[B-Greek] Wallace or Porter?

CWestf5155 at aol.com CWestf5155 at aol.com
Fri Sep 16 12:28:06 EDT 2005


 
Elizabeth,
 
I want to apologize for taking more than two weeks to respond to your  
inquiry.  I had various distractions, technical and professional.
 
Porter would not take Relevance Theory (RL)as a starting point because it  
"lacks rigour".  Stan is focused on the patterns of the formal features of  the 
grammar and what they can mean--he's much more interested in the  patterns of 
what is actually there rather than what is missing.  Corpus  linguistics is of 
great interest to him in his research in conjuntion with  Matt O'Donnell.  
But his models are by no means based on a code model,  since verbal aspect (for 
instance) completely involves the speaker/writer  selection of a "tense" based 
on the viewpoint he/she wishes to communicate  to the hearer/reader.  And 
what Stan is focused on does not limit the  capacities of the Systemic Functional 
Model that he utilizes, and I "infer"  from your question that you see an 
affinity between RT and Porter's linguistic  assumptions.  I tend to agree.
 
The insights of Wallace's "Figure and Ground" are foundational to the  
development of the concept of planes of discourse as well as particularly the  work 
of Wilson and Blakemore.  The concepts of prominence and markedness  involve 
pragmatics and semantics.  Jeff Reed, Stephanie Black and I have  further 
integrated and developed points of relationship between Relevance Theory  and 
Systemic Functional Linguistics in our models. 
 
Sorry again for the delay,
Cindy Westfall 
 
On the other hand, 
 
In a message dated 8/30/2005 11:00:47 AM Mountain Daylight Time,  
kline-dekooning at earthlink.net writes:

CWestf5155 at aol.com wrote:

"I'm intimately acquainted with both  works ... But much of what Ben  
observes below is a difference in  theory."

Dr. Westfall,

How would you compare Porter to Wallace  in terms of a code model  
framework?
Has Porter incorporated the  insights about semantic inference from  
Relevance Theory (Diane  Blakemore, Robin Carston, Ernst-August Gutt)  
into his linguistic  framework?
How does this impact his treatment of syntax?

In the  traditional framework when one runs across what looks like a   
defective (abbreviated) clause structure the analysis proceeds to   
describe what is missing. Relevance Theory maximizes the inferential   
component in the communication process and it seems to me that this   
would have some impact on how we understand abbreviations in  syntax.

Elizabeth Kline







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