Application of Marking Theory in Functional Grammar

different ways to highlight important and noteworthy information segments in the text, thereby guiding listeners to correctly perceive the role of that important information, focus their attention on that information appropriately and process it accurately .

With this focus of information, focus functions like a spotlight. It selects a particular piece of information and declares, “This piece of information is of particular importance.” In other words, the speaker announces to the listener, “This is important, please listen!”

In short, when discussing this linguistic phenomenon, we want to emphasize the effectiveness or effect of using focalization to help the speaker or writer focus on the information parts that are considered important in the message structure of the sentence and are expressed through many surface structure devices. These devices are very diverse in form. We will discuss it right after this.

1.2.3.2. Focus marking method

When talking about the phenomenon of focalization, we cannot help but mention the means of expression. There are three common types of language means used to express the focalization of information. These are phonetic-phonological means, lexical means and syntactic means.

(i) Phonetic and phonological means

Phonetically, focal information can be identified by means of stress and accent. It can be asserted that one of the ways to mark the focus of a sentence is to create a pitch. The speaker will "clarify the focus by pronouncing the words in the focus differently from the words that are not in the focus, including pronouncing them more tensely, more strongly, louder, or even unusually softly" [3,276]. And the usual position of the focus by accent is at the end of the sentence. For example:

[1:8] An broke the neighbor's glass .

But in our opinion, the focus of information is not necessarily on the last element of the sentence. For example:

[1:8a] An broke his neighbor's glass. ( An (not someone else) broke his neighbor's glass).

[1:8b] An broke his neighbor's glass. (The action that An did to his neighbor's glass was breaking it .)

[1:8c] An broke his neighbor's glass . (The glass that An broke belonged to his neighbor , not anyone else.)

[1:8d] An broke his neighbor's glass . (An broke the glass , not anything else.)

The phenomenon of focalization marking from the perspective of stress and intonation has been of interest to many linguists (see Quirk, R. [54]. Recently, author Chungmin Lee [53] has a research work on the contrasting ways of expressing focus and topic in English and Korean. However, they also emphasized that stress and intonation are not the only ways of expressing focus.

However, this issue requires sophisticated survey tools and research processes on phonetics and phonology, so in this thesis we only mention it without intending to delve too deeply into it.

(ii) Lexical means

The effect of focalizing a subject-predicate structure can be created when a word or phrase is added or reused in an utterance.

a. Add word

Words that create a focal point for information can be added before or after the word containing the highlighted information. For example:

[1:9] The picture of martyr Nguyen Van Be hangs right in the middle of the tent, next to a row of books.

(NTNT:455)

b. Repeat words

An expression containing a piece of information chosen as a focus can be repeated to demonstrate its salience. The repeated piece can be a word or phrase, and can be repeated in its entirety or with some variation. For example:

[1:10] The stars in the sky gave birth to her as a girl, a girl from Hang Dao Street ; a girl from Hang Dao Street with beauty ; a girl from Hang Dao Street with the beauty of a rich family ; a girl from Hang Dao Street with the beauty of a rich family in the prime of her youth, but she was not born into a family that was free to dress, to be worthy of all the things that she had that were better than others.

(NCH:147)

In Vietnamese, the lexical tools to create focal points are very diverse and rich (they can be emphatic auxiliary words such as chinh, ngay, ca, rieng ... modal particles such as co, day, ch... ; combinations of auxiliary words and particles such as chi... thoi, co... thi co ...) and always go together with structural tools to create a tight system. Therefore, when studying the tools to express focal points of the subject-predicate structure of a sentence, it is necessary to examine the syntactic means that we will mention below.

(iii) Syntactic means

Quirk suggests that "the best way to consider the location of the focus is to place it in relation to the syntactic structure of the sentence" [54,938]. He offers the following explanation for this problem: "The sentence (simple sentence) is a grammatical unit closely related to the intonation unit, or information unit" and therefore the information structure is conveyed through the syntactic structure of the sentence. In saying this, the author intends to emphasize that the syntactic structure of the sentence is the realization of the information structure and is the specific syntactic unit for examining the means of focus. Syntactic means are often expressed through syntactic transformations. Syntactic transformations are the operations of transforming from one structure to another without changing the relationship of the actual words participating in that transformation. The change in syntactic structure does not change the content of the sentence but changes its semantic-pragmatic value; thereby creating an information-emphasizing effect (information focalization). Here we see the asymmetrical nature of language, meaning that there is no one-to-one correspondence between the two sides of the language signal: the same form (the expression), can contain many contents (the expressed) and vice versa, the same content (the expressed) can be expressed in many forms (the expressed). Regarding the focalization phenomenon, we believe that the speaker does not create a new structure to express new information but only skillfully and creatively uses existing structures to effectively carry out the purpose of communication. Therefore, in each language in general and Vietnamese in particular, there always exist certain ways of expression. That is the reason why we want to study the means to mark the focalization of the subject-predicate structure of Vietnamese sentences.

