, Auster’s text is narrated from the point of view of a first-person enactor throughout. Where the focalisation of McCall Smith’s novel is variable, Auster’s text has a fixed focalisation. The reader has only one route into the text-world: that provided by Sidney Orr, the protagonist of the novel who both sees and speaks here. In homodiegetic narratives with a fixed focaliser, such as Oracle Night, the line of communication between the author and the reader which has been split at the discourse-world level is not reinstated at a text-world level in the way we saw in The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. In fact, in these kinds of narratives, the text-world level of the discourse barely exists at all. The go-between figure of an omniscient narrator – relating the key world-building and functionadvancing elements of the discourse, reporting on the mental and verbal activity of the enactors, and doing so within an artificially accessible text-world – simply does not exist in these kinds of texts. Instead, the reader must rely solely on the narrating and focalising enactor for all text-world information.
A number of world-building elements are easily identifiable in the first few lines of Oracle Night. Two enactors are nominated, the first-person narrator and the doctor, who communicate with one another in a hospital. However, locating this inter-enactor communication in time as well as in space is more difficult. The enactor-narrator is not relaying events as he experiences them; the text as a whole is situated in a past time-zone, indicated primarily by the use of the simple past tense (for example, ‘I barely knew’, ‘I could barely remember’, ‘the doctor said’). Even more interesting is the past-perfect construction, ‘I had been sick for a long time’, with which the novel begins. This tells us that the narrator is looking back on events in his own life from an unspecified spatio-temporal location. From this position, he provides detail about his long-term sickness in a time-zone in the distant past, leading up to his presence in a more recent time-zone in a hospital with a doctor. The timezone in which the telling of the story is taking place is never fully defined. As the narrator begins his communication with the reader of the text, no information is given about where or when he is situated. Figure 8.1 illustrates the conceptual structure of this focalised narrative. The text-world level of the discourse is shown to the far left of the diagram. Note that this level is not filled with a text-world but with an epistemic modalworld which relates the narrator’s version of events, just as in The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. However, in McCall Smith’s text, readers are aware that their narrator has a floating perspective in the world he describes and are also able to map their knowledge of the real-world author of the text onto this narratorial voice. By contrast, readers of Oracle Night have no information about the spatio-temporal location of their narrator and no world-building or functionadvancing information, explicit or inferred, with which to construct this world beyond the presence of narrator-enactor himself. For this reason, the first world encountered in the novel, the time and place of narration, falls quickly into the background of this discourse process. The reader must make a double leap from the discourse-world: firstly beyond the text-world level, then again beyond the world of the act of narration and into the enactor-accessible worldswitch which describes the narrator’s earlier illness. The redundancy of the text-world level of the discourse in the novel as a whole is indicated in Figure 8.1 through the grey-shading of this first focalised world. The relegation of the text-world level of the discourse in this way is a common phenomenon in literary fictional discourse. The resulting worlds, which are normally text-initial but ultimately immaterial, are known as empty text-worlds in Text World Theory terms. In the opening of Oracle Night, the world-switch out of the empty text-world and into the description of the narrator’s prolonged sickness is followed almost immediately by a further world-switch into the world in which the narrator is leaving hospital and following his doctor’s advice. This epistemic modal-world develops much more extensively than the two modal-worlds which have
Figure 8.1 Fixed focalisation
TEXT-WORLD LEVEL
worldswitch eps
narrator ↓ believes doctor
eps
eps
‘make an effort … and in three or four months you’ll be back in the swing of things’
DIRECT SPEECH WORLD-SWITCH (enactor-accessible)
worldswitch
narrator ↓ leaves hospital ↓ follows doctor’s advice
EPISTEMIC MODAL-WORLD (enactor-accessible fixed focalisation)
NEGATIVE MODAL-WORLD
narrator ↓ sick for a long time
enactors: narrator
worldswitch
EPISTEMIC MODAL-WORLD (enactor-accessible fixed focalisation)
EPISTEMIC MODAL-WORLD (enactor-accessible fixed focalisation)
narrator ↓ barely knows
EPISTEMIC MODAL-WORLD (enactor-accessible)
narrator ↓ barely remembers
EPISTEMIC MODAL-WORLD (enactor accessible)
preceded it. Most notably, it has a number of further worlds embedded within it. Two instances of epistemic modality in the passage (‘I barely knew how to walk anymore, could barely remember who I was supposed to be’) produce two related embedded epistemic modal-worlds. The present tense of the Direct Speech relating to the doctor’s advice to the narrator creates a world-switch, and finally a negated epistemic modal-world occurs when the narrator comments that he ‘didn’t believe him’. (As discussed in Chapter 6, the process of the narrator believing the doctor must first be conceptualised before its negation can be understood. The negative status of this modal-world is illustrated in the diagram by its dotted line.) The crucial difference between the conceptual structure of Oracle Night and that of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency is that in the latter of these two texts the reader is able to substitute a textual entity in place of the absent author. The implied author is easily conceptualised thanks to the third-person narration of the text and his presence in the discourse increases the perceived reliability of the epistemic modal-worlds which constitute the main body of the narration. In Auster’s novel, on the other hand, the fixed homodiegetic narration foregrounds the fictional status of the narrator and the enactor-accessible nature of the worlds he creates. It also simultaneously throws the text-world level of the discourse further into the conceptual background. The enactoraccessibility of the fixed focalisation is also highlighted by the fact that the narrator’s unstable physical and mental state is a major theme in the beginning of the novel. Following the description of a prolonged illness and a hospital stay in the first paragraph, the second paragraph details the narrator’s continuing health problems after his release. Here, references to the narrator’s perceptions of his surroundings are abundant. We are told, for example, that ‘walking produced an odd, airy lightness in my head, a free-for-all of mixed-up signals and crossed mental wires’, ‘everything shimmied and wobbled’, and ‘I had trouble telling where my body stopped and the rest of the world began’. The embedded epistemic modal-world which results from this final confession, in particular, would seem to suggest that the preceding descriptions of the inner workings of the narrator’s mind – and therefore perhaps the whole of the rest of the narration focalised through his perspective – may not be as reliable as the reader is being led to believe. However, with no other narratorial presence available in the text, we have no choice but to increment the information Sidney Orr provides if a mental representation of the novel is to be constructed.
N A R R AT I V E D E C E P T I O N
Many fictional texts, particularly in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, take advantage of the conceptual structure of narrative described in the previous two
: sections of this chapter in order to achieve specific literary effects. As the novel form has matured over the last couple of hundred years, and readers’ expectations with it, author experimentation has increased. Here is another example taken from a recent piece of literary prose fiction: The girl walked the full length of the carriage towards me and sat down, precisely blocking my reflection in the opposite window. She struck me as brave. I think it was because she was still holding her book in one hand, and one finger was keeping the page she had been reading. ‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘Do you mind if I sit here?’ I shook my head and held her gaze, and hoped my expression seemed reassuring. I didn’t need to look sideways to know the young men would follow her down the carriage. I wondered what would happen next. The young men appeared; one of them pulled at the girl’s bag again; her wrist was grabbed; her arm was twisted in order to make her release her grip on the strap; she shouted. I didn’t feel sure of what was happening. I didn’t know what to do. I stood. I raised a hand. I said, ‘Hey.’ As a small boy, I once fell backwards from a high swing and hit the ground hard on the back of my head. As this accident was happening, I watched it remotely, from the perspective of the branches of the tree to which the swing was tied. Now, through the side windows of the train, as if I were hovering between the external glass and the subway walls, I saw myself walking backwards through the carriage, holding up my arms around my face and upper body. The young men were attacking me. Many of their blows looked as if they glanced harmlessly off my head and shoulders, and some missed me altogether. But some blows connected hard. My movements were slow and confused. My hands swung out a couple of times to ward the men off, but the gesture looked no more fierce than if I were swatting away a fly. Soon, my legs buckled, and I fell backwards against the seats, then rolled down to the floor. From my position outside the carriage, I watched as the young men kicked me into unconsciousness. (Garland 2004: 3–4) This sequence is from Alex Garland’s (2004) novel, The Coma. The paragraphs extracted here are not from the opening of the novel, but occur a couple of pages into the story. The first section describes a scene on a London underground train, in which the narrator defends a young woman being threatened by a group of youths. This scene continues into the second section of the extract, although here the structure of the narrative shifts in an intriguing manner.
To begin with, the conceptual structure of The Coma is very similar to that of Oracle Night. As already noted, both texts are written in the first person and both narrators are enactors participating directly in the unfolding events of their respective stories. The Coma also has a fixed focalisation and the perspective of the enactor narrating the extract above is the only one depicted in the novel. Once again, the text-world level of the discourse remains empty: readers are given no information about the time and place from which the story is being narrated and must rely on an enactor-accessible representation of the narrator’s thoughts and opinions for all the world-building and function-advancing information in this discourse. The epistemic modal-world in which the narrator describes the past timezone of the underground attack is an extensive one. In the first section of the extract, he provides detailed world-building and function-advancing componory: a girl is situated in a tube-train location and her physical movement towards the enactor of the narrator in that world is described. A number of further modal-worlds become embedded within this one. Firstly, the use of perception modality (‘She struck me as brave’) generates one epistemic modal-world, followed by another (‘I think it was because she was still holding her book . . .’). There is then a brief world-switch, created by the Direct Speech of the girl, which injects present tense into the past-tense narration and acts to draw the reader further into the here and now of the girl and the narrator. The narrator constructs a boulomaic modal-world when he says, ‘I . . . shoped my expression seemed reassuring’. This is followed by a negative deontic modal-world (‘I didn’t need to look sideways . . .’) and three further epistemic modal-worlds, one of which is positively framed (‘I wondered what would happen next’) and two of which are negated (‘I didn’t feel sure of what was happening’, and ‘I didn’t know what to do’). Each of these embedded enactor-accessible modal-worlds adds to the sense of panic rising in the narrator’s mind as the situation on the train escalates. Interestingly, when the narrator-enactor finally takes action, all embedded modalisation disappears and he describes these events in declarative mood: ‘I stood. I raised a hand. I said, “Hey.” ’ The second section of the extract begins with a world-switch back to the narrator’s childhood and a scene in which he hits his head after falling from a swing. As he describes this event from his perspective in a more recent, but otherwise undefined world, he also describes the remote perspective he had on the incident at the time of its occurrence. He relates an out-of-body experience during which he watched his own fall from the branches of a nearby tree. This experience recurs as he is attacked by the group of youths on the underground train. Again, the temporal structure of this section of the text is peculiarly interesting as a range of different tenses and other temporal deictics are used to separate different time-zones and different perspectives on them. Firstly, the flashback to the narrator’s childhood is signalled by the temporal locative ‘As
: a small boy’. The simple-past tense is then used to describe the childhood fall (‘I once fell backwards from a high swing and hit the ground hard on the back of my head’) and the narrator watching this from a tree (‘I watched’). However, the separation of the narrator’s physical experience (falling) from his cognitive processing (watching) during this event is enabled by the past-progressive verb form in the locative ‘As this accident was happening’. As the narrator begins to experience the same out-of-body sensation during the underground attack, the temporal adverb ‘now’ acts to bring his narration back to this more recent time-zone. The simple-past tense is here used to describe the narrator’s floating perspective on the assault, for example in ‘I saw’, ‘their blows looked’, ‘My hands swung’, and ‘I fell backwards’. The immediate experience of the violence itself within the train carriage, however, is narrated mainly in past progressive (for example: ‘I saw myself walking backwards through the carriage, holding up my arms around my face and upper body. The young men were attacking me’). The text-world structure of this double-focalisation is illustrated in Figure 8.2. To the far left of the diagram, the world containing the narrator’s childhood fall is shown as an enactor-accessible epistemic modal-world. The events contained in this world are focalised once in the narrator’s first description of them and then again in his description of his out-of-body view from the tree. The double-focalised version of the fall is shown emerging from the single-focalised world within its own epistemic modal-world. This modal-world is also shown within a double line to emphasise the double-filtering of its contents. The next world to be generated in the text is a world-switch, as the narrator returns to the more recent time-zone in which the attack on the underground train is taking place. Once again, this world exists in both a single- and doublefocalised form. The basic function-advancing components of both versions of the attack remain the same: the narrator moves through the carriage as the young men attack him and he eventually falls to the floor. However, it is interesting to note that the double-focalised modal-world produced by the out-of-body experience contains further speculation and opinion on the events portrayed. Three more embedded epistemic modal-worlds are created by the narrator as he occupies his floating perspective outside the train carriage. Firstly, his description of his position (‘as if I were hovering between the external glass and the subway walls’) is a hypothetical construction and generates an epistemic modal-world as a result. The narrator then creates a second and a third epistemic modalworld in his use of perception modality. He states that ‘Many of their blows looked as if they glanced harmlessly off my head and shoulders’, and ‘the gesture looked no more fierce than if I were swatting away a fly’. These references to the visual senses reflect the objective perspective the narrator’s separation of mind and body give him on the assault. Note, however, how great is the epistemic distance between these embedded modal-worlds and the
eps
Figure 8.2 Double-focalisation
narrator ↓ falls
EPISTEMIC MODAL-WORLD (enactor-accessible single-focalisation)
narrator ↓ falls
worldswitch
EPISTEMIC MODAL-WORLD (enactor-accessible double-focalisation)
‘the gesture looked no more fierce…’ ‘their blows looked as if…’
eps
‘as if I were hovering…’
eps
men ↓ attack
EPISTEMIC MODAL-WORLD (enactor-accessible perception)
eps
narrator ↓ walks ↓ holds arms up ↓ falls backwards ↓ rolls to floor
EPISTEMIC MODAL-WORLD (enactor-accessible perception)
eps
men ↓ attack
EPISTEMIC MODAL-WORLD (enactor-accessible double-focalisation)
EPISTEMIC MODAL-WORLD (enactor-accessible hypothetical)
narrator ↓ walks ↓ holds arms up ↓ falls backwards ↓ rolls to floor
EPISTEMIC MODAL-WORLD (enactor-accessible single-focalisation)
: single-focalised and entirely unmodalised world of the attack itself. The narrator’s bodily experience is here being presented as far more reliable and tangible than his disembodied perception of the event. The unreliability of the narrator’s own opinions on and speculations about his situation, suggested in the sequence of embedding above, becomes of central importance in the narrative of The Coma as a whole. After the attack on the underground train, the narrator is taken to hospital in an unconscious state. His journey in the ambulance is narrated entirely from the disembodied, floating perspective established during the assault as the narrator continues to watch his body remotely as it is transported to hospital. He then relates a series of what he calls ‘snapshots’: several disjointed scenes (such as the girl from the train visiting him, a nurse trying to wake him) pieced together from brief wakings from his comatose state. When the narrator wakes fully, he is being tended by a nurse. He reports being discharged from the hospital the next evening and returning home. However, after removing his blood-soaked bandages in his bathroom, he begins to feel distressed and turns up on the doorstep of some close friends in the middle of the night with no memory of how he arrived there. His conversation with his friends does little to calm him, as one of them suggests that he may have suffered brain damage during the attack: The implications of my condition began to explode. It occurred to me suddenly that for all I knew, I already had a wife and family and I had hallucinated myself into a state where they didn’t exist. I cursed myself for having left my wallet at home. I could have checked it for passport-sized photos or crayon drawings of houses with smiling stick figures standing outside. In fact, the implications were almost limitless. If I couldn’t differentiate between hallucination and reality, it was hard to conceive of anything certain I could use to define myself. I might be a different age from the age I believed I was, or a different gender. I might not be walking down a street, but standing in a field, or lying in a room. (Garland 2004: 57–8) The narrator takes his friend’s suggestion very seriously and begins to hypothesise about what might be happening to him. As he does this, he creates numerous enactor-accessible epistemic modal-worlds, embedded within the epistemic modal-world which forms the basis of his focalised narration. In the extract above, the narrator generates a total of seven remote situations, from the possibility that he has a wife and children to the possibility that he is not walking down a street but lying in a room. The truth and reliability of each of these embedded modal-worlds is unverifiable by the reader of the text. Because the narrator himself provides the only access to the world-building and function-advancing components of the discourse, no other information is available to help the reader discern what is real and what is not in the text-world of The Coma.
