Elena Martínez Caro Miranda Mendoza

Universidad Complutense de Madrid, SPAIN

IC-FDG 2012. Ghent University, 6-8 June 2012

(1) An adopted child, Mr Jobs caught the computing

bug while growing up in Silicon Valley. (The Economist, Steve Jobs)

(2) Overweight and lonely, Ted was shuttled through a

succession of boarding and day schools, but he grew into an athletic, good-looking teenager, one who ambled into Harvard, where Jack and Bobby had gone before him. (Time, Ted Kennedy)

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� Defining the construction

� Data

� Formal characteristics

� Discourse-pragmatic functions

�  Insights from F(D)G

� Conclusions and untouched issues

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Phrases or reduced clauses?

Being an adopted child, Mr Jobs… Since he was an adopted child, …

“In FG we wish to avoid deletion of specified material wherever possible. Thus, there is no room for some such rule as relative clause reduction” (1997: 26)

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Occurrence of adverb premodifying the AdjP/NP favours the clause vs phrase interpretation (3a) Although edible, the bulbs of the wild garlic plant are usually

too small to be of much use and if you ever buy a bunch you're unlikely to see any bulb at all (digging the bulbs out means no foliage for next year). (The Guardian, Wild garlic)

(3a) Ever the rebel, Anthony Bourdain opts for chicken stock,

while, perhaps in obedience to the dish's peasant roots, Raymond Blanc uses good old water. (The Guardian, French onion soup)

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�  Absolute constructions (absolutes) vs free adjuncts (Kortmann 1991 / Río-Perez 2002)

Free adjunct: (4) Inflating her lungs, Mary screamed. Absolute construction: (5) The coach being crowded, Fred had to stand.

�  ‘Supplements’ (Huddleston, Payne & Peterson 2002: 1350):

“elements which occupy a position in linear sequence without being integrated into the syntactic structure of the sentence”

�  Verbless clauses

�  Circumstantial satellites or verbal restrictors (Dik 1997:82)

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(6a) Bob Rand, a notorious burglar, found it easy to force open the lock. (Quirk et al. 1315)

(6b) A notorious burglar, Bob Rand found it easy

to force open the lock. (6c) A notorious burglar, Bob Rand, found it easy

to force open the lock.

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(1´) Mr Jobs, an adopted child, caught the computing bug while growing up in Silicon Valley.

(2´) Ted, overweight and lonely, was shuttled through a succession of boarding and day schools, but he grew into an athletic, good-looking teenager, one who ambled into Harvard, where Jack and Bobby had gone before him.

(Ed Zimny, the pilot, died at the scene. Ed Moss, a Kennedy aide, died a few hours later.)  

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Participial clauses (7) Asked if his demonstrations were meant as a

response, he said, "Look, those people need to understand that we have a chance right now to resolve this situation without the use of force.” (Time, Russians)

(8) Setting aside her academic career, she found herself drawn into civic causes, feminist campaigns and politics, (...) (The Economist, Maatthai)

Non-restrictive PrepP (9) With no competitors to worry about at the time, the

first iPad offered a barely adequate specification. (The Economist, Tablets)

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The distinction between verbal and non-verbal type is by no means always clear-cut:

(10) Far out of cell phone range and ill-dressed for the situation in tennis shoes, jeans and a cheap jacket, Vial huddled for warmth in a sleeping bag and shrouded his shivering feet in a towel. (Time, Alaskan) (11) Young and from Manipur, one of the neglected “seven sister” states in the north-east, he dares to hope that the Vivek Express now binds his state more closely to the rest of the country. (The Economist, Riding India)  

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AdvPs, of a similar type, have been discarded (12) Not far from Ampleforth, the Anglican vicar of Lastingham at the time, Rev Jeremiah Carter, played the violin in the Blacksmith's Arms where his wife was the landlady. (The Guardian, Cider-making monks)

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Authentic language �  BNC �  COCA

•  Mark Davies interface

�  News magazines (Time and The Economist) �  Newspapers (The Guardian and The Independent)

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�  Syntactically and semantically detached from the host clause

•  Two discourse acts are recognised

�  Term modifiers

(1) An adopted child, Mr Jobs caught the computing bug while growing up in Silicon Valley. (The Economist) (2) Overweight and lonely, Ted was shuttled through a succession of boarding and day schools, but he grew into an athletic, good-looking teenager, one who ambled into Harvard, where Jack and Bobby had gone before him. (Time)

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�  The referent is normally the subject of the host clause.

