real grammar in fictional contexts

12/7/2014 Real Grammar in Fictional Contexts

http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/STELLA/COMET/glasgrev/issue4/realgram.htm 1/12

Real Grammar in Fictional Contexts

Catherine Emmott

Grammarians have traditionally confined their studies to isolated sample sentences or phrases andhave typically drawn on their intuitions about how they believe language works rather than onobservations of how language actually does work. Using this method, a grammatical system may bedeveloped without the analyst ever considering how linguistic features occur in “real” 1 naturallyoccurring acts of communication such as novels, textbooks, newspapers and everyday conversation.There is, however, a strong assumption amongst certain linguists (e.g. Chafe, 1980, 1994; Thompson,1987; Sinclair (ed.), 1987, 1990; Werth, forthcoming; Emmott, forthcoming) that the study of “real”acts of communication should provide the raw material for creating grammatical theories, rather thanbeing viewed as an “after the event” application. The “real grammar” which emerges from studyingthis type of data may be significantly different from findings based on artificiallyconstructed data interms of both specific details and the overall theoretical approach.

This study examines one particular genre, narrative fiction, looking at how language actually operatesin these texts. The main object of this work is not to provide an analysis of the stylistic properties ofspecific texts or to comment on the language of the genre (although such observations will arise fromthe analysis), but to look at some of the canonical assumptions of grammatical theory, seeing howapplicable these assumptions are in the face of real data and exploring topics on which the standardgrammar textbooks remain silent. In particular, the study suggests that the interpretation of particulargrammatical relationships in narrative texts can only be explained by such cognitive factors as theinvolvement, perspective and orientation of the reader. This raises questions about the nature ofgrammatical theory and about what should be included in grammar textbooks.

FROM UNREAL TO REAL DATA

Utilising unreal data has a long tradition in Linguistics and also in Social Science subjects such asPsychology. Most grammar textbooks illustrate their observations about language using examples thathave been made up by the grammarians themselves and which they assume will be recognised asrepresentative of how language works in general. Often this has been due either to convenience or toan undue reliance on intuition. Sometimes, however, there are more deliberate reasons, boththeoretical and practical, for the choice of data. Generative linguists, for example, have shunned realtexts in the belief that they are replete with “performance errors”, such as slips of the tongue in spokencommunication, and so do not adequately reflect the underlying knowledge of a language possessedby a speaker. This point of view is made explicit by Chomsky (1965, p. 4) when he comments that:“Observed use of language or hypothesized dispositions to respond, habits, and so on, may provideevidence as to the nature of this mental reality, but surely cannot constitute the actual subject matter oflinguistics, if this is to be a serious discipline”. For different reasons, many psychologists will also optto use selfcreated language materials in their experiments on language comprehension. This type ofdata is considered by experimenters to be more easy to “control” empirically than sentences extractedfrom real acts of communication.

In contrast to this approach, discourse analysts argue that artificiallyconstructed data lacks importantproperties of real language. This is partly due to the brevity of artificial data, which is often only oneor two sentences in length. Certain grammatical features have been shown only to be understoodproperly when they are studied alongside related linguistic items spanning much larger stretches oftext, as shown by Halliday and Hasan’s seminal (1976) work on textual cohesion. Brief madeupexamples are also likely to lack overall discourse structure, such as topic shifts in nonnarrative and



flashbacks or changes in point of view in narrative. Much research in discourse analysis hasdemonstrated that major discourse boundaries can have an effect on grammatical form (e.g. Chafe,1980; Clancy, 1980, 1992; Fox, 1987a,b, 1988; Emmott, 1989).

Even if a single sentence of real text is compared with a single sentence of madeup text, thedifferences can be considerable. Chafe (1994, p. 108) has found that the patterns of given and newinformation in constructed examples are often quite unlike those found in a corpus of real texts.Traditional grammar textbooks may also give undue emphasis to simple structures which arecomparatively rare in reality (Chafe 1994, p. 17), as Sinclair (1990, p. xi) points out in relation to twoword sentences comprising just a subject and verb. Conversely, structures which have a reasonablefrequency in real text might never be mentioned in a grammar textbook based on constructedexamples alone.