Garland’s text plays deliberate tricks on its readers, manipulating their subconscious processing habits for a particular literary effect. No indication is given at the beginning of the novel that the reader should not trust the narrator and should not process the information he provides as though it were a participant-accessible text-world. As the story continues, doubts about the narrator’s reliability as a focaliser are increasingly raised, for example in the sequence of speculations examined above. However, it is not until half-way through the book that the instability of the enactor-accessible, and thus unverifiable, worlds created by the fixed focalised narration is exposed in full. In the following scene, the narrator returns to the hospital in which he was first treated to report his recent disturbances of mind and seek help with his consequent anxiety. He is met by a nurse: At the far end, at the final door, which was closed, the nurse turned. ‘This is your room,’ he said. ‘I’ll be staying here?’ I asked. ‘You are staying here,’ the nurse replied, and indicated for me to enter. This is the way it is with dreams. One moment I was opening the door to the ward room, and seeing myself lying on the bed. I was lying on the bed. The bruises I thought had faded and gone were covering my head and shoulders. My eyes were purple and yellow and puffed shut, and my lips were split. A support collar was fastened around my neck. On the table, the flowers that had been left for me were starting to wilt. One of the heads had fallen and looked as if it had hit my pillow before rolling down to the floor. A spray of orange pollen showed where it had landed. The next moment, I was lying on the bed. I was lying on the bed, and the nurse was walking across the room towards me. He sat on the edge of the mattress. ‘Carl,’ he said. ‘Can you hear me?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, and my mouth didn’t move. (Garland 2004: 75–8) Here, we finally learn that the narrator never woke from his coma and that the preceding seventy pages between the attack on the train and the narrator’s return to the hospital have described a hallucination created by his unconscious mind. This realisation forces the reader of The Coma to undertake what is known in Text World Theory as world-repair. The fundamentally dynamic nature of every act of communication means that participants are continuously
: incrementing new information into their mental representations during the discourse process. As we have seen throughout this book, the structure and content of any given text-world or modal-world have the potential to shift and change at any moment. On occasion, the incrementation of new information into a world can misfire, with erroneous components being added to (or missed out of) a particular world as a result. Consider, for example, how many times you have mistakenly believed that a friend or relative is talking about one particular person, when in fact he or she is referring to someone completely different. This sort of misfire may be a consequence of a lack of concentration on the part of one of the participants, such that a word or phrase is misread or misheard. Lack of clarity on the part of a speaker or writer can also lead to errors in the processing of discourse. Erroneous incrementation can continue or remain in place in a world for as little as a few words or for as long as an entire discourse. However, when a mistake in world-building or function-advancing is detected by the reader or hearer, action is normally taken to correct any inconsistencies or illogicalities which may have arisen in his or her conceptualisation of the discourse as a result. In face-to-face communication, hearers will often question their co-participant once an error is realised, seeking further information or clarification in order to repair the relevant mental representation. In split discourse-worlds, a rereading of the text is possible. In all discourse types, the reader/hearer in the communicative situation concerned may also be able to repair a world without having to pause or retry the discourse process. In the case of Garland’s novel, the world-repair necessary to correct a mistaken conceptualisation of the focaliser as a reliable source of information presents a considerable undertaking for the reader. Almost half the novel is revealed to have been a figment of a damaged mind, throwing into doubt not only the accuracy of the account which precedes the revelation of the narrator’s still comatose state, but also his reliability as a focaliser of the rest of the novel to come. The damage caused to the reader’s mental representation of the novel may be so extensive, in fact, that world-replacement may be necessary before the discourse process can continue. In my own reading of The Coma, I found myself unable to trust any of the information provided by the narrator from the scene in the hospital room onwards and was waiting for further false awakenings to become evident throughout the final chapters of the book. The revelation that the narrator had been unconscious throughout most of the first half of the text was so dramatic that I was forced to rethink my conceptualisation of the novel entirely. This rethinking involved not so much a repair of existing worlds, but their complete abandonment in favour of a new reading and new worlds: The Coma was not a novel about a man recovering from a violent assault, but one about his ongoing mental deterioration as a result of that assault; a psychological and philosophical reflection, rather than a dramatic thriller.
As already noted, Garland takes advantage of readers’ processing habits in order to achieve a deliberate narrative deception. Such twists in plot are by no means rare in literary fiction and, in fact, form the very basis of most detective novels and thrillers. For many readers, world-repair and world-replacement form a major part of their enjoyment of a text. The manipulation of narrative for particular effects is also by no means restricted to literary discourse alone. Plots twists, surprise revelations, jokes, games and many other forms of narrative deception are a central constituent of much of our everyday linguistic creativity.
F U RT H E R I N V E S T I G AT I O N
• Here is an example of everyday linguistic creativity: A duck goes into a pub, waddles up to the bar and says to the barman, ‘I’ll have a pint of bitter, please.’ ‘Certainly, sir,’ says the barman, serves the duck and stands there staring at him. ‘What are you staring at?’ asks the duck. ‘Sorry mate,’ says the barman, ‘I’ve never seen a talking duck before. Where did you come from?’ ‘I work on the building site over the road,’ says the duck. ‘A building site?’ says the barman, ‘Never mind a building site, you should be in the circus with a talent like that.’ ‘What’s a circus?’ asks the duck. ‘Well, it’s a big travelling show,’ explains the barman, ‘with clowns and acrobats and performing animals.’ ‘Never heard of it,’ says the duck. ‘There’s one just down the road,’ says the barman, ‘They’ve got a big top, you can’t miss it.’ ‘What’s a big top?’ asks the duck. ‘Well, that’s where the circus is held,’ says the barman, ‘It’s a great big tent, made out of canvas. You should go along and see the circus master. He’ll love you.’ ‘The circus master? In a tent? Made out of canvas?’ exclaims the duck, ‘What will he want with a plasterer?’ Try to explain, in Text World Theory terms, how the humour of this joke operates. Track your own construction of a text-world for the joke. Use text-world diagrams, if you find it helpful. Can you identify any points of dramatic change in your mental representation of the narrative? Can Text World Theory help explain what happens at these points?
: • Have a look at another joke: An Irishman working on a building site has borne the brunt of his workmates’ jokes about the stupidity of the Irish for weeks. One morning he arrives at work and one of the other builders remarks, ‘Michael, you’re so thick I bet you don’t know the difference between a joist and a girder.’ ‘Sure now,’ says Michael, ‘didn’t Goethe write Faust and Joyce wrote Ulysses?’ Is the humour of this joke operating in the same way as it was in the previous example? If you think that different conceptual processes are at work, can you explain what their key differences are? Think about the following questions too: Who is the narrator of the joke? Who is the focaliser? Do these roles remain the same throughout the text? Consider the context of performance for this joke. In other words, do the narratorial roles remain the same if someone tells a joke as they are when someone reads a joke? Can this be accounted for within a Text World Theory framework? What other kinds of discourse-world factors do you think might influence the mental representation of this and other narratives?
F U RT H E R R E A D I N G
The discussion presented in this chapter of different types of focalisation, as well as of the differences between homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narration, is based on Genette’s (1980) categorisations and analysis of narrative fiction. Other examples of key texts in narrative theory and narratology include Bal (1997 and 2004), Fludernik (1983), Rimmon-Kenan (1993), Toolan (2001). Simpson (1993) provides a useful introduction to Genette’s work as part of his own formulation of a modal grammar of point of view in narrative, drawing also on Fowler (1986). Leech and Short (1981) remains one of the most comprehensive and influential accounts of Free Indirect Discourse, and of the representation of speech and thought in literature in general. A more recent updating of this work, based on the analysis of a broad corpus of discourse types, can be found in Semino and Short (2005). The notion of the implied author is discussed extensively in Booth (1961). Other key considerations of authorial implication include Chatman (1978 and 1990), Eco (1981), and Iser (1974 and 1978). The term ‘empty text-worlds’ was devised by Lahey (2005). The notions of world-repair and world-replacement are borrowed directly from Emmott’s (1997) categories of ‘frame-repair’ and ‘frame-replacement’. For further
applications of these notions to literary texts see Emmott (2003b), Ryder (2003) and Stockwell (2000: 139–68). The terms ‘world-repair’ and ‘worldreplacement’ were first introduced to the Text World Theory framework in Gavins (2000 and 2001). Charolles (1983 and 1989) provides an extensive consideration of what he terms ‘garden-path narratives’. Anyone interested in the cognition of humorous discourse should refer to Attardo (1994 and 2001) and to Simpson (2003).
Double-vision
KEY ISSUES IN THIS CHAPTER
This is the final chapter in this book to explain a specific aspect of the Text World Theory framework, before Chapter 10 moves on to explore some of the directions the text-world approach to discourse study as a whole might take in the future. The discussion in the present chapter concerns the conceptualisation of a particular linguistic and cognitive phenomenon: metaphor. Metaphor has received an enormous amount of attention from cognitive linguists and psychologists in recent years. Indeed, a new understanding of the conceptual properties of metaphor was the main driving force behind the cognitive revolution in linguistics from the 1980s onwards. This chapter begins with a summary of some of the most recent theories of metaphor to emerge from Cognitive Linguistics, alongside some typical single-sentence examples of how metaphor is processed in the mind. However, Text World Theory’s encompassing and discourse-focused approach means that the extension of metaphor through longer texts, and sometimes throughout entire discourses, is of greater interest to textworld theorists. This phenomenon is examined in the later sections of the chapter. Poetry provides some obvious and useful examples on which to base an initial discussion of metaphor, though both literary and non-literary texts are analysed here. The chapter also includes an exploration of metaphorical constructions in non-literary discourse, and a range of examples of the same sort of lonely-hearts advertisements with which this book opened is examined.
