Functions of Language - Volume 12, Issue 1, 2005

When a speaker makes an utterance that comments on herself, she is doing more than simply making a reflective statement about herself. She is drawing attention to a part of her self that she deems relevant to the current exchange by objectifying that part of her self. As it happens, meta-discoursal self-evaluative statements are often made by a speaker about what she has just said or is about to say in the ongoing discourse. Based on a model that sees the self as a conglomeration of all the narratives constituting a person’s experiences, and in all of which the person occupies the role of the protagonist, this paper investigates three meta-discoursal constructions which refer to facets of the self, and their pragma-semantic function of distancing in discourse. These are the ‘my N V-ing’, the ‘N in me’, and the ‘N in me V’ constructions, as exemplified respectively by That was my arrogance speaking, That’s the purist in me talking, and The cynic in me would say yes.

The study of interpersonal features of academic texts, through which writers evaluate their material and engage their readers, has been one of the most productive areas of discourse studies of the past decade. Scholarly writing involves adopting a position and persuading readers of claims, and the linguistic resources used to achieve these goals have been described in terms of evaluation, stance and metadiscourse. A relatively overlooked interpersonal feature however is what we shall call evaluative that constructions, a structure which allows a writer to thematize attitudinal meanings and present an explicit statement of evaluation by presenting a complement clause within a super-ordinate clause. In this paper we explore the disciplinary variations in the frequencies, forms and functions of evaluative that structures in 240 research article abstracts from six disciplines. We find that this structure is widely employed in these abstracts, about once every five sentences, and is an important means of providing author comment and evaluation. Evaluative that therefore helps writers to manage their discourse in various ways and to signal a clear stance towards the information they present.

This study concerns two scientific texts of the late seventeenth century. One is Newton’s Opticks, written in English; the other, written in French, is Traité de la lumière by Huygens. It is argued that the two writers have different ideologies, in the sense that Newton is working in an empirical framework, whereas Huygens is a Cartesian. This has an effect on the semantics and lexicogrammar of the two texts. The percentage of Material process passives, the type of personal pronouns and the process types with which they are used, and the types of processes which are nominalized are all features which reflect the empirical stance of Newton as opposed to the Cartesian position adopted by Huygens. The contexts of the two texts are virtually identical, measured in terms of Field, Tenor and Mode. This has implications for SFL theory, and allows for the hypothesis that ideology affects the semantic metafunctions directly.

In modelling the discourse–grammar interface, a central question concerns the status of discourse act as the minimal unit of discourse organization and its relation to units of grammatical structure. This paper seeks to clarify the notion of act by defining it as a strategic rather than a conceptual unit, and by setting out a classification of strategic acts. Illustration is then offered for the position that discourse acts are to a very considerable extent realized in English by intonation units and punctuation units. This is done by considering how punctuational variation and cases of intonation/syntax mismatch can be explained in terms of the specific discourse contribution of the units concerned. Although the correlation between discourse acts and intonation/punctuation units remains problematic, in that there may not be a 1 : 1 correspondence, it is still attractive — at least for English — to see the linguistic correlate of acts in intonation and punctuation units rather than in syntactic structures. The paper finishes by considering the implications for the formalizing of relations between discourse, semantics and syntax in Functional Discourse Grammar.