As an increasing amount has been learnt about the properties of real discourse, approaches to writinggrammar textbooks have been changing, with some of these textbooks now citing extracts from realtexts (e.g. Freeborn, 1987; Downing & Locke, 1992). The purpose of such extracts does, nevertheless,often seem to be to illustrate a preexisting model derived from artificial data or to fill in minor gapsin such a model. This is very different from utilising real data to build a model of grammar from firstprinciples.

More revolutionary in this respect are recent attempts to analyse linguistic usage utilising large textcorpora which are analysed with the assistance of computer concordances (e.g. Sinclair, 1987, 1990).Such projects are changing many of our assumptions about the language. This type of analysis is not,however, the only way of analysing grammatical items in real data and can be complemented by otherapproaches. The following section discusses how grammatical items can be studied by tracing theirusage through specific passages and observing how linguistic forms are influenced by thedevelopment of the texts in which they occur.

REAL DATA, REAL GRAMMAR

The approach taken to grammar in this article can be described as cognitivefunctional and textorientated, in the tradition of American discourse analysts such as Chafe (1980, 1994), Du Bois(1980), Clancy (1980, 1992), Hopper (1979), Hopper and Thompson (1980), Thompson (1987) andLongacre (1983). This approach involves identifying cognitive reasons for the use of a particulargrammatical form at a specific point in a text. This section illustrates this type of analysis byexamining instances of three grammatical features (the past perfect, the indefinite article andanaphoric/cataphoric pronouns) in selected examples of narrative text. I argue that the textualexamples cited can only be accounted for by postulating cognitive factors such as the following:

(i) Knowledge: for example, information which is available to enable the reader to identify thereferent of a referring expression or to make inferences about the possible identity of the referent (e.g.Emmott, 1994; Werth, 1995, forthcoming). (ii) Orientation and reorientation: for example, the reader’s need to track the continuity of eventsin a spatiotemporal unit or to recognise switches from one spatiotemporal unit to another (e.g.Chafe, 1980; Clancy, 1980; Emmott, 1989, 1995b, forthcoming; Werth, 1995, forthcoming). (iii) Involvement: for example, the perception of a scene as being more or less vivid by virtue of itsnarrative presentation (e.g. Longacre, 1970, 1983). (iv) Perspective: for example, the identification with the point of view of one character rather thananother (e.g. Fowler, 1977, 1986; Fludernik, 1993; Duchan et al (eds.), 1995; Werth, 1995,forthcoming). (v) Salience: the degree of importance of knowledge (see (i) above), due to factors such as the statusof a character or the centrality of events in terms of plot expectations (Clancy, 1980, 1992; Grimes,1975; Grimes (ed.), 1978).



(vi) Distance: the amount of text/discourse that has elapsed since relevant knowledge (see (i) above)was acquired from the text (e.g. Clancy, 1980; Emmott, 1995a).

These categories will be explained further in the remainder of the section, as the text examples areanalysed. The list above is not intended as a comprehensive one since a full analysis of a text wouldrequire a much finergrained system (Emmott, in preparation). It will, nevertheless, serve to illustratethe general point that cognitive factors are important in grammatical analysis and, furthermore, todemonstrate how a number of cognitive factors may weigh against each other in theproduction/interpretation of a particular grammatical form. In each case, this explanation is comparedand contrasted with that of standard grammar textbooks and the differences identified are thendiscussed in the following section.