U N D E R S TA N D I N G M E TA P H O R
In order to explain the basic conceptual processes at work in metaphorical constructions, cognitive linguists often begin with a simple, single-sentence example. This is a productive approach, since the complexities of metaphorical
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processing can quickly escalate as soon as the analyst’s focus broadens from this point. Consider, then, the following sentence: Fauconnier and Turner build a convincing case for the singular nature of human thought. – WIRED This comment appears at the top of the front cover of an important recent work in the discipline of Cognitive Linguistics, The Way We Think, by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner (2002). Like most of the ‘blurb’ written for academic texts, it summarises the main achievements of the book concerned in an eye-catching and positive way, making the source’s opinion of the text quickly apparent to the reader. Part of its strategy for achieving this is the use of a metaphor, which in this case is quite a subtle one. Did you notice it? The blurb is actually commenting on the overall cohesion and strength of the theoretical argument presented by Fauconnier and Turner. However, it does not explicitly refer to the process of writing, arguing, or explaining: rather, ‘Fauconnier and Turner build a convincing case’. As already explained briefly in Chapter 1, one of the central advances in the cognitive revolution of the late twentieth century came with the realisation that supposedly ‘dead’ metaphors, such as this one, actually provide evidence of the complex conceptual processes which underlie all human understanding. In early Cognitive Linguistics, it was argued that aspects of a familiar and imageschematic source domain, such as CONSTRUCTION in the example above, are mapped onto an abstract and unfamiliar target domain, such as ARGUMENT, in order that the target be better understood. More recently, these initial and hugely influential insights have been developed in more detail into a theory of conceptual integration. What this new approach adds to existing theories of conceptual metaphor is an understanding of how the separate source and target domains merge together in a metaphorical mapping to form an integrated conceptual blend with a structure and meaning of its own. Look again at the blurb from Fauconnier and Turner’s book. In this example, the familiar source domain has already been identified as CONSTRUCTION and the unfamiliar target domain as ARGUMENT. In conceptual integration terms, these domains are described as two input spaces. In one input space are Fauconnier and Turner as cognitive theorists, engaged in what to many people seems an abstract and opaque academic practice: formulating a complex theory. In the other input space, Fauconnier and Turner are builders, participating in the much more physical and practical activity of construction. When processing the metaphor, we make use of our existing personal and cultural knowledge of both of these activities. Consider your own mental representations of the process of writing an academic text on the one hand, and the process of building something on the other hand. In your input space for the formulation of a theoretical argument, you may envisage the academics responsible at a
: computer, or writing by hand at a desk, or in a library, or in some other suitable environment. In your input space for construction, you may have an image of someone wearing protective clothing, carrying tools of some description, on a building site, or in your home. You may also be imagining a particular kind of construction, such as brick-laying, plastering or roofing. When considered together in the context of the metaphor, the connections between certain elements of both spaces become apparent. For example, Fauconnier and Turner exist as central figures in both spaces, although the activities they are engaged in differ. Academics and builders also both make use of tools in their everyday lives: a book, a pen, or a computer for the former; a spade, a spirit-level, or a hammer for the latter. Both are also creative, producing a tangible product (a book, a house) at the end of their activities where once there was nothing. The fundamentally text-driven nature of discourse means that the points of commonality between the two mental representations are indicated by the text and, more importantly, by its surrounding context. The text also specifies which aspects of their background knowledge the discourse participants will need to access in order to make sense of the metaphor. Once these connections have been made, understanding the metaphor becomes a process of blending: the two spaces feeding into the metaphor merge together, rather than one space simply mapping on top of another. As a result of this blending process, a new space is formed independently of the spaces which have led to its generation. This new blended space has its own emergent structure and contains elements which do not exist in either of the input spaces. It has the potential to become a complex mental representation autonomously from its originating inputs. In the example of the blurb for The Way We Think, the blended space which emerges from the combination of the ARGUMENT space and the CONSTRUCTION space is a complex mental representation of Fauconnier and Turner formulating their theory. In the blend, the authors exist as builder-academics; writers attributed with characteristics which might normally be associated with construction workers. Specifically, the metaphor endows Fauconnier and Turner with great practicality and suggests that they take a matter-of-fact approach to what would otherwise remain obscure theoretical issues. The text of The Way We Think itself also benefits from this association in the blend: the metaphor suggests both accessibility and sturdiness and the book is consequently represented as containing an easy to follow yet robust argument. None of these details exists in either the CONSTRUCTION input space or the ARGUMENT input space. They are peculiar to the blend alone and only come into being as a result of the merger of the two input spaces in the relevant discourse-world context. The formulation of a coherent theory of conceptual integration in Cognitive Linguistics has been of enormous benefit to the development of Text World Theory. As already explained in Chapter 1, the text-world framework has always
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had a close relationship with contemporary theories of conceptual metaphor, mental spaces and conceptual integration, drawing influence from each of these and many other fields. In particular, the notion of metaphorical blending helps to explain how metaphors are processed in a different way from other discourse elements. An added layer to the conceptual hierarchy, the blended space, comes into being whenever a metaphor occurs in a given text. To maintain the consistency of the WORLD metaphor, this is simply referred to as a blended world in Text World Theory terminology. Blended worlds occur in discourse as the result of the conceptual merger of two otherwise independent text-worlds. Blended worlds exist at the same conceptual level as the text-worlds (or the epistemic modal-worlds acting as text-worlds in the case of fictional narrative – see Chapter 8) from which they originate. They are separate but concurrent mental representations. That is to say that while blended worlds have their own structure – their own world-building and function-advancing components – they maintain a direct connection with the world in which they are constructed. For example, when we conceptualise Fauconnier and Turner as builderacademics in their blended world, we do so within the context of the book cover from which this metaphor emerged, in order to understand what is being communicated to us about this text in the discourse-world. The communicative context, the discourse-world, which surrounds the production and reception of a metaphor remains of paramount importance in its processing. Blended worlds are not separate discourses, only separate mental representations. They create an added layer of detail to an existing conceptualisation, they do not replace that conceptualisation entirely. Crucially, the particular input world in which a given metaphor occurs, and from which the resultant blended world emerges, retains its prominence in the discourse process as a whole. To use the terminology of earlier cognitive-linguistic theories, the originating textworld is still the target world in the discourse: the metaphor has been created in order to facilitate a better understanding of this target, which remains the central point of reference for the discourse-world participants. The notion of conceptual prominence is explored in further detail later in this chapter.
E X T E N D E D M E TA P H O R
With the basic mechanisms of conceptual blending explained, we can now turn our attention to more lengthy examples of metaphor in discourse and explore them from a Text World Theory perspective. As already noted above, the complexities of conceptual integration soon multiply when extended texts become the focus of analysis. Consider this example of metaphor in discourse: What is our life? A play of passion, Our mirth the music of division;
: Our mothers’ wombs the tiring-houses be, Where we are dressed for this short comedy; Heaven the judicious, sharp spectator is, That sits and marks still who doth act amiss; Our graves that hide us from the searching sun Are like drawn curtains when the play is done. Thus march we, playing, to our latest rest; Only we die in earnest, that’s no jest. (Sir Walter Raleigh, 1612) Poetic texts often develop a particular metaphor through long stretches of text and sometimes even through the entirety of the discourse. Raleigh’s use of the LIFE IS A THEATRE metaphor in this famous poem is a typical example of this kind of extension. The whole poem is an exploration of the connections between the human experience of LIFE and that of THEATRE, a conceptual metaphor which Raleigh dissects into smaller constituent parts following its initial statement in the opening line: ‘What is our life? A play of passion’. As the poem begins, a participant-accessible text-world is created containing an enactor of Raleigh, his poetic persona. An enactor of the reader is also present in this text-world, nominated by the inclusive personal and possessive pronouns ‘we’ and ‘our’, which are repeated throughout the text to signal concerns and experiences shared by both reader and author (for example, ‘our life’, ‘Our mothers’ wombs’, ‘Our graves’, ‘march we’, ‘we die’, and so on). As with many of the other written texts examined in the preceding chapters of this book, the re-creation of a face-to-face situation at the text-world level here acts to diminish the distance between the discourse participants, minimizing the spatio-temporal split in their discourse-world. As already noted, Raleigh specifies in the opening line which aspect of the text-world the poem is seeking to illuminate: the abstract notion of LIFE. Over the next seven lines, he highlights a number of individual facets of LIFE and blends them, one by one, with a range of different aspects of the theatre: happiness, pregnancy, God and death are each framed in terms of music, dressing rooms, the audience, and stage curtains respectively. For example, the second line of the poem (‘Our mirth the music of division’) has a HAPPINESS IS MUSIC conceptual metaphor underlying it. Here, Raleigh selects the notion of human happiness from within the text-world he shares with an enactor of the reader and blends it with a separate mental representation of MUSIC. The MUSIC component of the metaphor is conceptualised in a separate but concurrent text-world, formed, just like any other text-world, from a combination of textual information and the reader’s background knowledge. However, the processing of the metaphor does not end here. Once the two separate text-worlds are established, a blended world then emerges in which aspects of each text-world are combined to form a new mental representation with its own emergent structure. In my own
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conceptualisation of the poem, the blended world realises connections between music and laughter in particular. Its structure is further informed by my knowledge that ‘the music of division’ referred in the Renaissance to a rapid melodic passage, originally conceived of as the break-down of lengthy notes into a series of shorter ones. The blended world thus comments expressly on both the brevity of existence and the transitory nature of happiness, neither of which exists in the two text-worlds which originally fed into this blend. Similarly, the third and fourth lines (‘Our mothers’ wombs the tiring-houses be; Where we are dressed for this short comedy’) are based on a metaphor common in literature of THE FEMALE BODY IS A ROOM. ‘Tiring-houses’ in the seventeenth century, as the co-text explains to some extent, were theatrical dressing rooms where actors would be ‘attired’ for their performance. Lines three and four in the poem, then, establish another separate text-world in which such a dressing room can be conceptualised. As this world feeds into the established and developing LIFE IS A THEATRE blended world, a notion of theatre as pretence, and also of everyday life as pretence, is added to the discourse. New text-worlds continue to be created and fed into the blended world throughout the poem, as individual micro-metaphors single out the precise aspects of the theatre to be blended with particular characteristics of human life-experience, in a process which is essentially text-driven. Each of these micro-metaphors contributes to the developing complexity of the blended world, the emergent structure of which continues to run to the point where an overarching megametaphor can be identified operating across the text. In Raleigh’s poem, it is this LIFE IS A THEATRE megametaphor, constructed in the blended world, not the text’s component micro-metaphors, which extends through the entirety of the discourse and allows the intricacy of the poem to be fully realised. Crucially, this extended blended world exists not as a simple mapping of one domain onto another, but rather as a steadily evolving, complex and autonomous mental representation. From the apparently cheerful declaration which opens the poem, and the connotations of entertainment and merriment it brings with it, the gradual assembly of a multifaceted blended world allows far darker and pessimistic undertones to emerge in the text. In the blended world, human beings become actors, who are prepared for their roles in life by their parents and particularly by their mothers. Emotions, and human behaviour more broadly, are presented in the blend as attire, as costume, suggesting that pretence and falsehood underpin much of our everyday interactions. By the end of the fourth line of the poem, the ‘play of passion’ has transformed into a ‘short comedy’, which in the Renaissance, of course, was a genre in which deception was as typical as a happy resolution. Raleigh’s bleak assessment of his deceitful fellow human beings is corroborated in the fifth and sixth lines by the presence of God as a ‘sharp spectator’, sitting in similarly grim judgement
: on the unconvincing actors. By the final four lines, the true despondency of Raleigh’s text becomes apparent, as death and final judgement are presented as closing curtains on the brief and frivolous play depicted in the preceding lines of the poem. In contrast with the rest of LIFE, death is ‘no jest’ and is the only event which happens ‘in earnest’. Broadening the focus of analysis beyond the sentence-level phenomena of the micro-metaphors contained in the text to the examination of the discourselevel phenomenon of extended megametaphor allows the true sophistication of the emergent structure of the blended world to be uncovered. Raleigh’s poem contains a far gloomier message than many of its component micro-metaphors might at first identification suggest. Only an understanding of how our conceptualisation of these metaphors contributes to an extended blended world can reveal the inclusion of far darker aspects of theatre (pretence, frivolity, finality) in Raleigh’s overarching metaphor. It is noteworthy that Raleigh wrote this poem while imprisoned in the Tower of London, awaiting his execution in 1618. The micro-metaphor he uses for death as closing theatre curtains, which in my own image-schematic mental representation follow a downwardswooping trajectory, has particular historical resonance when one considers that Raleigh was beheaded. Following execution, Raleigh’s head was embalmed and presented to his wife. This was common practice in the seventeenth century and she carried it with her at all times until her own death twenty-nine years later.
