Step 1 introduction: ‘a disciple of Jesus’
Ļ
Step 2
event: ‘the body of Jesus’ not ‘his body’
ĺ ‘it’ not ‘the body’ Ļ
Step 3
event: ‘the body’
ĺ ‘it’, ‘it’ not ‘the body’
‘his new
tomb’ Ļ
Step 4
event: ‘the entrance of the tomb’ not ‘its entrance’
Ļ
Step 5 add-on: ‘opposite the tomb’ not ‘opposite it’ Figure 12: Referential expressions in Matthew 27:57–61
Judging by minimal coding zero in Greek, pronoun in English, the recent-reference centers of attention—Jesus, his body, the tomb—do not retain their status as center of attention across a step
boundary. But the paragraph topic Joseph, following his introduction in step 1, retains his status as center of attention throughout the paragraph: although he is named in step 3 following a switch of subject, in
step 4, across a step boundary, he is referred to by minimal coding. Similarly, in the Guarani bow text Example text 9, the paragraph topic bow retains its status as center of attention across step boundaries,
having minimal coding: ‘its decoration’, ‘its string’, ‘its arrows’ in Guarani, minimal coding for possessors is a prefix. The referent ‘a palm tree’ is likewise referred to with minimal coding later on in
the same step in which it is introduced.
Hinds, from his study of Japanese and English texts, takes the strong position that “optional pronominalization at the discourse level does not exist; pronominalization is in fact controlled by
paragraph level constraints” 1977:78. More generally, this claims that use of minimal coding is conditioned by the division of the text into paragraphs and the division of paragraphs into steps. The fact
that the status of center of attention does not persist across the respective unit boundaries can be seen as a reflection of Gernsbachers 1985:344 analysis of processing shift: “information in a particular
substructure is most available during the active processing of that substructure. Once a processing shift has occurred, information represented in the previous substructure becomes less available.”
The division of the text into paragraphs and of paragraphs into steps is only partially determined by the content. Speakers and writers often use this hierarchical structure to construe texts in particular ways.
For example, a speaker might divide his text into short paragraphs or use very short sentences, even resorting to sentence fragments, in order to convey the impression that what he is saying is quite
informative. Advertisers often do this, as well as politicians. Conversely, packing extensive content into a single linguistic unit, such as a sentence or a paragraph, can achieve the effect of immediate perceptual
access, which “has the quality of continuous, uninterrupted flow” in contrast to the “islandlike quality” of verbalization Chafe 1994:202. Further, subordination and other kinds of dependency among linguistic
units are often used to give prominence to the information that is presented in an independent unit. Segmentation into linguistic units can thus be used to communicate a particular construal in regard to
evaluation or prominence, without greatly affecting the content itself Grimes 1975:334.
It remains for further research to determine how center of attention and paragraph structure are related in different languages. However, if something like the above holds in at least some languages, it provides
a concrete application of discourse schemas and a direct link between conceptual structure and linguistic form see further in §3.3.5. In particular, it validates three kinds of conceptual objects: paragraph
schemas with their steps, paragraph topics, and centers of attention.
2.6.3 Paragraphs as minimal complete discourse units
The
PARAGRAPH
is here taken to be a minimal complete discourse unit, and in this sense can be thought of as the basic-level conceptual unit of discourse Chafe 1994, ch. 11. Paragraphs have certain
distinctives which, taken together, lead to their being taken as the minimal complete discourse unit. “Complete” here does not mean “independent,” as if a paragraph could stand alone as a discourse.
• Orientation: A paragraph is the maximal scope for values of orientation dimensions. It is construed as
being continuous in regard to orientation dimensions: within the paragraph, changes in orientation are not construed as significant discontinuities §2.3.1. Thus, Hinds 1979:136 defines the
paragraph as “a unit of speech or writing that maintains a uniform orientation,” noting that micro- level units inherit their orientation from their matrix paragraph. Similarly, Givón 1983:7: “The
thematic paragraph is the most immediately relevant level of discourse within which one can begin to
discuss the complex process of continuity in discourse,” continuity with respect to orientation dimensions §2.3.1. It is true that micro-levels can have a point of departure with an access function,
such as ‘its decoration’ and ‘its string’ in Example text 9 about making bows, but such points of departure are referential and have to do with access rather than orientation per se §2.3.1. Orientation
information, such as ‘when it was evening’ in the paragraph about the burial of Jesus, remain valid throughout the paragraph as a whole. Even when there are apparent changes, such as changes of place
in the paragraph about the burial—Joseph ‘came’, ‘went to Pilate’, went and took the body down, took it to his tomb for burial, then went away—they are presented simply as the outworking of the
schema, which took place in different locations, not as discontinuities of orientation. Whenever significant reorientation is required, a new paragraph is begun Chafe 1994:138.
• Schema and genre: A narrative paragraph appears to be the lowest-level discourse unit which can
have a specifically narrative schema, and in general, a paragraph of a particular genre appears to be the lowest hierarchical level which can have a schema that is specific to that genre. That is, the
paragraph is the lowest level genre-specific discourse unit.
