Transcript The variability of referring expressions

Referring and the nominal group
Lise Fontaine
Cardiff University
LinC Summer School and Workshop 2010
outline
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A few words about terminology
Brief overview of the CG
The place of referring in the CG
Structure of the nominal group
Walk through of the referring process
Analysing some challenging nominal
groups
Hi Jane,
what’s new?
<buy>
Well,
1. I bought that phone I wanted
2.
I bought a new phone
3.
I bought the new motorola
4.
you know that phone I wanted, well, I bought it
5.
remember I told you I was going to buy
a new phone? I couldn’t buy the one I wanted
so I bought a different one.
Why ‘referring expression’?
When you name something you take away the
possibility that it could have been something else
annonymous
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What can we call these expressions?:
 Discourse referent, referent, entity, thing, object,
participant, term, nominal group, referring
expression ...
Participant vs. participant

Participating entity  Participant (Halliday, 1969:160)
 Term participant is misleading
 But ‘participating entity’ is “clumsy”
 Participant = element that enters into the transitivity
structure … identified in relation to the process (e.g.
‘actor’ or ‘beneficiary’); inherently associated to
Process
 Combination of roles on one element of structure:
Identified/Goal (they elected John their spokesman)
 Semantic category  how our experience of the
world (is) construed (Halliday, 2004:178)
Participant vs. participant
participant (Martin, 1992:129)
 “a person, place or thing, abstract or concrete, capable
of functioning as Agent or Medium in TRANSITIVITY”
 “all participants are realised through nominal groups but
not all nominal groups realise participants” (Martin,
1992:129)
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Ngps not realising a participant:
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Attributes, e.g. He is a nice man
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meteorological it, it’s raining
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Some indefinite nominal groups, e.g. he didn’t see anyone
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Range/Scope in some cases, e.g. take a bath, have dinner,
play tennis.
Do we need a term?
Lyons (1977:23) states:
a term is required for the linguistic units that
serve to identify (or refer to) whatever we are
talking about when we make a statement about
something. The term that is most commonly
used in philosophical semantics for this purpose
is ‘referring expression’.
Referring Expression
“a noun phrase is a string of words which
syntactically is a constituent with an internal
structure containing a determiner, a modifier and a
head ... Semantically, a noun phrase can be used
as a referring expression.” (de Haan, 1989: 8)
Tuscarora (Mithun, cited in Rhijkhoff, 2002:13)
ra-kwá:tihs
wa-hr-at-káhtho-?
ka-téskr-ahs
he_is_young
he_looked_at_it
it-stinks
looked at
the goat'
'the boy
Referent as mental construct
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referent is in the mind of the speaker
as some sort of cognitive
representation or mental construct.
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Rijkhoff (2002:28), “the immediate
referent of an NP, i.e. the discourse
referent, is a mental construct rather
than an entity in the external world.”
A Glimpse of the system network for referent thing
(Fawcett, 1980)
performer
interactant
I, we
addressee
you
REFERENT
THING
naming
John, Mr Smith
recoverable_thing
it, her,
the red one
outsider
classification
a dog,
a dog that is black
seeking specification
who, what
Partial view of the main
generative components
of the COMMUNAL
computer model
Main components of SFG
(from Fawcett, 2000:36 and Fawcett, Tucker & Lin, 1993:121)
Four key concepts which contribute to the
syntax of any unit in the Cardiff grammar
1.
2.
3.
4.
the system network that defines the language’s
meaning potential,
the selection expression of features chosen from it on
any one traversal of it,
the realization rules that these trigger, and
the structure that is their output in any one instance,
consisting of syntax and items.
(Fawcett, 2007:8)
A very small systemic functional grammar for
the English clause
SEMANTICS
(MEANINGS)
information giver
.
.
.
. S. O or S M or if[being] S O/M
polarity seeker
.
.
.
