Interest I Other areas needing investigation

2.1.1 Consciousness

According to Chafe 1994:38, 27, consciousness is “the crucial interface between the conscious organism and its environment,” “what we experience constantly while we are awake and often while we are asleep. It is at the very core of our existence, but its exact nature continues to elude us. … The elusiveness of consciousness stems above all from the fact that it is an internal phenomenon, directly observable only to the experiencer. But…how is it possible for us to have a conscious experience and at the same time be conscious that we are having it?” This question will be considered later §3.6.4, in terms of an accessor who is part of the accessed space. According to Chafe op. cit., pp. 28–35, manifestations of consciousness have certain constant properties possessing a focus, having a periphery, shifting in a dynamic way, manifesting a point of view, and needing orientation as well as properties that vary from one circumstance to another having different sources from which they arise, being immediate or displaced, being factual or fictional, being verbal or nonverbal, and having various degrees of interest. Consciousness is often a very transitory state, with “continual shifting from one focus to the next,” whose linguistic realization is the “intonation unit” op. cit., p. 53 and ch. 5.

2.1.2 Attention

Consciousness is not completely random; it can be intentionally directed to certain objects. A TTENTION , the direction of consciousness towards certain objects or concepts, is a basic cognitive tool which is not limited to discourse or even to humans. Not only can we direct our attention to entities in our immediate environment, but also to entities that only exist only in our minds. This “displaced consciousness” is seen in remembering and imagination Chafe 1994:32 and ch. 15. In language, attention is evidenced in two major ways with regard to referents: • Attention is selectively directed towards individual concepts and propositions in ways that reflect their states of activation §2.4.1: new or important items are highlighted; the others are downplayed. This is attention management on a local level and in a sequential mode which is sensitive to very transitory levels of consciousness. It mostly operates below the level of macro-level discourse units, being commonly manifested by “information structure and sentence form” Lambrecht 1994. • In discourse topicality and thematicity, attention is directed towards a particular entity in a sustained way Tomlin et al. 1997:86. This kind of attention management operates on the level of discourse units as a whole and has to do with their holistic structures rather than simple sequences of expressions or utterances. In the present treatment, this higher level of attention management is a form of relevance construal that is commonly carried out by means of knowledge management, by the manipulation of knowledge structures, specifically schemas of discourse spaces, but can also be employed in a way that is not determined by such knowledge structures. In both cases, sustained attention is directed to particular concepts §§2.3.2, 3.4.2. The fact that attention is required on two levels of discourse processing local and unit-based, and in two modes of processing sequential and holistic raises fundamental questions. The linguistic form of these questions involves the fact that a language’s minimal referential coding pronouns for English, zero for many languages is used on both of these levels, as we shall see in §2.4.2 and §3.3.5.

2.1.3 Interest I

NTEREST is closely related to attention: what is interesting attracts our attention, usually for a sustained period. There are natural kinds or sources of interest. Several of these are discussed in the literature: • According to Chafe 1994, “interestingness seems above all to reside in conflict with mundane expectations. There is a general tendency to talk or write about the unexpected” p. 34. In particular, interest resides in sociological contrasts and outcomes that run counter to “scripts or frames” p. 122—the “cultural schemas” of §2.2.4. Cultures generally have folk tales based on an “underdog”— a less prestigious character—who comes out ahead of a more character with more natural prestige. An example of this type is a folktale in Ekoti Bantu, Mozambique entitled “The story of Lion, his daughter, and Hare” Appendix H, with the hare as hero. Among the Mbyá Guarani Brazil, the monkey as hero often seems to embody the people group as social underdogs who can nevertheless come out on top. • Egocentrism and anthrocentrism have commonly been seen as sources of intrinsic interest and, because of this, as being intrinsically “topic-worthy” Givón 1976, van Oosten 1985:23, Dahl and Fraurud 1996:63, Croft 2003:137. We are interested in ourselves and entities that are portrayed as being similar to ourselves, such as personified animals in folktales. It is not accidental that in children’s books, animals are commonly drawn as looking like humans, talking like humans, feeling like humans, and engaging in human activities. Further, when speakers and addressees adopt a text- internal participant’s point of view §3.6, it is usually because they are aware of certain things about that participant that remind them of themselves or of their experience. • Uncertainty also tends to generate interest, especially if it involves what happens to a human-like entity. “Discourse irrealis which Grimes calls ‘collateral information’ mentions what does not happen, or what could possibly happen, as a means of highlighting what actually does happen. Common forms of irrealis are negation such-and-such did not happen and possible outcomes. The latter category includes questions could she escape?, desiresplans he wanted to escape, and conflictobstacles the rope wouldn’t let him escape. Possible outcomes provide strong cohesive ties pointing forward in the text: the hearer’s interest is aroused to find out which actually happens and how” Dooley and Levinsohn 2001:82. 7 Danger, including portrayed danger, is a form of uncertainty, the possibility of harm, that almost always concerns humans. Although certain kinds of concepts can be expected to have intrinsic interest, speakers can build interest in another kind of concept in different ways. One way is simply by talking about it, thus encouraging addressees to link a lot of material to that entity in their mental representation. This is construal of interest and of relevance. A possible result is for the concept to become a point of thematic integration for a certain discourse space §2.2.3. Managing the addressee’s interest presents the speaker with more problems than managing low-level, sequential cognitive states such as identifiability or activation §§2.4.1, 2.4.2. For one thing, it is hard for speakers to assess or predict the addressee’s level of interest; it is not a simple matter of calculating cognitive effects from what addressees know and or are told. Perhaps because of this uncertainty, speakers often put extensive effort into passing on their interest to addressees. One way is by means of stylistic devices “e.g., metaphors, alliteration capture attention, unsettle conventional meanings, and evoke feeling”; these can “foster appreciation of the aesthetic quality of the narrative … [which] may motivate continued or repeated consideration of the narrative e.g., rereading a text” Louwerse and Kuiken 2004:170. Another way that speakers attempt to pass on interest to addressees is by means of EVALUATIVE COMMENTS which indicate why the speaker finds something interesting Labov 1972:366, discussed in Chafe 1994:121. One evaluative comment is found in line 15 of Labov and Waletsky’s Oral narrative 4 Appendix E: one man killed another Just over two dollars that he was sent for peaches with. The incident was interesting because it violated a cultural norm—there was little provocation for violence. Even with stylistic devices and evaluative comments, however, there is no guarantee that the addressee will share the speaker’s interest; that would be a perlocutionary effect, over which speakers exert little control Searle 1969:23f.. However, it is important that addressees are able to recognize expressions of the speaker’s interest an illocutionary act; loc. cit., because these often signal construal of a discourse theme. The speaker’s intrinsic interest is a necessary condition for discourse topics and all other kinds of discourse themes §2.2.5; also van Oosten 1984:372, van Oosten 1985:29. Thematic structure results from interest management, that is, from attention management which is sustained over a significant stretch of discourse, generally a discourse unit. Local attention management, which is basically a sequential phenomenon, seems not to involve interest in any systematic way. 7 An event which raises a speculative question is called a “feeder” van Kuppevelt 1995:119. 2.2 Conceptual structures in discourse processing 2.2.1 Mental representations and base spaces