Indeterminate Participant Tracking

Martin & Rose (2007: 177):

Another place where the story sends out mixed signals has to do with tracking Helena’s second love and his special forces friends. In the passage below, we can’t be completely sure whether they (in they stayed over) includes her second love or not. If her second love is living with her, presumably not; but if he’s away living with his team, probably so. Helena hasn’t made it clear whether moving to a special unit also meant moving away from home:

Then he says: He and three of our friends have been promoted. 'We're moving to a special unit. Now, now my darling. We are real policemen now.' We were ecstatic. We even celebrated. He and his friends would visit regularly.
They even stayed over for long periods. 
Suddenly, at strange times, they would become restless.

As the text unfolds it seems clear that they includes her second love, since he obviously takes off on trips with his team; and from this we might conclude that he has in fact moved away from home after promotion just like her first love:

Then he says:
He and three of our friends have been promoted.
'We're moving to a special unit. Now, now my darling.
We are real policemen now.' We were ecstatic. We even celebrated.
He and his friends would visit regularly.
They even stayed over for long periods.
Suddenly, at strange times,
they would become restless.
Ø Abruptly mutter the feared word 'trip'
and Ø drive off.
I ... as a loved one.. .knew no other life than that of worry, sleeplessness, anxiety about his safety and where they could be.

So at one point we can’t be sure; but looking back we feel more confident. This kind of tension shows us that participant tracking is a dynamic device that’s very sensitive to just where we are as a discourse unfolds. In analysis it’s important not to lose sight of indeterminacy that eventually gets resolved because we can look backwards, carefully, taking as much time as we like, and with hindsight weigh up the evidence and make sense of the meaning overall. The ways in which meaning accumulates in discourse is just as significant as what we finally decide a discourse meant. Reading opens; readings close.

Blogger Comments:

[1] This misunderstands the text. To be clear, we can be sure that they (even stayed…) refers anaphorically to he and his friends, because, given that both Helena's lover and his friends visit, it follows that these visitors are the ones that 'stay over'.

[2] To be clear, any indeterminacy in resolving a referent is evidence against the claim that the function of reference is to track participants, since indeterminacy undermines the effectiveness of the tracking.

[3] To be clear, the accumulation of meaning in the unfolding of text, logogenesis, is the instantial system of that text. Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: ):

It is helpful to have a term for this general phenomenon – i.e. the creation of meaning in the course of the unfolding of text. We shall call it logogenesis, with ‘logos’ in its original sense of ‘discourse’. Since logogenesis is the creation of meaning in the course of the unfolding of a text, it is concerned with patterns that appear gradually in the course of this unfolding; …. We shall refer to the version of the system created in the course of the unfolding of a text as an instantial system since it represents a distillation of patterns at the instance pole of the cline of instantiation.

[4] Inanity opens, inanities close.