�  In subject extrapositions, the referent is the subject in the extraposed (subordinate) clause rather than the grammatical subject of the main clause

(13) Come join the poverty jet set, the generation without a name: Generation X. I'm talking about my generation, or rather Douglas Coupland is in the hipster's first novelette Generation X (Abacus, £5.99). The book is a documentation of the " nameless " and " forgotten " twentysomething generation, and is being touted as a signpost for the decade .A funny creation, it's probably best to read it first before you change your life, as all it may signpost is another batch of second-rate lifestyle articles. (BNC: magazine)

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�  Syntactic make-up of NP and AdjP

•  Indefinite NP •  A modified head •  Frequent coordination in AdjP

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From single-word phrases to quite complex ones: (14) Tall for his age, friendly and fascinated by gadgets, the 13-year-old with the ready smile has communication difficulties, making him vulnerable and a target for bullying. (The Independent, Saved from the bullies) (15) A product of a loving home with a strong and articulate mother, Mark defies the misconceived stereotype of the troubled youngster on the cusp of adulthood setting off on a train for London with a rucksack full of possessions. (The Independent, Saved from the bullies)

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NPs: A keen sportsman / An only child / A chartered accountant / An associate professor / A brilliant + noun (linguist/climber…) / A young woman / A little girl A close friend of (…) / A good friend of (…) / A small town / A good example (of…)

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A far cry from… (only postmodified) (16) Get smart about sunscreen Be proactive about preventing skin cancer by wearing sunscreen every day on areas that will be exposed to outdoor light -- even on cloudy days, when 80 percent of the sun's UV rays can slip through the clouds. A far cry from the white stuff you wore as a kid, today's sunscreens are nongreasy, invisible on the skin, and come in every form possible, from sprays to wipes. (COCA: magazine)  

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A far cry from… (only postmodified)   (17) Whereas motorcycle helmets, for example, are meant to be discarded after one severe impact, football helmets must be soft enough to cushion routine blows, stiff enough to absorb the force of violent helmet-to-helmet collisions and durable enough to withstand week after week of intense punishment. # A far cry from the leather headgear of the early 1900s, most modern football helmets are stiff polycarbonate shells lined with dense foam padding. (COCA: news)

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An example of a particularly productive AdjP: undaunted (18) Within another two minutes Simmons was two-thirds towards completing his hat trick after he outpaced all six defenders and side-footed the ball past goalkeeper Slack, who had been caught unawares as at the time he was trying to impress a group of young girls in the crowd by swinging on the crossbar. Undaunted, Athletico played as one man. That man was RegPybus. Reg looked at least three divisions better than anyone else on the park, and many of us thought it incomprehensible of " Bencey " to literally drag him off after only five minutes. (BNC: FR9)

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Frequent combinations of ADJ and ADJ like:   (19) On exceptionally fine days I used to prefer Oxford's other river. The Cherwell is quite different from the Thames, a toy stream winding through stately parks and bucolic meadows miraculously unencroached upon by the dreary outskirts of the

city. Shy and secretive, not quite real and very safe, it is an apt setting for the young enthusiasts who flock thither on summer afternoons to recreate scenes from Brideshead Revisited. (BNC: w_fict_prose)  

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Frequent combinations of ADJ and ADJ like:     (20) Life on the islands is relaxed and simple .Basic and unsophisticated, the resorts are clearly designed to blend with the natural surroundings and feature little in the way of nightly entertainment; watching the evocative sunsets or taking romantic walks along the beach at twilight are more in keeping with this slice of unadulterated paradise. (BNC: w_misc)

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Combination between AdjP and NP: (21) After the first eight days of action -- during which 19 of his 31 officers were killed and seven wounded, and the battalion was reduced to 40 per cent of its original strength -- he himself was badly wounded leading a counter-attack. Undaunted, his lower leg and ankle in plaster, Hoppy led what was left of his battalion across mountainous jungle terrain teeming with enemy units to Imphal, where the battalion was re-formed at less than half strength. (BNC: brdsht_nat_misc) 

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�  They serve the purpose of identifying participants.

�  They add information which is not essential for identifying the referent (Dik 1997: 40, among others)

�  The referent: •  is normally a human entity, expressed by personal

pronouns (he, she) •  less frequently, an inanimate entity (it) •  may be uniquely determined (use of proper nouns)

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Non equivalence between NP and its referent:

•  Part-to-whole relations:

(22) After the first eight days of action (…) he himself was badly wounded leading a counter-attack. Undaunted, his lower leg and ankle in plaster, Hoppy led what was left of his battalion across mountainous jungle terrain teeming with enemy units to Imphal, where the battalion was re-formed at less than half strength. (BNC: brdsht_nat_misc) (23) Philip Gregory is in charge of museums under O'Mara. A measured man, his knowledge of museums is primarily from the tourism and management angles. (BNC: magazine)

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�  These initial phrases are of an ascriptive vs. specifying (referential) type

•  Thus different from appositions, which identify the referent

The murderer, the man with the scar, will be arrested soon.

