[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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