Language characterology and textual dynamics: a crosslinguistic exploration in English and Scottish Gaelic

Abstract

Fries 1984Fries , 1991 to compare the means by which cohesion and information structure are signalled in English and Scottish Gaelic. We start with a brief discussion of textuality across languages and question the universality of Halliday's concept of Theme. From there we present a contrastive overview of textuality in the two languages, in which we characterise English as participant-oriented and Gaelic as process-oriented. We then provide a detailed analysis of the range of ways in which the distinct resources of each language combine to structure the flow of a narrative text in its English and Gaelic versions, as translated by the author (MacDonald 2009). In this way we demonstrate: (i) how the form and function of the textual resources available in each language can be related to their distinctive characterologies; (ii) how these individual resources function differently within the two texts; and (iii) how the distinct functions realised at the clausal level nonetheless interact to fulfil broadly equivalent functions in terms of the semantic relations indexed between consecutive stretches of text above the clause. Building on these findings, we suggest more general points regarding the appropriate units of analysis in (crosslinguistic) discourse analysis and typology and the level of abstraction of linguistic universals.

Reconnecting Form and Meaning

“…Building on earlier arguments that the Scottish Gaelic clause is in the unmarked case process-oriented (Bartlett 2016;Bartlett & O'Grady 2019), it is proposed that the canonical clause lacks the topic-comment structure of an unmarked categorical statement.…”

SFL approaches to language dynamics and contrast

“…This work was derived from the pioneering work of the Prague School and colleagues into 'Communicative Dynamism' and the Functional Sentence Perspective (e.g. Mathesius 1911;Jakobson and Halle 1956;Firbas 1971Firbas , 1992Daneš 1974), although there are significant differences between the approaches (Bartlett and O'Grady 2019). Further work on logogenesis in the SFL tradition includes Halliday and Hasan (1976) on cohesion across texts as semantic units; Cloran (2010) on Rhetorical Units as chunks of language demonstrating spatiotemporal unity beyond the clause but below the text; Zhao (2010) on the temporal dynamics of hypertexts; and Martin's work over several decades into the discourse semantics of texts (particularly Martin 1992).…”

“…A number of such descriptions can be found in Martin et al (2020), including the verbal group in Khorchin Mongolian (Zhang 2020), Mood in classical Tibetan (Wang 2020) and Theme in Brazilian Portuguese (Figueredo 2020). Considering the literature on Theme alone, descriptions have been provided by Steiner and Ramm (1995) for German, Fang et al (1995) for Chinese, Caffarel (2000) for French, Andersen (2004) for Danish, Kim (2007) for Korean, Susanto (2008) for Ludruk, Moyano (2016) and Arús-Hita (2010) for Spanish, Thomson (2013) for Japanese, and Bartlett and O'Grady (2019) for Scottish Gaelic.…”

Interpersonal Grammar in Scottish Gaelic

“…In other work (e.g. Bartlett & O'Grady, 2019) I analyse a syndrome of interconnected features and functions to make the case that there is no interpersonal element Subject in Gaelic and that all the entities involved function as Complements of the Predicator in the interpersonal structure of the clause. As already noted, therefore, I have provisionally used the labels C1 and C2 for the purposes of this paper.…”

“…However, where Martin and Cruz provided an introductory metafunctional profile of Tagalog clause grammar, followed by a discourse semantic analysis which exemplified these functional structures in use, for Scottish Gaelic this is not possible. Apart from questions of space, there is only a scant literature on Gaelic from a functional perspective on which to draw (Mackenzie, 2009;Bartlett, 2016;Bartlett & O'Grady, 2019;McDonald, 2008;Byrne, 2002). Instead, therefore, I will provide a discourse sematic analysis of Scottish Gaelic texts from the perspective of NEGOTIATION and ENGAGEMENT, and from there I will select relevant moves for further analysis in terms of interpersonal elements and function structures at the lexicogrammatical stratum.…”