Book contents
7 - Conclusions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 June 2011
Summary
The actual reality of language-speech is not the abstract system of linguistic forms, not the isolated monologic utterance, and not the psychophysiological act of its implementation, but the social event of verbal interaction implemented in an utterance or utterances.
(Voloshinov 1973: 94)In addition to the issues mentioned explicitly in Chapter 1, the previous chapters have raised several larger theoretical issues which I have not yet addressed. I would like to touch on two of these fundamental issues here, if only superficially, to open these concerns up for discussion. The two issues I would like to address explicitly here are the localness of linguistic patterning and the nature of discourse structure.
Localness
In Chapter 6, I raised the issue of genre-specific conventions of anaphoric patterning. As we have seen, there is no single rule for anaphora that can be specified for all of English (even the limited subset of third-person singular human examined here); instead, we have a variety of specific patterns which obviously share a number of general characteristics, but which nevertheless differ enough to require separate formulation (Fox, forthcoming, b). This is one level at which patterns are local (specific to a particular genre) rather than global (specifiable for all of English). There are other levels at which the idea of localness seems fruitful; it is to these levels that I would like to turn now.
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- Discourse Structure and AnaphoraWritten and Conversational English, pp. 152 - 155Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1987