М. В. Ломоносова Филологический факультет Кафедра английского языкознания Когезия и когеренция в философском дискурсе на материале эссе Бертрана Расселла "О природе знакомства". Курсовая

• Название: М. В. Ломоносова Филологический факультет Кафедра английского языкознания Когезия и когеренция в философском дискурсе на материале эссе Бертрана Расселла "О природе знакомства". Курсовая
• Анкор: Cohesion and Coherence in Philosophical Discourse On the basis of Bertrand Russell’s essay On the Nature of Acquaintance
• Дата: 17.02.2022
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• Имя файла: Cohesion and Coherence in Philosophical Discourse On the basis o.docx
• Тип: Курсовая; #365366
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Theoretical basis and background.

According to Lambrecht (1994), information structure concerns the way how the content is packaged in discourse “depending on the speaker’s assessment of the universe of discourse”. It is a part of linguistic structure that comprises of the following fundamental aspects:

i) presupposition vs. assertion of propositions (that is, the information that is known and not yet known, the content which can be traced back and the one which is impossible to processed on this way);

ii) identifiability and activation of referents (status of mental representations in the addressee's mind: active vs. brand-new unanchored);

iii) topic vs. focus status of the proposition elements (predictability vs. unpredictability of relations between propositions and their elements, whether any assumptions about the discourse that follows can be made or not) (rf. Lehmann 2008).

In order to substantiate this basic definition, let’s give an example of topic and focus in a sentence:

(Jane is my best friend.) She is very nice. (rf. Zikanova et al. 2015)

Here she is topic, as it is refers to the preceding sentence, and nice is focus, as it is not yet known to the recipient. The underlined word refers to the person that is known and evident in the present situation and from where the speaker starts. The italicized word, on the contrary, forms the core of the expression, as without this new information the statement would not reach its purpose.

Through centuries of scholarly research, there have been various terms to define this basic opposition. First, the earliest instance of scientific reflexion on the subject was conducted by Weil (1844), who stated that “If the initial notion is related to the united notion of the preceding sentence, the march of the two sentences is to some extent parallel; if it is related to the goal of the sentence which precedes, there is a progression in the march of the discourse” (Weil 1844). In 1907, the Czech scholar Mathesius developed the theory of “actual articulation” within the sentence, and aimed to structurally describe what later became known as ‘theme’ and ‘rheme’ (Mathesius 1907). He claimed that sentence predicate was not in the ‘nucleus’ (i. e. the focus, but rather on the edge between the two parts of the utterance, ensuring the transition from presupposed information to the new data. In the middle of the 20th century another Czech scholar, Firbas, and his team developed the theory of functional sentence perspective (FSP) deeply rooted in Mathesius’ work. Since that time, topic-focus articulation under various names (for example, information structure theory by Steedman 1991 and Lambrecht 1994 (we follow their terminology) and communicative structure theory by Melchuk 1981) has become a mainstream of linguistic research worldwide.

One of the most valuable approaches to this phenomenon in empirical sense seems to be the division of all sentence items into contextually bound and contextually non-bound ones (see Zikanova et al. 2015). A sentence item is considered contextually bound, if “it is deducible from the broader context” (ibid. p. 67), for example

We have two children. John_t is the younger, Mary_t is the older. (rf. ibid. p. 67)

Here John_t and Mary_t are contextually bound items, as they are deducible from the preceding context. However, if the broader context (the so-called context of situation) presupposes a choice of a wide range of topics for the next utterance, the topic chosen is still considered contextually bound (we avoid further specification into contrastive and non-contrastive contextually bound items introduced in Zikanova et al. 2015 for practical purposes):

The weather is nice. John_t is playing in the garden.

Here let us adduce an example of such topic-focus analysis of a short text:

Across the river_t Mary_t and John_t could now_t see_f a fire_f with two_f figures_f beside it_t. When they_t moved_f closer_f, they_t could make_f out two_f white_f horses_f against the background_f of the dark_f bushes_f. Then_t he_t [John] recognized_f them_t. (based on Shkvoretsky 1986)

Here contextually bound sentence items are marked by the index “t” and contextually non-bound ones by the index “f”. A detailed description of the scope of the focus within the sentence which in many instances determines the parameter of contextual boundness (except from the cases listed in 3. of the present work) is given below.