Transitivity in Grammar and discourse

TRANSITIVITY IN GRAMMAR AND DISCOURSE Paul J. HopperSandra A. Thompson State University ofNew York,University of California, BinghamtonLos Angeles Transitivity involves a number of components, only one of which is the presence of an object of the verb. These components are all concerned with the effectiveness with which an action takes place, e.g., the punctuality and telicity of the verb, the conscious activity of the agent, and the referentiality and degree of affectedness of the object. These components co-vary with one another in language after language, which suggests that Transitivity is a central property of language use. The grammatical and semantic prominence of Transitivity is shown to derive from its characteristic discourse function: high Transitivity is correlated with foregrounding, and low Transitivity with backgrounding.* The Transitivity Hypothesis 1. A mass of evidence suggests the significance of the notion of Transitivity in the grammars of the world's languages. In this paper, we wish to show (1) that Transitivity is a crucial relationship in language, having a number of universally predictable consequences in grammar, and (2) that the defining properties of Transitivity are discourse-determined. We begin here by presenting a broad theory of Transitivity. In §2 we discuss its morphosyntactic and semantic manifestations; and in §3 we outline an explanation of the grammatical facts within the framework of discourse structure. Transitivity is traditionally understood as a global property of an entire clause, such that an activity is 'carried-over' or 'transferred' from an agent to a patient. Transitivity in the traditional view thus necessarily involves at least two participants (a view which we shall later qualify), and an action which is typically effective in some way. This intuitive understanding is the one which we shall attempt to characterize explicitly and in universal terms. As a first step, we propose to isolate the component parts ofthe Transitivity notion, and to study the ways in which they are typically encoded by languages. We have identified the following parameters of Transitivity, each of which suggests a scale according to which clauses can be ranked. * An earlier version of this paper was presented as a colloquium at the Summer Meeting of the LSA, July 1978. We thank the discussants for their willingness to become involved in our hypothesis and for their valuable advice: Bernard Comrie, Edith Moravcsik, Ellen Prince, and Jerry Sadock. In addition, the following people have been generous in offering comments and discussion on the ideas in this paper: Judith Aissen, Bernard Comrie, Leonard Faltz, Sheldon Harrison, Robert Hetzron, Robert Kirsner, Robert Longacre, Edith Moravcsik, Jean Mulder, Paul Schachter, Maureen Schmid, Russell Schuh, and Stanley Starosta. We are very grateful to all these people for their help, and hereby absolve them of any responsibility for the use we may have made of it. 251 252 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 56, NUMBER 2 (1980) (1) A. Participants B.Kinesis C.Aspect D.Punctuality e. volitionality Affirmation Mode Agency Affectedness of O Individuation of O F. G. H. I. J. LOW 1 participant non-action atelic non-punctual non-volitional negative irrealis A low in potency O not affected O non-individuated high 2 or more participants, A and O.1 action telic punctual volitional affirmative realis A high in potency O totally affected O highly individuated It is easy to show that each component of Transitivity involves a different facet of the effectiveness or intensity with which the action is transferred from one participant to another: (A)Participants : No transfer at all can take place unless at least two participants are involved. (B)Kinesis: Actions can be transferred from one participant to another; states cannot. Thus something happens to Sally in / hugged Sally, but not in / like Sally. (C)Aspect: An action viewed from its endpoint, i.e. a telic action, is more effectively transferred to a patient than one not provided with such an endpoint. In the telic sentence / ate it up, the activity is viewed as completed, and the transferral is carried out in its entirety; but in the atelic / am eating it, the transferral is only partially carried out. (D)Punctuality: Actions carried outwithnoobvioustransitional phasebetween inception and completion have a more marked effect on their patients than actions which are...

