DOCUMENT RESUME ED 358 696 FL 021 012 AUTHOR Virtanen, Tuija TITLE Discourse Functions of Adverbial Placement in English. Clause-Initial Adverbials of Time and Place in Narratives and Procedural Place Descriptions. PUB DATE Dec 92 NOTE 411p. PUB TYPE Books (010) EDRS PRICE MFO1 /PC17 Plus Postage. DESCRIPTORS *Adverbs; *Context Clues; *Discourse Analysis; *English; *Grammar; Sentence Structure; *Written Language IDENTIFIERS *Clauses ABSTRACT An analysis of adverbial placement in written contemporary English focuses not on the sentence or clause context, as in conventional analyses, but on the textual or discoursal influences on placement. Specifically, the study examines:(1) the major textual and discoursal motivations behind clause-initial placement of adverbials of time and place in two types of text (narratives and procedural place descriptions);(2) central notions such as text strategy, text type, or text-strategic continuity; (3)a text typology for study of texts; and (4) contributions to general knowledge of text and discourse. An introductory chapter describes basic concepts of text and discourse under consideration. In chapter 2, adverbials are viewed t -om a sentence-grammar perspective. Chapter 3 outlines the study's methods and materials, and text strategy is discussed in general terms in chapter 4. In chapters 5-7, the textual and discourse factors are discussed individually with respect to their effects on adverbial placement. Chapter 5 presents a typology of texts, and chapter 6 looks at text-strategic continuities in four sample texts. Information dynamics, or the distribution of given and new information within a text, are considered in chapter 7, and the final chapter synthesizes the interplay of the different factors in text processing. A sample text and analyses are appended. (MSE) **********:.************************************************************ Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. *********************************************************************** AIL .°,ti:411.17171111-4.7, AIL 2F- I a (11 D US OEPANTNENT Of EDUCATION Oft* co Educational RIlteetch and Imprevernen1 EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION "PERMISSION TO REPRODUCETHIS CENTER (ERIC) MATERIAL HAS BE NGRANTED BY eis document has beenreproduced as Cisect from the OAliOn oforganization onginaling it C Mmor changs nay* tefian maaeto improve rgooductoct Clulihty Points of wfw Or OPfliOniSfaf.Cf'rtlh'sdoctr mm do not ncsaarity pfesntofficial OE RI posOon of pohcy TO THE EDUCATIONALRESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) " AL 9 T -ija Virtanen is at present acting as a senior lecture in the Department of English at Abo Akademi (theSwedish-language university of Finland) in Abo, Finland. Abo Akademi University Press Kaskisgatan 2 C 14, SF-20700 Abo/Turku, Finland Tel. +358-21654477, fax +358-21654490 Distribution: Tibo-Trading, PR 33, SF-21601 Pargas, Finland Fel.+358-21889355, fax +358-21889164 Cover design: Tove Ahlback DISCOURSE FUNCTIONS OF ADVERBIAL PLACEMENT IN ENGLISH '6. Tuija Virtanen Discourse Functions of Adverbial Placement in English Clause-Initial Adverbials of Time and Place in Narratives and Procedural Place Descriptions AKADEMISK AVHANDLING som med tillstind av Humanistiska fakulteten vid Abo Akademi framINgges till offe.itlig granskning i Gadolinia, Auditorium A, Porthastsgaan 3-5, lordagen den 16 januari 1993 kl 12. ABO ABO AKADEM IS FORLAG - ABO AKADEM I UNIVERSITY PRESS 5 Discourse Functions of Adverbial Placement in English Clause-Initial Adverbials of Time and Place in Narratives and Procedural Place Descriptions by Tuija Virtanen ABO ABO AKADEMIS FORLAG - ABO AKADEMI UNIVERSITY PRESS CIP Cataloguing in Publication Virtanen, Tuija Discourse functions of adverbial placement in English : clause-initial adverbials of time and place in narratives and procedural place descriptions / by Tuija Virtanen. - Abo : Abo Akademis forlag, 1992. Diss. : Abo Akademi. ISBN 952-9616-20-1 UDK 800.852:801.56:802.0(043) ISBN 952-9616-20-1 Gillot Oy Abo 1992 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The present study has been written within the framework of Professor. Nils Erik Enkvist's project "Style and Text as Structure and Process" at Abo Akademi. Since September 1985 I have had the privilege of working under optimal circumstances at the Research Institute of the Abo Akademi Foundation. The project officially lasted three years, and the present work is a revised and expanded version of my unpublished Licentiate thesis, which was comnleted in 1988. One of the outcomes of the project are the close contacts between its members, from which I have continued to benefit during the process of writing this thesis. Looking back at those precious years,I wish to acknowledge the fact that the present study would not have been written without such an inspiring framework. I cannot express my gratitude enough to Professor Enkvist for including me in his research group