One the constraints
on the speaker/writer is that he can produce only one word at a time. When he
orders these single words into sentences, and those sentences into texts, he
confronts what has come to be called the linearisation problem. He has to
choose a beginning point. This point will inflience the hearer/reader’s
interpretation of everything that follows in the discourse since it will
constitute the initial textual context for everything that follows. Consider
just two types of invented example. First of all consider the effect of on
identical attributive description being preceded by different evaluative
comments:
1. a. I can’t stand Sally Binns.
She’s tall and thin walks like a crane
b.
I do admire Sally Binns.
She’s tall and thin and walks like crane
In a the attributes
tall and thin and walks like a crane must be assumed to be unattractive,
awkward, ungainly. In b those same properties are now endowed with elegance and
grace.
Consider next the
effect of linear sequencing on the interpreation of event in time where the
listener can be expected to derive different implicatures from different
ordering’s (Levelt, 1981:91)
2. a. She married and became pregnant
b.
She became pregnant and married
There is, as Levelt
reminds us an ordo naturalis, whereby it is assumsed that, if there is no cue
to the contrary, the first-mentioned event happened first and the
second-mentioned event followed it. It is, then, open to the heare/reader to
draw implicature from that ordering , implicatures which will be constrained by
both the content of what is said and stereotypical expectations based on
previous experience.
We are familiar in
the field of visual perception with effects produced by presenting the same
stimulus in a different context. A block of colour produced in the centre of a
light surround may be perceived as being much darker than that same block of
colour presented in the centre of a dark surround. Similarly a line presented
in a given context is perceived as being longer than a line of same length
which is presented in a different context. In a similiar way, understanding of
verbal input processed against the relevant background of the immediately
precding co-text. The same sequence of word may take on a different value
(Widdowson, 1978) when it is uttered in an different co-text. We shall consider
this effect, first level, and then with respect to the organisation of large
stretches of discourse (Brown, Gillian and George Yule, 1983:126).