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Using a broad classification of genre, we can say that narrative schemas, for example, have contingent temporal succession and agentivity
Longacre 1996:8f., dialog paragraphs have configurations of “repartee” op. cit., ch. 5, and so forth; see footnote 22 for studies of schemas of specific genres. In the paragraph about the burial of
Jesus Matthew 27:57–61, Example text 6, the schema Figure 5 is specifically narrative, having a contingent-temporal sequence of acts that are oriented in space and time and purposefully brought
about by an agent. The claim is not that all paragraph schemas are genre-specific—for example, the partitive schema in the Guarani bow text Example text 9 is not limited to procedural texts. A
partitive schema of this task line 03 is also found in a section of Churchill’s speech Appendix A, lines 03–10 that is at least partially narrative: 04 a war cabinet has been formed … in one single
day, 06 other key positions were filled yesterday, 07 submitting a further list to the king tonight, 08 hope to complete the appointment of principal ministers during tomorrow, 09 the
appointment of other ministers usually takes a little longer, but at any rate 10 I trust that when Parliament meets again this part of my task will be completed. The claim is not that all paragraph
schemas such as these partitive schemas are genre-specific, simply that lower, micro-level schemas are not genre-specific.
• Semiactive concepts: At paragraph boundaries there is a discrete drop in activation status, especially
from semiactive to inactive §2.4.1: “once a processing shift has occurred, information represented in the previous substructure becomes less available” Gernsbacher 1985:344. Chafe 1994:138 finds it
possible that “semiactive consciousness is limited to the amount of information verbalized in a narrative schema,” so that “when more information is added it may have to be divided” and given a
schema of its own. Semiactive status does not typically to follow an concept across paragraph boundaries, unless the concept is semiactive by virtue of belonging to a superordinate schema or a
base space. We can see this in two ways. Nominal elements, such as participants in a narrative, are also generally updated by means of a noun phrase at the beginning of a new paragraph, even if recent
mention in the preceding paragraph would indicate that they are active or semiactive see examples in Fox 1987 and Dooley and Levinsohn 2001:114. A high-level topic whose schema spans the
paragraph boundary, however, may preserve its semiactive status and therefore require only an intermediate kind of reactivation Hofmann 1989:242f., Ariel 1996:22. A similar thing is true for an
orientation dimension, such as a place, which remains stable throughout a higher-level unit that spans the paragraph boundary: it need not be explicitly updated. For example, in the paragraph about the
burial of Jesus, the initial temporal phrase ‘when it was evening’ makes use of the temporal orientation the day of the crucifixion of the episode in which this paragraph is embedded; only the
part of the day is updated in orienting the paragraph. In this paragraph the place of the crucifixion is
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For the Greek New Testament, Levinsohn 2000, §17.1 found that “whereas the division of a book into larger units is largely determined by the purpose of the book, the primary genre of the book produces many low-level
divisions.”
assumed from the episode as well, with the verb ‘there came a rich man’. At paragraph boundaries the status of center of attention, as indicated by minimal coding §2.4.2, is often not maintained even
for a referent that is topic for both paragraphs. In English, this is apparently responsible for the fact that commonly, “pronominalization does not operate across paragraph boundaries” Hinds 1977:93.
Thus, in an obituary consisting of several paragraphs, the deceased the global topic is generally named at the beginning of each new paragraph, as in the following text-medial but paragraph-initial
sentence: Born as the son of a printer in Asakunsa, Tokyo, in 1901, Iwata became one of of Japan’s most popular illustrators… Hinds 1977:84. Similary, in the barber text Appendix F, the second
paragraph begins with a restatement of the topic of the first paragraph line 09, even though it is also the topic of the second.
• Structure retained in memory: The paragraph appears to be the lowest-level discourse unit whose
structure is commonly retained in memory. Below this, apparently primarily on micro-levels, “shortly after a passage is comprehended, information about the exact surface form of its sentences e.g., their
word order becomes less available” Gernsbacher 1985:324; data for “less available” concepts include information structure and grammatical structure. The grammatical form of the story of the
burial of Jesus—for example, the fact that it took two sentences to relate Joseph’s getting permission to take his body—is not likely to be retained in memory; the facts of the story as the schema
organizes them are much more likely to be retained. This is only to be expected, since grammatical structure and information structure are largely conditioned by activation states and similar factors that
are ephemeral. Experiments show that “thematic information” is retained much longer op. cit., p. 341. This implies that once a discourse space has been fully consolidated §2.3.3, paragraphs
constitute the lowest level of subspaces. Micro-level units are possibly stored as simple content nodes in paragraph level schemas.
It is true that, in discourse production and comprehension, micro-level phenomena can have discourse structural aspects such as schemas and themes, but micro-level schemas, being extremely simple and
general, easily coalesce into steps in the paragraph schema Hinds 1979:150–155. Thus, for example, in Example text 9, what is presented as a two-phase process on the micro-level—4 ‘For its string, I cut
down a palm tree also. 5 Its crown I strip for fibers’—could be stored as a single node in the resulting mental representation, corresponding to a proposition such as ‘For its string, I cut down a palm tree and
strip its crown for fibers’, just as Joseph’s getting permission from Pilate to bury Jesus can easily be reduced to a single proposition.
2.6.4 Sequential and unit-based phenomena
