"Tracking In Administrative Discourse"

Martin & Rose (2007: 181):

With policy, almost everyone and everything mentioned is generic, since the provisions are designed to apply across the board. The exceptions to this are the specific agents and agencies set up by the provisions, and the provisions themselves. As noted above, the provisions are named section by section, paragraph by paragraph and so on as the text unfolds (using numbers and letters). And these names are used to refer forward and back in the document in almost every case such reference is required, very much more often than in narrative or argument because of legal pressures to be absolutely clear about how the parts of the text are tied together. The effect of this is a complex lattice of intratextual relations, as opposed to the chaining effect we see in narrative. Significantly, there is no text reference; naming does the work of distilling discourse so that it can play a role in another clause.

With other kinds of reference the general rule for policy is that participants can be tracked within but not between sentences. This holds true for generic classes of person and thing and for specific agents or agencies:

(c) establishing and making known the fate or whereabouts of victims and by restoring the human and civil dignity of such victims by granting them an opportunity to relate their own accounts of the violations of which they are the victims, and by recommending reparation measures in respect of them; 

4. The functions of the Commission shall be to achieve its objectives, and to that end the Commission shall

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, the "mentioning" of 'everyone and everything' and 'specific agents and agencies' is reference in the sense of ideational denotation, which is the construal of experience, not textual reference, in which a reference item presumes an identity to be recovered elsewhere.

[2] To be clear, "naming" is reference in the sense of ideational denotation, which is the construal of experience, not textual reference, in which a reference item presumes an identity to be recovered elsewhere. Naming sections of text with numbers and letters is naming metaphenomena, rather than the first-order phenomena of experience.

[3] To be clear, this is more a statement about the (orthographic) sentences of such texts, than the deployment of textual reference. Consider the following sentence (showing referent of reference item):

11. When dealing with victims the actions of the Commission shall be guided by the following principles:

(a) Victims shall be treated with compassion and respect for their dignity; 

(b) victims shall be treated equally and without discrimination of any kind, including race, colour, gender, sex, sexual orientation, age, language, religion, nationality, political or other opinion, cultural beliefs or practices, property, birth or family status, ethnic or social origin or disability; 

(c) procedures for dealing with applications by victims shall be expeditious, fair, inexpensive and accessible;

(d) victims shall be informed through the press and any other medium of their rights in seeking redress through the Commission, including information of –

(i) the role of the Commission and the scope of its activities;
(ii) the right of victims to have their views and submissions presented and considered at appropriate stages of the inquiry;

(e) appropriate measures shall be taken in order to minimise inconvenience to victims and, when necessary, to protect their privacy, to ensure their safety as well as that of their families and of witnesses testifying on their behalf, and to protect them from intimidation; 

(f) appropriate measures shall be taken to allow victims to communicate in the language of their choice; 

(g) informal mechanisms for the resolution of disputes, including mediation, arbitration and any procedure provided for by customary law and practice shall be applied, where appropriate, to facilitate reconciliation and redress for victims.