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
A distinction that shows up repeatedly in discourse analysis is between
SEQUENTIAL
and
UNIT
-
BASED
or global phenomena: sequential phenomena proceed linearly from one clause or sentence to the next, while unit-based phenomena hold for an entire discourse unit paragraph, episode, entire text.
These two modes of discourse organization can divide up linguistic resources or compete for them. •
Both knowledge management and attention management have unit-based as well as sequential aspects §2.1.
• In conversational texts especially, it is common to find a sequential progression of topics, in which
each speaker continues on with the last thing, or one of the last things, that the previous speaker mentioned. But it is also common for a speaker to continue with the previous speaker’s discourse
topic footnote 103.
• Grimes 1978:vii–viii observes that strategies for discourse reference are either sequential or
thematic unit-based §3.5.4; cf. Tomlin 1987. In some languages, a sequential strategy may be used for micro-levels, while a thematic strategy is used on macro-levels.
• The level of minimal coding for ordinary referents in language, such as unstressed pronouns in
English, can apparently be used for both paragraph topics and recent-reference centers of attention, a sequential phenomenon §2.4.2.
2.6.5 Hierarchical structure and attention management
The hierarchical structure of language—phrases, clauses, sentences, discourse units—relates primarily to knowledge management; on the discourse level, it realizes schemas. But there are times when
attention management makes use of hierarchical structure to achieve special effects. Two main ways this can happen are hierarchical upgrading and hierarchical downgrading.
H
IERARCHICAL UPGRADING
takes place when a normally dependent element is presented as if it were in some sense independent. The following example is the initial “sentences” of a poster advertising
the MA in Language Documentation and Description and Ph.D. in Field Linguistics at SOAS School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London:
Example text 14: “What’s on his mind? You may never know,” excerpt SOAS poster
01 ¶This century, half the languages on the face of the planet could die out. 02 And with them the unique insights, understandings and cultures of countless civilizations.
03 ¶If we let it happen. Lines 02 and 03 are formally sentence constituents, but in the poster they are presented as full
sentences—in the case of line 03, as a full graphical paragraph. This seems to be done in the interests of attention management, to indicate high interest importance of certain expressions while keeping them of
a pithy length. According to findings by Stark 1988:298, graphical paragraph breaks do not radically affect comprehension knowledge management, but “can call attention to the beginning of a paragraph
and make it seem more important.”
A particular type of hierarchical upgrading is found on the discourse level, in thematic organization. It is illustrated in the interview with a barber Appendix F. In line 09, the speaker recovers from a
thematic interruption by beginning a new paragraph a new discourse unit, when conceptually he is continuing the same one. The discourse topic for the overall paragraph, NEW BARBERS TODAY, has a
subtopic BARBER COLLEGES for several lines 02–08. In order to reestablish the global topic, the speaker begins a new paragraph at line 09 with a nominal left-detached point of departure, Young
barbers today, unless they go in for hair styling, it isn’t enough money in it. This paragraph division was made by the interviewer, Studs Terkel, but his criteria are not known. The conceptual structure of this
example was presented in Figure 8 in §2.2.6. This is hierarchical upgrading in the sense that line 09 beings what is conceptually only a dependent element a new step in the schema as if it were independent
as a new paragraph schema. The new paragraph is not occasioned by knowledge management, since the second paragraph is logically parallel with steps within the first paragraph in furnishing reasons for the
first paragraph’s macropredication, that today new barbers are fewer.
H
IERARCHICAL DOWNGRADING
is the reverse process, presenting a normally independent element as if it were in some sense dependent. This generally seems to be for the purpose of what Chafe 1982:39
calls “integration” in written language: “the packing of more information into an idea unit than the rapid pace of spoken language would normally allow.” It is illustrated repeatedly in “Winds of terror”
Appendix B:
Example text 15: “Winds of terror,” excerpts Michelmore 1991 02 Black clouds were sweeping in from the northwest, separated from the fields of ripening corn
and beans by only a pale ribbon of light.
