The Contraction And Expansion Of Meaning

Martin & Rose (2007: 165):

In abstract discourse such as Tutu’s argument, this kind of reference to what was just said is very common to refer to a point that’s just been made, possibly to evaluate it. What was said previously is typically tracked with demonstratives (this, that):

For some it has been so traumatic that marriages have broken up.
That is quite a price to pay. 

Amnesty is not given to innocent people or to those who claim to be innocent. It was on precisely this point that amnesty was refused to the police officers 

Once amnesty is granted,
and this has to happen immediately

The advantage of this kind of tracking is that stretches of meaning can be packaged up to play a new role as the argument unfolds. In the following passage, for example, Tutu packages up the effect of amnesty in order to expand on its consequences for civil damages (this means that...). These consequences are in turn packaged up to be evaluated (that is...) and identified (it is...):

The effect of amnesty is as if the offence had never happened, since the perpetrator's court record relating to that offence becomes a tabula rasa, a blank page.
This means... that the victim loses the right to sue for civil damages in compensation from the perpetrator.
That is indeed a high price to ask the victims to pay,
but it is the price those who negotiated our relatively peaceful transition from repression to democracy believed the nation had to ask of victims.

This kind of tracking of what was said is called text reference. As we’ve seen it is used to turn big meanings into smaller, more manageable ones, so that we can then make some more meanings with them. Meanings contract, in other words, so that new meanings can expand. The text is breathing, as the argument moves along.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, in terms of SFL Theory, each of these is a genuine instance of cohesive anaphoric reference. However, in terms of the authors' model, each is inconsistent with the notion of participant identification, since each of the referents is either a figure or a sequence, not a participant.

[2] To be clear, the unacknowledged intellectual source of this theorising is Halliday & Hasan (1976: 52), who, unlike Martin & Rose, make a distinction between text reference and extended reference.

[3] To be clear, it is not the meanings that become "smaller", but their realisation in wording, as when the meaning of a referent (marriages have broken up) is realised in wording by a reference item (that) which then serves as an element in another clause (that is a high price to pay).

[4] The text is farting, as the argument moves along.