. O
. S
being
situation
Cl
M
REALIZATION RULES
(FORMS)
action
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
or [being]
if
O/M S
. S, .M < form of "be", C
one participant
S, M < form of "simmer", "die", etc
two participants
S, M < form of "simmer", "visit", etc, C
validity assessed
O < "may", "might", etc
validity unassessed
no circumstance
manner . . A
circumstance
time position A
Key:
=
enter all systems to the right
=
=
is realized as
= is expounded by
<
choose between the features to the right
(Fawcett, 2008a:93)
Four components to the realization rules:
Tucker (1998:47):
1. Rule number
2. System feature(s)
3. Any conditions on the rules
4. Rule operations.
e.g. ‘the woman gave the ticket to the man’.
1
2
60 : thing : 3
4
if congruent_thing then ngp,
if minor_relationship_with_thing then pgp.
‘the woman’
‘to the man’
The basic categories and relationships of
syntax
(Fawcett, 2008a:74-75)
a unit is composed of one
or more elements
Elements are filled by
units or expounded by
items
the lowest element is
expounded by an item
Nominal group syntax: (d)*
(m)* h (q)*
determiner
modifier
head
qualifier
(&) (rd) (v) (pd) (qd) (v) (sd or od) (v) (dd) (m)* h (q)*
Elements of the nominal group
representational determiner (rd)
a recording of her voice
selector (v) (always ‘of’)
a recording of her voice
partitive determiner (pd)
the back of the house
fractionative determiner (fd)
half the population
quantifying determiner (qd)
two cultures
superlative determiner (sd)
the fastest of the runners
ordinative determiner (od)
the first of the runners
qualifier-introducing determiner (qid)
those of her family
typic determiner (td)
a different brand of oil
deictic determiner (dd)
the castle
modifier (m)
the old castle
head (h)
the old castle
qualifier (q)
the old castle in the centre of the city
The chemo pills she takes are working
basic logical form (Lin, 1993)
event(event1[agent=object1, process=work]),
<work>
Following the first pass of the network
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Selections have already been made concerning
Subject and Theme (see Fawcett, Tucker & Lin,
1993).
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Therefore, object1 is already known to be
Agent/Subject/Theme.
There is an assumption made here within the
CG model that the selection of Theme takes
place before lexicalisation.
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Potentially problematic
Role of preselection
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All referring expressions are generated by
preselection.
[referent thing] is preselected to fill the Agent
conflated with Subject/Theme.
The basic algorithm for
generating a referring
expression
(Cook, 1991:34)
.....
Alex
it
what great chemo pills
what are working
which/that are working
the red ones
Cultural classification system will lead to
noun items and a realization rule to
expound the head of the nominal group
with the selected item , i.e. h < “pill”
modifiers and qualifiers
Ad hoc descriptions
Example
the pills
three pills
the new pills
the tasty pills
the chemo pills
the pills on the shelf
the pills she takes
the chemo pill she
takes
the pills over there
the pills, Doxorubicin
ad
hoc
+/-
age
+/-
attit
+/-
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Note: Quantity is not an ad hoc description
epith minor role in altern. deictic
+/rel
sit
spec. place
+/+/+/+/-
the selection expression has been given as:
{ [thing], [congruent thing], [stereotypical thing],
[outsider], [cultural classification potential], [count
cultural classification], [plural cultural classification],
[particularized plural], [ad hoc description], [not by age],
[by general epithet], [not by affective attitude], [not by
minor relationship with thing], [by role in other situation],
[classifying description of thing by role in situation] }.
Cultural classification system: pill (h < “pill”)
Output from the first pass through the first pass
through system network for THING
The final labeled tree diagram after re-entry
Nominal group syntax
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Analysing nominal group grammar
A challenging nominal group
Long story short, we end up staying in
a parking lot which is two streets
away from a garage that ends up
directing us to a shop that can rebuild
alternators for 1975 Datsuns and is
just two streets over from them.
This is something that we were not
able to do in Vancouver, we had tried
with little success
Draw trees for these nominal groups:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
I’d like a little house with a yard
Tomorrow is the parade, friends across the street rent a hotel
room downtown and make a party of it
and the chaps. are other parents that I know and trust
It’s a fact he’s known for at least a year
He was one of the guys that found him
There are a variety of management techniques outlined in the
handbook
mom arrives home the same day the girls head down
I had a hard time getting ready for the anniversary
There are an estimated 425,000 woodlot owners in Canada who
collectively own more than 18 million hectares of commercial
productive forest land