05 Hailstones as big as golfballs hammered her car as she pulled into her driveway in the
Wheatland Plains subdivision, nine miles southeast of Aurora. 08 Jim, who’d been stowing away patio furniture, liked to call his slightly built wife Toughie,
because of her energy and determination
. These sentences use different syntactic constructions: a nonrestrictive participial phrase, a nonrestrictive
adjective phrase, a nonrestrictive relative clause, and a because clause which is indicated by the comma as being nonrestrictive see discussion in Higashiizumi 2006, §3.1, as well as references cited there. Each of
these elements, being nonrestrictive, constitutes an additional assertion. For this reason, it can be paraphrased as an independent clause and gives the sentence an additional focus cf. Lambrecht
1994:329. This link with information structure associates hierarchical downgrading with attention management.
Another form of hierarchical downgrading involves several sentences—or better, several predications—which are presented as a single “run-on” utterance. The following is a rather dramatic case:
Example text 16: The right stuff, excerpt Wolfe 1979:3, formatted in lines by RAD, but with three dots and italics as in the original
01 When the final news came, there would be a ring at the front door – 02 a wife in this situation finds herself staring at the front door as if she no longer owns it or
controls it – 03 and outside the door would be a man…
04 come to inform her that unfortunately something has happened out there, 05 and her husband’s body now lies incinerated in the swamps or the pine or the palmetto grass,
06 “burned beyond recognition,” 07 which anyone who has been around an air base for very long
08 fortunately Jane had not 09 realized as quite an artful euphemism to describe a human body that now looked like an
enormous fowl that has burned up in a stove, 10 burned a blackish brown all over,
11 greasy and
blistered, 12 fried, in a word,
13 with not only the entire face and all the hair and the ears burned off, 14 not to mention all the clothing,
15 but also the hands and feet, 16 with what remains of the arms and the legs bent at the knees and elbows and burned at
absolutely rigid angles, 17 burned a greasy blackish brown like like the bursting body itself,
18 so that this husband, father, officer, gentleman, this ornamentum of some mother’s eye, His Majesty the Baby of just twenty-odd years back,
19 has been reduced to a charred hulk with wings and shanks sticking out of it. This kind of “run-on” sentence structure usually has a highlighting function.
Schemas that we would expect to be realized as a paragraph are sometimes compressed into a single sentence. This is hierarchical downgrading of a radical kind. One example is Ephesians 1:3–14, which in
the original Koiné Greek forms a remarkable single sentence:
Example text 17: Ephesians 1:3–14 Young 1862, 1898
3
Blessed is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who did bless us in every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ,
4
according as He did choose us in him before the foundation of the world, for our being holy and unblemished before Him, in love,
5
having foreordained us to the adoption of sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good
pleasure of His will,
6
to the praise of the glory of His grace, in which He did make us accepted in the beloved,
7
in whom we have the redemption through his blood, the remission of the trespasses, according to the riches of His grace,
8
in which He did abound toward us in all wisdom and prudence,….
13b
in whom ye also, having heard the word of the truth—the good news of your salvation—in whom also having believed, ye were sealed with the Holy Spirit of the promise,
14
which is an earnest of our inheritance, to the redemption of the acquired possession, to the praise of His glory.
Although there is no general consensus among commentators as to the structure of this passage, it does seem to present a progression in different dimensions. That is, the passage proceeds from what God the
Father had done for us in Christ to what Christ himself has done for us to the role of the Holy Spirit in our salvation; it also proceeds from the ‘we’ of Jewish believers to ‘ye’ of Gentile believers; and finally from
praise for God’s past choice, to praise for current salvation benefits, to praise for future salvation benefits Bruce 1988. The coherence of the passage seems to depend on a partitive schema, possibly a different
partitive schema for each dimension of progression: the holy Trinity, the two ethnic halves of the early
church, the progression of personal salvation. However that may be, the sentence is a paragraph with different conceptual steps. In general, at the boundary between steps we would expect to find sentence
boundaries as well, but here we do not. Under what conditions does this happen? This is an area for further study.
2.6.6 Relevance theory and hierarchical structure