(I) VERBAL ASPECT: THE PAST PERFECT

One generalization that is often made in grammar textbooks is that the past perfect (e.g. had spoken)is used to signal “remote” or “past in the past” time, which is “anterior” (Quirk et al (1985, pp 195196) to that denoted by the simple past tense (e.g. spoke). In describing the language of narrativetexts, it would seem natural, therefore, to assume that when the main narrative is in the simple pasttense, flashbacks will be in the past perfect. In fact, an examination of real narratives shows thatsubstantial portions of flashbacks may utilise the same verb form as the main narrative. Indeed, thepast perfect is often found only at the beginning of a flashback and sometimes intermittentlythroughout 2. During much of a flashback the simple past may be used, as shown below:

Example 1

This account [of her childhood] Vivien had given in a not at all selfpitying way but speculatingas to how many siblings she might actually by then have. Zosie had been there and had listenedwith a kind of staring intensity, her elbows on the table and her little pale face held in the cup ofher hands. “My mother’s abandoned me too,” she said. That was before she had told Vivien about the baby. She was still the mystery girl, come out ofnowhere. “My mother doesn’t know where I am,” she said. “She doesn’t care, does she? She hasn’t triedto find me, she hasn’t looked for me, she hasn’t told the police. I’m missing but she doesn’tcare.” “How do you know?” Rufus said. “It was you ran away from her not she from you. Or so onegathers. How do you know she’s not going spare?” “We’ve had the radio on every day and there’s been nothing. I bought a paper while we were inLondon. I’ve looked at papers every time we’ve been in Sudbury and there’s never been a word.She doesn’t care, she’s glad I’ve gone.” “So what?” said reasonable Rufus. “Isn’t that what you want? I thought you said that the lastthing you wanted was to go home. You don’t want your mother fussing around you, do you?” Shiva thought he had understood. Vivien certainly had. Vivien said it was one thing a younggirl running away from home and being glad to leave her parents but quite another for her tofind out the parents were relieved she’d gone. And Zosie said: “Don’t you see how terrible it is? I’m missing from home and my mother isn’t worried. I mighthave been murdered. For Christ’s sake, I’m only seventeen.” She began to cry, tearing sobs. Vivien sat down beside her and put an arm round her, then sheturned her round and held her in her arms. It was later that day that Zosie had told Vivieneverything – or almost everything. At any rate she had told her about the baby.

(Barbara Vine, 1987, A Fatal Inversion, pp. 194195)



In this extract, all the events take place several years prior to those of the main narrative, recallingevents which happened to the characters in their youths. The extract begins in the past perfect (hadgiven, had been, had listened), but switches to simple past whilst still describing the same time period(said, began, sat down, etc.). Towards the end of the extract, the verb form switches to the past perfectagain (Zosie had told Vivien everything), signalling a time which is still anterior to the main narrative,but which is nevertheless subsequent to that of the immediately preceding passage. Clearly, there is nopervasive correlation between anterior events and the past perfect verb form. Quirk et al (1985, p.196), which is one of the most detailed grammar textbooks, does, in part, prepare us for this:

But of course, the past perfective does not have to refer to a more remote time than that referredto by the simple past. In some cases, particularly in a clause introduced by after, the twoconstructions can be more or less interchangeable:

[i] I ate [T2] my lunch after Sandra had come [T3] back from her shopping.

[ii] I ate [T2] my lunch after Sandra came [T3] back from her shopping.

After places the eating (T2) after Sandra’s return (which we may call T3), so the past perfective,which places T3 before T2, is redundant. What difference it does make is a matter of the“standpoint” of the speaker. In [sentence (i)] the “past in past” time T3 is identified as beingearlier than T2 by the past perfective; but in [sentence (ii)] it is left to the conjunction after tosignal this temporal relation.

This explanation alerts us to the possibility of variability but does not adequately account for why inone of Quirk et al’s examples the conjunction is followed by the past perfect (or past perfective as it istermed in Quirk et al) whereas in the other it is omitted as redundant. To ascertain this type ofinformation, it would be necessary to look at the communicative context of real examples of thisstructure to see what motivates the use of a particular verb form.

