Intentionality In Discourse

Intentionality is one standard of texuality, which concerns the text producer's attitude that the set of occurrences of sentences should constitute a cohesive and coherent text instrumental in fulfilling the producer's intentions.Philosophers and linguists have made some investigations of intentionality. Three models of communication are regarded as relevant to the study of intentionality, that is, a code model, an inferential model and an interactional model. All discourse analyses assume some underlying model of communication. The present thesis is intended to probe intentionality at discourse level.The present thesis attempts to answer three questions: (1) What is the relationship between intentionality and the coherence of discourse? (2) How does intentionality contribute to the construction of discourse? (3) What roles does intentionality play in the interpretation of discourse? In order to answer these three questions, a small-scale corpus was set up with data collected from newspapers, novels and daily communication. Following a review of the relevant literature, a theoretical framework is established as the theoretical basis of the present research.The author attempts to analyze data by using Beaugrande and Dressler's (1981) theory of text linguistics, which maintains that the construction and interpretation of discourse are bound up with the intentional aspects of language use, and the process of construction and interpretation of discourse is carried out as cooperative endeavor through the negotiation of intentions.On the basis of the analysis, we reach the conclusion that intentionality plays an important role in the coherence, construction and interpretation of discourse.To some degree, cohesion and coherence can themselves be regarded as operational goals without whose attainment other discourse goals may be blocked. However, text users normally exercise tolerance towards products whose conditions of occurrence make it hard to uphold cohesion and coherence altogether, notably in casual conversation. But if a text producerintends to defy cohesion and coherence, communication will be slowed down for negotiation and can break down altogether. On occasion, a text producer may deliberately impair coherence for special effects. The interdependence of coherence with intentionality can lead to complicated situations.Text construction consists of five phases: planning, ideation, development, expression, and parsing. The first phase of text construction would usually be planning (cf. Flower & Hayes 1979; Meyer 1979). The producer has the intention of pursuing some goal via the text. The setting of a goal and the choice of a text type will be closely followed by (or will overlap with) a phase of ideation. Following ideation, a phase of development can serve to expand, specify, elaborate, and interconnect the ideas obtained. The results of ideation and development need not yet be committed to particular natural language expressions and there is a phase of expression to which the content accruing so far is relayed. The last phase of construction is parsing: putting the expressions relayed from the last phase into grammatical dependencies and arranging the latter in a linear format for the surface text.The interpretation of texts can be modeled as a corresponding set of phases of processing dominance in the reverse direction. The receiver begins on the "surface" with the presentation and work "downward" to the "deeper" phases. The surface text is parsed from the linear string into grammatical dependencies. The elements in those dependencies are the expressions which activate concepts and relations in mental storage - a phase called concept recovery. As the conceptual configuration accrues and shows densities and dominances, the main ideas can be extracted in a phase of idea recovery. The extraction of the plans which the text producer appears to be pursuing is performed during plan recovery.In the construction and interpretation of discourse, the participants usually observe the Cooperative Principle, but sometimes pr...