Basic Issues systems and models

2.13 Some typical operations of development could be carried out via linkages of specification and instance, e.g. ‘people – young people – my friends – my best friend’. Time and location can be subdivided into steadily smaller components, e.g. ‘what I did this year – what I did this summer –what I did on a weekend at the seashore’. Or ‘life in the south-life in Florida – life in Miami’. The priorities of development, including link types, are strongly controlled by the text type, e.g. descriptive, narrative, or argumentative (cf. VII. 1. 8ff.). A further factor influencing development is the use of the global knowledge patterns we explored in chapter VI: frames, schemas, plans, and scripts. These patterns act as channels for spreading activation, alerting the writer about what components require specification in a relevant context. For such a pattern to become active, TOPIC configurations need to emerge from densities of linkage in the ongoing textual world (cf. III.4.11.9). The type of linkage will affect the type of pattern, e.g. states, attributes, parts, etc, for frames; event or action progressions for schemas; pathways of goal-attainment for plans and scripts. The variables in the pattern will be filled in with applicable individuals. Some modifications might also be required to make the intended content fit. Nonetheless, the PROCEDURAL ATTACHMENT of the pattern to the planned output makes decision and selection much more efficient (VI.1.5).

2.14 Global patterns, though channelling the development of the text-world model, do not necessarily determine the format of the surface text. The most supportive pattern is the schema, which provides an ordered progression of underlying events and actions. The writer is free to express those events and actions in some other order than their temporal and/or causal sequence, provided signals are given; but the pattern offers guidance even then. The frame, in the sense I use the term here, is less obvious in its ordering. To describe a scene or a room, a writer has some typical strategies, such as moving from higher to lower, central to peripheral, mobile to stationary (cf. IV.2.3ff). Yet these strategies could compete with each other, and they might fail to respect the nature of the scene components per se, i.e. relative importance from a human perspective such as a plan. As a result, the normal ordering strategies for text world content are usually applied EPISODICALLY, in response to the demands of context and interest. Consider, for example, Dickens (1836-37: 35f.) depicting a newly introduced character:

(190) It was a careworn-looking man, whose sallow face and deeply sunken eyes were rendered still more striking than nature had made them, by the straight black hair which hung in matted disorder half-way down his face. His eyes wore almost unnaturally bright and piercing; and his jaws were so long and lank, that an observer would have supposed that he was drawing the flesh of his face in, for a moment, by some contraction of the muscles, if his half-opened mouth and immovable expression had not announced that it was his ordinary appearance. Round his neck he wore a green shawl, with the large ends straggling over his chest, and making their appearance occasionally beneath the worn button-holes of his old waistcoat. His upper garment was a long black surtout; and below it he wore wide drab trousers and large boots, running rapidly to seed.

We can observe here a number of strategies for describing a person. The general direction is to begin with the face and move from there to the clothes, working gradually from highest (shawl) to lowest (boots). Superposed on this conventional design is a focus on unusual features: eyes that are ‘deeply sunken’ and ‘piercing’, and jaws that are ‘long and lank’. An episodic comparison to a man contracting his facial muscles follows for emphasis. As the writer passes on to describe the clothes, focus is directed to cues indicating poverty and neglect. The spatial ordering is generally preserved: ‘neck – shawl – chest – beneath […] waistcoat – surtout – trousers – boots’. The writer’s selection is motivated by his plan to introduce shortly afterwards a remarkably dismal tale of ‘want and sickness’ narrated by this ominous-looking character.

2.15 This illustration suggests how the EPISODIC tendencies of organizing text-worlds can be controlled by DIRECTIONALITY. No writer would want to describe every aspect of someone’s appearance, and Dickens’ careful depictions are more detailed than the average. The writer should fovus attention on to those portions of the available material which are INTERESTING (i.e. not predictable), and RELEVANT (i.e. fitting to the plan for guiding the presentation of the textual world along a given course). The untrained writer is hard-pressed to make a selection and shifts about in a maze of episodic pursuits, assembling a mass of discontinuous or superfluous details. Notice the unity of the Dickens’ passage despite the divergent descriptive strategies. The features he mentions are relevant not merely by belonging to the same character, but by suggesting a consistent impression of the ‘striking’ (interest) and ‘careworn’ (writer’s plan) aspects.

