INFERENCE AS COHERENCE:
FUNCTION AS DETERMINANT OF TEXT-TYPE ORGANIZATION
A CASE STUDY OF THE GENRE OF SHORT STORIES
Pedro Pablo Sánchez Villalón
Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha
INTRODUCTION
'The way language is organised has been determined, over the millions and more years of its evolution, by
the functions it is called on to serve'. (Halliday and Hasan, 1989;44)
In the studies of the previous decades about the functions of language we can find only a little reference to
the function of literature in Malinawski's (1935) magical function and in Jackobson's (1960) 'poetic function',
which focuses on the linguistic form of the message, without considering any other element in the communicative
situation of a text (i.e., art for art's sake). Perhaps there is more reference in the ancient classical studies
about language: Aristotles´s works Poetica and Rhetorica and Horace´s Epistola,
where they centre the goal of literary work and rhetoric on the threefold process of docere-delectare-movere,
i.e., to teach, to enjoy and to persuade (García-Berrio and Albaladejo Mayordomo, 1987: 179). The ideal
of persuasion is one which has not been much taken into account by the studies on literature until recently.
Functions and the components of language
Discourse Analysis considers language as a system of signs rather than an enclosed structure of linguistic elements
(Firth,1957), and discourse as language in use. The system has a series of components which make it function
to achieve its communicative purpose, this is, to communicate meaning. Five of Jackobson's view of six communicative
functions applied to language (i.e., 1. to express inner states, 2. to communicate information, 3. to
describe language itself, 4. to maintain social relations and 5. to affect the behaviour of others) are simplified
into two metafunctions by Guy Cook (1994): a) communicating information (which includes 1., 2. and 3.) and b) maintaining
social relations (which includes 4. and 5.). These resulting metafunctions would merge into a direct protofunction
of language: to manipulate environment. In this protofunction he includes the third metafunction, to change the
receivers' experience of the world, a function which he thinks is characteristic of literary texts, the function
of cognitive change. In a different way, Jackobson's sixth function is the poetic one, a descriptive function in
some way identified as the function of literature.
Halliday (1973) distinguishes three metafunctions as the various kinds of meanings reflected by language in
use: textual, ideational and interpersonal meanings. The ideational meaning focuses on the content of
the meaning and its components (the participants, the circumstances and the process). It deals with the representation
of the users' experience of the world through language with the help of fundamental logical relations. The interpersonal
meaning is seen as the exchange of information with assignment of speech roles (mood) and users' attitudes.
The textual meaning deals with the message as conveying meaning through context: the context of text and
the context of situation. The central aspect of the textual function is the information structure, based on New
and Given information, elements which determine the organization of the text into discourse units in the
context of situation. So, the organization of literary language, its information structure, must be determined
by its textual function. The concepts of New and Given information should be analysed at a textual, not only sentential,
level. As literature is a representation of the world and our experience and it is not a presentation of concepts
and relations per se, the writer needs common ground where lots of concepts and relations, events and
situations can be perceived as elements of Given information, and their manipulation of deviant New information
can imply inferences of experiences of a new textual world.
INFERENCE AS COHERENCE
Coherence as the interactive element of function
There is a conventional interaction between the elements of textual meaning. This interaction, or linking, is
realized mainly through coherence as the ordering and relation of the functional components in text. We can conceive
coherence as the element which gives unity to a text, so as the crucial axis of discourse, among text, context
and users. Let's review some opinions about coherence. Cook defines coherence as the 'purposeful, meaningful, connected'
perception of discourse, which is variable depending on the perceivers as individuals or groups and on the context
(Cook, 1994:25). In the same direction, Brown and Yule regard coherence as a result of the interaction of the text
and the receiver in a given context of situation, the 'semantic relations ... exploited by the authors (of communication:
senders and receivers) to achieve a particular effect' (Brown and Yule, 1983:198). Those semantic relations affect
the organization or structure of the language, not only at the level of surface text (through cohesion) but also
at the level of the textual world (through coherence). Brown and Yule say that the reader bases the interpretation
of discourse on the connection of the elements of the message, which is not always a linguistic connection. There
are 'principles of analogy, local interpretation and general features of context, ... regularities of discourse
structure ..., regular features of information structure organization', ... and some common 'socio-cultural knowledge'
(Brown and Yule, 1983:225). These elements of connection generate conventional structures of communicative interaction.
