Discourse Grammar: Shaping Meaning and Processability
The Grammar of Discourse
The fact that we have grammatical options helps us negotiate social relationships. We can choose certain grammatical structures over others to express our attitudes, to allocate power, and to establish and maintain our identities, among other things.
Understanding the choices people make helps us interpret their intentions. Several other areas of grammatical choice need consideration to fully explain appropriateness in usage. These areas are united by their involvement in the grammar of discourse.
Grammatical structures contribute greatly to the processability of texts, enabling others to follow or interpret what is being said or written without the speaker or writer being overly redundant.
Key Terms
- Text: The coherent product of the discursive process. A text is any stretch of language that functions as a whole unit, no matter how brief, even something as short as a “No Smoking” sign.
- Co-text: The linguistic context.
The Role of Grammar in Texts
One reason grammar can appear arbitrary is that we often only look at it at the sentence level. When we adopt a broader perspective, we realize there is less arbitrariness than a narrower perspective suggests. By elevating our perspective to the level of discourse, we can see five additional roles of grammar:
- Cohesiveness: How grammatical structures organize a text. Halliday and Hasan have pointed to several linguistic mechanisms that give cohesion or structure to a text (reference, conjunctions [e.g., thus], substitution [e.g., did], lexical cohesion, ellipsis, continuatives [e.g., still], adjacency pairs, parallelism [e.g., parallel structures: My sister didn’t want to go to college; her friend didn’t want to go to college]).
- Coherence: How grammatical structures connect ideas. English has a fairly fixed word order in sentences; still, variations are possible since choice is present. Theme provides the point of departure and offers a framework to make sense of what follows in the rheme. A common pattern in texts is to first introduce new information in the rheme of one clause, then treat it as given information in the theme of a subsequent clause. Given information is what the speaker/writer assumes the reader/listener knows. New information is newsworthy—not something the writer/speaker can assume the reader/listener knows. End focus is the tendency to place new information at the end of a clause.
- Texture: How grammatical structures contribute to making a text whole. One way to create texture, a feeling that the text is a coherent whole, is through the use of verb tenses. Too many tense shifts can disrupt texture.
- Discourse Patterns: How grammatical structures work together to create discourse patterns.
- Discourse Functions: How grammatical structures fulfill discourse functions, such as distinguishing the main storyline from less important information. These sentences are often distinguished from each other by verb tenses.
Examining the grammar of discourse reveals its function in shaping texts and improving their processability. It suggests that aspects of grammar elusive at the sentence level make better sense and are easier to teach at the text level.
Grammar and the Organization of Discourse
Units of spoken or written language have an organizational structure of their own.
Teaching Grammaring
- Language: A dynamic process of pattern formation by which humans use linguistic forms to make meaning in context-appropriate ways.
- Grammar: Much more about our humanness than some static list of rules and exceptions suggests. It allows us to choose how we present ourselves to the world, sometimes conforming to social norms yet establishing our individual identities.
- Grammaring: The ability to use grammatical structures accurately, meaningfully, and appropriately.