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Another difference with apposition “This construction does not qualify as apposition because the supplement cannot always be substituted for the whole construction in such a way as to yield an entailment of the original.” (Huddleston, Payne & Peterson 2002) �  As for AdjPs (The editor, angry at the delay, resigned from the

project.)

Huddleston, Payne & Peterson (2002) state that “These constructions are similar to those with an ascriptive, as opposed to specifying, NP supplement.”

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�  A developments of FDG with respect to FG is that it takes the discourse act rather than the sentence as basic unit of analysis.

�  Some sentences thus contain two, rather than one, discourse acts

Kroon defines discourse acts as

“the smallest identifiable units of communicative behavior” (1995: 65).

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Evidence for the recognition of two discourse acts

•  Syntactic and semantic detachment between the two

•  “In contrast to restrictors, non-restrictors freely admit attitudinal and illocutionary satellites”

(Dik 1997: 41)

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�  Dependence relation between the two discourse acts,

one of them being subsidiary to the other

•  The subsidiary may show different rhetorical functions

�  In fact, here one discourse act relates to a constituent part of the Nuclear Discourse Act, rather than to the entire A (H & M 2008: 55)

•  Extraclausal constituents (Theme and Tail in FG)

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The holophrase and the P1 position

�  These elements can also seen as holophrastic expressions: elliptical, short and, often seen as, incomplete, utterances, expressing no more information than is needed (Mackenzie 1998).

�  The initial position has been widely associated with

elements expressing several discourse-pragmatic functions, and may also be conditioned by aspects relating to register and argument structure.

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A discourse act has an associated illocution, capturing “the lexical and formal properties of that discourse act that can be attributed to its conventionalized interpersonal use in achieving a communicative intention” (Hannay & Hengeveld 2009).

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�  Dependence is shown in underlying representation through the presence of a rhetorical function on the Subsidiary Discourse Act, relating the two discourse acts in the Move.

�  Rhetorical functions may include: Motivation, Concession, Orientation, Correction. (H & M: 2008, 53ff)

�  Function of Orientation: “extraclausal orientation constituents may serve to ‘prepare the ground’ for the information contained in the ensuing clause” (Dik 1997: 85)

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(24) Little is to be seen or heard during the day of the thousands of " night birds " which nest deep in the tussac stools. Only the white-chinned petrel makes an occasional sortie past or drops down in the tussac. A large bird, it comes between sooty shearwater and giant petrel in size, and is called the " shoemaker " from its repetitive call, said to be like the tapping of a cobbler's hammer. (BNC: w_misc: Migrations)

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(25) The cooks I spoke with recollected eating it with gusto in all those circumstances. # Fried chicken also suits July Fourth. That's when Grimsinger's wife, Susana Monteverde, first encountered it. A little girl at the time, she was visiting her mother's family in Pittsburgh from her home in Mexico City. The United States left an indelible impression: (…) (COCA:news)

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(26) The three times overall champion, Switzerland's PirminZurbriggen -- recently married -- was sixth. A devout Catholic, he has said this will be his last season while he devotes himself to his family. (BNC, w_newsp_brdsh_nat_sports)

(27) He did it in the classic manner, by pitching the ball well up and bowling very, very quickly, and the fact that he needed help from his colleagues for only two of those wickets shows just how accurate he was. Tall and slim, without the usual broad shoulders of the pace man, he had excelled at athletics as a youngster, with the result that he was a fast bowler like virtually no other; (BNC: w_misc)

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(28) Aitken's honours included FRSE, 1875; the Keith (1883) and Gunning (1895) prizes of the Royal Society of Edinburgh; FRS, 1889; the Royal medal of the Royal Society of London, 1917; and LLD, University of Glasgow, 1899. Bearded and dignified, Aitken was an original thinker who remained outside the mainstream of scientific activity. This helped him take an individual approach to problems, but he stayed in touch with other workers, and his findings were always made available. (BNC: w_biography)