The lack of linguistic connection, or cohesive gaps, can be filled with conventional connection of other kind (analogy,
situation, discourse, information, or socio-cultural knowledge). Language can be seen as a sequence of communicative
actions, where the participants take their roles to interact. It is the way they establish to interact that makes
a particular genre of interaction. The conventional sequencing of interaction creates coherent types of discourse.
For Van Dijk and Kintsch(1983) discourse is a social action consisting of speech acts affecting interpretation
and representation by means of strategies as a mixture of cognitive behaviour and mental acts. When they are organized
we can talk about plans with goals dominated by a macro-action, giving unity to a set of actions as a result of
the specific functions or plans employed to communicate at any level. Textual coherence uses strategies to handle
cognitive and contextual information. These strategies focus on semantic coherence of two types: conditional,
based on cause, consequence and temporality; and functional, based on example, specification, explication,
contrast, comparison, generalization, conclusion.
Inference in literature: effects on textual organization and interpretation.
In literature the way the components interact can be seen as peculiar since one of the main elements of the
context, the situation, is not real. Things happen in a created world, so there is no help of situational referents
(such as deixis) unless they are specifically implied. But it is not possible to refer to every detail of every
situation in a created world. Texts would be mainly explanatory without any place for narratives, poetry and so
on. Created worlds and situations in literature resemble the real world and conventional situations. It is the
task of coherence to connect all the actions, concepts and relations in a literary work, without continually referring
to the similarity with stereotyped situations. This is fulfilled by means of inference. In a literary work the
reader infers the textual world making comparisons with real situations, and through deviant features they are
led to change their expectation into another stereotyped situation. Only these deviant features or relevant events
are really the ones which create relations in the literary world. The reader learns about these relations shaping
them in their experience of the textual world.
Between readers and writers, there is a portion of shared knowledge of the world or 'stereotyped' mental representation
of the world, achieving communication through text by reference to schemas from stereotyped knowledge structures
or global patterns. This is the basis of the schema theory proposed by Rumelhart and of the knowledge structure
by Schank and Abelson. 'The process of understanding a passage consists of finding a schema which will account
for it' (Rumelhart, 1976), 'a knowledge structure among the repertoire the reader brings to the understanding process'.
(Schank and Abelson, 1977) Literature constantly refers to conventionally acquired mental representations or experiences
of real and textual worlds and develops new patterns of experience in the textual world, where coherent connections
are inferred by the reader's experience of language and of the world.
The organization of text is affected by the sender's purpose of achieving a particular understanding by the
receiver, to cause either a desired effect or a cognitive interchange. Swales (1990) is interested in the study
of 'the roles the text play in particular environments.' In the discourse convention there are a variety of communicative
events with typical textual and procedural features relating 'text roles and text environments'. That makes the
structure of 'genres'. He identifies the communicative purpose with 'the prototypical criterion of genre identity
operating as the primary determinant of task'. Couture (1986) thinks that genres can be realized only in completed
texts, they specify the conditions for beginning, continuing and ending a text. They are structured texts
operating at the level of discourse structure where we can find a specific typical order of functional units, which
will establish the features of specific genres.
In literature, we are more interested in the communicative linguistic effects and also in the determinants of
those effects (the communicative elements of the effective use of literature). The description of a house by students
in a classroom situation, apart from using a higher proportion of certain syntactic structures (adjectives, relative
constructions, verb 'to be', prepositional phrases as noun determiners, etc.) over other ones and some specific
lexical items, usually features a common order of the description sequence -from the outside, through the entrance
hall, to the bottom of the house; and from the general framework to the particular details- following, in this
way, a plan of description with stereotyped schemas where a great number of details are not referred, but inferred.
This is due to the previous acquisition of a common global pattern in the shared knowledge of students about the
description of a house. The same process seems to apply to linguistic units of a higher level. There must be specific
knowledge structures for different discourse conventions, i.e. for different genres.