2.16 Like the development phase, the EXPRESSION phase during which the actual surface text emerges is subject to a range of control factors. I would propose at least three CONTROL LEVELS that are important for the mapping operations in the expression phase:

2.16.1 The ORGANIZATION of EVENTS, ACTIONS, SITUATIONS, and OBJECTS in the textual world exerts certain influences upon the organization of the surface text. I reviewed in IV.2.6ff. the experimental literature regarding this issue, such as the strategies of moving from higher to lower, central to peripheral, changing to unchanging, mobile to stationary, earlier to later, and so on. I cited in III.4.18 some correspondences between text-world organization and the use of tense, voice, and mood. Harald Weinrich (1977) shows how tenses in French tend to convey either a descriptive or a narrative perspective on the textual world. Halliday and Hasan (1976: 40) suggest that the characteristics of objects are cited in a certain order when modifiers are linearized in a noun phrase such as:

    (191) two high stone walls along the roadside

where number is followed by size and substance (on modifier positioning, see also Vendler 1968; Martin 1969; Danks & Glucksberg 1971).

2.16.2 The STANDARD SEQUENCING OPERATIONS for imposing a linear format on English texts must be respected. I suggested in section II.2 that the basic phrases, clauses, and sentences of English act as frameworks for judging what surface occurrences are probable. These frameworks are not obligatory, but they must be kept in mind when departing from them, because they still act as a means of orientation. The correlations between sequencing operations and text-world organization can be arbitrary on occasion. In English, it is customary to place expressions of location before those of time, while in German, the reverse order is preferred; yet the event or situation may be the same. Such formatting standards reduce the decision-making load, not so much concerning what to say as when to say it. Sometimes, sequencing operations require conceptually empty placeholders without justification in the text world, e.g. the dummy ‘it’ used for expressions of the weather (cf. V.5.4.2). And the LINEARIZATION PROGRAMS often fail to reflect grammatical dependencies via direct adjacencies (II.2.7ff.).

2.16.3 The INFORMATIVITY of text-world entries can also affect the order in which they are expressed in surface formatting (cf. IV. 3). The general trend is to mention new or focussed material after known or marginal material. For expressing configurations of familiar content, sentences will generally be longer and more complex than for expressing unfamiliar (cf. IX.4.6); perhaps the more problematic coherence of the unfamiliar content is compensated via a less problematic cohesion. The distribution of focus depends not only on the internal linkage of knowledge (whether pathways are predictable vs. problematic), but also on the RELEVANCE of knowledge organization to the producer’s plan (cf. VII.2.8): the arrangement of materials is co-ordinated with the ordering of steps in a plan (see for instance Dr. Haggett’s utterances among (96-104) in the stage play of VI.4.17). This control level thus applies not only to what to say and when to say it, but also to why. Let us pursue the interaction of these control levels by envisioning how a writer might describe a simple event sequence. The writer observes a man leading a dog whose bright-colored collar attracts a child; in order not to be grabbed, the dog breaks its leash to escape. The man spanks the child. If we arrange this much content in a network of concepts and relations, we might obtain Figure 28. 

The three animate agents: man, dog, and child, appear as object nodes with their respective actions and attributes. I include some descriptive traits, e.g. ‘old’, ‘ugly’, ‘small, for purposes of demonstration. The writer’s task is to find a surface expression, that is, to find a sequential connectivity that captures the conceptual connectivity of the text world. This is a special instance of PROBLEM-SOLVING: mapping out points in problem space according to the already solved and connected points in a problem space on a different level (cf. VII.2.10).⁵ [5. Burton’s (1976) “semantic grammar” functions by using these two levels in close correlation; compare also the “cascading networks” (Woods & Brachman 1978b) depicted in III.4.14]

(192.1) I saw an old man. (192.2) He was leading an ugly dog. (192.3) The dog was wearing a bright orange collar. (192.4) The collar attracted a small child. (192.5) The child grabbed at the dog. (192.6) The dog broke its leash. (192.7) The leash hurt the man’s hand. (192.8) The hand spanked the child.