In addition, to summarize and analyze the lexical and syntactic means used to create the effects of focal phenomena, we rely on some basic principles to establish some necessary and sufficient conditions for means of expressing focal information:

(a) Grice's cooperative principle [4]

The principle of conversational cooperation has a general form: Make your contribution (to the conversation) exactly as it is required at the stage (of the conversation) in which it appears, in accordance with the purpose or direction of the conversation in which you have agreed to participate (quoted from Do Huu Chau [4,229]). This principle has four categories: quantity, quality, relation, and manner in the spirit of the categories of the philosopher Kant. Each of these categories corresponds to a "sub-principle" that Grice called a maxim:

(i) Maxim of quantity:

- Make your contributions as informative as required (of the ongoing purpose of each part of the conversation)

- Don't make your contribution more informative than required.

(ii) Quality maxim

- Don't say things that you believe are not true.

- Don't say things you don't have solid evidence for.

(iii) Relationship maxim: Speak in the right place.

(iv) Manner maxim

- Avoid ambiguous language

- Avoid ambiguous language (which can have multiple meanings)

- Be brief (avoid wordy)

- Speak in order.

This principle applies to special sentence structures - as a syntactic means of expressing the focal phenomenon of the sentence. For example, instead of a structure with all its components and in a normal order such as Subject - Predicate - Complement, the reader may find a structure lacking the components: Adverb - Predicate - Subject

This inverted order, applying Grice's principle, is certainly for a certain purpose when the speaker deliberately introduces the adverbial part as the topic of his utterance.

Grice himself admitted that in addition to the above maxims, "others could be added" (4). He also asserted that among these maxims, some maxims should be respected more than others.

(b) Truth conditions

J.Lyons [28,157] when discussing propositions and propositional content stated the views of philosophers on four criteria of a normal proposition:

(i) either true or false;

(ii) may be known, believed or suspected;

(iii) may be confirmed, denied or questioned;

(iv) remains unchanged when translated from one language to another.

Information about propositional content is thus determined by the truth-condition of the utterance. Two different sentences expressing the same propositional content, i.e. having the same truth-condition, will either be true or false. In that case, we can say that the two sentences above carry the same semantic information content: propositional information.

On the basis of this concept, a medium is used to mark a point if and only if:

(i) the means does not change the truth conditions, or does not change the content of the proposition;

(ii) the device highlights notable pieces of information in the sentence;

(iii) the means must be marked.

In this thesis, we do not intend to study all the lexical and syntactic devices of Vietnamese, but only those lexical and syntactic devices that have the effect of creating focus and highlighting noteworthy information. Therefore, in the process of research, we found that there are terms that do not exist in Vietnamese, so we have to borrow them from English to translate into Vietnamese, such as the structure of inverting an element to the beginning of a sentence called preposing or inverting a certain element to the end of a sentence called postposing. This will be presented in detail in Chapter II.

1.2.4. Marking theory

1.2.4.1. Jakobson's theory of marking

Trubetzkoy was the first to discover the concept of marked/unmarked. This concept was later called "marked" and developed the theory of markedness in phonology by introducing three phonemic oppositions:

(i) Contrast with/without: that is, the contrast between two phonemes, all other distinguishing features are identical, they only differ in one distinguishing feature according to the two values ​​of having or not having that distinguishing feature. He further explained that the marked component of a pair of contrasts is the phoneme characterized by the existence of the positive value ( of having ) of the distinguishing feature. The unmarked component is the component characterized by the absence ( of not having ) of that distinguishing feature. We can take the example of the pair /d/ and / t / then

/d/ is a marked component because it is voiced, and /t/ is unmarked because it lacks the voiced (voiceless) stroke.

