Kinds of adverbial clauses

kind of clause	common conjunctions	function	example
time clauses	when, before, after, since, while, as, as long as, until,till, etc. (conjunctions that answer the question "when?"); hardly, scarcely, no sooner, etc.	These clauses are used to say when something happens by referring to a period of time or to another event.	Her goldfish died when she was young.
conditional clauses	if, unless, lest	These clauses are used to talk about a possible or counterfactual situation and its consequences.	If they lose weight during an illness, they soon regain it afterwards.
purpose clauses	in order to, so that, in order that	These clauses are used to indicate the purpose of an action.	They had to take some of his land so that they could extend the churchyard.
reason clauses	because, since, as, given	These clauses are used to indicate the reason for something.	I couldn't feel anger against him because I liked him too much.
result clauses	so...that	These clauses are used to indicate the result of something.	My suitcase had become so damaged on the journey home that the lid would not stay closed.
concession clauses	although, though, while	These clauses are used to make two statements, one of which contrasts with the other or makes it seem surprising.	I used to read a lot although I don't get much time for books now.
place clauses	where, wherever, anywhere, everywhere, etc. (conjunctions that answer the question "where?")	These clauses are used to talk about the location or position of something.	He said he was happy where he was.
Clause of Comparison	as	Adverb as is a clause which states comparison.	Johan can speak English as fluently as his teacher.
clauses of manner	as, like, the way	These clauses are used to talk about someone's behavior or the way something is done.	I was never allowed to do things as I wanted to do them.

Lecture # 13 Describing and teaching English Grammar with reference to written discourse

This article emphasizes the current need in the ESL/EFL discipline to re-analyze virtually all of English grammar at the discourse level.

Most ESL/EFL teachers tend to view “grammar” as an exclusively sentence-level phenomenon. This perspective is outmoded and has had negative consequences for the way in which grammar is described and taught. A sentence-based view of grammar is also inconsistent with the notion of communication competences: linguistic/grammatical competence, socio-linguistic competence, discourse competence, and strategic competence.

Since communicative competence is the foundation of communicative language teaching, it is clearly important that we move beyond the sentence level in our conceptions of grammar and understand the relationship between the morphological and syntactic aspects of linguistic competence, and the various socio-linguistic and pragmatic aspects of discourse competence. This paper will attempt to describe the nature of this relation ship by examining the discourse functions of grammatical structures in written English; namely, demonstratives, two different tense-aspect patterns and expletive there constructions.

Functional linguists (e.g. Givon, 1979; Halliday, 1985) argue that very few “rules” of grammar are completely context free. The vast majority of grammatical choices that a writer makes represent “rules” that depend on certain conditions being met in terms of meaning, situational context, and/or discourse context. All languages have such context-dependent, pragmatic rules (Levinson, 1983). If one takes English as the language under study, one can easily argue that all of the following rules or structures of English grammar are sensitive to discourse context: The list is far from exhaustive.

• use of passive voice
• indirect object alternation
• pronominalization across clauses
• article/determiner choice
• use of existential there
• tense-aspect-mood choice

In all such cases, the writer’s ability to produce the form or construction in question accurately is but a part of a much larger process in which the semantic, pragmatic, and discourse appropriateness of the construction itself is also judged with respect to the context in which it is used.

In most ESL/EFL teaching materials tense and aspect markers are taught and practiced one form at a time at the sentence level:

John goes to school every day (simple present)

John went to school yesterday (simple past)

However,, teachers often bemoan the fact that even after extended drills practicing the above forms – along with the other tense-aspect forms, their students cannot control tense and aspect over a sequence of related sentences. They claim that their learners jump from one tense-aspect form to another without justification when they write. This is not surprising. The functions of many tense-aspect markers at the discourse level are quite different from what students have been taught about these markers at the sentence level. For example, students are taught that the past perfect tense in English signals a time anterior to some other specified time in the past and that it does not make sense without this past time anchor:

By ten p.m. last night, I had already gone to bed

These are the kinds of things advanced ESL/EFL students learn about the past perfect tense. However, it si important to ask how the tense gets used in extended written course. It is used rarely but strategically in written narratives to signal the writer’s purpose for relating the narrative.

The students sat in the bleachers of Pauley Pavilion watching the faculty enter in their caps and gowns. Dignitaries continued to arrive while the band played a festive melody for the onlookers. The cheers of the crowd, President Clinton came in and took his assigned seat on the podium. UCLA’s 75^th anniversary celebration had begun.