The surface text is perfectly clear and cohesive, and there are no obstacles to coherence and comprehension. The “process-type” actions (in terms of Halliday 1967a) are expressed with the continuous form (‘be’ + verb + ‘ing); the “uniplex” actions (in terms of Talmy 1978) are expressed via the simple forms (here, simple past). Notwithstanding, the text is objectionable. It is monstrously uninteresting to read, precisely because the continued use of preferences makes such a predictable and repetitious pattern. The mapping is not efficient because each underlying node has to appear so often in surface structure: ‘dog’ in four sentences, ‘man’ and ‘child’ in three each, and ‘collar’, ‘leash’, and ‘hand’ in two. To suggest how our network from Figure 28 has been divided up for the surface text, I partitioned the diagram of Figure 29 with dotted-line spaces for each sentence (small numbers are sentence numbers) (on network partitioning, see Hendrix 1975, 1978).⁸ [8. Each space encloses its nodes and link labels. The numbers of dots of enclosing lines match the sentence numbers of (192).]

We can observe that REDUNDANCY is graphically visible partition overlap. It might be a general definition that redundancy can be formalized as the overlap of systemic unity partitioning of an actualization network for the next deeper-level system.

2.19 The writer has good reason to be dissatisfied with this particular mapping. Let us consider how an alternative version can be generated which, being based on the same network, counts as a PARAPHRASE of the first (cf. III.3.11.10). This new version will adopt a more flexible standpoint regarding event boundaries and interestingness, and will cut down on redundancy. This procedure is not comparable to sentence transformations, though the latter are also of paraphrase character (II.1.11): transformations are done by an autonomous syntax in which interestingness or efficiency of communication play no distinct role.

2.20 Let us follow the production of the new version along and observe how decisions are made. The opening sentence is a strategic place to introduce the topic (cf. VII.3.9). Here, the topic is not so much the old man, as (192.1) would imply, but the events involving the dog being on a leash. It is therefore expedient to load this topic material onto the opening sentence, yielding:

(193. 1) I saw an old man leading an ugly dog.

The predicate has been expanded with a participial modifier, so that the topic material is effectively located toward the end of the sentence. A gain in efficiency is also attained by reducing the number of sentences, and hence the number of focusable predicate slots; moreover, the single occurrence of ‘man’ in (193.1) supplants the redundant occurrences in (192.1-2) with no loss of clarity.

2.21 The next task is mapping out the events involving the collar. Because a collar is typically in “containment’ of a dog, and a determinate “instrument-of’ leading a dog, there is no motive to assert the collar’s presence in a separate sentence such as (192.3): a predicate slot is wasted on content that is easily predicted. Instead, the predictable relation can be mapped onto a possessive modifier dependency and the, predicate slot filled with the unpredictable event in which the collar figures as instrument:

(193.2) The dog’s bright orange collar attracted a small child.

Again, this paraphrase saves resources by conserving a predicate slot and cutting out a second expression for ‘collar’ vis-à-vis (192.3-4).

2.22 The TURNING POINT of this little story (cf. VIII.2.7) is composed of the events of grabbing and leash-breaking, because these deflect the course of things most decisively. As I shall argue in Chapter VIII, the turning point of a story is usually accompanied by MOTIVATIONAL STATEMENTS that justify the central actions (cf. VIII.2.23ff.; VIII.2.32). We might want to state the relation between the ‘grabbing’ and the ‘breaking’ that is left implicit (192.5-6). A subordinative junctive preferentially indicative of purpose will do:

(193.3) In order not to be grabbed, the dog broke its leash and ran away.

The ‘run away’ action can be derived from the original text-world model via inferencing based on knowledge of purposes. This presentation helps to integrate the least predictable event into the reader’s ongoing text-world model.

