3.5.4 Sequential connectedness and just-in-time coherence
Conversations, such as the following one, often have a rambling sequence of topics:
102
Example text 32: Conversational text, excerpt Brown and Yule 1983:84
01 A: I went to Yosemite National Park 02 B: did you
03 A: yeah—it’s beautiful there right throughout the year + 04 B: I have relations in California and that’s their favorite Park because they +enjoy camping a
lot 05 A: oh yeah
06 B: they go round camping + 07 A: I must admit I hate camping +
In Example text 32, there is a transition from talking about Yosemite to talking about camping. Brown and Yule call this conversational style “speaking topically”: “a discourse participant is ‘speaking
topically’ when he makes his contribution fit closely to the most recent elements,” whereas “speaking on a topic” means “the participants are concentrating their talk on one particular entity, individual or issue”
loc. cit.. In more general terms, we can contrast texts which have only
SEQUENTIAL CONNECTEDNESS
with those that have a consistent global topic or some other kind of global theme. Conversation is where one would typically look for examples of repeated negotiations of topic between interlocutors see, for
example, ch. 3 of Brown and Yule 1983.
103
Extended monologue, with its greater hierarchical depth, is where one would look for more consistent high-level topics and hierarchical arrangements of topics.
104
There are, however, monologues with sequential connectedness and no clear and consistent global theme, hence no coherence in the sense defined in §2.2.1. Example text 8 is a contrived text with
sequential connectedness but no overall coherence and no single situation. Perhaps few naturally occurring texts would show that kind of blatant disregard for coherence, but gray areas of coherence—
non-ideal coherence—seem to be common in natural texts, and not just in literary texts §2.6.6. One such is a text in Aché Tupi-Guarani, Paraguay, whose initial paragraph is as follows:
Example text 33: Aché “Oranges” text, excerpt
01 Aché women went to where they saw oranges. 02 A lot of women bring oranges home for their husbands to eat.
03 They bring oranges for their hungry husbands to eat. 04 Grandmother said, “Bring oranges for your husbands to eat.”
05 A lot of women took baskets in order to bring oranges. 06 Their husbands are hungry.
07 Grandmother said, “Bring oranges for your husbands to eat. They will arrive very hungry.”
In this initial paragraph, possible discourse topics are the Aché women and oranges, since both are active throughout the grouping. The women seem to be more likely as topic: not only are they human, they are
mentioned initially in 01 and confirmed as topic in 02. The women are subject in 01, 02, 03 and 05, possessors in 02, 03, 04, 06, and 07, and implicit addressees of the quotations in 04 and
07. The women have a goal, of bringing oranges for their husbands to eat when they arrive hungry. It seems to be presuppposed that the husbands were off somewhere hunting. The macropredication of this
102
“A conversation can be viewed as a process of the continual negotiation of new topics” Levy 1982:295.
103
Tracy 1994 found that even in in conversational data, speakers most often “speak on a topic” rather than “speak topically.” See Chafe 2001 for an analysis of topic progression in conversation.
104
It is sometimes claimed that “face-to-face conversation is the basic and primary use of language” Fillmore 1981:152; Hinds 1979:136, and even that other uses of language are mere extensions of it Werth 1995:51. It
appears, however, that no single language use is primary in this sense; each one potentially presents unique aspects.
paragraph seems to be that Aché women do, or did, or should, bring oranges to feed their hungry husbands for when they come back from hunting. The tense and other grounding mechanisms in this text
are not clear.
In the following 18 lines of the text, however, neither the women nor the oranges are mentioned again. The text proceeds to talk about the husbands who are off hunting; what kinds of game they found
principally armadillo, also tapir and why they were delayed in getting home they had to wait overnight for an armadillo to come out of his den. The fact that they had to be away overnight is why they would
return hungry. At the end of the text the men do return, but they ate armadillo, not oranges. Possibly the oranges were gathered in case the men found no game. At any rate, the hunters turn out to be the closest
thing to a global topic, and the fact that they arrived hungry and needed and found food on their return seems possible to take as a macropredication. In the initial paragraph, the men are presupposed and
nontopical, but they subsequently displace the women as topic. There is thus a topic shift, and the global relevance of the first paragraph seems diminished. It is not known if this sequence was intentional or
whether the narrator changed his mind or lost his train of thought. But the topic switch to the hunters may have made possible a broader theme and a broader coherence. However that may be, the switch itself
illustrates sequential connectedness.
