Participant Tracking - workshop
Lise Fontaine
Cardiff University
LinC Summer School and Workshop 2010
outline
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Notion of Participant
Referring vs non-referring
Identification
Tracking
Multifunctional nature of referring
expressions
participant
A participant is “a person, place, or thing,
abstract or concrete, capable of
functioning as Agent (or Medium) in
transitivity”.
Martin, 1992:129
e.g. John’s friend who Mary had never met
3 participants
John ‘the friend’
‘Mary’
identification and tracking
Participant Identification “refers to the
strategies language use to get people,
places and things into a text and refer
to them once there”. Martin, 1992
I saw John last night and I met his friend.
He seems like a nice guy.
Referring – nominal groups - coreferentiality
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It doesn’t have to exist to be referring
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Unicorns are real.
Negation doesn’t mean the expression isn’t referring
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cf. ‘anyone’ (Martin, 1992:106)
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*I don’t have a car, it isn’t red.
I didn’t see John, he wasn’t there.
Did you find anyone? Yes, they’re waiting outside
I didn’t find anyone. *Bring them in
No, they must have left.
Indefinite descriptions
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I saw a man this morning or Rockets are dangerous
Identifying and tracking (maintaining) a referent
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How are participants introduced?
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How are they ‘tracked’ (i.e. How is a
given referent referred to throughout a
text?)
Novel referents (non-phoric)
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Referents not previously mentioned
and not recoverable or presumed
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Indefinite expressions
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Once upon a time, there was a boy.
Descriptions
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Full potential of the nominal group
phoricity (recoverability)
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“Every time a participant is mentioned, English
codes the identity of that participant as explicitly
recoverable from the context or not” (Martin, 1992:98)
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Phoricity: signals that the information must be
recovered in order to identify the participant
(referent)
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speaker assumes (or believes) the addressee can
retrieve the information.
Ways to refer phorically
See Martin & Rose (2007)
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exophora  I ate the apple
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anaphora  I saw Jane, she looks good
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cataphora  If you need it, the cap is in the drawer
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esphora  I took my car to the garage, the door
handle was broken
homophora  Have you fed the dog?
Additional ways to refer
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bridging (indirect)  I went to a restaurant. The
waitress was from Canada.
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Cf. Matsui (1993)
 We went to a Thai restaurant. The waitress was from Bangkok.
 We stopped for drinks at the New York Hilton before going to
the Thai Restaurant. The waitress was from Bangkok.
ellipsis (implied)  the man jumped up and Ø started
shouting
ambiguous  there are distractors, more than one
possible referent (e.g. response might be: no not that one,
the red one)
Reference Chains
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every member of the chain refers to the same
referent:
There was a nice man in the shop today. He came
in with his wife to buy a scarf. There weren’t many
people in the store so we ended up talking for a
long time. Then the man asked if we could tell him
where ...
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a nice man  he  his  (we)  the man  him
Multifunctional nature of referring expressions
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“Experiential meaning most clearly defines
constituents” (Halliday and Mathiessen, 2004: 328)
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EXPERIENTIAL MEANING: Determiners, Modifiers,
Thing, Qualifiers
[Deictic, Numerative, Epithet, Classifier, Thing, Qualifier]
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PARTICIPANT (or Circumstance) Role in the clause
SPECIFICITY: specific vs. non-specific
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Definiteness/particularization
Multifunctional nature of referring expressions
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“Interpersonal meanings tend to be scattered
prosodically throughout the unit” (Halliday and Mathiessen,
2004: 328)
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Embodied in PERSON SYSTEM as pronouns
(person as Thing, e.g. she, you) and as
possessive determiners deictic (e.g. her, your)
ATTITUDE expressed in type of Epithet (e.g.
great)
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CONNOTATION: meanings of lexical items
PROSODY: prosodic features (e.g. swear words)
Multifunctional nature of referring expressions
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“Textual meanings tend to be realized by the
order in which things occur” (Halliday and Mathiessen,
2004: 328)
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INFORMATION STRUCTURE of nominal group
(e.g. unmarked focus of information on last word
not Thing)
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Initial items establishing RELEVANCE
(determiner system): progression from
elements having greatest specifying potential
to elements having the least (related to ‘given’)
COHESION: cohesive ties
PARTICIPANT / REFERRING EXPRESSION
 PARTICIPANT:
“a person, place, or thing,
abstract or concrete, capable of
functioning as Agent (or Medium) in
transitivity”
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?
a referring expression (must have a
referent)
the potential to function as a discourse
referent (i.e. potential to be maintained)
Participant vs. participant
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“all participants are realised through nominal
groups but not all nominal groups realise
participants” (Martin, 1992:129)
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Ngps not realising a participant:
 Attributes, e.g. He is a nice man
 meteorological it, it’s raining
 Some indefinite nominal groups, e.g. he didn’t see
anyone
 Range/Scope in some cases, e.g. take a bath,
have dinner, play tennis.
Task: (use sample table)
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Select a text
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Identify all referring expressions (RE) used to refer to
your chosen referent
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Alternatively you might want to compare several referents
For each RE:
 State whether presenting or presuming ?
 Analyse the experiential, interpersonal, and textual
meanings
 Determine the type of phoricity used to maintain the
referent.
references
Halliday, MAK & Hasan, R. (1976) Cohesion in English.
London: Longman.
Halliday, MAK & Matthiessen, C. (2004) Introduction to
Functional Grammar. London: Arnold.
Martin, J. (1992) English Text. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Martin J.R. & Rose, D. (2007) Working with Discourse:
Meaning Beyond the Clause. 2nd ed London:
Continuum.
Matsui, Tomoko (1993) Bridging reference and notions of
'topic' and 'focus': a relevance-theoretic approach.
Lingua 90/1-2, 49-68.