David Rose On Homophoric Reference, Contact And Instantiation

David Rose wrote to SYSFLING on 24 Jun 2024, at 19:35:

Homophoric reference is characteristic of contraction, instantiating close contact, discussed in English Text, eg from p531... 

... 

Leaving homophoric ‘the’ unsaid instantiates even closer contact.

and again at 21:27:

This little quote from Working with Discourse Ch 9 encapsulates it...

Contraction refers to the amount of work it takes to exchange meanings, and the idea that the better you know someone the less explicitness it takes... Technically speaking, the less information a homophoric reference contains, the tighter the community it constructs and the more people it excludes.

Blogger Comments:

To be clear, the instance under discussion is:

in the scene where the couple realise they are being stalked by the iconic masked killers, they get into the car trying to escape and the guy says:

[1] To be clear, if the speaker had said the car won't start, the reference would be exophoric to the car they are sitting in, not homophoric (self-specifying). But he could also have used other Deictics, such as our or my, which do not serve as reference items.

[2] To be clear, the proposed relation here would be realisation, not instantiation, since this is concerned with the relation between context and language. Instantiation is the relation between potential and instance.

[3] Rose's claim here is that the reason why the Deictic could be omitted in this instance is because of the amount of contact between the interlocutors, husband and wife. This suggests that if the speaker's addressee, sitting beside him in the car, had been a hitchhiker he had just met, and he had said simply car won't start, the addressee would need to have the referent clarified, with something like which car?

Mick O'Donnell On 'That Means'

Mick Donnell replied to Emma Vale on asflanet on 16 October at 22:50:

Be careful when saying:

you could take out the 'that means' and experientially the clause means the same thing, hence my suggestion that 'that means' is redundant

Just because it does not serve an experiential function does not mean it it redundant. It serves a logical function, and removing it loses the logical connectivity of ideas.

Shooshi says that "that means" is not conjunction but rather reference, and that is true if looked at in terms of grammar. But discoursally, "that means" is one discoursal strategy to link one clause to another as a consequence. For instance, would you take the following two clauses as saying the same thing:

The northern hemisphere is tilting towards the sun,

that means that the Southern hemisphere is tilting away.

The northern hemisphere is tilting towards the sun.

Consequently, the Southern hemisphere is tilting away

For me, this is a case where a semantic relation between two processes can be mapped onto lexicogrammar in distinct ways.

And getting back to your example, the fact that "consequently" can be dropped without affecting the experiential meaning of the second clause does not mean "consequently" is redundant, just that it serves a logical not experiential function.

Blogger Comments:

 To be clear, the two clause complexes under discussion are:

When the Northern hemisphere is tilting towards the sun that means that it is summer in the Northern hemisphere.

And because the northern hemisphere is tilting towards the sun that means that the Southern hemisphere is tilting away.

[1] Importantly, the inclusion of that means that is the student's step towards mastering grammatical metaphor. See Tilting Towards Grammatical Metaphor. Removing this wording makes the clause complexes more congruent:

[2] This is misleading, because it is untrue. The wording that means serves the experiential functions Token and Process: relational: identifying: intensive: sign. The logical relation between the clauses in each complex is marked by the conjunction of the dependent clause: when (temporal) and because (cause: reason).

[3] This is misleading, because it is untrue. The reference is made by that, not that means.

[4] This is misleading, because it is untrue. The two wordings are not saying the same thing. The first pair of clauses (not a complex) are related by cohesive reference (that) and do not express the meaning 'consequence', whereas the second pair of clauses are related by cohesive conjunction and do express the meaning 'consequence'.

Agnate wordings of the first pairing include:

• The northern hemisphere is tilting towards the sun; that indicates that the Southern hemisphere is tilting away.
• The northern hemisphere is tilting towards the sun; that suggests that the Southern hemisphere is tilting away.
• The northern hemisphere is tilting towards the sun; that implies that the Southern hemisphere is tilting away.

See Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 269).

[5] This is misleading, because it is untrue. The conjunctive Adjunct consequently, which does not feature in the original example under discussion, functions textually, not logically, since it marks a relation of cohesive conjunction.

∞

See also:

The Promotion Of Anti-Intellectualism In The SFL Community
Mick O'Donnell Falsely Accusing The Sys-Func Moderator Of Misogyny.