2.23 The final task is mapping out the conclusion. The ‘hand’ node is linked to one event as ‘affected entity’ and to another as ‘instrument’ ‘If we want to map out the node only once onto surface expression, we need a sentence format that has a passivizing and an activizing constituent. The passivizing construction is preferentially the passive voice, or the past participle. We could then have a choice between:

(193.4a) The man’s hand was hurt by the sharp tug and spanked the child.

To decide between them, a writer should consider the knownness or inferrability of the underlying events. The stronger those factors are, the less likely one is to devote a separate subject-predicate construction to the surface expression of the event. Because breaking a leash is very likely to hurt the owner’s hand, (193.4b) seems the better selection. It has the added advantage of a surface symmetry with ‘hand’ located between the expressions of the two events in which it was involved, thus enacting the balance where one hurt is the reason for the inflicting of another.

(193.1) I saw an old man leading an ugly dog. (193.2) The dog’s bright orange collar attracted a small child. (193.3) In order not to be grabbed, the dog broke its leash and ran away. (193.4) Hurt by the sharp tug, the man’s hand spanked the child.

Although still pretty trivial in its content, (193) is better reading than (192) in its form. The redundancy of (192) has been dramatically cut down: ‘dog’ in three sentences, not four; ‘man’ and ‘child’ in two each, not three; and ‘collar', ‘leash’, and ‘hand’ in one, not two (cf. VII.2.18). The savings allows the addition of some further material in (193), e.g. ‘in order to’ and ‘ran away’, yet the total word count is still less than (192): 43 versus 47. The new version is thus more READABLE then the old, conveying as much with fewer expressions, yet maintaining interest by motivated variety of structuring. The partitioning of the textual world into sentence-length spaces for (193) is illustrated in Figure 30.

The lower redundancy appears as reduced overlap. 

2.25 Strategic control upon decision and selection is crucial. The mere loading of more material onto more intricate sentence frameworks offer no certainty of producing a worthwhile text. Untrained writers, who want to break out of the monotony resulting from using the same mapping over and over, may fail to retain the necessary control. Consider the following expression of the same text-world model loaded onto a single sentence:

(194) An old man I saw whose dog’s leash, attached to a bright orange collar, attracting a small child who grabbed at the dog that broke its leash, hurt his hand, spanked the child.

The uncontrolled overloading of the sentence structure yields two participial dependencies and four relative clauses. This structuring is in principle allowable by rules of syntax proper. It cannot be the task of a grammar to state at what length or degree of complexity a sentence is no longer allowed for a language (1.3.4.5). Moreover, redundancy has been reduced still lower than in (193): ‘dog’ mapped only twice and ‘man’ only once. Still, the text is far less readable than (192) or (193). Too many events are packed into modifiers and relatives as if they were already known to the reader. Distinctions between predictable and non-predictable events are flattened. The reader’s attention is scattered all around with no cues as to what might be important. For example, the phrase ‘the dog that broke its leash’ wrongly suggests that a previously mentioned dog with this action should be in the reader’s active storage.

2.27 To produce a text of enduring quality, substantially more extensive processing is demanded. Both the original search for knowledge and the subsequent mapping must be carried on with great circumspection. I shall attempt to follow the processes that might create the following Shakespearean sonnet (number 33) (discussed also in Beaugrande 1979e, 1979i):⁹ [9 Here, as in all other Shakespeare quotations in this volume, I follow the Kittredge edition (Shakespeare 1936).]

(195)  I Full many a glorious morning have I seen

3  Kissing with golden face the meadows green,

4  Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;

5  Anon permit the basest clouds to ride

6  With ugly rack on his celestial face,

7  And from the forlorn world his visage hide,

8  Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace:

9  Even so my sun one early morn did shine

10 With all-triumphant splendour on my brow;

11 But, out, alack! he was but one hour mine,

12 The region cloud hath masked him from me now.

13 Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth,

14 Suns of the world may stain where heaven’s sun staineth.

2.28 The writer’s problem for this text is especially delicate: to present the poetic expression of a complaint to a particular addressee in such a flattering way that reconciliation is by no means precluded. The PLANNING phase decides to characterize some of the addressee’s actions negatively, yet without direct confrontation. The underlying macro-structure of events for this communicative situation is built along these lines: (1) addressee treats speaker as friend; (2) addressee changes to unfriendly treatment; (3) speaker enters a negative emotional state; and (4) speaker complains, the text itself being the instrument.

