7. INTERACTION AND INTERTEXTUALITY

7.1. Introduction

Remember that we have said that the Reciprocity Principle applies to writing as well as speaking. Writing, like talking face to face, is a form of interaction. It applies to academic writing, writing software documentation, memos or advertisements. Expert writers in these fields say they think of some particular reader, so they don't fall into repeating bland, impersonal formulae, as for instance the very impersonal beginning "Ever since the dawn of Civilisation, human beings have been fascinated with.".

Though it is obvious that writing is interaction, it is not at all obvious just what any particular piece of writing, taken just as a text, tells us about that particular interaction and the persons involved. Does a deferential letter really indicate a difference in hierarchy? If I apologise in a text, does it mean a s 636d33g erious offence of some sort has been committed?

Modality

Modality refers to speaker or writer commitment to propositions. Given some proposition about the world , such as 'the earth is round', one may categorically assert it ('the earth is round) or deny it ('the earth is not round), but there are also available various less categorical assertions, such as 'the earth may be/is probably/possibly/s sort of.'. Modality shows the speaker's or writer's 'affinity' (Hodge and Kress, 1988:123) to the statement made, so any utterance has the property of 'modality' or is 'modalised'. In other words, modality is the indication of certainty or uncertainty of statements.

Hodge and Kress also speak about the producer of a statement indicating a degree of 'affinity' with the proposition. They speak of

low affinity, when the producer is not very certain about the truth of the statement (consequently, modalises the statement), and

high affinity, when the producer is certain and committed to the proposition (using present tense)

Linguists have traditionally considered modality in terms of modal auxiliary verbs, which are important means of realising modality. However, there are other linguistic categories that can show modality. These are:

adverbs (possibly, certainly, maybe), with their equivalent adjectives ('it's likely, probable, possible, certain)

present tense is another way of realising a categorical modality, vs. past tense, which shows distance form the proposition.

Beyond these possibilities, there is a further, somewhat diffuse range of ways of manifesting various degrees of affinity (Fairclough, 1995:158-162)

hedges ('sort of', 'a bit', 'or something')

speaking hesitantly

intonation patterns

According to Fairclough (1995:133-150), modality may be

a)      subjective modality - in the sense that the subjective basis for the degree of affinity is made explicit, as in the following example:

b) objective modality - where this subjective basis is left implicit, as in the example:

In this latter case, it may be not clear whose perspective is being represented - whether the speaker is projecting his/her own perspective as a universal one, or acting as a vehicle for a perspective of some other individual or group. The use of objective modality often implies some sort of power.

Modality may be achieved a several ways in one and the same utterance, as in the example below:

In this example, low affinity is expressed in the subjective modality marker ('I think'), hedging ('a bit'), and the addition of a tag question to the assertion ('wasn't she?)

Another way of looking at modality is to see it as a way of showing the producer's sense of affinity or solidarity with the interactants, rather than the proposition.

Utterances a) and b) in the example above are ways of expressing high affinity with the proposition 'she is beautiful', but also ways of expressing solidarity with the person he/she is talking to, since they presuppose that high affinity with the proposition is shared between the speaker and the hearer, because the questions presuppose an affirmative answer.

Modality is a major dimension of discourse, and more central and pervasive than it has traditionally been taken to be. Modality is not simply a set of choices available to the speaker or writer, but it is also imposed on particular discourse types. For example, in academic writing, in a familiar Anglo-Saxon tradition, avoidance of categorical modality is a fundamental principle. This is rather for rhetorical reasons than because of low affinity with propositions.

7.3. Intertextuality

Talking about the intertextuality of a text is highlighting its dependence upon other texts, types of texts, and discourses. Bakhtin (1950/1986) considers that all utterances, both spoken and written, from the briefest of turns in a conversation to a scientific paper, are demarcated by a change of speaker (writer), and are oriented retrospectively to the utterances of previous speakers and prospectively to the anticipated utterances of the next speaker.

Fairclough (1992:101-136) makes the distinction between a) manifest intertextuality and b) interdiscursivity.

7.3.1. Manifest intertextuality

Manifest intertextuality is where one text explicitly invokes another text. In its turn, manifest intertextuality can be of several types:

Direct representation of discourse, when the text of another may be clearly set off from the rest of the text by quotation marks and reporting verbs

Indirect representation of discourse, where a text relies on presupposed and implied statements. For example, the statement 'Consider for a moment why diplomats and company directors the world over choose to travel by first class', presupposes that diplomats and company directors do travel by first class.

Formulations, or repeating one's own version of what someone else has just said

Metadiscourse, i.e. a text's comment on its own use of language ('a so-called x', or 'what one might call an x')

Irony: an ironic utterance has been explained by Sperber and Wilson (1986) as 'echoing' someone else's utterance. For example, suppose you say 'It's a lovely day for a picnic'. We go for a picnic, it rains, and then I say 'It's a lovely day for a picnic'. My utterance would be ironic, in that it echoes your utterance, but there is a disparity between the meaning I am voicing, and the real function of my utterance, which is to express some negative attitude towards your utterance.

7.3.2. Interdiscursivity

Fairclough (1992) speaks of interdiscursivity where one text draws implicitly on others for its interpretability. For example, the adaptation and mixing of genres, as when university documents use business language, advertisements use scientific forms of illustration, commercials parody soap operas, cartoon style teaching materials, mixing cartoons with teaching.

Intertextuality entails an emphasis upon the heterogeneity of texts. Texts vary a great deal in their degrees of heterogeneity, depending whether their intertextual relations are complex or simple. Texts also differ in the extent to which their heterogenous elements are integrated, and so in the extent to which their heterogeneity is evident on the surface of the text.

7. 4.CONCLUSION

As you may have discovered while learning about pragmatics and discourse analysis, these fields are different from other areas of linguistics, in particular in that they are probabilistic rather than precise sciences. Within grammar, the linguistic is striving to make rules which are as comprehensive as possible, whereas in pragmatics and discourse analysis linguistics are trying to show how people use language in real-time, in real interactions. In these situations, people are most of the time uncertain about the precise meaning or intentions and can tolerate ambiguities. Pragmatics and discourse analysis try to offer a descriptive system for such indeterminancies.

On the other hand, the question has often been risen: is there any practical relevance in doing discourse analysis? The methods and findings of pragmatics and discourse studies have been applied in a wide variety of fields, such as, political communication, human-computer interaction, the treatment of language disorders.