Over the past few decades, there has been an increased interest in the formulaic aspects of languages, including English. There has also been work conducted into the learning and teaching of formulaic language and its use by non-native speakers. Despite the increase in English language teaching in China, there has, however, so far not been any combined research into the learning, use and teaching of formulaic language in the Chinese EFL context. This study addresses this gap by investigating the written texts of Chinese university students and the learning, use and teaching of formulaic language in this research context. As background to this study, an overview of existing research on formulaic language is firstly introduced, and then the rationale for this study, investigating formulaic language through student written texts, is established by positioning the role of written language in second language research and the relation between formulaic language and genre analysis studies. After these, specific background information on the EFL context in China is presented by supporting the claim that the EFL students in the study are seen as language learners as well as writers and users of English. The research questions that this study sets out to answer are the following: (1) To what extent do Chinese university students use formulaic language in their written English? a) What are the main structures of formulaic language used by these learners? b) What are the main discourse functions of formulaic language used by these learners? c) What is the relationship between the distribution of structural and functional categories of formulaic language in the learners’ written texts? d) How is the formulaic language used differently in the written texts of Year1 and Year 3 university students? (2) What do Chinese university students perceive formulaic language to be? a) To what extent is this perception different in Year 1 and Year 3 students? (3) How do Chinese university students perceive the learning, use and teaching of formulaic language? The results of this research will present formulaic language use in student written texts, and link this use to students’ self-reported processes, strategies and sources of formulaic language learning and use. Nevertheless, student reflections on the teaching of formulaic language in the research context will be introduced in order to address the research questions thoroughly. A mixed methods research design is employed in this study. The fieldwork took place during one semester (16 weeks) at a Chinese university. The participants were 83 students from the Year 1 and 73 students from Year 3 groups in the foreign language department. The main sources of data were firstly, students’ written texts and secondly, in-depth interviews with 12 informant writers. The findings of the research present a well-rounded description of formulaic language use in Chinese university students’ English written texts, by analysing and comparing the distribution of structural and discourse functional categories in the formulaic strings identified by the student perceptions and through corpus linguistic methods. Also, triangulation of the textual data collected from the written texts and perceptual data gathered from interviews shows some discrepancies regarding the perception of formulaic language in English among students and in researchers in the field. This thesis ends with a discussion of the implications and limitation of the present study, and directions for future research on formulaic language in the EFL context.

Mothers differ in how much they talk to their young children. The present study asked what processes occurring in mother—child conversation might contribute to differences among mothers in the amount of speech that they produce. The present study also asked what discourse processes might explain previously observed associations between maternal education and the amount of talk mothers address to their children. The database consisted of transcripts of dyadic mealtime conversations between 63 mothers and their 1½‐ to 2‐year‐old children: 30 mothers were high‐school‐educated; 33 mothers were college‐educated. The results suggested that differences in the amount that mothers talk to their children are a function of both characteristics of mothers’ language use and characteristics of their children's conversational participation. The mothers who talked more to their children more frequently produced multiple utterances on a single topic, and this feature of language use was associated with maternal education....

This study is the first to analyse WhatsApp’s semantic notifications particularly those of Jordanians. It also seeks to analyse the differences in these notifications’ language use by gender and endeavors to reveal some latent socio-cultural values affecting the way users make certain language choices in these online notifications. The study contributes to knowledge since such analysis helps to reveal unique networks of individuals communicating through Arabic and English in unique and innovative ways. It mainly assists in describing the members of the Jordanian society revealing a great deal of information about their personal status, their activities, society and problems. The discourse analysis of these notifications also describes how the language has been adjusted to online discourse. The written status notifications from 300 WhatsApp’s users were compiled and analysed based on a critical discourse analysis to form a predictive model of the users based on their language and to investigate the traces of social values in these semantic expressions and explain their connotations and functions in discourse. Results indicated that the language used in WhatsApp’s status notifications were a mixture of both standard and non-standard abbreviations, reduced endings which were ungrammatical. It was also found that the linguistic notifications-based assessments constitute a valid reflection of the status of its users and their society as a whole. They were as a revelation of personal, social, religious and political issues the users are concerned about. Differences with respect to gender were not found in structural construction of the language rather in categories indicating various themes. Results showed that females status updates are more personal, religious and social while males are concerned more about political, national and international themes.

L2 English Academic Speaking Development: Insights from a Multilingual University Context

The value of reflective writing in teacher education is widely accepted and research has focused increasingly on investigating the quality of students’ reflective texts by assessing their reflective depth or breadth. Studies on student teachers’ professional vision have looked at processes of noticing relevant classroom events and reasoning about them, emphasizingthat thinking about teaching and learning is a strongly knowledge-guided process. While much empirical attention has been given to assessing students’ writing, little insight has been gained into how reflective thinking actually unfolds. The aim of this study is to examine student teachers’ discursive practices as they engage in reflective writing in the context of a teaching practicum. Data consists of reflective essays which were analysed using linguistically based qualitative coding in order to identify discourse functions in students’ texts. Findings allow a detailed description of verbal actions carried out in guided reflective writing. They also indicate that due to the situated nature of their writing, student teachers engage in affective appraisal and reasoning processes which are verbalized by using everyday as well as academic language depending on students’ zone of proximal development and their developing pedagogical content knowledge.

