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Sentences in Discourse: an Analysis of a Discourse by Bertrand Russell

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Book cover Text, Time, and Context

Part of the book series: Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy ((SLAP,volume 87))

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Abstract

In this paper I present a stylistic analysis of a short discourse by Bertrand Russell. My purpose is twofold: first, to suggest an approach to syntactically based stylistic analysis that goes beyond mere frequency counts, and, second, to draw out some linguistic ramifications of the approach.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For a stimulating discussion of successiveness and simultaneity in language, see Jakobson (1960).

  2. 2.

    Except various technical sentences, as of mathematics or chemistry, for instance; or on the other hand, sentences of poetry.

  3. 3.

    See Ross (1967) for a discussion of the problem of pinning down the characteristics of linguistic units of a certain length.

  4. 4.

    An interesting discussion of how such units are signalled is given in Halliday (1967a).

  5. 5.

    Different types of nominals are listed separately: there are listings for factive, genitive, action, question, infinitive, and N of N nominals. Whether these nominals should be considered separately is debatable. I consider them separately here since the underlying elements are presented in different surface forms, depending on the type of nominal. However, this difference may turn out to be unimportant in understanding.

  6. 6.

    A discourse is unique with respect to a particular period and a particular genre, among other things; Thomas Pynchon would be more unique had he written during the eighteenth century than he is today, and Samuel Johnson would be more unique today than in his own time.

  7. 7.

    For an explanation of what is covered by this category, and by others, in the lists, see the section on details of the syntactic analysis, 2.4

  8. 8.

    I refer here to constructions like that in the relative clause of sentence (3). Such constructions are to be distinguished from as that can be replaced by about (as in the main clause of the same sentence) and from cases with a PP with as as an obligatory verb complement, e.g. with the words speak of, conceive, regard, in Russell’s discourse.

  9. 9.

    In the sense of the Russian formalists, cf. Mukarovsky (1967). The approach of the formalists is introduced with notable clarity in the first chapter of Gopnik (1970).

  10. 10.

    It is not clear why such sentences are ungrammatical. Fodor (1970) suggests that a surface constraint blocks two by-phrases, but note that not all successions of by-phrases are ungrammatical: Mary was seen by John by the river bank. A possible explanation, offered only tentatively, is that in the offending sentence both by-phrases come from the same sentence, and that it is this that must be blocked.

  11. 11.

    This sentence was suggested by Senta Plotz.

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Correspondence to Carlota S. Smith .

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Smith, C.S. (2009). Sentences in Discourse: an Analysis of a Discourse by Bertrand Russell. In: Meier, R., Aristar-Dry, H., Destruel, E. (eds) Text, Time, and Context. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 87. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2617-0_10

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