U N D E R S TA N D I N G D O U B L E - V I S I O N
In order to understand the position that metaphors and their resultant blends take in the discourse as a whole, it is helpful to think about the processing of a blended world, whether it relates to a micro-metaphor or an extended megametaphor, as a kind of conceptual double-vision. Whenever a metaphor occurs in a discourse, our mental representation of the text in which the metaphor was generated continues and normally remains the prominent focus of our attention. This world, plus any further text-worlds created by the metaphor, feed into the blending process. As a result of that process, a concurrent blended world comes into being at the same level as the originating textworlds. The participants in the discourse-world are able to manage all these mental representations simultaneously, toggling between the worlds if necessary. For example, have a look at the following discourse: Shipwrecked and gorgeous blonde is lonely on celebrity island without a n/s, 54–64, resourceful Robinson Crusoe. Must enjoy sunsets and rum punch. Central Mids. (Daily Telegraph, 6 February 2004)
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This advertisement was placed in the lonely-hearts column of the British national broadsheet newspaper, the Daily Telegraph. These sorts of advertisements are common across the UK. Many local, national, broadsheet and tabloid newspapers of all political positions carry regular lonely-hearts columns in which readers can advertise themselves and their personal needs and wishes. In fact, lonely-hearts columns have such a long history in the UK that the adverts they contain have over time developed their own set of abbreviations and other communicative conventions which are particular to their genre of discourse. These conventions have arisen, at least in part, as a result of economic factors: advertisers are normally charged per word and many newspapers impose a maximum word or character limit. With space at a premium, abbreviations such as ‘WLTM’ are used instead of ‘Would Like To Meet’, ‘n/s’ in place of ‘non-smoking’, ‘r/ship’ for ‘relationship’, and so on. The common purpose shared by the authors of these texts (to find another human being with whom to have a personal relationship of some kind) also determines the inclusion of certain key information. As already noted in Chapter 1, this information normally incorporates the advertiser’s age, gender, geographical location and contact details, along with an outline of the characteristics of his or her ideal mate. The lonely-hearts columns themselves often contain many dozens of advertisements and, consequently, a range of attention-grabbing techniques is employed by individual authors in an attempt to make their advertisement stand out amongst the multitude of others appearing on the same page. One of the most common of these techniques is metaphor, which enables advertisers to communicate a wealth of information within a limited number of words. As we saw at the beginning of this book, lonely-hearts advertisements are excellent examples on which to base a text-world analysis not only because of the metaphorical structures they often contain, but because they constitute an entire discourse in a manageable few lines of text. Consider the example above again. This advertisement is twenty-five words in length. A substantial proportion of it describes its author’s real-life situation to the reader. It contains basic information with which a mental representation of the advertiser and her spatio-temporal location can be constructed by her co-participant in the other half of the split discourse-world. The text specifies that the writer here is female, blonde and situated in the Central Midlands. The main function-advancing proposition in this text-world, and those of most other lonely-hearts advertisements, is the search for a partner in which the author is engaged in her real world. In the text above, this is communicated through the verb phrase ‘is lonely’, although other advertisements often use the verb ‘seek’ in various forms to express the same situation. Further details about the advertiser can be inferred from her specifications about the partner she is seeking, whom she requests should be non-smoking, aged 54–64, and resourceful. Readers of the text may assume that these stated needs are reflective of
: similar characteristics in the author, or perhaps a lack of them for which she wishes her mate to compensate. Both the specified and inferred information about the author’s basic details and those of her ideal partner can be seen to form the essential world-building component of the initial text-world for this discourse. From these discourse elements alone, readers are able to create a clear mental picture of a particular human being with particular needs and wishes. Of course, the inferencing process in lonely-hearts advertisements often extends far beyond the fleshing-out of basic world-building elements through information contained within the text. Frequently of far greater influence in the processing of these discourses is the reader’s personal and cultural background knowledge outside of the text. With only a very limited number of words available upon which to base a mental representation, a considerable amount of additional detail is supplied through the reader’s knowledge frames. For example, as a UK citizen and former resident of the Central Midlands, I have substantial previous experience of this area of the country and its people, which informs my mental representation of this particular lonely-heart to a great extent. You, on the other hand, may never have been to the Central Midlands, or even have seen it on a map. If this is the case, then it may help you to know that the Central Midlands of England has a long and distinguished history as the centre of the British Industrial Revolution. This also means that its population is often thought of within a working-class stereotype by people from elsewhere in UK. My own personal memories of living in this area of England are dominated by a recollection of the self-effacing humour of its inhabitants. The wider culture to which I belong holds a further stereotype for blonde women as glamorous and attractive, but also rather stupid. Despite my personal objections to this kind of sexist labelling, the advertiser’s choice to include this information in her text leads me to believe that she does not herself object to it and in fact regards her blondeness (along with its accompanying stereotypical associations) as one of her most positive features. In general, then, the mental representation I have of the advertiser, based on a combination of the world-building information she provides in the text plus my own background knowledge, is one of a glamorous, but distinctly prefeminist, working-class but aspirational woman, aged about 50, with a selfdeprecating sense of humour. However, adding the most inferential detail to the text-world of this lonely-hearts advertisement are the metaphors around which it is based. Alongside the text-world representation of a real-world situation, containing a blonde, Central Midlands female without a mate, a concurrent blended world develops from the use of a series of ‘marooned’ micro-metaphors in the advertisement: ‘shipwrecked’, ‘celebrity island’, ‘Robinson Crusoe’, ‘sunsets’, and ‘rum punch’. These textual elements share an obvious broad semantic connection, but are drawn from a number of different sources and carry contrasting connotations.
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Being ‘shipwrecked’, for example, would not normally be considered a positive thing, the process itself usually involving destruction and human suffering. There seems to be a clear indication being given here that the author is unhappy or damaged in some way at the time of writing the advertisement. The use of ‘celebrity island’ as a descriptor of location, on the other hand, carries far more positive connotations and is a reference to a recent television programme which has been highly popular in the UK, in which a group of minor celebrities volunteer to live together on a remote and beautiful island somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. They are encouraged by the programme’s producers, through the completion of certain tasks and games, to form intimate relationships with one another, the details of which are broadcast to the viewing public in the nowfamiliar ‘reality-TV’ format. The advertiser’s references to ‘sunsets’ and ‘rum punch’ add to the accumulating sense of glamour in the text, suggesting expensive holidays in the Caribbean rather than violent shipwreck. ‘Robinson Crusoe’ is, of course, the most famous of all shipwrecked literary figures. His inclusion here seems to have two functions: firstly to emphasise the necessary resourcefulness of the wanted partner, and secondly to suggest that the author of the advertisement is a well-read and cultured individual. Just as in the Raleigh poem analysed in the previous section of this chapter, a number of separate text-worlds feed into the blending process in this text. First of all, the realistic reflection of the author’s discourse-world which forms the main text-world provides input about who she is, where she is, and what she is looking for. A shipwreck forms a second text-world, a Caribbean holiday a third, Robinson Crusoe a fourth, and so on. The blended world which results from the combination of all these conceptual spaces is a complex representation of the author as a glamorous celebrity, enjoying a holiday in her remote and beautiful island location (the industrial Central Midlands, remember!) with Robinson Crusoe as her partner. Crucially, however, the reader of the advertisement is able to conceptualise each of the originating text-worlds and the blended world simultaneously. The doublevision effect of metaphor (or rather multiple-vision effect, in this case) means that an understanding of the real-world situation of the author is retained, while the blended world of the metaphor adds complex detail to the mental representation of the discourse as a whole. This detail would otherwise have been impossible to include in such a limited number of words. The blended world does not replace the initial and prominent text-world, which remains the central point of reference throughout and enables the key function of the discourse to be realised. Rather, the blended world has a conceptual structure all of its own, feeding intricate inferential information into the processing of the entire text. The concurrency of the blended world alongside the text-world allows the reader to toggle between two mental representations, making conceptual use of both sets of information. This is particularly crucial if the humour of the
: advertisement is to be communicated effectively in the reader’s half of the split discourse-world. My earlier comments about the self-effacing wit of Central Midlanders were deliberately placed, since this stereotype influences my mental representation of the advertisement to a great extent. Because of my previous experiences of people from this area of the UK, I do not interpret the representation of a glamorous blonde on a celebrity island contained within the advertisement as a serious reflection of the author’s real-world situation at all. The selection of text-worlds for input into the blend here to me seems deliberately fantastic and far removed from the advertiser’s likely everyday life. My personal and cultural knowledge means that I read a heavy irony at the heart of this text, which is only apparent to me because of the double-vision afforded by the metaphors present. I am able to toggle between the text-worlds created in the advertisement. The first and most prominent of these is a realistic representation of a single woman in the Central Midlands searching for a partner and is greatly informed by my discourse-world knowledge of the landscape, climate, economy and population of this area of the UK. Alongside this is a fanciful blended world, a merger of various desert island scenes, plus input from the initial realistic text-world which also feeds into the blend. The simultaneous conceptualisation of both the realistic world and the blended world reveals the disparity between these two mental representations and allows, for me, the ironic humour of the text to emerge.
D O U B L E - V I S I O N A N D S E L F - I M P L I C AT I O N
The creation of a concurrent blended world can have an important further function in the discourse of lonely-hearts columns. When considering the conceptual structure and resulting effects of lonely-hearts advertisements, it is important to bear in mind their central purpose in the discourse-world. Here is another example: Stunning stallion seeks fragrant feisty filly for passionate stable r/ship. Tall, well-constructed, n/s, intellig damsels RSVP. Liverpool. (The Guardian, 9 July 2005) This advertisement was placed in The Guardian, again a British broadsheet newspaper, this time with a left-wing political agenda. It bears a number of resemblances to the advertisement by Old Cockerel, also placed in The Guardian, which opened this book. Chief amongst these is its use of an animal megametaphor which runs throughout its text. Here, the theme is equestrian. The advertiser describes himself as a ‘stunning stallion’ and his ideal mate as a ‘fragrant feisty filly’, while other elements in the text (‘stable’ and ‘wellconstructed’) extend the metaphor further through the discourse.