“Discourse” is language in use, and discourse analysis is the study of language in use. Language occurs, reflects, and is interpreted within social and ideological contexts. In turn, language constructs social realities, relationships, and power structures. Discourse analysis explores those functions, operations, and powers of discourse, in texts and other forms of communication events, investigating the ways in which discourse becomes meaningful. It focuses on how implicatures arise in relation to the contexts in which discourse functions. Discourse analysis is particularly interested in the interpersonal dimensions of discourse and in the social relationships and positions constructed through discourse. Discourse analysis has chiefly been informed by text linguistics and pragmatics, though its applications span many disciplines, from geography to psychology, and from literature to politics. This is partly because discourse is a universal and transdisciplinary phenomenon, and partly because many disciplines are asking similar research questions of the discourses and discursive constructs with which they engage. While traditional discourse analysis can be loosely divided into text-focused and speech-focused domains, many discourse phenomena occur across modes, and many discourse analytic approaches are likewise relevant across modes. Discourse is also being recognized as inherently (and in some areas increasingly) multimodal, opening up new avenues of study. Discourse analysis is essentially a critically reflexive field. It is motivated by an interest in social structures and ideologies underscoring discourses and discourse practices and also in social structures and ideologies embedded within discourse analytical stances. This criticality makes it a crucially important tool for the 21st-century era of instant global sharing of discourse, of easily digitally manipulable multimedia discourse, and of “post-truth” Western discourses of political power.

Although political discourse is essentially expected to be fact-based and objective, both practice and research show that literal language in political discourse is very often compounded with figurative language. The paper at hand tackles figurative language use in political interviews. For the purposes of this research, we conducted a critical discourse analysis of a corpus of political interviews given by a former Macedonian female politician – Radmila Shekerinska. The corpus consists of six interviews (with a total duration of about 3 h) in which she answers questions about the political climate and the challenges of North Macedonia in the last couple of decades. The selected interviews are all conducted in English as they are aimed at international audiences and they all fit into the time frame from 2017 to 2021, which practically overlaps with the final years of Shekerinska’s long-standing political career. This study uses a descriptive qualitative research design and focuses, first, on ascertaining the presence of different types of figures of speech in her answers (e.g. metaphors, simile, metonymy, synecdoche, personification, rhetorical questions, idiomatic expressions, proverbs, etc.); then, on identifying the pragmatic functions they perform in the context in which they are used, and finally, on establishing an interface between the figurative language use and the political ideology propagated by this politician. The results point to an extraordinarily resourceful use of a wide spectrum of figurative devices, skillfully intertwined with fact-based political discourse, primarily for addressing highly sensitive political issues, but also for driving important political points home; also, for gaining support from both the domestic and international community regarding the political ideology of this political figure as well as for enhancing the criticism addressed to political adversaries with an additional layer of creative flourish.

The main purpose of this study is to examine a relation between grammatical distance and cognitive distance in language use. To find out structural regularities or patterns whereby grammatical distance reflects cognitive distance, this study explores how language users organize or categorize grammatical entities or sequences on the basis of their cognition of specific knowledge, or experience of language use, and thus examines particular types of grammatical structures or variations, such as indirect object alternation, non-temporal uses of simple past tense, discourse functions of this and that, information structure in separable phrasal verbs, and structural variations of relative clauses. The observation on certain patterns of language use reveals that both structural variation and regularity tend to be strategically exploited for the purpose of maximizing cognitive effects and facilitating information processing, and thus the choice of a particular type of grammatical construction reflects pragmatic strategies in a cognitive-oriented way in which the use of a recurring structural pattern is optimally matched to language users’ cognitive capacity or ability.

There are various studies investigating the speech community of people of German descent from Russia (Russlanddeutsche) and their language use. In my data, I find various language contact phenomena, most remarkably code-switching. I examine how the Russlanddeutsche alter their speech according to its possible functions in discourse. Thus, my qualitative study focuses on the morpho-syntactic and interactional linguistic analyses of spoken data in natural contexts and situations. In order to thoroughly answer the complex question ‘How do speakers use the languages available to them?’ I have taken the following socio-cultural factors into account: the sociolinguistic aspects of the interlocutors taken from their biographies, especially information about the preferred language of the speakers etc.

