Consciousness Attention 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