Variability of the verb form in the narrative extract in Example 1 might be partially explained byredundancy after the initial setup of the scene. The initial events would therefore be in the pastperfect to establish the anteriority of the ensuing sequence of events, but once established all events inthe sequence might be assumed to belong to the same time period without the need for a linguisticindicator. In addition, the simple past might be regarded as a more immediate form, more appropriateto a scene incorporating a fair amount of direct speech and from a practical point of view the simplepast may also be easier to sustain over long stretches of text since it has a less cumbersome structurethan the past perfect 3. The switch to the past perfect at the end of the extract might be seen as areaffirmation of the anteriority of the flashback time frame after a minor shift to the parameters (laterthat day), even though, at this particular point, time is moving forwards rather than backwards. Theuse of past perfect verb forms at this point also coincides with summarising of the conversation ratherthan the more “mimetic” direct speech that has come earlier.

If this analysis is correct, the past perfect can be seen as a characteristic of reorientation rather than asa time marker of orientation. The reader’s assumption of the continuity of events within the “past inthe past” time band would make unnecessary repeated grammatical signalling and a lack of repeatedsignalling would allow greater involvement in the action, making the events “come to life” for thereader. However, in cases where a flashback may intermittently signal orientation, there may be atension between reminding the reader of the time frame of the activity and increasing involvement bymaking the presentation more vivid.

(II) DEFINITENESS

Examining real texts shows the articles to have a more complex range of functions than suggested by



the standard grammar books. Consider, for example, standard statements about the indefinite article,as found in Quirk et al (1985, p. 272):

...a/an X will be used where the reference of X is not uniquely identifiable in the sharedknowledge of speaker and hearer. Hence a/an is typically used when the referent has not beenmentioned before, and is assumed to be unfamiliar to the speaker or hearer: An intruder has stolen a vase. The intruder stole the vase from a locked case. The case wassmashed open.

Although common, this is not the only pattern to be found in narrative. An entity may also be denotedwith an indefinite article when it has been previously mentioned in the text and can therefore beassumed to be familiar to both writer and reader. Consider the following situation in Mervyn Peake’sTitus Groan. Steerpike has been climbing across the roof of Gormenghast for several hours trying tofind a way of entering the castle. He eventually manages to force his way through a window and, inexhaustion, lands unconscious on the floor of Fuchsia’s secret attic. Some time later, Fuchsia entersthe attic:

Example 2

Her long coloured candles were by the door and she lit one of them immediately from the littlewhite one in her hand. Turning to place it on the table, her heart stopped beating, for she foundthat she was staring across the room at a body lying huddled beneath her window.

(Mervyn Peake, 1985, Titus Groan, pp. 147148)

The indefinite article a is used in the noun phrase a body even though the reader must know both thatthere is a body in the attic and that the character is Steerpike. This knowledge comes partly from theprevious account of Steerpike’s entry into the room and partly from the chapter heading(incorporating a definite article), “The body by the window”. Clearly, the reason for the indefinitearticle is that Steerpike is at this point unknown to one of the other characters, Fuchsia, through whoseeyes the reader is witnessing the action. This use of the indefinite article often accompanies a switchin perspective, either from one character to another or as the physical distance increases between theperceiver and the perceived.

Example 3

...He [Matty] thrust his books into their hands and limped quickly away. They held on to eachother, laughing like apes. They broke apart, clamorously collected their fellows. The wholetroupe clattered up the stone stairs, up, up, one, two, three storeys to the landing by the greatwindow. They pushed and shoved against the great bar that ran from one end to the other atboyheight, and held the verticals that were less than a boy’s width apart. Fifty yards away andfifty feet down a boy limped quickly towards the forbidden tree.

(William Golding, 1980, Darkness Visible, p. 24)

In this example, Matty is represented by the indefinite expression a boy at the point at which hemoves into the distance and this device also serves to highlight his alienation from the other boys.This linguistic signalling of perspective, by means of the indefinite article, therefore overcomes theusual requirement for a definite article when the reader has knowledge of the character’s identity(particularly when the individual has been so recently mentioned, so the linguistic distance is small).