(ii) Contrast of scale: that is, the contrast between a number of phonemes that are identical in all distinguishing features, differing only in different degrees of a certain distinguishing feature. For example, the contrast between the three phonemes /i/, /e/, /ε/ in Vietnamese. They are all front-row vowels, differing only in the degree of mouth opening: /i/ has the narrowest opening, then /e/ (written as ê). The widest is the vowel /ε/ (written as e).

(iii) Equivalent opposition: all other oppositions, not yes/no oppositions, not scale oppositions. In other words, each member of a group has a characteristic that other members of the same group do not have. For example, the two consonants /p/ and /t/ are both voiceless, stop consonants, but /p/ is a labial consonant, /t/ is a labial-dental consonant. The labial distinction is equivalent to the labial-dental distinction (this is not a yes/no opposition because the labial-dental distinction is not a labial distinction).

The phonemic structure of Trubetzkoy and of the Prague school was continued by R.Jakobson, an outstanding representative of this school. Around 1940, R.Jakobson further developed the theory of phonological differentiation. But the difference between Trubetzkoy and R.Jakobson was that Trubetzkoy, due to the limitations of the technical conditions of the time, only used articulatory characteristics, while R.Jakobson, thanks to quite sophisticated acoustic machines, used acoustic characteristics as phonological differentiation.

Studying a wide range of very different languages, Jakobson showed that only a few distinctive features, about 12, were sufficient to describe them.

On the other hand, Jakobson's theory of marking is a theory that deals with the relationship between marked and unmarked units in binary oppositions. He defines a marked unit as an utterance of a property A, while an unmarked unit can be divided into two parts: either a non-utterance of A or an utterance of A. A property is defined by Jakobson as a given semantic property that is relatively independent of extra-linguistic reality. He notes that markedness must be considered in relation to unmarked units.

For example, in English, count nouns have two forms: singular ( book ) and plural ( books ). The plural form is indicated by the explicit presence of an "-s" at the end of the word; the singular form by the absence of a similar inflection. Such a presence or absence of a formal marker corresponds to a semantic difference: the plural form ( books ) refers to more than one unit of books; but the singular form is not necessarily limited to one unit of meaning, as we find in many examples: bookshop, bookseller, book-shelf, bookstore , etc. Such cases are not necessarily plural, they can be singular or neuter. Since they are more likely to occur than the plural form, they are considered unmarked. All the unmarked elements in this example include all the cases of singular book and non-indicator book , and the opposite elements (the unmarked elements) are the cases of plural books. The pair of opposites above can be described as follows:

[1:12]

book

Books

markup

unmarked

tick

form

Absent suffix

suffix present

meaning

non-plural

plural

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Application of Marking Theory in Functional Grammar


1.2.4.2. Application of marking theory in functional grammar

Based on Jakobson's theory of markedness, Dik applied the terms marked and unmarked to language. According to Dik, cases with high frequency of occurrence are unmarked cases and cases with low frequency of occurrence are marked cases. He gives an example

about word order in English with the common structure: S + Vf + X (S= subject; Vf= main verb in agreement with the subject; X= other elements). Through a survey of 100 English sentences, he thought that inverted word order in English must certainly express a meaning other than the function of providing information.

Compared with the information structure of Vietnamese, the topic position is usually placed at the same position as the topic and subject, but when another element of the sentence is promoted to this position, we can mark and create an information focus in the utterance.

Dik also argued:

(i) A phenomenon that is considered marked in one (linguistic) environment may be unmarked in another (linguistic) environment;

(ii) When marked forms are used frequently, they gradually lose their markedness and a new marked form may emerge to replace them.

Dik's views on markedness have helped us gain a deeper insight into the phenomenon of focalization: the speaker/writer can use a certain word to replace or supplement another word to convey a message that needs to be emphasized or can use an unusual structure to express a special meaning, creating an informational focus in the sentence to attract the listener's attention (a focal structure) to replace an unmarked structure that has no informational focus or emphasis value.

We give an example that applies the theory of marking through the use of focalization method, which is a structure containing a determiner at the beginning of the sentence. In addition to adverbs used to separate sentences such as then/la/ma , Vietnamese sentences can have modal adverbs such as mai/moi to contribute to creating information focus. See example:

[1:11] It was not until he heard Hai Thep calling from in front of the cave that he stood up.

(AD 1:94 )

[1:12] Only the sound of water flowing impatiently from the stream echoed that statement.

(CL:18)

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