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(29) Despite financial difficulties, however, Hahnemann displayed such intellectual ability that his teachers helped him in his studies and allowed him to finance his education by tutoring the younger children in the school. A brilliant linguist, he was also deeply interested in botany, chemistry and other scientific subjects. Despite the opposition of his father he took up the study of medicine, first at Leipzig University and then in Vienna, where his funds ran out, forcing him to take employment for a time with the Governor of Transylvania until he had accumulated sufficient money to continue his studies. (BNC: w_non_ac_medicine)

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(30) We couldn't drag Phil away. A keen botanist, he was in his element identifying the ferns, plants and shrubs which inhabit the miniature ecosystems in the cracks and fissures, adding a welcome touch of colour to this primeval landscape. (BNC: magazine)

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(31) The majority of fighters are being exploited. It's a mug's game " CHRIS EUBANK WORLD TITLE CONTENDER " I live this like a religion, " says Chris Eubank, anticipating a question about his commitment to his chosen profession. A Brighton-based boxer, Eubank is a middleweight world title contender the boxing critics love to beat up in print. At 24, there is little of the pug image about him. (BNC: magazine)

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(32) Glowing with hope, Hank had gone back to the garage and pruned and polished. Then the professor and Isobel, both young and enthusiastic, had helped him to choose a likely publisher to whom to send it. The English firm which they first suggested returned the typescript. Undaunted, Hank sent it to a New York firm and they accepted it. He was so excited that he forgot about the revenge the book was supposed to wreak on his parents. (BNC: W_fict_prose)

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(33) Brian has joined the faculty from South Devon College of Arts and Technology, where he was senior lecturer for 25 years, teaching BTEC National and HND courses in hotel and catering institutional management, a course now franchised to the University of Plymouth. Brian Julyan Christopher Bond FHCIMA to chairman of The Chester Grosvenor Hotel. A chartered accountant, he was for 18 years managing director of Allied-Lyons Embassy Hotels Group, and five years managing director of the PROSIT Hotels and Tourism Consultancy. (BNC: HC4, w_misc)  

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  (34) Even today, as Samaranch handed power to Rogge and received a prestigious gold Olympic Order, he drew criticism. In May, he was accused of nepotism when he nominated his son -- Juan Antonio Jr., known as Juanito -- for IOC membership. A vicepresident in the international pentathlon federation, Juanito, 41, today was admitted by a vote of 71-27, with 11 abstentions. New Zealand IOC member Tay Wilson had stated his opposition, saying the vote would be misperceived and should be held only after Samaranch had stepped down. (COCA: news)

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(35) Thompson & Morgan's Black Flowers Mixed contains poppies, pansies, hollyhocks and carnations (£2.99 from garden centres or by mail order; see Address Book, page 38). Thompson & Morgan also has a new annual from America, Nemophila " Pennie Black ", which has almost-black flowers with scalloped, silvery-white edges. A mat-forming plant, it is an unusual candidate for a hanging basket. (BNC:magazine)

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Initial and non-initial positions of NP and AdjP

• Difference is in information structure •  Foregrounding-Backgrounding

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(36) Despite financial difficulties, however, Hahnemann displayed such intellectual ability that his teachers helped him in his studies and allowed him to finance his education by tutoring the younger children in the school. A brilliant linguist, he was also deeply interested in botany, chemistry and other scientific subjects. Despite the opposition of his father he took up the study of medicine, (…) (BNC, w_non_ac_medicine)

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Idea of compact language, maximising the space

(37) Andy Sheppard: quirkiness Obituary: Professor Norman Davis. Scholar worth his dinars:. PROFESSOR Norman Davis was one of the finest English historical philologists of this century. A New Zealander, born in Dunedin and a graduate of Otago University, he went to Merton College, Oxford, in 1934 as a Rhodes Scholar, where he took a First in English. (BNC, w_newsp_brdsh_natural_arts)   Every discourse act transmits one unit of information (Chafe).

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�  Restrictors and non-restrictors / verbal and non-verbal restrictors

�  In FG, non-restrictors are seen as: •  Subordinated within the clause in which they occur •  Having a certain degree of formal and semantic

independence within that clause •  Not falling within the scope of the term to which they

refer

�  Dik (1997: 44) solves ‘the problem’ by analysing them as “open clauses adjoined by way of a parenthesis to a term which is complete in itself”

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A keen sportsman , he has several times completed the Great North Run. (BNC, w_newsp_other_commerce)

�  Interpersonal level:  

•  One subsidiary act or dependent discourse act (relating to a constituent in the following act) + discourse act:

•  The discourse act a keen sportsman contains a subact of ascription, the function of that discourse act being one of Orientation

(MI: [(AI: —a keen sportsman—(AI)) Orient (AJ: —he has several times completed the Great North Run—(AJ))] (MI))

