Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2004. Vol. 4. Eger Journal of English Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 30)
ÁGNES DELI Interpersonality and Textuality in Discourse
Eger Journal of English Studies IV (2004) 101-114 Interpersonality and Textuality in Discourse » Agnes Deli Lingusitic literature abounds in discussions of speech events, discourse and conversation, and to these issues there are multiple approaches. Among other perspectives the linguist may be interested in social roles and behaviour, various pragmatic principles, the structure of discourse, the organisational perspectives, providing a framework for conversational sequences and the ethnography of speech or she may be concerned with the psychological plane of discourse where the interpretation takes place. This means an assessment of the function of an utterance in a particular context involving the investigation of the procedures working behind the surface realisations of discourse acts. In my research I have been led by Brown and Levinson's (1978: 99) proposal: "in general the abundance of syntactic and lexical apparatus in a grammar seems undermotivated by either systemic or cognitive distinctions and psychological processing factors". My approach to discourse being primarily linguistic I'm not concerned with the social aspect of conversation. I restrict my analysis to the discourse itself, its linguistic formation, while tracking down the mental processes involved in both the production and the interpretation side. In this paper I address myself to two tasks. First of all, I am concerned with how the participants interpret certain non-interrogative utterances in an initiation move and what is it that implicates the elicitative function in these cases, i.e. how the implicature is arrived at. In other words: what makes the addressee —apart from subjective factors —respond. Secondly, I am interested in how two levels of discourse, viz. the interpersonal and the textual —the two terms are taken from Halliday's work —arise and intertwine in discourse. The analysis is based on linguistically observable conditions, and the conversational extracts provided come from the author's own recordings of natural English talk. The hypothesis put forward here is that the elicitative force of an Initiation move is frequently due to a prevailing contextual factor, which is labelled here the U-fact or, and that there is another discourse factor present in several ehcitations which I propose to call the K-factor. The former obtains from the unknown, the unspecific or the uncertainty