Pedagogical agents are widely employed in intelligent tutoring systems and game-based learning environments, but research suggests that learning benefits from virtual agents vary as a function of agent features (e.g., the form or register of agent dialogue) and student characteristics (e.g., prior knowledge). Students’ responses to agent-based conversations provide useful evidence of students’ knowledge and skills for assessment purposes; however, it is unclear whether these agent design features and student characteristics similarly influence students’ interactions with agents in assessment (versus learning) contexts. In this paper, we explore relationships between agent features and student characteristics within a conversation-based assessment of science inquiry skills. We examined the effects of virtual agents’ knowledge status (low vs. high) and language use (comparative vs. argumentative question framing) on agent perceptions (ratings) in a conversation-based assessment of scientific reasoning (i.e., using data to predict the weather). Preliminary results show that the effects of these features on students’ perceptions of agents varied as a function of students’ background characteristics, consistent with research on learning from agents. Implications for designing agent-based assessments will be discussed.

Recent evidence from adult pronoun comprehension suggests that semantic factors such as verb transitivity affect referent salience and thereby anaphora resolution. We tested whether the same semantic factors influence pronoun comprehension in young children. In a visual world study, 3-year-olds heard stories that began with a sentence containing either a high or a low transitivity verb. Looking behaviour to pictures depicting the subject and object of this sentence was recorded as children listened to a subsequent sentence containing a pronoun. Children showed a stronger preference to look to the subject as opposed to the object antecedent in the low transitivity condition. In addition there were general preferences (1) to look to the subject in both conditions and (2) to look more at both potential antecedents in the high transitivity condition. This suggests that children, like adults, are affected by semantic factors, specifically semantic prominence, when interpreting anaphoric pronouns.

The paper relates the results of an ethnolinguistic vitality (ELV) survey among the Kashubs in Poland. The results reveal two interrelated layers of ELV: (1) an individual ELV reflected in language use and shaped by personal experience, emotions, and language proficiency; (2) a more collective ELV associated with the perception of the group's language strength, its status and utility. The most surprising predictor of linguistic praxis in our study, in addition to language skills, was the positive impact of experienced discouragement on language use. This remained significant when controlling for proficiency. We argue that the correlation between experiencing discouragement and increased language use is best explained by the self-empowerment of speakers who, earlier in their lives, met with negative attitudes toward their heritage language. Rather than succumbing to this discouragement and assimilating to the dominant language, their response was to develop an emotional link to Kashubian and increase their use of this minority language as a conscious act of self-determination and engagement.

The paper relates the results of an ethnolinguistic vitality (ELV) survey among the Kashubs in Poland. The results reveal two interrelated layers of ELV: (1) an individual ELV reflected in language use and shaped by personal experience, emotions, and language proficiency; (2) a more collective ELV associated with the perception of the group’s language strength, its status and utility. The most surprising predictor of linguistic praxis in our study, in addition to language skills, was the positive impact of experienced discouragement on language use. This remained significant when controlling for proficiency. We argue that the correlation between experiencing discouragement and increased language use is best explained by the self-empowerment of speakers who, earlier in their lives, met with negative attitudes toward their heritage language. Rather than succumbing to this discouragement and assimilating to the dominant language, their response was to develop an emotional link to Kashubian and increase their use of this minority language as a conscious act of self-determination and engagement.

The action-oriented approach (AoA) is a powerful basis to inform teaching, learning, and assessment in the classroom that identifies learners as social agents and focuses on language learning through language use. This paper answers the call for developments that help teachers teach and learners learn in an AoA-informed way. We argue that cognitive discourse functions (CDFs) align with AoA, helping to develop learner thinking by focusing on the learners’ use of language. We complement our conceptual discussion referring to the process of developing a self- and peer-assessment tool informed by AoA and CDFs and the initial application of this tool in an advanced academic writing course in a Japanese university with B1 and B2 level students. We discuss how this tool can guide learners’ understanding of their writing process and fosters learners’ responsibility for deciding how they mobilize their linguistic resources to express particular language functions.