Abstract
Caldwell sets out an alternate view to the prevailing orthodoxy that syntax is the fundamental structuring force of language. Focussing his discussion around discourse, he distinguishes between two kinds: discourse in the large sense – a set of semantic relationships that become conventionalised through continuous use in the same way; and discourse in the small sense – a particular act of speech, writing, or conversation that takes place ‘within’ a discourse in the large sense. Caldwell argues that discourse naturally structures itself in three different ways: through the discontinuity of its terms and forms; by the mutual presupposition of the terms ‘inhabiting’ the discourse; and the directionality, purpose and aim of a discourse (in the small sense). These three forms of the coercive structure of discourse provide a discipline to it that differs from the syntax of standard theory, and highlight how the meaning of our words comes not from the terms themselves, but from the discourse within which they are situated.
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Notes
- 1.
I mean, of course, impossible in discourse terms, not in grammatical terms.
- 2.
Some of them, like Nomi Erteschik-Shir (1997), typically try to incorporate focus-structure as just another (computable) annotation on syntax, in which topic and focus constituents are marked, lying between the syntax and the semantics.
- 3.
- 4.
Notice for example the elaboration of categories in Kay & Fillmore’s Glossary entry for “valence”, which is meant to indicate a verb’s capacity for taking complements:
The adjective “afraid” can be said to “take” a subject which expresses an experiencer, and a complement which expresses the content of the experience, this expressed either with a finite clause (“I’m afraid he’ll lose the election”) or a prepositional phrase headed by “of” (“I’m afraid of earthquakes”). The representation of the valence of this adjective is expressed as a set whose members are feature structures specifying the values of three attributes: grammatical function, “theta” role, and morphosyntactic form… (emphases mine). Cf. the Berkeley Construction Grammar website at http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~kay/bcg/ glossary.html
- 5.
By this she means various kinds of relations between verbs and their objects: the Ditransitive, the Caused Motion, the Resultative, the Intransitive, etc.
- 6.
All the Romance languages have a structure of increasing salience. Others, like Japanese, combine word order with overt salience markers to indicate a generally decreasing salience. But every language has some means of indicating salience.
- 7.
I have omitted a major implication of this coerciveness from this paper: the way the salience structure of discourse focuses on what I call a molecular sememe, which is the “arena” in which word meaning-in-context is created. For more about that, see Caldwell (2004) and Caldwell (1989). [Reprinted here in their final form as Chapters 3 and 2 respectively – Eds.]
- 8.
- 9.
For more detail, see Caldwell (2002).
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Caldwell, T.P., Cresswell, O., Stainton, R.J. (2018). The Coerciveness of Discourse. In: Cresswell, O., Stainton, R. (eds) Discourse, Structure and Linguistic Choice. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 101. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75441-3_4
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