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The choice of ‘fragrant’ as a pre-modifier for ‘filly’ carries certain connotations for a UK readership and for readers of The Guardian in particular. Specifically, this adjective was famously used in 2001 by a High Court judge, Mr Justice Caulfield, to describe Lady Mary Archer during his summing up of a case which ended in the gaoling of Lady Archer’s husband, the disgraced Conservative Member of Parliament and thriller writer, Lord Jeffrey Archer, for perjury. The Archers continue to be a favourite easy target for satirists across the UK media and are loathed and derided in equal measure by many left-wing journalists, politicians and intellectuals in this country to this day. Used in the context of a lonely-hearts advertisement in a left-wing newspaper, then, ‘fragrant’ suggests either that the author is signalling his membership of the same upper-class to which the Archers belong, or that he has a keen political sense of humour, or perhaps both. The link between ‘fragrant’ and the Archer case is further emphasised by the later reference to women as ‘damsels’ in the advertisement. Lady Archer, despite her fragrance, nevertheless endured a number of alleged infidelities by her husband and was often portrayed as a suffering ‘damsel in distress’ by the British press during her time in the media spotlight. Just as in the ‘Shipwrecked and gorgeous’ advertisement, the presence of a megametaphor running throughout the text allows two mental representations to be established concurrently in the reader’s mind. The first of these, the prominent text-world, again relates to the real-world situation of the author, his details and his needs. However, there is less basic world-building information available in the Stunning Stallion’s advertisement than there was in the ‘Shipwrecked and gorgeous’ text upon which to base a text-world representation of the author’s discourse-world. The only deictic information explicitly supplied is the author’s geographical location in Liverpool. Again it is possible to infer from the co-text that the author is also non-smoking, since he requests this of his ideal mate. However, all other details about the author and his wishes must be inferred either from the reader’s discourse-world knowledge and from the metaphors present in the text. Figure 9.1 shows the conceptual structure of Stunning Stallion’s lonelyhearts advertisement. To the far left of the diagram, outlined in bold, is the prominent text-world in this discourse. This text-world contains an enactor of the author, located in Liverpool on 9 July 2005, seeking a partner. This textworld realises the central function of the discourse, since it is the world which reflects the real-world situation of the author and communicates his need for a mate to the reader of the text. It is also the text-world which all the subsequent worlds created in the text serve to illuminate. As already noted, in the terminology of early Cognitive Linguistics, this world represents the target domain which a series of sources are used to explain. From within the prominent text-world four further worlds are created, relating to the four micro-metaphors contained in the advertisement. These are shown abbreviated as ‘met’ worlds in Figure 9.1, emerging from the prominent
met
met
stable
filly
stallion
damsels
MICRO-METAPHOR WORLD (participant-accessible)
MICRO-METAPHOR WORLD (participant-accessible)
future Liverpool-stable stallion-author → non-smoker, virile political, strong independent, upper-class damsel-filly-partner → tall, upper-class athletic, political non-smoker intelligent fragrant, feisty
MICRO-METAPHOR WORLD (participant-accessible)
time: location: enactors:
BLENDED WORLD (participant-accessible)
MICRO-METAPHOR WORLD (participant-accessible)
met
9 July 2005 Liverpool author → non-smoker ↓ seeks partner
Figure 9.1 Metaphor
met
time: location: enactors:
PROMINENT TEXT-WORLD (participant-accessible)
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text-world. The first of these worlds is established by the reference to a ‘Stunning stallion’, which produces a mental representation that is as richly detailed as a text-world in any other discourse might be. The conceptualisation of a male horse in this world will be based on the reader’s previous experiences of such animals and will include all the connotative detail associated with stallions in his or her cultural situation (for example, strength, virility, independence). The second micro-metaphor world is a mental representation of a ‘filly’, similarly enriched by details added from background knowledge. A third textworld relates to a ‘stable’, which is used as a pun in the advertisement to refer to the solidity of the relationship between the author and his future partner. This pun is made evident initially by the co-text, but in the communicative context of a lonely-hearts advertisement, ‘stable’ also refers to a horse’s shelter and feeds into the blended world in this sense. The presence in the blend of two separate mental representations for the same word is what allows the pun to operate. Finally, a micro-metaphor representing women as ‘damsels’ is used, which is not entirely unrelated to the horsey metaphors which have preceded it. Once again, the co-text and the context of the advertisement draw out associations of handsome princes, normally on horseback, rescuing maidens in legends and fairy-tales. The contents of this world, then, seem to support my earlier conjecture that the author of the text may belong, or may perhaps aspire to belong, to the upper classes. In describing women as damsels to be rescued, he seems to be implying that he fulfils the role of handsome prince in this text-world. Each of the individual micro-metaphors which emerge from the advertisement creates a mental representation which feeds into the blended world, shown to the immediate right of the prominent text-world in Figure 9.1. This input process is illustrated in the diagram by the block arrows. The blended world which develops in the text can be seen here to have an emergent structure all of its own. It is not a simple conglomeration of individual mental representations found elsewhere in the text, nor does it constitute the mapping of one mental representation onto another. The blended world has its own worldbuilding elements: its location is a blend of Liverpool and a horse’s stable, suggesting at once the liveliness and friendliness of the north-western English city and the warmth and basic surroundings of animal shelters. The enactors inhabiting this setting are a man-stallion and a woman-filly, each endowed with the attributes associated with both of the separate entities which have merged to form their blended representations. The enactor of the author in this world is a strong and independent man of great virility. His political awareness and social class are shared by the enactor of his mate, who is both athletic and intelligent. Interestingly, her fragrance in the blended world I create for this text seems also to take on a distinctly horsey tinge! Just as in the ‘Shipwrecked and gorgeous’ advertisement, the processing of the text does not end with the creation of the blended world. This world exists
: concurrently alongside the prominent text-world and, just as elements of the prominent text-world have fed into the blended world, so the blended world feeds information back into the prominent text-world. As an unfamiliar target, the prominent text-world is enriched and progresses as a consequence of its reciprocal relationship with the blended world. Our understanding of the author and his needs is enhanced through his metaphorical representations of himself and his ideal partner. Notice that all the worlds created in this discourse are participant-accessible, since they are creations of one of the participants in the discourse-world and function to communicate the nature of his environment and state of mind. (Blended worlds can be either participant- or enactoraccessible, depending on which entity is responsible for the production of the metaphor concerned.) However, once again, the blended world is not a realistic depiction of the discourse-world situation of the author. It is a fanciful and humorous creation which exists within autonomous world-boundaries. Most importantly, as shown in Figure 9.1, the blended world does not have the same temporal co-ordinates as the prominent text-world. Where the prominent textworld shares the same time-zone as the author’s half of the split discourseworld, the blended world is a construct belonging to a future time-zone. Not only does it contain fantastical and rather preposterous blended enactors, but it describes their union in a future and unrealised point in time. The creation of a blended world which is remote in this way is a common and often essential component of many lonely-hearts advertisements. Here is a final example of this kind of conceptual structure: Recycled tom cat seeks slim recycled sex kitten, 40–45, to share cat flap, milk, cat basket & purr-fect times. Must be genuine fun for r/ship. Loughborough/Leics. (The Guardian, 25 June 2005) The author of this advertisement has chosen to use an extended metaphor of cats to describe himself, his ideal mate and a potential future relationship between these text-world enactors. Again, a prominent text-world provides a reflection of the author’s discourse-world situation in this text: he is slim, probably aged 40–45, and is located somewhere near Loughborough, Leicestershire. These rather minimal world-building details feed into a blended world along with a series of micro-metaphors based on cats. The text produces further textworld representations of a tom cat, a kitten, a cat flap, milk and a cat basket, which exist separately but concurrently with the prominent text-world. Each of these elements blends with an element of a human sexual relationship to form a blended world, and the reader is able to toggle between all these mental representations in order to develop a more detailed understanding of the author’s half of the split discourse-world. The author also employs the less extensive metaphor of recycling as a euphemism for his age, his ideal partner’s age and, probably, their common divorced status.
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In the blended world of this advertisement, an enactor of the author is given a combination of characteristics drawn from the male of two species: cats and humans. The blended world’s emergent structure bestows him with the same independence and virility which Stunning Stallion’s metaphors granted him. The reference to a cat flap (which allows cats to come and go from their domestic environment as they please) further emphasises the author’s need for freedom. His ideal mate is a ‘sex kitten’, a common dead metaphor in English which presents women as sexually active and playful, yet also sweet and vulnerable. The unrealised sexual relationship between the tom-cat-author and his sex-kitten-partner takes place in a cat-basket bed in the blend, which suggests animalistic passion as a key factor in this union. The reference to ‘milk’ seems to counterbalance this and suggests a nurturing side to the relationship also. Just as in Stunning Stallion’s advertisement, the complex blended world which results from the extended combination of a series of different text-worlds feeds detail back into the prominent text-world, clarifying and expanding the minimalistic detail given explicitly about the author’s real-world. However, certain elements of the blended world remain unrealised and remote from the textworld representation of a real person with real needs and desires. This lonelyhearts advertisement, like all those examined in this book, describes both actual and non-actual situations and entities. Tom Cat’s ideal partner does not yet exist in his real-world, his ‘purr-fect times’ with her have not yet come into being, and his advertisement is entirely intended to rectify this situation. The futuristic and unrealised nature of the blended world plays an essential role in the discourse-world realisation of the central function of the text. It is, of course, crucial to remember that lonely-hearts advertisements are not aimed at text-world analysts but at other lonely-hearts reading lonely-hearts columns also in search of a mate. In order for these discourses to function, for the appeal for a partner to have a physical, real-world effect, the reader of the text must be able and willing to implicate himself or herself as an enactor in the future time-zone depicted in the text. In this way, lonely-hearts advertisements such as those examined in this chapter contain descriptions of both the participants in the discourse-world. The metaphors they contain enable the detailed depiction of the author of the text and the precise specification of an ideal reader. The author, of course, exists as an enactor in the text-world and as a participant in the discourse-world. The ideal reader, on the other hand, may not exist in any world other than the fictional and fanciful blend. In Tom Cat’s advertisement, then, only those elements of the blended world which relate to him and his real-world environment can be fed back into the textworld representation of this situation. All readers of his text will be able to transport an enactor of themselves into the blended world and to imagine an existence as his ideal sex kitten. However, only some of these readers (if any at all) will be willing or able to take this transportation to the next level of conceptual involvement and identify aspects of themselves in the text-worlds
: Tom Cat has created. Indeed, notice how the author emphasises the conditionality of the future world in which he and his ideal reader are united through the inclusion of a deontic modal-world in the text: ‘Must be genuine fun for r/ship’. His ideal sex kitten remains a remote possibility and is confined to the blended world until such a point when a successful act of selfimplication might collapse the boundaries between blended world and textworld and make Tom Cat’s ideal partner a concrete feature of his real-world.
F U RT H E R I N V E S T I G AT I O N
• Although conceptual metaphors have been found to underpin much of our understanding of our day-to-day existences, an argument persists in some areas of both literary criticism and stylistics that literary metaphor is somehow different, both structurally and conceptually, from non-literary metaphor. Have a look at the two separate extracts below. The first is taken from a review of Chilean red wine, the second is an extract of literary prose fiction. Dark Satinic Thrills to Make Santa Claus Blush with Delight: Two Staggeringly Toothsome Reds from Chile. Casa Lapostolle Classic Cabernet Sauvignon 2003. £8.49. 17 points. Not quite a 100% classic Cabernet but 100% classically delicious. The other grapes in the pot are Merlot (10%) and Malbec (5%) and though I would prefer these facts to be prominent on the label and so no grape took precedence, I cannot deny this wine’s superb character and polished style. It has a lovely dry berried richness, courtesy of blackberries, hint of cherry and plum, and it is young yet serious, seriously tannic yet smooth, highly textured yet sheer liquid satin. It is about as elegant as a wine calling itself Cabernet can be, highly drinkable yet able to withstand hours of scrutiny by the thoughtful drinker. ‘Dark Satinic Thrills’ might indeed be a better name for the wine altogether rather than ‘Classic Cabernet’, but with so deeply conservative a wine producer it is highly unlikely that such frivolity will appeal . . . Casa Lapostolle Classic Merlot 2004. £8.99. 16.5 points. No lies here. It is 100% Merlot and it truly is a classic. The fruit is plump yet lithe, richly nutty with a subtle leathery cherry/berry edge. The bottle I opened had an immediate sulphur undertone but this is easily dealt with by wholly decanting the wine for 90 minutes and giving it a good shake and leaving it to pull itself together. With exposure to air a finely attuned liquid shows itself, in the elegant house style of this producer, and for the money it is a bargain. What is the house style of Casa Lapostolle? Why are the wines such bargains? Because they have an incredible finesse, an
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haut couture cut, fine materials, delicate stitching, yet you get all this at something approaching Primark prices. (Gluck 2005) The dead squirrel you see in the driveway, dead and decapitated, turns out to be a strip of curled burlap, but you look at it, you walk past it, even so, with a mixed tinge of terror and pity. Because it was lonely. Because smoke rolled out of the hollows in the wooded hills and the ferns were burnt brown by time. There was a sternness of judgment in the barrens, shades of flamed earth under darkish skies, and in the boulders sea-strewn at the edge of the pine woods, an old stony temper, a rigor of oath-taking and obduracy. And because he’d said what he’d said, that she would be here in the end. (DeLillo 2002: 111) Can you identify any structural differences between the metaphors included in these two texts? What does a stylistic analysis reveal about them? Think about the syntactic structure, the register, the construction of a particular point of view. Now, try a text-world analysis: Describe the discourse-worlds, text-worlds and blended worlds contained in each text in as much detail as possible. Use text-world diagrams if you find they help your examination of the texts. Does your analysis reveal any conceptual differences between literary and non-literary metaphor? If so, at which level of the framework do these differences exist? Consider, in particular, whether our notions of literary and non-literary metaphor are identifiable features of the text-world or whether they might be a result of our reading practices in the discourse-world. • With the preceding question still in mind, try this experiment to see whether it is possible to force metaphorical reading practices in the discourse-world onto non-metaphorical text-world structures: Select a few examples of picture books for young children which have no obvious metaphorical content. Good examples to work with might be The Tiger Who Came To Tea by Judith Kerr (1968), The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson and Alex Scheffler (1999), Where’s My Teddy? by Jez Alborough (2001), Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy by Lynley Dodd (1985), or Green Eggs and Ham by Dr Seuss (1962). Construct readings of your chosen texts which are based on an interpretation of their contents as metaphors for some other abstract idea or theme. For example, The Tiger Who Came to Tea, read literally, is a book about a tiger who comes to call at a little girl’s house and has tea with the girl and her mother while the girl’s father is out at work. The tiger eats all the food in the house and leaves the house in state of extreme bad repair. When the
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little girl’s father returns home, he listens to his wife and daughter’s account of events and then takes the family out to eat instead. Read metaphorically, the tiger might represent the repressed emotions of the girl’s mother and her desire to break free from, and ultimately destroy, the patriarchal and domestic constraints which restrict her personal and political freedom. How convincing do you think your own metaphorical interpretations of the texts are? Are some of the stories more receptive to this treatment than others? Try presenting your readings to your colleagues and ask them to evaluate the persuasiveness of your argument for each text. Think, in particular, about how you constructed your metaphorical interpretations. Did you rely mainly on text-world elements to formulate your argument, or did you make use of your own discourse-world environment in some way? Did the pictures in the texts help or hinder your progress? Note how different your own adult and wilfully metaphorised reading would be from a child’s literal reading of the same text.