Churchill’s speech Appendix A can be analyzed as having a global topic, “the new government I have been asked to form,” which is introduced lines 01–02 and then developed in two main sections: a
narrative section lines 03–13 with the macropredication “I have been forming it” followed by a hortatory section lines 14–35 with the macropredication “Support it” The narrative section appears to
have two main parts, the first dealing with “the most important part of this task” which “I have already completed” lines 03–07 and the second dealing with the rest which should shortly be completed lines
08–10. Lines 11–13 appear to be an add-on to this narrative part dealing with essential details of scheduling meetings of the House. Line 10 is a possible transition to that add-on: “I trust when
Parliament meets again this part of my task will be completed….” A second add-on occurs in line 20, where Churchill justifies his brevity and “lack of ceremony”—a relatively minor point—on the basis of
the crisis that he is describing lines 17–19.
An outline and diagram of the schema of this speech is given as Figure 20: 01–02: Initialization: establishes global topic “the new government I have been asked to form”
03–13: Narrative schema with macropredication: “I have been forming it” 03–06: “the most important part” is “already completed”
07–10: the
rest Add-on: 11–13: scheduling meetings of the House
14–35: Hortatory schema with macropredication: “Support it” 14–20: invitation for House to formally declare its support
16–19: urgency of
support Add-on: 20: justifying brevity “lack of ceremony”
21–35: personal appeal for support 21–22: challenge
to fortitude
23–30: goal 23–26: policy:
“wage war”
26–30: aim: “victory”
31: wish:
that it
be realized
32: reason:
consequences of
defeat 33–35: personal “bouyancy and hope” and final appeal for support
GT 01-02
03-13 03-06
07-10 11-13
14-35 14-20
16-19 20
21-35 21-22
23-32 23-26
26-32
33-35 31
++++ ++++
32
Solid lines indicate hierarchical developments in the schema. Plus signs and dashed ovals indicate add-ons.
Figure 20: Schemas in Churchill’s speech Appendix A
Possibly, then, the most common nemesis of ideal coherence with a clear global theme is not complete disconnectedness, but sequential connectedness. The add-ons that we have observed all seem to
be based on sequential connectedness. That is, there is some semantic connection between the add-on step and what precedes it. This was noted twice in Churchill’s speech, lines 11–13 and 20. In the Aché text,
the men who were off hunting—the new topic—were mentioned just before, in the initial paragraph.
In these two texts, however, the sequential connectedness has different structural consequences. In Churchill’s speech, the new topics that were introduced by sequential connectedness were minor and
parenthetical: after mentioning them, the speaker returned to the schema he was using before. In the Aché text, the new topic leads to a new schema with a level that is superordinate to the previous schema: the
returning hunters could be taken as final topic that is superordinate to the topic of women gathering oranges. In the conversational Example text 32 we find a similar possibility: the topic switches from
Yosemite to camping, but after all, camping could develop into a broader theme that includes Yosemite. So even though these two texts—the Aché text and the Yosemite text—may have not the ideal coherence
that comes from a clear and constant global theme that is understood from the first, they show that it is sometimes possible to create a new coherence,
JUST
-
IN
-
TIME COHERENCE
, in a dynamic fashion. Just-in- time coherence may be planned or unplanned; its essential characteristic is that the highest-level space of
a discourse is not presented early on, only after the presentation of a lower-level unit or lower-level units which, when the higher-level space is manifest, are then seen to be embedded in it.
105
Other examples include the Guarani bow text Example text 9, discussed in §2.3.1, fables with morals, and “The train
ride” Appendix C as discussed in §3.4.4.