Of course, narratologists and text linguists are increasingly studying the relationship betweenlanguage and point of view (e.g. Fludernik, 1993; Duchan et al (eds.), 1995; Werth, 1995,



forthcoming), so these observations about perspective are not new. However, there does need to besome transfer of these ideas from the domain of literary linguistics to the grammatical canon. This useof the indefinite article is not just found in literary texts. Du Bois (1980, pp. 258272) finds similarfeatures in oral narratives he examines and comments that “The literature on definiteness....hasisolated definiteness from larger considerations of discourse structure as a whole.....many crucialphenomena related to definiteness are either not found or not easily recognized within the domain ofonesentence or twosentence examples which are typically used”.

(III) ANAPHORIC AND CATAPHORIC REFERENCE

The distinction between anaphora and cataphora is rarely examined critically in the grammartextbooks. Quirk et al (1985, p. 347) offer the following explanations:

... we distinguish between Anaphoric and Cataphoric uses of a 3rd person pronoun, according towhether the element with which it corefers (the Antecedent) precedes or follows it.

and also (p. 351):

Cataphoric reference occurs less frequently [than anaphoric reference], and under limitedconditions. Where it does occur, anaphoric reference is also possible, so that we can equate twosynonymous sentences such as [i] and [ia] in which the positions of pronoun and antecedent arereversed. [i cataphoric] Before he joined the Navy, Gerald made peace with his family. [ia anaphoric] Before Gerald joined the Navy, he made peace with his family.

This explanation takes no account of the fact that a sentence may be preceded by prior text. Thefollowing example would be cataphoric by Quirk et al’s criterion, but is, arguably, anaphoric in itsnatural context:

Example 4

In addition to his five famous novels and collection of short stories available as Penguins, E.M.Forster has published about fourteen other works...

(Opening biography in E.M. Forster , 1954, Collected Short Stories)

The pronoun his precedes the name E.M. Forster in this particular sentence, as he precedes Gerald inQuirk et al’s example. The biography has, however, begun with the statement that Edward MorganForster was born in London in 1879 and the intervening text contains a succession of anaphoricpronouns. The pronoun his can be interpreted automatically if we have already read the preceding textand can therefore be analysed as anaphoric to the antecedent noun phrase Edward Morgan Forster inthe first sentence rather than cataphoric to the succeeding E.M. Forster in the sentence cited inExample 4.

This may seem as if the notion of anaphora simply needs to be expanded to take account ofantecedents in previous sentences of the text. This is the approach suggested by cohesion analysts(e.g. Halliday and Hasan, 1976) who see texts as being comprised of intersentential ties or chains oflinguistic items. The problem with this approach is that there are cases where there is no recentantecedent, but where there are still clues to the identity of the referent, as in the following extract:

Example 5



“I’m going to work on that kid every hour of the day until I get something.” She roseformidably and moved across the restaurant, like a warship going into action, a warship on theright side in a war to end wars, the signal flags proclaiming that every man would do his duty.Her big breasts, which had never suckled a child of her own, felt a merciless compassion. Rosefled at the sight of her, but Ida moved relentlessly towards the service door.

(Graham Greene, 1943, Brighton Rock, pp. 120121)

This example begins in medias res at the start of a new chapter. The previous episode (pp. 116120)does not mention the referent, Ida, at all. In terms of the proximity of an antecedent, the pronouns inthis extract would have to be considered cataphoric, with the antecedent being the name Ida in thefinal line. It is, nevertheless, relatively easy to guess, before encountering the name, that thesepronouns refer to Ida. The mention of “going to work on that kid every hour of the day” and thewarship metaphor link in with the fact that she is pursuing Pinkie, a character who is referred tothroughout the story as “the Boy” or described as a “kid”. This is so central to the plot of the story thatthe reader must be aware of this information. The physical description also corresponds to previousdescriptions of Ida. Although the final mention of the name may confirm the identity of the referent,there seems a fair possibility that the reader will have already ascertained it. Making assumptions ofthis kind is part of reading, but is not taken account of in grammatical theory. If the above example isclassified according to Quirk et al’s criterion (or by that of Halliday and Hasan), it cannot beanaphoric. If, however, anaphora is taken to mean that information is available to decode a pronoun(whether or not in the form of an explicit antecedent), then the pronouns could be classified asanaphoric, depending on the interpretive strategy of the reader. As far as cognitive functions areconcerned, the reader’s knowledge of the character, reinforced by the salience of the individual due toher plot centrality, means that the distance of the last mention can be overcome.

