The Deployment Of Lexical Resources

Martin & Rose (2007: 173-5):

After Helena’s name is presented by Tutu in his introduction to her letter, she is referred to with first and second person pronouns throughout the other stages.

Lexical resources are used to introduce her two loves (a young man, another policeman) and they are then tracked with pronouns until lexical resources are needed again to evaluate them (that beautiful big strong man and my murderer, my wasted vulture). Incident I is about Helena’s first love, and he is tracked through it and also mentioned once at the beginning of Incident 2. Her second love is then introduced and tracked through Incident 2 and also plays a role in two phases of the Interpretation.

The minor characters are more local. First the three friends are tracked through the early phases of Incident 2. The Interpretation introduces the other players in turn: ‘those at the top’ when she discusses her new found ‘knowledge', together with her second love who is re-presented as my murderer. Then the people of the struggle are introduced and tracked through her discussion of the ‘black struggle’. In the ‘white guilt’ phase, ‘those at the top' are re-presented as our leaders and Mr F. W. de Klerk. Finally she re-presents her second love as my wasted vulture in the Coda when he describes his mental torture.

Globally then such a table lets us survey the role in the development of the story by different characters, as they are presented and re-presented in each phase in turn. Locally, it lets us examine the way in which participants are introduced and tracked within each phase. This kind of display also lets us monitor the use of lexical resources instead of pronouns once a participant has been introduced, which as we’ve noted is connected with evaluation in Helena’s narrative.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, the reference of first and second person pronouns is exophoric to the environment of the text, and so is not textually cohesive.

[2] To be clear, a young man and another policeman are grammatical units, nominal groups, not "lexical resources". It would appear that by "lexical resources" Martin & Rose mean 'content' words (like young, man, policeman, beautiful, big, strong, murderer, wasted, vulture) rather than 'function' words (like a, another, that, my). More importantly, the introduction of 'her two loves' is not textual reference, but ideational denotation: the realisation of a semantic element as a nominal group, and, as previously explained, textual reference is not the tracking of ideational denotations.

[3] To be clear, the presentation and re-presentation of characters in the text is not textual reference but ideational denotation, the realisation of a semantic element as a nominal group, in the instantiation of the text. Textual reference involves a relation between a reference item and its referent.