|
The coffee is hot relates a proposition about some aspect of the partici-pants’ shared context to their respective roles in the interaction and the circumstances of their contact (some reason for remarking on the temperature of the coffee). However, CONTEXT influences the ADDRESSOR’s and ADDRESSEE’s identities and the kind of CONTACT between them. For example, if your close friend works part time in a coffee shop, when you go in to buy coffee, the context of your contact will (at least partially) include a waiter/customer relationship.
Phatic function: sentences focusing on the relationship (CONTACT) between participants mainly serve a phatic function. For example, Hi! Good to see you! provides little information about the surrounding context, but as a first pair part of a greeting sequence, it initiates an interaction and a re-negotiation of the status of the participants’ relationship.
Poetic function: sentences that focus on the MESSAGE itself serve mainly a poetic function. For example, Carl Sandburg’s line, The fog comes in on little cat feet, manipulates the CODE to convey the silent approach of the fog through metaphor.
Emotive function: sentences that express the impact of some facet of the external world (context) or internal world (feelings, sensations) on the ADDRESSOR mainly serve the emotive function. For example, I am hungry states an internal condition of the ADDRESSOR. But because it may be interpreted as a request that the ADDRESSEE make dinner it may also have a conative function.
Conative function: sentences that focus on the relation of the ADDRESSEE to the context or the interaction mainly serve the conative function. For example, Are you hungry? can be interpreted as either a request for information from the addressee or as an invitation to join the addressor for dinner.
Metalinguistic function: sentences focusing on the relation between code and situation serve mainly a metalinguistic function. For example, asking Did you just say “Don” or “Dawn” was coming? focuses on the pronunciation and reference of some prior word.
Sentences typically serve more than one function at a time. Although a sentence may have a primary function, it is likely to be multifunctional. Suppose, for example, someone says What time is it? The sentence’s primary function is conative: it is a question that requests something of the addressee. But it may also have a phatic function if it opens contact. And it certainly has an emotive function (it conveys a need of the addressor) and a referential function (it makes reference to the world outside of language).
Planes of discourse
Jakobson’s model of language functions stresses the context “beyond the sentence,” but it ignores the text – the unit of language “above the sentence.” What we say or write never occurs in a vacuum: it is always surrounded by other information in other utterances. The accumulation of information through successive chunks of language complicates the view of multifunctionality presented in Jakobson’s model. Since functions pile up with each successive sentence, how do we manage to sort out which functions we should pay attention to and which we may safely ignore? How are sentences with multiple functions strung together to create coherent texts?
To answer this question, we must shift our attention from the “sentence” to the utterance, a contextualized sentence. Whereas a sentence is a string of words put together by the grammatical rules of a language, an utterance is the realization of a sentence in a textual and social context – including both the utterances which surround it and the situation in which it is uttered. An utterance is the intersection of many planes of context, and as we speak and listen, we rely on these intersecting planes of context to con-vey and interpret the meaning of each utterance. An utterance thus expresses far more meaning than the sentence it contains.
The examples in (7) can help disentangle the difference between sentence and utterance.
(7) a.
|
|
Discourse analysis is fun.
|
b.
|
|
Discourse analysis is fun.
|
c.
|
Bob:
|
I really like my linguistics courses.
|
|
Sue:
|
Oh I do too! Discourse analysis is fun.
|
Although the sentences are the same, the three occurrences of “Discourse analysis is fun” in (7) are three different utterances, because they are produced in different contexts. Although (7a) and (7b) appear in the same social context (as examples presented in a textbook), there is a difference in their textual contexts: (7a) is the first appearance of the sentence, and (7b) is the second appearance (a repetition) of the sentence. (7a) and (7b) both differ from (7c), as well. Although (7c) is an illustration in a textbook, it is also part of an interaction between two interlocutors, so it has a different social context than (7a) and (7b).
Focusing on utterances allows us to see how several planes of context are related to, and expressed through, the language used in an utterance. Like the facets of a diamond, an utterance simultaneously has meaning as:
a reflection of a social relationship (who are you? who am I?)
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
