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

112 Ágnes Deli can be considered one factor of the context, which contributes to the flow of the discourse by operating on both the textual and the interpersonal levels. To summarize what has been said about the contextual factors of the interpersonal and the textual levels of elicitations we can pin down the following: • There are basically two crucial factors operating in the context of elicitations: • The so-called U-factor, which obtains from the lack or shortage of shared knowledge and/or from the uncertainty of the speaker. • The so-called K-factor, which comprises the shared knowledge of the participants in terms of reeil world experiences and familiarity with social conventions including rules of cooperative behaviour. • The presence of the U-factor is often lexically marked by U-verbs, by H-maxkers (hypothesis-markers) or by a USP (unspecific) unit, whereas the K-factor can be tracked down within the framework of certain textual patterns in some identifiable semantic units. • The two factors contribute to the interaction cf the interpersonal and textual levels of discourse. On the basis of the observations about discourse exchanges made in this paper we can describe the nature and the realizations of elicitations in the following way: SPEAKER'S INTENTION: FORM OF UTTERANCE: ASKING TO SPECIFY WH-QUESTION DECLARATIVE WITH SOME UNSPECIFIC UNIT TO REMOVE UNCERTAINTY YES/NO QUESTION HYPOTHETICAL STATEMENT The speaker's intention is to ask the hearer either to specify the "unshared" element of the context, that which he does not know or to remove his uncertainty about what he thinks he may or may not know. The linguistic forms available for the former are wh-questions or declaratives containing an unspecific (USP) unit, while the latter intention can be expressed by yes/no questions or by hypothetical statements. A further