ANALYSIS OF A SUPERSTRUCTURE: TEXTUAL ORGANIZATION MODELS OF SHORT STORIES
The model of short stories may have a structure of propositions leading to a typical schema for this kind of
conventional text form, this is, what van Dijk and Kintsch (1983) call a superstructure, made of conventional episodical
categories often hierarchically organized into a discourse type with relevant features as a cognitive model.
In the general superstructure of the narrative discourse the schema is formed by macrostructures
whose categories are the main events. A story centres on actors and major actions that change the states; the goals
and actions fill the story schema (a flexible entity, not a fixed, limited one). An episode consists of
actions falling into the categories of exposition, which introduces the actors and the situations; complication,
which brings in some remarkable, interesting event; and resolution which returns to a new stable
state. This schema can be elaborated by embedding or concatenating episodes or overlapping the categories.
Just as the literary narratives have peculiar common features in the organization of the text, each literary
subgenre seems to develop textual models whose structures coincide at certain level. So, from the superstructure
of the exposition of episodes, complication and resolution we can determine a subgenre or derived superstructure
of short stories. Analysing several short stories we can see that the basic structure is extended into extra elements:
global patterns evolved in the narrative of short stories which lead us to determine a superstructure that will
be the realization of the superact of speech accomplished by means of this genre. This is probable since, apart
the characteristics of the literary narrative (creation of an unreal world as a commonly experienced context -
exposition or setting -, development of a narrative macrostructure of events and changing states - complication
-, and conclusion or resulting states - resolution- ) in short stories, these features should be stressed and itemized
to create that world, to develop a contextual situation and get to a result in a short textual space.
Discourse, as it has been previously stated, is created by the interaction between texts and the knowledge of
the world provided by the context. The text activates, from declaratory knowledge of the real world, a procedural
knowledge that creates a series of expectations of subsequent possible events. It is the refreshing of these expectations
that redirects the story schema and makes it interesting.
Following the studies of De Beaugrande and Dressler (1981) on the semantic macrostructures and the procedural
method derived from the theories of Minsky (1975) and Schank (1977), based on coherence or dependency among concepts
('frames','plans', 'goals' and 'scripts') I have analysed several short stories of English writers under the hypothesis
that it is possible to find a common characteristic superstructure in this literary genre type, providing thus
some evidence for the Biber's theory of textual interpretation on the variations of language, not only at the level
of syntax and lexis (Biber, 1988) but also at the level of textual organization. With the purpose of simplifying,
I have analysed the stories from the top level of the superstructure, departing from the narrative text type, where,
after identifying the topic or frame in the category of plans, we find the exposition of the situation as the initial
state (which could be identified with the traditional term of setting), the complication and the resolution. At
that level there is a comparison among the stories to search for a common structure.
In the analyses we can discover the following structure:
The Demon Lover, by Elizabeth Bowen
TOPIC --- An evil lover
EPISODE 1
- EXPOSITION-1(Initial state, setting): A married woman arriving at her previous home
- COMPLICATION-1 - EPISODE 2-
- EXPOSITION-2:She finds a letter addressed to her in the abandoned home
- COMPLICATION-2:(Background) Story of the previous lover and the troth
EPISODE-3
EXPOSITION-3 last meeting with previous lover
COMPLICATION-3 the troth
EPISODE 4 : the troth ...
RESOLUTION-3 married to another man
- RESOLUTION-2: Try to flee
-RESOLUTION-1(Final State): The woman is kidnapped by her previous lover
The Lagoon, by Joseph Conrad
TOPIC --- Arsat's wife's death
EPISODE 1
- EXPOSITION-1(Initial state, setting): The white man arriving at Arsat's home
- COMPLICATION-1 - EPISODE 2-
- EXPOSITION-2: Arsat's wife is very ill
- COMPLICATION-2: Story of previous time when he had her and his brother was lled.
EPISODE 3: The story ...