F U RT H E R R E A D I N G
There has been an overwhelming amount of work published on conceptual metaphor within the field of Cognitive Linguistics. Some of the key texts are Kittay (1987), Kövesces (1986, 1988, 1990 and 2001), Lakoff (1987 and 1992), Lakoff and Johnson (1980 and 1999), Lakoff and Turner (1989), Ortony (1993), Paprotté and Dirven (1985), Steen (1994), and Turner (1991 and 1996). The theory of conceptual integration brings together early ideas about conceptual metaphor and insights from Mental Space Theory (see Fauconnier 1994 and 1997). It is introduced in detail in Fauconnier and Turner (2002) and Coulson (2001). Further key works on blending and conceptual integration include Brandt (2005), Brandt and Brandt (2005), Coulson and Oakley (2005), Fauconnier and Turner (1999 and 2000), Gibbs (2000), Grady (2000 and 2005), Hutchins (2005), Rohrer (2005), and Sweetser (2000). The theory has also recently been applied in the analysis of literary texts in Dancygier (2006), Freeman (2006), Hamilton (2002), McAlister (2006), Semino (2006), Sweetser (2006), Tobin (2006) and Turner (2006a). A useful introduction to the applicability of theories of conceptual metaphor and conceptual blending to literary analysis can be found in Stockwell (2002: 104–33). The phenomenon of extended metaphor is examined in Werth (1994 and 1999: 317–29). The concept of ‘megametaphor’ is introduced in these publications and further explored in Gavins (2001), Gregoriou (2002) and Requejo (2003). The most thorough and therefore most useful work on literary metaphor from within the discipline of literary criticism continues to be Brooke-Rose (1958), while Goatly (1997) provides an indispensable introduction to the language of metaphors.
Futures
KEY ISSUES IN THIS CHAPTER
The dynamism of Text World Theory is already continuing beyond the pages of this book, with new applications to diverse discourses being readily undertaken by the next generation of text-world researchers. The version of Text World Theory which has been presented over the course of the preceding chapters is by no means conclusive or absolute. I have introduced the basic mechanics of the text-world framework and reported some of the results of my own journey of discovery so far, but that journey is in no way at an end. The directions in which the exploration of human mental representation will advance have yet to be determined; the final boundaries of Text World Theory have yet to be drawn. This chapter presents just some of the possibilities for the further refinement of the text-world approach. It raises a series of questions which have occurred to me during my own explorations of Text World Theory and offers suggestions for how these questions might be addressed in future work through the analysis of particular texts or types of text. Unlike those which have preceded it, this chapter does not contain separate Further investigation and Further reading sections. Instead, proposals for independent research are made throughout the coming sections and pointers to helpful texts are given as they become relevant.
OBSCURITY
The majority of the recent modifications which have been made to Text World Theory have resulted from the application of the model to examples of discourse which are challenging or atypical in some way. This is the case in the development of many other linguistic theories and frameworks, too. The improvement of a particular analytical approach is often most
: successfully achieved when the limits of that approach are tested in full and the perimeter of its applicability is established. In linguistic terms, this normally means ascertaining the types of discourse and situations of use in which a given theory or methodology can be productively employed, often through a process of elimination. This process is ongoing within Text World Theory. In Chapter 3 of this book, transcripts of some extracts from pPod, an audioguide to London’s public toilets, were analysed in order to demonstrate the means by which basic text-world representations of a speaker’s immediate environment are constructed in the minds of participants who are separated from that speaker in time and space. In the examples examined in Chapter 3, the speaker concerned took care to provide clear deictic details about his half of the split discourse-world, increasing the listener’s involvement in the scene through the use of the present tense in particular. The important worldbuilding role played by the listener’s existing knowledge of certain objects and places was also noted in this analysis. However, the mental representation of the toilets described in pPod does not present many challenges for anyone who has had a previous experience of a toilet of some kind. Although the guide is based in London, the text-drivenness of the discourse quickly makes apparent the fact that listeners do not need detailed knowledge about the UK capital in order to formulate a text-world of Leicester Square men’s toilets. The knowledge needed to construct and furnish the scene described by the guide is culturally based, but very broadly so. The world-building elements contained in the text (toilets, hand-driers, sinks, and so on) have meaning in a wide range of geographical and cultural locations across the globe. Here is another, contrasting example of a guide to a remote location: They say that Hernando de Lerma founded the city of Salta at its present location because he was moved by the beauty of the scenery before his eyes. The diaphanous air, the green hills and the deep, starry nights must have been as beautiful in 1582 as they are today. It is perhaps due to this fact that Salta is a land of poets and musicians like the Dávalos family, who get renewed with each generation. Jaime Dávalos, Artidorio Cresseri, Gustavo Leguizamón, Manuel Castilla and Los Chalchaleros have raised the zamba salteña to the rank of national, universal music, making some zambas immortal, like La Candelaria, where ‘the moon cries the death of the sun with silver slivers’, or Quebrada de San Lorenzo, where ‘the song of the chalchalero moistens the air of the siesta’, or La López Pereyra, or Balderrama, from which ‘the night goes out singing’, or Eulogia Tapia, ‘who lends her tenderness to the air.’ Salta is a crescent moon cut in half: to the east lie plains and forests, to the west the pre-Andean region and the Puna. The city of Salta is situated in a privileged spot. On top of his monument, Martín Miguel de Güemes
rides as in the days of Independence, defending the young nation. In the city, tradition is history, present and future. (Brandariz 2001: 111) This is an extract from a guide to Argentina and, in this particular section, the city of Salta is described for readers of the text. The guide is aimed at travellers who have not yet visited Argentina, or Salta, and will not have an existing mental representation of these locations upon which to base their conceptualisation of the scenes described. Of course, it is perfectly possible that an inhabitant of, or former visitor to, Salta may also be reading this text, but the relationship between the text and its intended audience poses far more interesting questions for the Text World Theory of the future. The text presents a scene which, just like those described in the pPod extracts, is remote in time and space from the reader, and many of the same communicative devices are used in order to facilitate text-world construction. Some deictic information about the spatial location of Salta is provided, for example in the description of ‘the green hills’ and the specification that ‘to the east lie plains and forests, to the west the pre-Andean region and the Puna’. However, many of the rest of the world-builders in the text are the names of people (for example, ‘Hernando de Lerma’, ‘Jaime Dávalos, Artidorio Cresseri, Gustavo Leguizamón, Manuel Castilla and Los Chalchaleros’, and so on), or the names of songs (for example, ‘La Candelaria’, ‘Quebrada de San Lorenzo’, and ‘Eulogia Tapia’), of which the reader may have no existing knowledge upon which to base their mental representation of the text. Of course, other texts have been examined during the course of this book which contain worldbuilding elements of which you may have no real-world experience (in Chapter 4, for example, few readers of this text will know what the Stevenage Borough football player, Dannie Bulman, looks like). However, the description of Salta above, particularly when one considers the informative purpose of the text in the discourse-world, seems to be being deliberately obscure and makes heavy use of culturally-specific references to communicate with a culturally-naive readership. Consider your own processing of the extract. Were you able to construct a text-world of Salta at all? If you were, how detailed was it? What does Hernando de Lerma look like in your mental representation of him? What colour are the houses in Salta? What does Quebrada de San Lorenzo sound like? How do you reach these conclusions? Most importantly, why do you think the author of this text has chosen to describe Salta in this way? It seems clear that a very different kind of world-building process is required for the conceptualisation of the Salta description than for the pPod guide and that the former of these presents greater challenges to our world-building capacities than the latter. The author of the Salta guide provides few deictic or relational details that can be straightforwardly mentally represented by anyone unfamiliar with the city and its surrounding area. Nevertheless, in my own reading of the text, I get a strong sense of Salta; a feeling for it even if I am unable to visualise it precisely. The
: central question raised by this text, then, is whether Text World Theory can account for the world-building effects of texts which are evocative of a certain scene, rather than fully explanatory? Such texts can have a powerful emotional effect on their readers, many of whom take pleasure in the mysteriousness and exoticism suggested by the obscurity of their description. Indeed, the Salta extract is a typical example of the kind of text found in many travel brochures, on the basis of which hundreds of people part with considerable amounts of their hard-earned money each year in order to travel to the unimaginable places about which they have only ever read in those magazines and brochures. So, can we be transported into and immersed in an obscure or semi-formed text-world to the same extent as we can in a fully-described one? How great can the disparity between the background knowledge of the participants be before it has a negative impact on their ability to communicate effectively? We saw in the sandwich shop exchange in Chapter 2 how mismatches in cultural and experiential knowledge can be minimised through continuing negotiation in a face-to-face discourse-world situation, but what about discourse-worlds of written texts? How can a lack of requisite knowledge be overcome in a split discourse-world? • An investigation of the conceptual effects of considerable differences in background knowledge in the discourse-world could be taken to an extreme with a consideration of the following text: Boundary Conditions for Infinite Potential Energy. If V(r) is infinite anywhere, the appropriate boundary condition can be established by a limiting process that starts from a finite V and the above continuity conditions. Suppose, for example that there is an infinite discontinuity in V across a continuous surface, so that the potential energy is finite on one side of it and + ∞ on the other, and we wish to determine the boundary conditions on u(r) and grad u at this surface. The essential features of the problem are retained if we replace the continuous surface by the plane that is tangent to it at the point of interest, and the continuously changing potential energy on one side of the surface by a constant potential, which can, without loss of generality, be chosen to be zero since any constant change in V is equivalent to an equal change in E. We choose the origin of coordinates at the point of interest and the x axis perpendicular to the tangent plane. (Schiff 1955: 29–30) I am assuming (although I may be wrong) that the majority of readers of Text World Theory: An Introduction have no expertise in quantum mechanics. If this is the case for you, think about the following questions: How did you construct a text-world representation of this extract from a quantum mechanics text book? Were you able to represent this text
mentally at all? Were some parts of the text easier to conceptualise than others? Make a note of which components of the text you were able to understand and which you were not. What knowledge does the author of this text assume readers already have? How important do you think it is for the reader of this text to match the author’s ideal? If the text-world approach to discourse study can give an explanation of the comprehension of language, can it also give an explanation of a lack of comprehension? Are the serious problems we often encounter in our everyday lives with conceptualisation and understanding as much within the remit of Text World Theory, and any other theory of discourse-processing for that matter, as our successful communications with one another? Whether you are able to produce a text-world for this extract or not, do you believe what the text tells you? For example, do you believe that ‘if V(r) is infinite anywhere, the appropriate boundary condition can be established by a limiting process that starts from a finite V and the above continuity conditions’? Think about your mental image of the author of this text in particular. If you perceive him to be an authoritative and reliable figure, why do you think this is so?
• Here is another obscure text, this time extracted from a review in the British musical press of a new album by the group, Muse: Muse are classic whipping boys for the Keeping It Real campaigners, having never written songs about bouncers, waiting for taxis or fancying girls on dancefloors. Why bother with, say, the shonky bits of Sheffield when you’ve got the entire cosmos to sing about? Take the first single. It’s the one with a daring electro shuffle, like Kylie grooving with a goth Prince. It’s called ‘Supermassive Black Hole’ and its the most serious and hilarious musical moment of the year. Muse may have been inspired to write this by dancing to Franz in New York clubs, but they’ve made a classic of their own; the sort that Marilyn Manson would make if he were half as subversive as he thought he was. It has, suffice to say, scared some of the fanboys who can happily talk about the multiple ways the world may end, but can’t quite stomach talk of singular lust. They do, however, grasp the, er, gravity, of this Supermassive Black Hole: Muse have changed. (NME 2006) Consider, once again, the discourse-world knowledge frames that the author of this text is assuming readers already have. How important are they in the processing of this text? Compare the text with that extracted from the quantum mechanics text book above. How reliable and authoritative do you perceive the author of the music review to be? Why do you think this is so?
: Consider the readers that both the quantum mechanics text and the music review construct. Can you imagine actual readers who are not these ‘ideal’ readers? Are you one of them?
