On the independence of discourse structure and semantic domain

Abstract

Traditionally, linguistics has been concerned with units at the level of the sentence or below, but recently, a body of research has emerged which demonstrates the existence and organization of linguistic units larger than the sentence. (Chafe, 1974; Goguen, Linde, and Weiner, to appear; Grosz, 1977; Halliday and Hasan, 1976; Labov, 1972; Linde, 1974, 1979, 1980a,198Cb; Linde and Goguen, 1978; Linde and Labov, 1975; Folanyi, 1978; Weiner, 1979.) Each such study raises a question about whether the structure discovered is a property of the organization of Language or whether it is entirely a property of the semantic domain. That is, are we discovering general facts about the structure of language at a level beyond the sentence, or are we discovering particular facts about apartment layouts, water pump repair, Watergate politics, etc? Such a crude question does not arise with regard to sentences. Although much of the last twenty years of research in sentential syntax and semantics has been devoted to the investigation of the degree to which syntactic structure can be described independently of semantics, to our knowledge, no one has attempted to argue that all observable regularities of sentential structure are attributable to the structure of the real world plus general cognitive abilities. Yet this claim is often made about regularities of linguistic structure at the discourse level. In order =o demonstrate that at leas= some of the structure found at the discourse level is independent of the structure of the semantic domain, we may show that there are discourse regularities across semantic domains. As primary data, we will use apartment layout description, small group planning, and explanation. These have all been found to be discourse units, that is, bounded linguistic units one level higher than the sentential level, and have all been described within the same formal theory. It should be noted that we do not claim that the structures found in these discourse units is entirely independent of structure of the semantic domain, because of course the structure of the domain has some effect.