- RESOLUTION-2: Death of the woman
-RESOLUTION-1(Final State): The white man's departure and Arsat's plans for revenge
Mrs Bixby and The Colonel's Coat, by Roald Dahl
TOPIC --- Mrs Bixby's affair and her husband's
EPISODE 1
- EXPOSITION-1(Initial state, setting): Mrs Bixby's way of life and her husband's
- COMPLICATION-1 - EPISODE 2-
- EXPOSITION-2: Mrs Bixby's affair with the Colonel and the departure present
- COMPLICATION-2: The pawnbroker and the lie
EPISODE-3
EXPOSITION-3 Mince coat to the pawnbroker
COMPLICATION-3 Tells false story to her husband
EPISODE 4: The lie
RESOLUTION-3 Her husband takes the ticket
- RESOLUTION-2: Recovering part of the present
-RESOLUTION-1(Final State): Mr Bixby's secretary (lover) wears the mince coat
Cat in the Rain, by Ernest Hemingway:
TOPIC --- A married woman wants a cat seen in the rain. The hotel owner gets it for her
EPISODE 1
- EXPOSITION-1(Initial state, setting): A woman and her husband at a hotel. Raining. Cat outside
- COMPLICATION-1 - EPISODE 2- Going to fetch the desired cat unsuccessfully.
- EXPOSITION-2: Offerings to go and woman going for the cat.
- COMPLICATION-2: Feelings about the owner who sees her and send a maid with umbrella to help
her. Cat gone
EPISODE-3
EXPOSITION-3 Meeting owner. Liking him
COMPLICATION-3 Helped by maid with umbrella
EPISODE 4: Going out in the rain
RESOLUTION-3 The cat is gone
- RESOLUTION-2: Strong desire for the cat
-RESOLUTION-1(Final State): Maid sent by the owner with the cat for her.
Feuille d'Album, by Katherine Mansfield
TOPIC --- A boy's simple affair with a neighbour girl
EPISODE 1
- EXPOSITION-1(Initial state, setting): The boy's personality
- COMPLICATION-1 - EPISODE 2-
- EXPOSITION-2: His first sight of the girl
- COMPLICATION-2:
EPISODE 3 ...
His wishes and dreams
- RESOLUTION-2: Following her
-RESOLUTION-1(Final State): Offering an egg.
As we can see, the episodes are the nucleus of meaning, central signs as a socially shared convention. They
are essential as whole units for the evolution of the story. In the multilevel approach, we can find different
episodes, everyone giving compact unity to a different level of the story discourse. Episode 1 would be the macrolevel
in which we can find Episode 2 residing as a microlevel, which at the same time would be the macrolevel where we
can discover another microlevel, Episode 3, and so on. The unity of episode resides upon the sharing relations/interaction
of its elements (time, place, textual participants (characters) and sequence of events and states, interrelated
by the conceptual dependence imposed by the semantic coherence of the conditional type, based on cause,
consequence and temporality, as it is characteristic of narratives and literary texts in general.
Initial States or Expositions usually start in 'media res' followed by a quick description of the situation,
the main characters at the moment of their appearance or reference, the place, time and some other conditions or
roles, handling them with the most primitive schemas to explain the world context for the evolving story as fast
and compressedly as possible: a shut-up house schema in Bowen's story, a trip-on-a-boat schema in Conrad's, a family
life and occupation in Dahl's, a hotel schema in Hemingway's. The expansion of the schema description into relevant
deviant features makes the story rapidly provided with enough context to make the reader aware of the situation
(or textual world) and, with the aid of sequenced events, follow the evolution of the story with full baggage of
typical expectations at once.
There is a moment in the evolution usually at the point of an extraordinarily deviant event or state in the
conventional schema for which there is not much provision of semantic coherence (which on the other hand makes
the story interesting) when we encounter the stage of complication, the prominent feature of literary narrative.
When reporting events and states occurring in a different time or place or with an unknown reason or unexpected
result, a new structurally dependent sequence of events and states is inserted in the sequence of the current events
and states. This can be identified as the microlevel of Episode 2. It is usually a kind of flash-back (in Conrad's
and in Bowen's stories) or a timeless sequence of states, events, showing feelings or desire (in Dahl's, Hemingway's
and Mansfield's stories) whose function is the presentation of the contextual background situation as an explanation
of the current events and states, a justification or the cause for the main (or previous) episode to happen. It
prepares the reader for the change in their previous expectations, inferences or predictions, and to get extra
chunks of knowledge for future predictions in the whole macrostructure of that discourse. It will provide the new
development of the story with functional global coherence mainly of the kind of causality. It is an outstanding
feature of the short story structure with the effect of immersing the reader into the textual world in a kind of
extensive multilevelled funnel-like process to get to the most intricate reasons for the events and states to happen.