In this text the narrative in the past tense is being related to so that the writer can make a point. The point is encoded in a sentence with the past perfect tense. The so-called point or gist is not a prior action or state but an important climax or culmination of everything else that has been stated. Writers use the past perfect tense in this type of written narrative, which might label “purposeful narrative,” because they have an important point in mind that they then express in the past perfect once the setting has been prepared with the simple past.

One way for teachers to help learners is to use texts for comprehension to highlight form-meaning-use associations, which provides communicative input lacking in traditional presentations of tense/aspect. First, texts constitute what second language acquisition researchers call ‘positive evidence,’ examples of actual knowledge use.

Activities

Narratives lend themselves to demonstrating the chronological order conveyed by a sequence of past tense verbs, the contrast between simple past and other past tense verb forms, and the role that the tense plays in discourse structure.

Chronological order

Contrast

Using a text also helps learners contextualize the contrast between tense/aspect inflections. The first step in contrasting the meaning of tense/aspect inflections is to direct the learner’s attention to different forms of the same verb.

The next step contrasts the meaning and use of simple and past progressive. The choice of inflection relates to ‘point of view.’ If the event is viewed as a whole or single point, simple past is used. If the event is viewed as filling an interval or period of time, the past progressive is used.

Expanding meaning

The meaning of past progressive that learners encounter earliest is its progressive, simultaneous meaning as in was walking. Lines (They knew people were coming into the building because the students were telling them, but they couldn’t figure out where they were going once they got in and who was letting them in because I had given them all a key) illustrate the use of past progressive for repeated activities (its iterative function). The simultaneous use is illustrated on the left, the iterative use on the right. Note that both uses fill an interval.

Was listening | they

|

|

| I came home came& went came& went came& went

| ________________________________

They were coming and going

Learners can use this scheme to distinguish the two uses of progressive. Learners can also paraphrase the iterative passages using simple past and adverbials such as again and again, over and over, or regularly.

Sentence-level knowledge and production of a structure are but elementary prerequisites to knowing how to use or interpret a structure in written discourse. When to use the structure and for what purpose one might use it constitute critical knowledge for the learner. Our reference grammars and teaching materials must begin to supply teachers and learners with this kind of information.

Text structure

Tense/aspect also contributes to the structure of narratives. The simple past tense carries the main story line, or foreground. Foreground events occur in chronological order (what happened first is reported first, in other words). In contrast, other tense/aspect forms populate the background. The background provides information which elaborates or evaluates events in the foreground. The background is not in chronological order and can be used to set the scene or to make comments about events in the foreground, or to predict future events. These diverse functions result in the use of diverse tense/aspect forms. Simple past also occurs in the background. The important point points is that the other forms generally do not occur in the foreground.

The following illustrates how this works in Kevin’s narrative.

Foreground Background

I was walking one night. It was bitterly cold, around Christmas 1978, and I was walking, I think I was walking down to the river just to clear my head or to go for a walk. I love to walk. There was a man on the heating vent across the street from State Department at 21^st and E which was only a block from my apartment,

1. and he called out to me. {this is what he called:}

He said he wanted a buck to buy something to eat.

2. I thought, “well he just wants to get

Something to drink:” and I thought to

Myself, “…”

I was very irritated with him for calling out after me. I

Didn’t want to be bothered and I didn’t believe him

either.

Lecture # 14. Syntax. Text and Discourse

The interpretation of speech can be dealt with in terms of grammar, if grammatical categories are extended beyond the sentence. Two units are thus posited, the discourse and text which are strictly defined in terms of inherent connection. The text, on the one hand, is considered as structured sequences of sentences with certain semantic information.

Text

1. a piece of writing which conveys orderly structured information.

My feedback: a piece of any recorded texts audio-scripts included

2. a speech product which has a complete message cohesively composed in terms of its logic, language and stylistic connections. Such an off-line (static) interpretation of text is conventionally related to its difference from the discourse

3. an abstract unit as a sample of all speech activities and acts

Text
a piece of writing which conveys orderly structured information. My feedback: a piece of any recorded texts audio-scripts included	a speech product which has a complete message cohesively composed in terms of its logic, language and stylistic connections. Such an off-line (static) interpretation of text is conventionally related to its difference from the discourse	an abstract unit as a sample of all speech activities and acts

Discourse

1. Sociological discourse: actualization of discursive policies (scenarios), e.g. advertisement discourse, a spokesman’s discourse of a political party or other organizations

2. Discourse as actualization of mental processes including national (ethnic) and psychological peculiarities of interlocutors

3. Discourse as on-line interaction in contrast to text as off-line communication. It has the following forms: dialogue (interview, everyday conversation, etc) and monologue (public speech, for instance)