2.30 The planning phase sets up a pathway toward the goal: create a linkage among entities of knowledge that will make the underlying event series discoverable via PATTERN-MATCHING. The IDEATION phase accordingly searches knowledge stores for a TOPIC IDEA that will he a CONTROL CENTER for a textual world entailing a contrast of positive and negative events. The topic idea is readily accessed from the UNIVERSE OF DISCOURSE (I.1.3) for Shakespeare’s cultural setting: the workings of nature as the background of human activities. This general knowledge frame offers some obvious contrasts; for example, day versus night comes to mind, but is too irreconcilable and determinate, whereas an accidental contrast would be more relevant to the writer’s plan. Accidental contrasts are available in the unstable domain of ‘weather’ (especially in England). If the TOPIC IDEA were ‘change in the weather’. the DEVELOPMENT phase can easily attach the contents of a ‘weather-frame, e.g. ‘sun’, ‘sky’, ‘clouds’. and so on, along with their attributes, locations, motions, etc. To suggest what a typical person’s ‘weather’-frame might look like, linked onto a ‘landscape’-frame, I provide a network diagram in Figure 31.

It seems safe to assume that at least this much commonsense knowledge is well established.

2.32 In this fashion, several commonsense frames are attached concurrently to build a text-world model. The opening stretch (lines 1-4) describes the morning light and its effects on some typical elements of the landscape. But the selection of expressions is so designed as to point the reader away from that domain toward ‘actions of a friend’; otherwise, entries lick ‘flatter’ and ‘kiss’, being incompatible with the ‘weather’-frame, cannot be integrated into the textual world. The phase of conceptual-relational development (VII.2.1 1) has recovered some incidental knowledge from these frames, such as attributes, locations, and parts. The cognitive outcome of this multiple attachment is to impel the reader to recognize the analogy required by the writer’s plan: events of the weather versus events in a personal relationship.

2.33 This design process becomes a pattern to be repeated in the next stanza of four lines (5-8). The sunny morning is set in opposition to the ‘clouds’ which block out the light. The opposition spreads outward into the attributes and motions of clouds, rendering them uniformly negative: ‘basest’, ‘ugly’, ‘forlorn’, ‘steal, ‘disgrace’. A series of elements is presented, the integration of which requires the interface of the ‘weather’-frame and the ‘person’-frame: ‘face’, ‘forlorn’, ‘visage’, ‘steal, ‘disgrace’. The analogies for asserting that ‘clouds’ can ‘ride on’ and ‘hide’ the ‘face’ of the sun that moves ‘to west’ are derivable from the ‘weather’-frame-based knowledge about locations and motions. The outcome is the complex structure of concepts and relations, many shared among frames, represented in Figure 32.

The concepts of ‘morning’ and ‘cloud’ appear as topic nodes with the material from the first four and second four lines, respectively, being connected on. We see the further connectivity between the two knowledge spaces that result, including both equivalences and oppositions. The mastery of Shakespeare as a text designer is attested in the multiple justification he had for all of the selections and arrangements. He implements his global plan of complaining via a textual world with an inherent apperceptual power of its own. He presents high-informational occurrences as discrepancies and discontinuities between elements of frame-based knowledge; in downgrading the occurrences, the reader is irresistibly impelled to recover the planned underlying message.

2.35 These divisions are characteristic of the ‘sonnet’ text type as employed by Shakespeare (whence the enduring term ‘Shakespearean sonnet’). The couplet at the end is often opposed to the rest in content and format. Here, in effect, it deflects the whole impact of the statement so far; and it breaks the alternating rime patterns with consecutive rime. The internal organization is also reflected in the rhythm pattern. The first four lines have a syllable distribution of 12-10-10-11; the second have 10-10-10-10; the third group has 11-10-11-10; and the couplet is 11-12. The four-line groups are thus all distinctive, and the 12-syllable pattern of the first line returns in the last—just as the speaker hopes that the harmonious early stage of the personal relationship may return.