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A keen sportsman , he has several times completed the Great North Run. (BNC, w_newsp_other_commerce)

�  Morphosyntactic level:

(Le1: [(Np1) (Cl1)] (Le1)) Ppre Clause

“Preference for phenomena that are situated higher in the hierarchy to be expressed in either initial or final position within the clause.” (H&M: 315)

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�  “Stylistically marked constructions” (Kortmann 1991)

�  Formal, written, narrative •  Infrequent in informal, spoken, non-narrative

�  Specially common in descriptive narrative texts: biographies, obituaries

�  “Both these clause types are useful additions to the writer’s

arsenal because they are compact and can provide variation from the conventional adverbial clause.” (Hannay & Mackenzie 2002)

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�  The construction has to be distinguished from other superficially similar constructions: NP apposition

�  Part of the same group of non-restrictors (as participial clauses) but this is non-verbal

�  Detached from the host clause (phonologically, syntactically, semantically –but also attached to it)

•  Two discourse acts

�  Term modifier, normally the subject of the host clause

�  Syntactic make-up: indefinite NP, ADJ or ADJ and ADJ •  From single-word phrases to complex ones (heavily modified)

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�  Ascriptive rather than referential (distinct thus from appositions)

�  It serves the purpose of identifying participants

�  Referent is often a human entity, less often inanimate. It may be uniquely determined (proper nouns)

�  Cases of non-equivalence between the two referents: •  Part-to-whole relations

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�  Two discourse acts

�  Dependence between the two is shown through the presence of rhetorical functions on the subsidiary A

�  Functions found include:

•  frame/orientation, motivation: cause/reason, additive/additional property, justification/explanation, classifying the referent, manner, signalling role, concessive

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�  Questions of information structure in relation to position

�  Idea of compact language

�  The two-discourse act structure is reflected in the IL representation with the rhetorical function

�  At the ML representation the initial non-restrictive phrase occupies the pre-clause absolute position

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•  General frequency and per text type �  Differences BrE and AmE

•  Implications derived from the diiferent positions of these phrases with respect to the host clause

•  Initial detached phrases as markers of subjectivity (implicit or explicit)

•  Comparison with other languages may be inspiring

•  Appropriate lable for the construction!

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�  Martínez Caro acknowledges support from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, under the research project FUNDETT (FUNctions of Discourse: Evaluation in Text Types) number FFI2009-07308

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�  Dik, Simon C. (1997) The theory of Functional Grammar. Part 2: Complex and Derived Structures. (Edited by Kees Hengeveld.) Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

�  Fernández Leborans, María Jesús (1995) Sobre construcciones absolutas. Revista Española de Lingüística 25:2, 365-395.

�  Hannay, Mike and Kees Hengeveld (2009) Functional Discourse Grammar: Pragmatic aspects. In F. Brisard, J.O. Östman and J. Verschueren (eds.) Grammar, Meaning and Pragmatics. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 91-116.

�  Hannay, Mike and Evelien Keizer (2005) A discourse treatment of English non-restrictive nominal appositions in Functional Discourse Grammar. In J.L. Mackenzie and M.A. Gómez-González (eds.) Studies in Functional Discourse Grammar. Bern: Peter Lang, 159-194.

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�  Hannay, Mike and J. Lachlan Mackenzie 2002: Effective Writing in English: A Sourcebook. Bussum: Coutinho.

�  Hengeveld, Kees and J. Lachlan Mackenzie (2008) Functional Discourse Grammar: A Typologically-Based Study of Language Structure. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

�  Huddleston, Rodney, John Payne and Peter Peterson (2002) Chapter 15: Coordination and supplementation. In R. Huddleston and G.K. Pullum (eds.) The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1273-1362.

�  Keizer, Evelien (2004) Term structure in FG: a modest proposal. Working Papers in Functional Grammar 78, 1-22.

�  Kortmann, Bernd (1991) Free Adjuncts and Absolutes in English: Problems of Control and Interpretation. London and New York: Routledge.

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�  Mackenzie, J. Lachlan (1998) The basis of syntax in the holophrase. In M. Hannay and A.M. Bolkestein (eds.) Functional Grammar and Verbal Interaction. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 267-295.

�  Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey N. Leech and Jan Svartvik (1985) A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.

�  Real Academia Española y Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (2010) Nueva Gramática de la Lengua Española: Manual. Editado por I. Bosque. Madrid: Espasa.

�  Río-Rey, Carmen (2002) Subject control and coreference in Early Modern English free adjuncts and absolutes. English Language and Linguistics 6:2, 309-323.

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