4. Discourse as a style (personal style by a fiction writer, political discourse of a teacher or a doctor)

Discourse
Sociological discourse: actualization of discursive policies (scenarios), e.g. advertisement discourse, a spokesman’s discourse of a political party or other organizations	Discourse as actualization of mental processes including national (ethnic) and psychological peculiarities of interlocutors	Discourse as on-line interaction in contrast to text as off-line communication. It has the following forms: dialogue (interview, everyday conversation, etc) and monologue (public speech, for instance)	Discourse as a style (personal style by a fiction writer, political discourse of a teacher or a doctor)

In the 50s Emile Benvenist elaborating the theory of utterance used the term ‘discourse’ in its new sense – speech owned by the speaker, which in the French traditional Linguistics stood, as a technical word, for ‘conversation’. In 1952 Zelig Harris published his article “Discourse analysis” on the distributional technique applied to hyper-phrasal units. Therefore, Benvenist established a particular position of SPEAKER in the utterance, whereas Harris examined the sequence of utterances – a text extract bigger than a sentence. In the 60s M. Foucault and his adherents modified Benvenist’s views on the speaker’s significance to the text acknowledging the speaker’s importance to other participants of the utterance (their policy and strategy). So, in the French School of Linguistics discourse would be a type of utterance attributed to a particular social and political community.

In the Soviet Linguistics discourse was scrutinized in the works on the Grammar of Text which dealt with structure and formation of texts, lately recognized insufficient to interpret its semantic and pragmatic qualities. The narrow grammatical approach to the text by most Soviet linguists (И. Р. Гальперин, О.И. Москальская, З.Я. Тураева) caused the speculations on extra-textual factors to penetrate the text (Н.И. Жинкин, И.И. Ковтунова).

The term ‘discourse’ would not be used in these mentioned meanings until the end of the 80s when N. D. Arutyunova named it ‘speech driven into life’ highlighting its on-line nature.

The social phenomenon of discourse put forward by French post-structuralism has been propagated lately in modern linguistics (feminist discourse, violence discourse, public speech, etc).

To sum up, text is the result of bearing an idea and interpreting it through the communicative situation, while discourse tends to be a reciprocal interaction of interlocutors’ speech acts resulted from the information processed and presented in the intended way. Basically, the discourse composition signals the linguistic presentation of the out-linguistic world which is feasible to be reconstructed by the recipient. Such cognitive operations like world perception, world presentation, world reconstruction in language, experience of knowing and others enough fully reflect the complexity of cognitive operations performed by interlocutors. U. Chafe advanced ‘clauses’ as units of information correlative to cognitive ones which approve of the discrete nature of discourse. Presumably, distinctness - an intrinsic property of discourse, is actualized by the speaker /writer. Linguistically, the speech composition is a result of producing a text from relevant language units of lower rank through connecting them into bigger blocks of units.

When creating a text the author transforms his ideas to fit into a form. The transformation of the idea into its language form (expression) is evidently necessary and complicated due to the discrepancy of the concept intended and the forms of its expression. The transformation comprises the concept modification into the linear structure which is determined by the indispensable success of communication. Otherwise, lack of cohesiveness of the text would prevent the recipient from adequate decoding. The global and local cohesion of the text is established by the author at the very beginning of text-composition: topicalization and semantic/structural linking (linking propositions/linking words, sentences and paragraphs). This process determines patterns of the simple and composite sentences. At this level, the contrast between text and discourse could be worn off, especially when text is seen as a product of discourse.

Lecture # 15. Text and Discourse.

Linguistics does not study the true semantics, e.g. whether the event denoted in the discourse correlates with the reality, but the linguistic expression, i.e. the linguistic wrapping of the information. The observation over the functions of the linguistic means is of paramount importance to discover the cognitive laws and the human psychology in the speech interaction. The logic pragmatics has evolved in the kernel of semantics and reference theory. It aimed at explaining the semantics of language forms with the aid of the semasiological approach (from form to semantics). On the other hand, the language use presupposes coding a certain (intended) meaning which is possible on the account of onomaseologiacal technique (from meaning to form).

In the soviet and post – soviet times the research was done in terms of general theory of speech activity in psycholinguistics (Кубрякова, Арутюнова, Апресян и др.). The functional approach to study language in its use in context has highlighted the speaker’s personality in relevance to the aims of communication.