105
There is a Peanuts cartoon in which Snoopy is sitting on top of his doghouse typing a story. “It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly, a shot rang out. A door slammed. The maid screamed. Suddenly, a pirate ship appeared
on the horizon While millions of people were starving, the king lived in luxury. Meanwhile, on a small farm in Kansas, a boy was growing up.” Snoopy looks over what he has written, puts another sheet of paper into the
typewriter. He writes “Part II” and says to himself, “In Part Two, I tie all of this together” Schultz, Charles. Peanuts. Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 13 Nov 2005.
forms of recreation Yosemite
→ camping surfing
Yosemite → camping
→ surfing
In the three texts we have been considering—one in Aché and two in English—there is only one switch from the initial topic. If a text were to remove itself two or more steps from an initial theme—for
example, if the Aché text Example text 33, which had the topic progression women → hunters, had ended up talking about how different kinds of game are hunted women → hunters → game, the text
could have lost its coherence altogether. Or if the Yosemite text Example text 32 with the topic progression Yosemite → camping had ended up talking about surfing Yosemite → camping → surfing,
coherence could also have been lost. This is illustrated in Figure 21, where the final topic surfing is not related to the initial one, Yosemite, and there is no single space that includes everything:
Figure 21: Loss of coherence through sequential connectedness
A text like this with three sequential topics could doubtless still perform a useful social function, but would not have the conceptual unity that we are calling coherence.
However, because of just-in-time coherence, we cannot assume that even long strings of sequential connectedness necessarily destroy coherence. At some point it might be possible to express a theme that
would integrate everything that had been said. Thus, for example, it might be possible for the extended Yosemite text Yosemite → camping → surfing to be perceived as dealing with a superordinate theme,
forms of recreation, with Yosemite simply giving access to the first form, camping. If that were made clear to the addressees by means of some expression such as What I really like to do is… that creates the
superordinate theme, then the text could achieve a just-in-time coherence even with the double succession of topics, as shown in Figure 22:
Figure 22: Coherence preserved despite sequential connectedness
Just-in-time coherence may still be defective, however, if the superordinate theme does not have the speaker’s or speakers’, in the case of conversation intrinsic interest in relation to all embedded units.
A traditional oral narrative genre in Xhosa Bantu, South Africa, called intsomi, is based on creative sequential connectedness Gough 1990. These narratives are made up of a succession of “tale chunks,”
short narratives from a traditional inventory, are linked together to make a continuing story. In the example that Gough presents, a tale chunk about a girl who forgets her skirt after collecting clay is
followed by another about a dog who makes a request to the girl, and so forth. The connection between the first two tale chunks is that a girl—in the intsomi genre, it is interpreted as the same girl—is involved
in each one. In terms of Graesser et al. 1997:296, adjacent tale chunks have “argument overlap” as discourse units. The intsomi achieves coherence, not simply by means of sequential connectedness, which
in itself could be destructive of coherence, but through the creation of a just-in-time coherence.
Yet another example of sequential connectedness and just-in-time coherence was presented earlier as Example text 2, an apparently contrived text presented by Unger 2001:41, in which a long sequence of
apparently unconnected and even illogical pericopes turns out to be a person’s dream. Unger p. 149 asks the question, “If addressees tolerate blatant irrelevance for some time, why do they stop processing at
some times and not at others?” His answer to this question here paraphrased is that if addressees recognize that the genre text type, discourse type of the text could eventually make use of initially
noncoherent material, then because of these genre-related “expectations of relevance” they retain it “in a kind of memory buffer” see also Sperber and Wilson 1995:138f. and retrieve it when it is used. In the
present treatment, what Unger says about the role of genre is stated in terms of discourse schemas §2.2.4: If addressees recognize a larger discourse schema which could eventually make coherent use of
initially noncoherent material, then they retain it and hopefully retrieve it at an appropriate point. If it is never utilized, then the text is to that extent noncoherent. If addressees are not able to recognize a genre
or larger schema which would justify their retaining the noncoherent material in memory, then especially if it is in a genre which comes with the expectation of coherence, they may give the text up as
noncoherent.
3.6 Text-internal point of view
Kategori