Sometimes, the ability to identify a character in such circumstances may be due not just to generalplot salience but to the reinstatement of a specific “contextual frame” (Emmott, 1989, 1994), as in thefollowing extract:

Example 6

“But he was Fred. He told me he was Fred.” “He was Charles. You can read it there. Charles Hale.” “That don’t signify”, Ida said. “A man always has a different name for strangers. You aren’ttelling me your real name’s Clarence. And a man don’t have a different name for every girl.He’d get confused. You know you always stick to Clarence. You can’t tell me much about menI don’t know.” “It don’t mean anything. You can read how it was. They just happened to mention it. Nobodytook any notice of that.” She said sadly, “Nobody’s taken any notice of anything. You can read it here. He hadn’t got anyfolks to make a fuss. “The coroner asked if any relation of the deceased was present, and thepolice witness stated that they could trace no relations other than a second cousin inMiddlesborough.” It sounds sort of lonely, “Nobody there to ask questions.” “I know what loneliness is, Ida,” the sombre man said. “I’ve been alone a month now.” She took no notice of him: she was back at Brighton on Whit Monday, thinking how while shewaited there, he must have been dying, walking along the front to Hove, dying, and the cheapdrama and pathos of the thought weakened her heart towards him.

(Graham Greene, 1943, Brighton Rock, pp. 3132)

In the final paragraph, the first male pronoun (him) refers to the sombre man, but the second one (he)refers to the dead man who is called both Charles Hale and Fred. Since there is no antecedent between



these two pronouns, there needs to be some explanation of how the second pronoun can beinterpreted. It could be argued that there is a direct anaphoric connection between the last mention ofthe character (hadn’t got any folks) and this one (he must have been dying), made possible by thelexical cohesion between the words deceased and dying. Arguably, however, the shift of contextualframe (to the past Whit Monday in Brighton), recalling a prior salient scene involving Ida waiting forthe deceased man, reinstates these characters in our minds before we even reach the pronoun underanalysis. If this is the case, the frame switch is taking over the role that the antecedent is supposed totake, providing the necessary information for the reader to interpret the pronoun 4. The relevantcognitive factors in Example 5 are as follows. The reorientation produced by the flashback to WhitMonday allows a break between the pronouns, so that the second pronoun is not likely to corefer withthe first one (denoting the sombre man). The reader’s knowledge of the Whit Monday episode and thesalience of that episode to the plot make it possible for the scene to be reinstated and the character setto be inferred.

FROM UNFOLDING TEXTS TO A GRAMMAR OF COGNITION

Some linguists might argue that the type of analysis performed in the previous section is more amatter of usage or style than of grammatical theory. Many grammar books concentrate ondecontextualised sentences first and then, if they look at texts at all, move on to connected sentencesat a later stage. Hence Quirk et al (1985) finish their book with a chapter entitled “From sentence totext” (pp. 14211514), as if connected text is only to be looked at after a grammar of sentences hasbeen proposed. An alternative, however, is to create the initial grammar directly from contextualisedsentences, moving from texts to grammar. Although standard grammar textbooks do include somepoints of this type within their canon of topics, they do not generally seem to be prepared to gobeyond this traditional repertoire of observations to take account of new findings from text linguistics.Most grammar textbooks therefore include the observation that texts can begin in medias res with thedefinite article, but do not note the opposite point that referents can become indefinite part waythrough a story. These observations do, however, have very similar status and it is difficult to arguethat one has a place in a grammar book and the other does not. It is only a historical matter that inmedias res openings have been observed and perspective switches have not, probably due to theprominent position of in medias res openings at the beginning of texts. Similar ad hoc textualobservations can be found with relation to verb forms. Virtually every textbook includes a discussionof the historic present in oral storytelling, explaining that there may be a switch from the past tense tothe present tense at climactic moments in a story. The observations made earlier in this paper aboutthe past perfect are very similar in nature, but do not seem to be noted. Moreover, the point that thepast perfect may signal reorientation rather than a straightforward time signal is fundamental tounderstanding the basic meaning of the verb.