R E S I S TA N C E
At various points throughout this book, texts written in the second person have been examined. These texts have included a car instruction manual, some extracts of literary prose fiction, a magazine advice column, and a political speech. In all of these discussions, the possibility has been briefly mentioned that the reader or hearer being addressed directly by the text concerned might have difficulty following the self-implication in the text-world that a secondperson address invites. In their experiences of other texts, too, readers and hearers are able to transport themselves into the text-world with varying degrees of success. In some texts, we feel a high level of empathy with the speaker or writer, or with one of the enactors in the text-world. In others, we feel alienated, unmoved or even offended. The extent to which participants in the discourse-world accept the content of a given text-world and choose to immerse themselves in it is becoming an expanding area of research within the fields of Cognitive Psychology and Cognitive Poetics (see Barnes and Thagard 1997; Gerrig and Rapp 2004; Kuiken et al. 2004; Kuiken, Miall and Sikora 2004; Larsen and Seilman 1988; and Oatley and Gholamain 1997). However, the integration of the discoveries made in these studies into Text World Theory is only just beginning (see Lahey 2005 and Stockwell 2005) and further work is needed. Specifically, the processes by which readers and hearers resist, as well as pursue, self-implication in a text-world warrants detailed investigation which has not been possible within the parameters of the present book. There are many occasions when the participants in a discourse-world, and particularly readers and hearers, experience discomfort or distaste in a language situation: when wrong assumptions about the personal beliefs and experiences of a participant are made and articulated in a discourse; when offensive or objectionable opinions are expressed; when a psychologically disturbing scene or action is described; when an opposing version of an event is put forward; and so on. How are our mental representations of the discourse affected in these situations? What happens when plentiful world-building and function-advancing information is available with which to construct a world, but that world contains scenes, opinions or actions which we do not wish to experience, witness or support? Can Text World Theory help us to account for participant resistance to world-building and self-implication in these cases? • Below is another political text. In great contrast to the speech by Neil Kinnock reproduced in Chapter 7, I find this text very uncomfortable to
read. It is a speech by the former Prime Minister of Great Britain, Lady Margaret Thatcher, delivered at the Conservative Party Conference in Bournemouth in October 1986. At this time, Thatcher was one year into her second term as Prime Minister and a year-long national miners’ strike had ended just nine months earlier. Thatcher’s government had also more recently been implicated in a major arms scandal and had faced heavy criticism for its support of the American bombing of Libya in April 1986. (Note that ‘Mr President’ is a formal address which refers here to the chairman of the conference and not to the US president.) Mr President, you may have noticed there are many people who just can’t bear good news. It’s a sort of infection of the spirit and there’s a lot of it about. In the eyes of these hand-wringing merchants of gloom and despondency, everything that Britain does is wrong. Any setback, however small, any little difficulty, however local, is seen as incontrovertible proof that the situation is hopeless. Their favourite word is ‘crisis’. It’s crisis when the price of oil goes up and a crisis when the price of oil comes down. It’s a crisis if you don’t build new roads, it’s a crisis when you do. It’s a crisis if Nissan does not come here, and it’s a crisis when it does. It’s being so cheerful as keeps ’em going. What a rotten time these people must have, running round running everything down. Especially when there’s so much to be proud of. Inflation at its lowest level for twenty years. The basic rate of tax at its lowest level for forty years. The number of strikes at their lowest level for fifty years. The great advances in science and industry. The achievement of millions of our people in creating new enterprises and new jobs. The outstanding performance of the arts and music and entertainment worlds. And the triumphs of our sportsmen and women. They all do Britain proud. And we are mighty proud of them. Our opponents, having lost the political argument, try another tack! They try to convey the impression that we don’t care. So let’s take a close look at those who make this charge. They’re the ones who supported and maintained Mr Scargill’s coal strike for a whole year, hoping to deprive industry, homes and pensioners of power, heat and light. They’re the ones who supported the strike in the Health Service which lengthened the waiting time for operations just when we were getting it down. They’re the ones who supported the teachers’ dispute which disrupted our children’s education. They are those Labour Councillors who constantly accuse the Police of provocation when they deal with violent crime and drugs in the worst areas of our inner cities. Mr President, we’re not going to take any lessons in caring from people with that sort of record. We care profoundly about the right of people to be protected against crime, hooliganism and the evil of drugs. The mugger, the rapist, the drug trafficker, the terrorist – all must suffer the full rigour of
: the law. And that’s why this Party and this Government consistently back the Police and the Courts of Law, in Britain and Northern Ireland. For without the rule of law, there can be no liberty. (Thatcher 1986) Think about your own mental representation of this speech. You could compare it with the speech by Neil Kinnock in Chapter 7 and try a textworld analysis of the conceptual structures it creates. What stylistic techniques does Margaret Thatcher use in this speech to encourage her audience to agree with her opinions? Look in particular at the mode of address, the personal pronouns used, and the metaphors Thatcher creates. When you examine the text-worlds created by this text, are you able to implicate yourself in any of them? Do any of the opinions put forward here appeal to you in some way? How close do you consider your own political position in your real world to be to that of Lady Thatcher in her discourseworld? Do you find it difficult to implicate yourself in any of the text-worlds created here? If so, consider why this might be the case. What differences exist between you and Lady Thatcher which might affect how you conceptualise the language she produces here. If you sense your own resistance to the version of Britain being described in this speech, can you think of a way of exploring this emotional reaction systematically using Text World Theory? How would you go about investigating the kinds of discourse-world factors which impact upon textworld construction in a rigorous and controlled manner? Gerrig and Rapp (2004) and Kuiken, Miall and Sikora (2004) provide good starting points for the formulation of an empirically-based study of resistance in the discourse-world (for further guidance see also Halász 1987; Hjort and Laver 1997; Ibsch, Schram and Steen 1991; Kreuz and MacNealy 1996; Martindale 1988; and van Peer 1986).
PERFORMANCE
Of course, the component of the discourse-world which has perhaps the greatest influence on the reception of any political speech is the immediate situation of its delivery. Margaret Thatcher gave her speech to an audience of Conservative Party members, Kinnock gave his to a gathering of Labour supporters, and the participants present in these original discourse-worlds are likely to have had a very different experience of the texts that you have had, reading them as discourse examples in Text World Theory: An Introduction. It was noted in Chapter 2 that the immediate physical surroundings have the potential to impact upon on a discourse in numerous ways, some of which were
discussed in relation to the sandwich shop example in the same chapter. However, the importance of the performative context of a discourse remains an under-explored area of Text World Theory. The world-structures involved in dramatic texts of any kind (speeches, lectures, plays, and so on) are highly complex and only just starting to be examined in full by text-world theorists (for example, Cruickshank and Lahey 2006). • Here is an example of the sort of dramatic text which might make a productive basis for a text-world investigation of performance and mental representation: GOOPER: Brick, shut up or stay out there on the gallery with your liquor! We got to talk about a serious matter. Big Mama wants to know the complete truth about the report we got today from the Ochsner Clinic. MAE [eagerly]: – on Big Daddy’s condition! GOOPER: Yais, on Big Daddy’s condition, we got to face it. DOCTOR BAUGH: Well . . . BIG MAMA [terrified, rising]: Is there? Something? Something that I ? Don’t – Know? [In these few words, this startled, very soft, question, Big Mama reviews the history of her forty-five years with Big Daddy, her great, almost embarrassingly true-hearted and simple-minded devotion to Big Daddy, who must have had something Brick has, who made himself loved so much by the ‘simple expedient’ of not loving enough to disturb his charming detachment, also once coupled, like Brick’s, with virile beauty. Big Mama has a dignity at this moment: she almost stops being fat.] DOCTOR BAUGH [after a pause, uncomfortably]: Yes? – Well – BIG MAMA: I!!! – want to – knowwwwww . . . [Immediately she thrusts her fist to her mouth as if to deny that statement. Then, for some curious reason, she snatches the withered corsage from her breast and hurls it on the floor and steps on it with her short, fat feet.] – Somebody must be lyin’! – I want to know! MAE: Sit down. Big Mama, sit down on this sofa. MARGARET [quickly]: Brick, go sit with Big Mama. BIG MAMA: What is it, what is it? DOCTOR BAUGH: I never have seen a more thorough examination than Big Daddy Pollitt was given in all my experience with the Ochsner Clinic. GOOPER: It’s one of the best in the country. MAE: It’s THE best in the country – bar none! [For some reason she gives Gooper a violent poke as she goes past him. He slaps at her hand without removing his eyes from his mother’s face.] (Williams 1976: 90–1)
: This is an extract from Act 3 of Tennessee Williams’ play, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Try to analyse it from a Text World Theory perspective. What challenges does it present for the theory? Consider, in particular: Who are the participants in the discourse-world of your reading of this play? Who are the participants in the discourse-world of a performance of this play? In both these contexts, how does the background knowledge the participants bring with them to the discourse-world affect the nature of the textworld? How does the cognitive experience of reading this play differ from the cognitive experience of seeing it? In the context of your reading, which elements of the text are worldbuilding and which are function-advancing? Are there any world-switches or modal-worlds present in this discourse? In the context of performance, which elements of the text are worldbuilding and which are function-advancing? Are there any world-switches or modal-worlds present in this discourse? Tennessee Williams is famous for, among other things, his highly detailed stage directions, which often contain information about characters’ inner feelings alongside more typical directions for movement, lighting and so on. In both the context of reading and the context of performance, what effects do the stage directions have on the conceptual structure of the discourse?
TEXT
If it is possible to modify Text World Theory in order to accommodate dramatic discourse and its performance, as Cruickshank and Lahey (2006) have suggested, then, theoretically, it should also be possible to use the textworld framework to examine other types of immediate visual experience. For example, some text-world theorists (for example, Hidalgo Downing 2000c and Montoro 2006) are also now beginning to explore filmic texts and pictorial advertising using the model, and the investigation of other multi-modal forms from a cognitive-linguistic perspective more broadly is an expanding field of study (for example, see Forceville 2005a and 2005b, and Turner 2006b). In his original formulation of the text-world approach, Paul Werth claimed that his framework could account for the production and reception of all forms of discourse. Today’s generation of text-world theorists continue to test this ambitious claim in their applications of Text World Theory to more and more diverse forms of communication. So far, the limits of the applicability of the text-world approach have yet to be discovered and Werth’s impressive claims
about the framework’s universality remain to be falsified. One fundamental question underlies all ongoing attempts to establish the boundaries of the textworld approach: what counts as a text in Text World Theory? If we are to include dramatic performance, film, comic strips, concrete poetry and websites in all their communicative complexity within the remit of the text-world studies, then should we also include all other forms of expressive art? Can Text World Theory account for the communicative effect of painting or sculpture, for example? Is it possible to have a text-world analysis of dance?
TEXTURE
At the same time as they continue to broaden the horizons of Text World Theory’s applicability, the text-world theorists of the future need also to ensure that specificity and precision of their text-world analyses are maintained. The techniques and methodologies of longer established approaches to the study of discourse, such as discourse analysis and stylistics, from which Text World Theory already draws great influence, continue to offer a blueprint for the properly rigorous and systematic examination of language and its contexts. The focus of the Text World Theory of the future needs somehow to be both forward-looking and introspective in this way. While the conceptual structures of new and more challenging texts and contexts wait to be revealed through daring innovations in text-world analysis, the minutiae of the individual components of the model will also undoubtedly benefit from continued re-appraisal and fine-tuning. The intricacy of in-depth textual analysis presents as much of a test to Text World Theory as the enormity of discourse and context. • Have a look at the following two texts. The first is a leaflet warning of the dangers of carbon monoxide poisoning in the home; the second is a leaflet giving tips about how to deal with stress. Both texts are produced by different sections of the Department of Health within the UK government. Seven rules for safety 1. DO NOT use poorly maintained appliances that burn gas or other fossil fuels. Have all appliances serviced regularly by a trained, reputable and preferably registered engineer and make sure chimneys and flues are clean and not blocked. 2. Fit a carbon monoxide alarm that meets British or European Standards. 3. Never use unflued appliances in small closed-up rooms. 4. Do not use gas appliances if they produce yellow flames and deposit soot on walls and fireclay radiants. 5. Fit an extractor fan in your kitchen. A kitchen full of cooking fumes is dangerous.
: 6. For work on all appliances always employ a qualified, reputable and preferably registered engineer. 7. For work on gas appliances always employ a suitably qualified engineer who is registered with the Council for Registered Gas Installers (CORGI). Remember: Carbon monoxide can KILL (Department of Health 2006a) If you can’t find a solution highlight the problem with your boss – they can support you in finding positive ways to reduce work related stress. If your stress is because of non-work worries your boss may be able to do something to relieve the pressure whilst you are at work. If you find it difficult to broach the subject consider the following tips: book a time with your boss to meet prepare – think about what is causing you stress and any potential solutions you may have. Make a note of these to discuss think about positive changes that you would like to make to help you work more effectively make a list of points and questions that you want to cover – especially if you’re feeling under pressure as it’s easy to forget things help your boss to help you by giving them the information they need find out if there are any training courses that may help you cope better – like time management or problem solving. If you need training for an area of work that is causing you stress your boss may be able to organise this for you follow up – arrange a meeting to make sure that you and your boss are happy with how things are progressing and that your stress levels have gone down! (Department of Health 2006b) One of the first features a stylistic analysis of these two leaflets uncovers is the common use of imperative structures in both texts (for example, ‘Do not use gas appliances if they produce yellow flames and deposit soot on walls and fireclay radiants’ in the first leaflet and ‘make a list of points and questions that you want to cover’ in the second leaflet). As already discussed in Chapter 6 of this book, these structures create remote deontic modal-worlds in which the prescribed action can be conceptualised taking place. But are the worlds really the same in both these texts? Obviously, each example includes different worldbuilding elements and function-advancing propositions, but is it possible to extend a text-world analysis beyond this level of detail? Despite their shared stylistic characteristics and common conceptual structures, these texts seem to have differing textures (see Stockwell 2005). One, after all, aims to give a clear warning about a potentially fatal gas, while the other is aimed at readers who are likely to be feeling highly sensitive and vulnerable. Is it possible to explain,
using Text World Theory, how a different feel is created in two text-worlds based on the same linguistic structures? The suggestions for future work on Text World Theory which have been made in this concluding chapter represent only my own unanswered questions. It has been the aim of this book both to provide an explanatory survey of the text-world approach to discourse study and to stimulate further enquiry; to explicate and to provoke. If these aims have been achieved then the formulation of yet more schemes and proposals for the refinement and augmentation of Text World Theory will have been ensured, since the real beauty of the framework, as I see it, is that the more questions one answers through one’s text-world explorations, the more mysterious terrain reveals itself for discovery in the future.
