Mistaking Ideational Denotation For Textual Reference

Martin & Rose (2007: 181-2):

This local tracking rule also applies to demonstrative reference to provisions:

(c) The joint committee may at any time review any regulation made under section 40 and request the President to amend certain regulations or to make further regulations in terms of that section. 

41. (1) Subject to the provisions of subsection (2), the State Liability Act, 1957 (Act No. 20 of 1957), shall apply, with the necessary changes, in respect of the Commission, a member of its staff and a commissioner, and in such application a reference in that Act to "the State" shall be construed as a reference to "the Commission", and a reference to "the Minister of the department concerned" shall be construed as a reference to the Chairperson of the Commission.

Comparative reference is similarly constrained:

(viii) "former state" means any state or territory which was established by an Act of Parliament or by proclamation in terms of such an Act prior to the commencement of the Constitution and the territory of which now forms part of the Republic; 

(a) establishing as complete a picture as possible of the causes, nature and extent of the gross violations of human rights which were committed during the period from 1 March 1960 to the cut-off date, including the antecedents, circumstances, factors and context of such violations, as well as the perspectives of the victims and the motives and perspectives of the persons responsible for the commission of the violations, by conducting investigations and holding hearings

Overall, what this means is that unless we use a proper name to refer to something (e.g. For the purposes of sections 10(1), (2) and (3) and 11 and Chapters $6 and 7...), any information presumed must be available in the immediately preceding co-text. This kind of tracking has evolved, we presume, in order to avoid any ambiguities that might be exploited in a legal challenge. The result is a formally-partitioned text unfolding as short phases of proposals and definitions. We’ll return to the significance of this kind of scaffolding in Chapter 6.

Blogger Comments:

[1] Again, this has more to do with the length of orthographic sentences in such registers, than the deployment of reference.

[2] Again, the notion that reference is 'tracking' leads to absurdities such as the view that an author uses first person pronouns to keep track of herself in her discourse.

[3] Again, using names to refer is ideational denotation, not textual reference; in textual reference, a reference items presumes an identity to be recovered elsewhere.