In addition to looking at how grammatical features are actually used in real texts, it is also possible toobserve how grammar reflects the “dynamic” unfolding of a text 5. This approach observes the textunravelling, simulating the reading process. As Fillmore (1982, p. 254) points out:

The interpreter’s experience always has a clear dynamic aspect, to which our work has to payclose attention. We need to show, for example, that a text can create expectations in the reader’smind at one point which it then satisfies or subverts at a later point......In order to present thedynamic aspect of a reader’s experience with a text, we have developed a method of textanalysis which takes the text one segment at a time, asking ourselves at each point in thisunrolling of the text something like, “Having read this far, what would it have figured out, or bepuzzled by, or be expecting?”

This method might appear only to be valid for each specific text, but it is possible to move from ananalysis of a number of specific texts to make broad statements about how certain textual functionsare achieved. So although the exact nature of the knowledge that a reader has about a character will be



different for every text, the way in which knowledge can interact or override other factors (such as thedistance between a pronoun and the last mention of a character) can be observed.

This approach produces a grammar which takes account of cognitive factors such as the need fororientation and the ability to switch perspective. It can be used to explain both the writer’s andreader’s relationship with the text. The writer may be assumed to follow the “communicativecontract” of producing text which takes account of the cognitive abilities and limitations of animagined reader. Of course, each reader will respond differently as a result of factors such as theirability to remember details, their attentiveness, their reading strategies, etc. Hence an analyst can onlysay which factors are available to be taken into account rather than which are actually utilised in thereading process and how they are weighted.

CONCLUSION

Once cognitive factors are incorporated into the analysis, grammatical theory becomes an extension oftextual processing in general, with the reader’s awareness of the development of a fictional worldbeing relevant in both cases. Grammatical theory then begins to reflect cognitive constraints andabilities. Some grammatical items provide explicit linguistic signalling to reorientate the reader oridentify a specific referent. Other items provide less explicit information but rely on the reader 'sknowledge of the fictional world, particularly where information which is salient to the plot isconcerned. Often, basic storytelling techniques, such as switching perspective or creating a more vividrepresentation of past events, will have an effect on the form used.

The assumption that grammatical relations are linked to the dynamic unfolding of a text is ratherdifferent from traditional grammatical theory and cohesive approaches to linguistic patterns in texts.Such approaches have focused on the linguistic surface of texts. So anaphora and cataphora have beenseen in terms of linguistic antecedence, whilst definiteness has been a matter of whether a referent hasor has not been mentioned. By contrast, a cognitive approach puts the reader back into the equationand views the interpretation of grammatical items as being a matter of knowledge and inferencing.Ultimately, therefore, a cognitive approach is likely to have more relevance for practical applicationsof grammar such as artificial intelligence and education.

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1 Sinclair (ed.) (1987, 1990) uses the term "real English" to describe the corpus examples drawn onin the COBUILD dictionary and grammar. More recently, Milroy and Milroy (eds.) (1993) have usedthe same term to describe sociolinguistic variation in grammatical usage. For detailed discussions ofthe distinction between constructed and natural data see Chafe (1994) and Emmott (forthcoming,Chapter 3).Back to Text

2 See Emmott 1989, 1992, 1994. Back to Text

3 The use of the simple past for the flashback also allows the contrasting use of the past perfect as ameans of signalling events which are either prior to the "past in the past" events or earlier on in theflashback event sequence.Back to Text

4 In some texts, examples can be found in which a scene shift can cognitively reinstate a referentwhen there has been no lexical mention of the character for a considerable stretch of text (Emmott,1994). Back to Text

5 See Sinclair (1983, pp. 7175) for a discussion of the "dynamic approach"; also Ravelli (1991) fora detailed study. Back to Text

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real grammar in fictional contexts

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