Confusing Textual Reference With Ideational Denotation And Deixis

Martin & Rose (2007: 175-6):

Now let’s narrow the focus and have a look at how reference and lexical resources are used to introduce and track people through one phase of a story. We saw earlier how Helena’s first love is tracked through Incident 1; these references to him are presented again in Table 5.7. Like Helena, he’s tracked initially through a pronoun sequence: he, his, we. Then he’s referred to as a kind of person, with a full nominal group: my first love, that beautiful, big, strong person, and finally as my first love again.

 

There are two points we can make here. The first is that referring to characters with names or full nominal groups, instead of pronouns, is associated with phases of storytelling. So we get Helena’s name to introduce her story and sign off; and we get a young man to introduce the first love and my first love the last time he’s mentioned; and my first love is also used when Helena meets him once again after many years. What we’re looking at here is the use of pronouns to sustain reference within phases and nouns to frame phases in story telling.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, "lexical resources" ('content' words) do not refer in the textual sense, but only refer in the sense of ideational denotation. The items that refer in the textual sense are grammatical ('function' words and morphemes).

[2] As previously explained, the introduction of a participant is reference in the ideational, not textual, sense: the first mention of an ideational denotation, and the reference relation between a reference item and its referent is not the tracking of ideational denotations.

[3] To be clear, the reference in my first love is to the author, Helena, not to her lover. Here Martin & Rose have once again confused the deictic function of a determiner in a nominal group — to sub-classify the Thing — with its function as a reference item.

[4] As previously explained, names and "full nominal groups" refer only in the sense of ideational denotation — realising a semantic element — not in the textual sense. It is only reference items that refer in the textual sense.

[5] This is misleading, because it is untrue. As the previous table (Table 5.6) demonstrates, pronominal reference transcends phase boundaries in the text.