Martin & Rose (2007: 173):
The way in which participants are identified is an important aspect of how a text unfolds. Of all genres, stories make by far the greatest use of reference resources to introduce and track participants through a discourse. In other genres, such as Tutu’s exposition and the Act, general participants are presented and only briefly tracked. We’ve also already looked at the way in which reference helps construct the Act’s staging, using pronouns and determiners to track information within sections but not between, relying on names to refer between sections. So we'll concentrate on Helena’s story here.
Helena is in one sense the main character in her story. Tutu introduces us to her by name, and she uses this pseudonym to sign off at the end of her letter. In the story itself she appears more often than anyone else, always as pronouns (I, my, we, our and also you when she’s quoting from her second love). Helena, however, is not so much telling us a story about herself as about her two loves, and the devastating effect their bloody work has had on them. Not surprisingly, the way in which these two key protagonists are tracked is more varied and more interesting than the steady pronominal reference to Helena. In addition other key participants are introduced and tracked through various phases, including her second husband’s three friends, ‘those at the top’ and the people of the struggle.
Blogger Comments:
[1] To be clear, as the authors' own exposition demonstrates, the referents of reference items are not limited to participants.
[2] To be clear, in SFL theory, 'genre' is Hasan's term for text type, which is register viewed from the instance pole of the cline of instantiation. Martin (1992) models genre, not as a sub-potential of language, but as a system at one level of the context that is realised by language, but which, in contradiction, is instantiated as text: an instance of language, not context. Moreover, when Martin & Rose apply their notion of genre to analysis (e.g. 'staging', 'sections', 'phases'), they are actually concerned with the semantics of a given text type/register.
[3] To be clear, as previously explained, reference resources neither introduce nor track participants. The 'reference' of introducing a participant is ideational denotation: a nominal group realising a participant. The notion of reference as tracking is most clearly seen as absurd when applied to first-person reference items, where the authors' claim is that the speaker/writer tracks herself through her text, or keeps track of herself for the listener/reader.
[4] To be clear, this has not even been discussed, let alone validated. Moreover, the claim is invalidated, in the authors' own terms, by Helena's use of I and my throughout her entire text ("the steady pronominal reference to Helena").
[5] To be clear, names do not include reference items, and only refer in the sense of ideational denotation.
[6] To be clear, first and second person pronouns are exophoric to the environment of the text, and so do not function cohesively (textually). Martin & Rose present the system of identification as a textual system.
[3] To be clear, as previously explained, reference resources neither introduce nor track participants. The 'reference' of introducing a participant is ideational denotation: a nominal group realising a participant. The notion of reference as tracking is most clearly seen as absurd when applied to first-person reference items, where the authors' claim is that the speaker/writer tracks herself through her text, or keeps track of herself for the listener/reader.
[4] To be clear, this has not even been discussed, let alone validated. Moreover, the claim is invalidated, in the authors' own terms, by Helena's use of I and my throughout her entire text ("the steady pronominal reference to Helena").
[5] To be clear, names do not include reference items, and only refer in the sense of ideational denotation.
[6] To be clear, first and second person pronouns are exophoric to the environment of the text, and so do not function cohesively (textually). Martin & Rose present the system of identification as a textual system.
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