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Index
Key terms appear in bold type on first mention throughout this book or where a definition is given in context. All these terms are included in the index below, which also lists each further occurrence. accessibility, 12, 78, 90, 118, 124, 131, 135, 148 actor role, 56, 57, 59, 62–5, 68–9, 85, 122 actual world, 11, 12, 82, 115, 118, 120, 161 amplification, 120 analogue, 4, 5, 10, 16, 42–3, 64 Any Questions?, 110–18 apodosis, 120, 121 artificial intelligence (AI), 3, 4, 16 attention, 44–6, 48, 52, 55, 57, 63, 65, 69, 104, 107, 152–3 attribute role, 43, 44, 55–6, 63, 68, 112, 117 attributive processes, 43, 44, 68 Auster, Paul, 131–2, 135 Banks, Iain, 51 BBC News, 71 BBC Radio Five Live, 54, 57, 65–6 BBC Radio Four, 110–11, 116 Beckett, Margaret, 116–18 Blau, Melinda, 74–5, 83 blended world, 149, 150–2, 154–6, 158–63 blending, 148, 149, 152, 155, 161, 164
carrier role, 43, 44 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 173–4 cognitive grammar, 17, 52 cognitive linguistics, 4, 5–9, 17, 33, 37, 72, 146–9, 157, 164, 174 cognitive models, 3, 5, 33 cognitive poetics, 7, 17, 170 cognitive psychology, 3, 4, 8, 10, 17, 33–4, 40, 44, 46, 72, 86, 170 cognitive revolution, 4, 5, 17, 36, 146–7 Complicity, 51 conceptual blend, 147, 149–50, 164 conceptual frames, 3, 52 conceptual integration theory, 147, 148–9, 164 conceptual metaphors, 5, 17, 82, 147–50, 162, 164 conditional, 120, 121, 125–6, 162 context, 3, 6, 8, 9–10, 14, 17, 18, 21–3, 25–31, 33, 48, 52, 58–60, 62, 120, 126, 144, 148–9, 157, 159, 173–5 context-sensitive, 21, 33 critical discourse analysis, 64, 72 Daily Telegraph, 25–32, 88, 152–3
: deixis, 36, 37–59, 63, 65, 73, 76, 79, 81–2, 85–7, 111, 117, 121–2, 137, 157, 166–7 DeLillo, Don, 163 Dimbleby, David, 110–16 direct speech, 50, 95–6, 105, 111, 128, 134–7 direct thought, 111, 112, 116–18, 128 directive, 100, 103 discourse, 7, 8, 9–34, 109–25 discourse-world, 9, 10, 14, 18, 19–32, 35, 37–42, 46, 49, 53, 58–61, 63–4, 67, 71–81, 84–7, 89–91, 94–9, 101–6, 109–10, 112–20, 122–6, 129–30, 132–3, 142, 144, 148–50, 152–7, 160–4, 166–70, 172, 174 Dixon Evening Telegraph, 32 Doncaster Free Press, 31 double-vision, 152, 147–64 embodied experience, 5, 36 emergent structure, 148, 150–2, 159, 161 emotion, 2, 10, 21, 28, 30, 42, 64, 78, 85–6, 91, 151, 164, 168, 172 empathy, 44, 55, 64, 75, 103, 170 empty text-worlds, 133–4, 137, 144–5 enactor-accessible text-worlds, 77, 79–81, 89, 93–5, 110, 113–18, 124, 129–31, 133–5, 137–41 enactors, 40, 41, 42, 45–8, 50–1, 53, 55, 58, 64–71, 75–82, 84–9, 93–6, 98–103, 106, 110, 113–15, 117–18, 123–4, 127–35, 137–41, 150, 157–61, 170 epistemology, 81, 82, 90, 110, 131 existential processes, 62 Fauconnier, Gilles, 17, 147–9, 164 fictionality, 2, 12–17, 27, 35, 64, 73, 83–7, 90, 103, 126–45, 149, 161, 170 flashback, 50, 137–8 focalisation, external, 128 focalisation, fixed, 132, 135, 137, 141 focalisation, internal, 85, 128, 131–5 focalisation, variable, 129, 138–41
focaliser, 46, 127 Footymad, 65–6 frames, 3, 17, 22, 24–5, 29–30, 33, 35–40, 42–3, 52, 86, 97–8, 144–5, 154, 169 free indirect discourse, 46, 128, 129–31, 144 function-advancing propositions, 56, 57–72, 84–5, 87, 95–6, 98–102, 107, 112, 115, 119–24, 132, 137–8, 140, 142, 149, 153, 170, 174, 176 Garland, Alex, 136, 140–3 Glamour, 105–8 Gluck, Malcolm, 162–3 goal, 21, 56, 57, 59, 63–4, 85 Guardian, The, 1, 10–11, 15, 28, 111, 156–7, 160 Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, 83–7, 103 Hamlet, 89–90 Hardy, Thomas, 29 health advice texts, 175–6 heterodiegetic narration, 127, 130–2, 144 Hogg, Tracy, 74–83, 85, 98, 110 homodiegetic narration, 132, 135, 144 How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive, 97–104, 106, 129–30 hypotheticals, 6, 12, 118, 119–23, 125, 138–40 idealised cognitive models (ICMs), 5, 33 identified, 43, 44 identifier, 43, 44 identifying processes, 43 ideology, 23, 25 image-schema, 5, 6, 17, 147, 152 imperatives, 64, 98, 101–2, 106, 123–4, 176 implicate, 86, 87–90, 103–6, 108, 144, 156–62, 170, 172 implied author, 129, 135, 144
incrementation, 21, 26–7, 60, 79, 131, 135, 141–2 indirect thought, 117, 118 inferencing, 4, 18, 24, 29–32, 38, 122–3, 154 input spaces, 147, 148–9, 156, 159 integrationalist linguistics, 33 Jenkins, Simon, 110–11 jokes, 38, 143–4 Kinnock, Neil, 118–19 knowledge, cultural, 10, 23, 24–5, 29, 33–8, 147, 156 knowledge, experiential, 2–6, 9–10, 12–14, 22, 23–33, 35–8, 42, 44, 59, 71, 86–7, 90, 154, 168 knowledge, linguistic, 18–20, 23, 24–5, 59, 64 knowledge, perceptual, 4, 10, 22, 23–5, 27, 29, 31, 34, 37, 44, 62, 81–2, 113–18, 135 linguistic code, 59 literary theory, 7, 12, 129 lonely-hearts advertisements, 1–2, 6, 11, 15–16, 146, 152–62 McCall Smith, Alexander, 45, 49, 127–30, 132–3 mapping, 5, 147–8, 151, 159 material processes, 56, 57–9, 61, 63–4, 68–9, 94, 101, 120, 122 material processes, action, 56 material processes, event, 56, 62 material processes, intention, 56, 57–8, 62–3, 65, 68–9, 85, 94, 101, 120, 122 material processes, supervention, 56, 57, 62, 65, 68–9 Maude, Frances, 116 megametaphor, 151, 152, 156–7, 164 mental models, 3–4, 5, 16 mental processes, 62, 63, 85, 111, 117 mental processes, cognition, 62, 69, 85
mental processes, perception, 62, 85, 117 mental processes, reaction, 62 mental processes, verbalisation, 85 mental spaces, 3, 17, 146–64 metaphor, 1–2, 5, 11, 15, 17, 82, 85, 122, 146–64, 172 micro-metaphors, 151, 152, 154, 157–60 misfire, 142 modality, 91, 92–108, 110–18, 120–5, 128–31, 133–5, 137–40, 142, 144, 149, 162, 174, 176 modality, boulomaic, 93, 94, 95–7, 99, 101, 107–10, 112–14, 116, 126, 137 modality, deontic, 98, 99–103, 105–12, 121–2, 124, 126, 137, 162, 176 modality, epistemic, 110, 111–18, 120–2, 125–6, 128–31, 133–5, 137–40, 149 modality, perception, 113–15, 117–18, 137–40 modal-world, boulomaic, 93, 94, 95–6, 101, 108–9, 112–14, 126, 137 modal-world, deontic, 99, 100–3, 105–6, 108–9, 112, 122, 124–5, 137, 162, 176 modal-world, epistemic, 110, 112–18, 120–1, 125–6, 128–31, 133–5, 137–40, 149 Muir, John, 97–106 narratology, 7, 12, 126–45 narrator, 46, 54, 62–3, 127–44 negation, 102, 108, 115, 117, 122, 135 negotiation, 20, 22, 24, 33, 59–60, 64, 76, 78, 168 News of the World, 71–2 Niffenegger, Audrey, 41–2 NME, 169–70 OK! Magazine, 92–6, 101 omniscient narrator, 46, 128–32
: ontological status, 76, 77–9, 81–6, 90, 110, 130–1 Oracle Night, 131–5, 137 origo, 36, 37, 40, 46, 50–2, 76, 82 parallel text-world, 122–3 participant-accessible text-worlds, 77, 79–82, 89, 93–4, 99, 110, 114–18, 128–31, 141, 150, 158, 160 participants, 10, 19, 34, 37–42, 48–9, 53, 58–62, 64, 68, 73–84, 89–90, 91–5, 97–9, 102–3, 105–10, 112–15, 117–18, 124, 126, 129–31, 141–2, 148–50, 152–3, 158, 160–1, 166, 168, 170, 172, 174 performance, 6, 38, 102, 106, 120, 144, 151, 172–4 possible worlds, 11, 12–13, 17, 90 pPod, 38–46, 54, 166–7 pragmatics, 33 principle of minimal departure, 12, 28–9 projection, 40, 41–2, 46, 52, 76, 84, 86–7, 103, 106, 129–30 prominence, 44, 68, 149, 152, 155–62 protasis, 120, 121–3 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 149–52, 155 Real People, 107–8 relational processes, 43, 63, 65, 68, 85, 112, 121, 122 relational processes, circumstantial, 43 relational processes, intensive, 43, 68, 121–2 relational processes, possessive, 43, 121 reliability, 73, 77–8, 81–2, 87, 95, 112, 115, 124, 130, 135, 140–2 resistant reading, 28, 74, 87, 170–2 RESTAURANT script, 3, 21–5 Robbins, Tom, 83–7, 103 rule-governed, 11 schema theory, 3, 4, 16, 33 schemas/schemata, 3, 4, 16, 22, 33
scientific writing, 168–9 scripts, 3, 5, 16, 22, 23–5, 33 self-implication, 87, 90, 103–6, 108, 156–62, 170 Shakespeare, William, 89–90 Smith, Delia, 124–5 social cognition, 34 source domain, 5, 147, 157 split discourse-worlds, 26–7, 75, 78, 83–5, 106, 129, 132, 142, 150, 153, 155–6, 160, 166, 168 sub-world, 52, 53, 108, 125 stylistics, 7, 44, 64, 127–8, 162–3, 175 systemic functional linguistics, 43, 52, 56, 62, 64, 72 target domain, 5, 147, 149, 157, 160 text, 8, 11–13, 59–64, 175–7 text world theory, 2 text-drivenness, principle of, 29, 35, 61, 148, 151, 166 texture, 50, 53, 102, 175–7 text-worlds, 2, 10, 35 Thatcher, Margaret, 118–19, 171–2 The Baby Whisperer, 74–85, 98, 106, 110, 129–30 The Coma, 136–43 The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, 45–50, 127–35 The Time Traveler’s Wife, 41–2 The Way We Think, 147–9 time-zone, 11–12, 46, 48–50, 54–5, 58, 75, 79, 85, 88, 94–6, 103, 113, 117, 120–1, 133, 137–8, 160–1 Tindersticks, 61–4 toggling, 152, 155–6, 160 transitivity, 70, 71–2, 84–5 trans-world projection, 103 travel guides, 166–8 truth-value, 12, 76, 78, 82, 95, 110, 112, 118, 140 Turner, Mark, 147–9, 164, 174 variation, 120 verifiability, 77, 112–13, 116–18, 130, 140–1
Werth, Paul, 6–8, 14, 17, 33, 52, 72, 90, 108, 125, 164, 174–5 Williams, Tennessee, 174 world-building elements, 36, 37–46, 51–9, 62–71, 84, 87, 95–6, 99, 101–7, 109, 111, 119, 121–2, 124, 129–30, 132–3, 137, 140, 142, 149, 154, 157, 160, 166–8, 170
world-repair, 141, 142–5 world-replacement, 142, 143–5 worlds, 3, 4, 8–13, 35–44, 83–8, 118–23 world-switch, 47, 48, 49–54, 58, 73, 75–7, 79–80, 85, 88, 93–6, 117, 121, 130, 133–5, 137–9, 174