and thus providing me with the best post- graduate guidance possible. He originally suggested the topic to me and he has continued to show a tireless interest in my work even after the project ended. He has offered invaluable advice and encouragement, and his detailed and wide-ranging comments have repeatedly helped me to see the core of the problem at hand and to put it in a larger linguistic perspec- tive. I owe a special debt of gratitude to my friends and colieagues in the research group "Style and Text". In particular, I wish to single out fruitful discussions with Martina Bjorklund and Brita WArvik. I have also greatly benefited from the advice, criticisms, and unfaltering support of the other members of the research group and all those who have taken part in the seminars organized by Professor Enkvist. Associate Professor Marita Gustafsson and Professor Kay Wikberg acted as examiners of my Licentiate thesis. I wish to thank them for their comments and suggestions which compelled me to reconsider a number of important aspects of the study. Before publication, the manuscript of the present thesis was examined by Professor Gunnel Tottie and Professor Kay Wikberg. I thank them for their comments which have improved the work. Ingegerd B5cklund has always shown a keen interest in my work. She has read my Licentiate thesis and given me helpful comments. I am also indebted to Fredrik Ulfhielm, who spent a large part of his summer read- ing one of the latest versions of the manuscript. His questions made me rethink a number of issues and clarify the exposition. There are other people I could mention here, as many individual ideas in this work Lave emerged from informal discussions. The final version of the book is considerably better for the efforts cf all those who have pro- vided me with comments, but there are points where I have been unable to follow their advice. I am, of course, alone responsible for the short- comings of the present study. I wish to thank Christopher and Kristiina Moseley who helped me to find native speakers of English and who administered part of the text-seg- mentation test. My thanks also go to all the subjects, who kindly com- pleted the task. I should also like to offer my thanks to Kristina Toivonen for her help and efficiency in practical matters. And Stefan Malmberg put his native speaker stylistic competence into checking the English of my thesis, which I gratefully acknowledge. I am g, awful to the following for permission to reproduce copyright material: Elsevier Science Publishers B.V., Amsterdam, for portions of text from my article "Given and new information in adverbials: Clause-in- itial advcrbials of time and place", Journal of Pragmatics 17:2 (1992), pp. 99-115; Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, for portions of text and a figure (Fig. 3 in the present study) from my article "Issues of text typology: Narrative a 'basic' type of text?" Text 12:2 (1992), pp. 293-310; Walker Books Limited, London, for the entire text of a retold version of Three Bears, by Wendy Boase, 1983. Despite every effort, I have, unfortunately, had no success in tracing the copyright holder of the second sample narrative "The cats who stayed for dinner", which is reprinted in the Appendix. I am pleased to ackr ,wledge with gratitude a research grant from the Academy of Finland during Professor Enkvist's project and another three- year research post from 1989 to 1992. Thanks are also due to the Re- search Institute of the Abo Akademi Foundation for first-class working facilities in a pleasant environment. For the funding of my participation in several international conferences, which have contributed to my work in many ways, I am indebted to the Academy of Finland, the H.W. Donner Fund and the Research Institute of the Abo Akademi Foundation. Finally, it is my pleasant duty to thank the Abo Akademi University Press for including this book in their series. Tove Ahlback has kindly designed the cover. There are no words I could use to express my most heartfelt thanks to those dear to me, who have borne with me, and still do. My parents, Brita and Erkki Virtanen, have never questioned the necessity of my spending most of my time working on this study, year after year. And my husband, Fredrik Ulfhielm, has been a continuous source of encouragement and support. He has put up with my working hours and the states of mind connected with thc process. Thank you, Fredrik, for still being my hus- band. Turku/Abo, December 6, 1992 Tuija Virtanen CONTENTS Acknowledgements Contents Figures Abbreviations 1. INTRODUCTI 1.1. Some basic cc,ncepts 3 2. ADVERBIALS 7 2.1. The concept of adverbial 7 2.2. Previous studies of adverbial placement 10 2.3. Adverbials in clause-initial position 15 2.4. In-depth variation in adverbial classification 19 2.5. Interim summary 28 3. METHODS AND MATERIALS 31 4. TEXT STRATEGY 41 4.1. Outline of a text-typological model 41 4.2. Text strategy 51 5. TEXT TYPES 56 5.1.