The communicative approach to speech practices has revealed that a sentence out of use has nothing to do with discourse, the latter overlapping the entities bigger than an utterance in size. Traditionally, discourse is meant as a complete speech product with multiple communicative purposes bound up with the extralinguistic conditions in complex ways. N.D. Arutuynova stated: “Discourse is a speech driven into life”. Such an interpretation of discourse is conditioned by viewing it as an arena for interlocutors (speaker and hearer) to communicate and/or socialize. Moreover, M.M. Bakhtin claims that there always is a speaker presented in the discourse structure.

The recipient of the information is the second participant who the discourse is addressed to, for T. van Dijk states that the speaker’s speech act is successful only in case it is conditioned by the right extralinguistic (external) context comprising the hearer as well. Basically, the speaker’s intention may involve controlling the hearer’s mind in the discourse of public directive, for instance (notices regulating peoples’ behaviour in public places – ‘keep off the grass’, ‘no smoking’ – ‘не курить’). They can be specific in the discursive styles in various national and ethnic communities, e.g. the use of infinitives or passives in Russian – ‘въезд не загораживать’ или ‘остановка по требованию запрещена’ versus the possible use of polite forms like ‘thank you’ with the imperatives – ‘thank you for keeping off the grass’. The scholars unanimously acknowledge that such texts are constituents of the social setting (M. Snell-Hornby, 52). A. Wierzbicka provides sound credentials on the special lexical and syntactical “wrapping” of such discourses and says that they witness the values of the community concerned.

The discursive studies have been complemented by pragmatic research in the contextual use of language forms. A major contribution in the field of pragmatics is the concept of the speech act. Speaking is not only saying things about reality, it is also doing things about it, and there is even nothing but action in some cases (performatives). The utterance expressed in a speech act is a two-facet sign: first, it describes (names) an event (a state of affaires, predicative relations), which is called a proposition or dictum by Charles Bally, e.g., the following utterances have the same propositional content: James has come back. Has James come back? James, come back! I wish James would come back. However, they have different communicative (pragmatic) intentions. Traditionally, a speech act combines 1) a speaker, 2) a hearer, 3) presupposition, 4) the aim of the speech, 5) the internal structure of the speech act, 6) context (internal and external ones), 8) inference, 9) reference (definite or indefinite ones), 10) relevance (related/unrelated information), implicature (unuttered information)

The pragmatic approach centered on the speaker and the hearer with their social (political, professional, age) characteristics. Presupposition is any kind of knowledge (general and language competences which are true without proof). The aim of the speech act could be any intended message (representatives, directives, declaratives, emotives and commissives). Under these headings there have been enumerated multiple speech acts like statements, suppositions, affirmations, promises, requests, questions, orders, demands, expression of various fillings, etc., which can be uttered directly or implied.

In a way, the difference between grammar and pragmatics is an updated version of the distinction between system and use or between langue and parole. In fact, both are different sides of the same coin. Sentences are linked in sequences in certain coherence and cohesion to bring about a text with an intended discursive line and message. Assumingly, the discourse act does not necessarily coincide with a syntactic sentence or a text. There is no general procedure that assigns a discourse structure to a given stretch of talk.

Moeschler (1996) applies Sperber and Wilson’s (1986) relevance approach to relations between propositional forms, as expressed by means of utterances and of contextual information. Sperber and Wilson offer a general theory of human cognition and communication. When speaking, they argue, people elicit conclusions which are valid only for these specific occasions. Both direct and indirect speech acts are explained in this way. For instance, “It is rather late” as an answer to “Do you want a drink?” is to be understood in terms of the contextual information that when it is late one does not want a drink. This property of rendering additional conclusions which compensate for the effort in bringing them about is called relevance by Sperber and Wilson. Both speaker and hearer must follow the same path in order to arrive at the same interpretation. The non-propositional components of the utterance’s linguistic form place constraints on the process of interpretation, that is, they represent procedural information. Consequently, the interlocutors’ background knowledge – proposition should be correlative, otherwise there might be misunderstanding followed by misfortunate interaction.

Maxims by P. Grice:

1. maxim of quality

2. maxim of quantity

3. maxim of relevance (relation)

4. maxim of clarity

Fiction discourse has some peculiarities:

1. The discourse is generated by a reader in the sense that it should be transformed from an off-line text to a meaningful discourse.

2. A fiction text has several discursive strategies owing to the presence of characters’ personalities additionally to the essential writer’s one. In order to infer textual strategies the recipient has to possess textual competences such as linguistic ones (vocabulary, grammar), semantic-pragmatic (conventional scenarios), stylistic ones (rhetoric and coding/decoding information).

3. A specific choice of linguistic means to render the writer’s intentions and message.

4. A writer’s world perception (knowledge and credo).

5. A writer’s viewpoint on the events narrated and characters described

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