2.36 The careful interlocking of mapping options is, as we shall note, essential to the writer’s plan. The lines (9-12) begin with the junctive ‘even so’ to signal that knowledge from the first eight lines should be kept active and re-applied. That signal is reinforced by lexical recurrences and equivalences: ‘morn’ (9) looking back to ‘morning’ (1); ‘splendour’ (10) to ‘glorious’ (1);’but one hour’ (11) to ‘anon’; ‘region’ (12) to ‘heavenly’ (4); ‘cloud’ (12) to ‘clouds’ (5); and ‘masked’ (11) to ‘hide’ (7). Such extensive correlation supports the transfer of knowledge from an already constructed model space to an ongoing one-an example of TEXT-INTERNAL INHERITANCE via pattern- matching (cf. IV.4.5: V.7.1). The intriguing aspect here is that the negative terms of lines (1 -8) have no correlates in (9-12). The characterization of the addressee’s actions regarding the speaker’s situation in (9-12) is accomplished entirely by inheritance from (1 -8). Moreover, the writer is careful not to personify the ‘sun’ in (9-12). As a result, the complaint is delivered with the greatest mediation and indirectness. Whatever negative comments are made about the addressee are filtered through an ennobling analogy in which the latter figures as nothing less than the ‘sun’. Of course, the ‘sun’ is not at fault if ‘clouds’ intrude; and the message is even so arranged as to keep some surface distance between the ‘sun’ and those negative terms that do appear. To conclude, the final couplet withdraws the complaint as inappropriate to a being of such grandeur. The contrajunctive ‘yet’ in line (13) signals a surface reversal, but the drift of content organization has been conciliatory all along.

2.37 The total text-world model for the sonnet is diagrammed in Figure 33.

I have drawn in the various recurrences, equivalences, or class inclusions that render the text-world model so uniquely motivated in its design (cf. 1.4.14). The exceptional density of linkage holding so many entities in place is indicative of the extraordinarily skillful selection and decision processes of the writer. The surface text is so designed as to elicit spreading activation within several frames at once. The intersections, as such, are unforeseeable and hence interesting, and yet convincing by virtue of their dense connectivity. The processing that recovers such a configuration underneath the already intensely structured surface expression is the foundation of AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE: discovering a multiplicity of functions among elements of the message (cf. VII. 1.8.5), and overcoming problematic linkages by finding their motivations.

2.39 My experiments regarding the production and reception of creative texts have been inconclusive so far, due to empirical obstacles of obtaining creative behavior under reliable conditions. In one set of tests run by Walter Kintsch and co-workers, subjects who recalled a Shakespeare soloquy did undertake to rephrase the content in everyday language. Those subjects who did not only recovered a few bits of the original. Until conclusive evidence to the contrary is obtained, I merely claim that creativity is an intensification of normal production processes rather than something altogether different. The question of whether all content can be accorded creative treatment remains in debate. Given sufficient licence (and a bent sense of humour like mine), one could wring a poem even out of the ‘ugly-dog’ story:

(196) Not many a dotard gentleman I spy

Drawing with collar orange a child nigh,

Rending to ‘scape its rank rapacious reach;

With stinging hand the man requites the prank,

Belaboring the infant nether flank.

Even so did God in Eden new-made beasts display

Before our childish fancy in parade;

But we who snatch and seize in wanton way

Must harrow hence the habitants He made.

Bewhilst we deem ourselves creation’s dears

And blight the earth till heaven interferes.

Bally rotten tosh, I know, but maybe it can help to suggest once again the endlessly pliant relation of language to content.

3. RECALLING TEXTUAL CONTENT

3.1 Many years ago, Sir Frederick Bartlett (1932) obtained experimental evidence that recall is not merely a REPRODUCTION of what people experience, but also a RECONSTRUCTION.