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17 results

  • Managing information flow through prosody in it-clefts

  • CHARLOTTE BOURGOIN, GERARD O'GRADY, KRISTIN DAVIDSE
  • Journal:
    English Language & Linguistics / Volume 25 / Issue 3 / September 2021
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    29 November 2021, pp. 485-511
    • Article
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  • This article addresses the question of how speakers manage information flow in specificational it-clefts by balancing grammatical and prosodic choices in real time. We examine this in a qualitative and quantitative corpus study of both full and reduced it-clefts extracted from the first London–Lund Corpus (LLC–1), whose prosody we studied combining auditory and instrumental analysis. Our empirical analysis resulted in the following findings about cleft usage in speech. Speakers have considerable freedom to choose what information to make prominent irrespective of the actual discourse-givenness of the constituents. Clefts allow speakers to highlight elements by means of two strategies, syntactic and prosodic, which may reinforce each other or create their own different types of prominence in sequence. It-clefts always have a high first pitch accent, which signals some form of reset of the expectations generated by preceding utterances. The choice of whether or not to produce a cleft relative clause is not purely informationally motivated. Rather, reduced clefts achieve specific unique rhetorical effects. All of this makes clefts a particularly useful device for speakers responding moment by moment to informational needs and shifting communicative goals.

  • 18 - SFL and Critical Discourse Analysis

  • from Part II - Discourse Analysis within SFL
  • Edited by Geoff Thompson, University of Liverpool, Wendy L. Bowcher, Lise Fontaine, Cardiff University, David Schönthal, Cardiff University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Systemic Functional Linguistics
    Published online:
    03 May 2019
    Print publication:
    09 May 2019, pp 462-484

  • Summary

    This chapter traces the historical relationship between Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). I describe Fairclough’s linguistic SFL approach to CDA focusing on his seminal 1989 work Language and Power and outline his three-stage methodology, which enables analysts to account for discourse as (i) text, (ii) discursive practice, and (iii) societal practice. Text samples are used to illustrate how SFL is able to analyze language use as text and practice. Furthermore, I show that the Marxist heritage underpinning the genesis of SFL is shown to fully harmonize linguistic theory with social theory. Various criticisms of SFL-flavoured CDA such as the unrepresentativeness of data, subjectivity of analyses, and an anti-mentalist theory of context are discussed and dismissed. A claim that cognitive linguistics is the missing link in the analysis of ideological patterns underpinning social action is considered and mostly rejected on the grounds of its seeming incompatibility with social theory and individual-centred focus. Finally, technological developments which have the potential to add to the power of CDA descriptions and explanations in language and other modes are briefly outlined, as are some of the tensions remaining between theory and practice.

Systemic Functional Linguistics
  • Exploring Choice
  • Edited by Lise Fontaine, Tom Bartlett, Gerard O'Grady
  • Published online:
    18 December 2013
    Print publication:
    19 December 2013
  • This stimulating volume provides fresh perspectives on choice, a key notion in systemic functional linguistics. Bringing together a global team of well-established and up-and-coming systemic functional linguists, it shows how the different senses of choice as process and as product are interdependent, and how they operate at all levels of language. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, it covers a range of linguistic viewpoints, informed by evolutionary theory, psychology, sociology and neuroscience, to produce a complex but unifying account of the issues. This book offers a critical examination of choice and is ideal for students and researchers working in all areas of functional linguistics as well as cognitive linguistics, second-language acquisition, neurolinguistics and sociolinguistics.