It seems to be the typical resource of short-story makers to present the contextual background in a short written
space. This funnel-like extension is processed by means of embedding episodes (and so, a story can have Episode
3, 4, and so on), different from the characteristic concatenating extension of episodes in longer narrative writings
such as novels, with a functional coherence mainly of the kind of temporality (in novels sometimes poorly reflected
in the editorial division of the structure in Chapters).
The resolution is to different degrees in some way unexpected (though we know that something is going
to happen). Readers can experience an expectant mood, the state can be imminently determined and at the point of
being stable, but the particular event which makes the final state to be stable is unknown until the moment it
is referred. The appearance of the lover in Bowen's story is imminent and expected but not in the way he does;
the death of Arsat's wife can be expected but not his determination to take revenge and attitude to death after
so long time; the final receptor of the mince coat in Dahl's short story is completely unexpected; offering an
egg as the only communicative act after a long pursuit in Mansfield's story. Thus we can see that unexpectedness
is the main feature of the quality of events at the resolution stage in a short story. That makes it interesting,
preparing the reader of short stories to expect something unexpected when reading them. In this way, the knowledge
structure of participants is heavily affected (as Cook (1994) points out) by the textual patterns of this text-type.
The text communicates meaning of the knowledge of the world, affecting and changing the receivers' knowledge
of the world, providing non-directly experienced knowledge of the world to the receivers, creating additional patterns
of cognitive structures in their minds. Here we meet the function of cognitive change, proposed by Cook to explain
the main function of literature, and so having so much value in culture, education and developmental psychology.
Through language, and mainly through the literary use of language, we can receive external experiences as communicating
and giving shape to our own experience and perception of the world.
The communication of the cognitive elements in a short story helps the reader learn the possible world, inferring
the technique of narrating and understanding facts in the way of the narration, waiting till the end for the resolution,
an unexpected one, which can become a stylistic resource for the reader to expect unexpected results when reading
short stories and using that structure when telling or writing stories with the purpose of causing surprise, suspense
or interest. Therefore, reading short stories can influence the reader's behaviour and of course it influences
their cognitive structures or knowledge schemas.
CONCLUSION
From our analysis we can conclude that short stories have a conventional organization consisting of stereotyped
schemas with a set of events and states (with a goal in a plan), grouped in three multilevelled elements or categories.
To use van Dijk's terminology, they are formed by embedding episodes consisting of exposition, complication and
resolution, delimited by changes in the events or states.
It is not difficult to see, then, the parallelism between the functions and the text structure of this genre
as an effect of the most relevant function reflected in the features of the categories of every episode of this
discourse type. Although the three functions act all the way from the start at the level of sentences, we can observe
that each episode is governed mainly by a determined function at the level of text:
We could even see the global
textual function represented in the Short Story global structure, where the Theme comes first being all the cognitive
components of the exposition, then the Action group of events and states changing roles in the textual world at
the stage of complication, and finally, the New information comes at the end in the resolution, outstanding its
surprising effect on the mind of the reader. There is a surprising coincidence in the structure of a short story
with the nuclear structure of a sentence, as if it were a reverse process of expansion of a unique, nuclear idea
into a whole unitary text.
At the level of knowledge structure, connections of cause and result produce mechanisms of inferred expectations
and sequential relevant events modified by means of the manipulation and presentation of their time, location and
characters in the story which enrich the readers' experience of the textual world.
We can notice the great essential, intrinsic influence of the knowledge structures used to communicate in the
text type organization. On the other hand, we can conclude that the knowledge structuring of receivers, in an interactive
way, is modified and given shape by some kind of texts with a typical textual organization, which is the previously
referred function of literature following Cook's view, hence its prominent importance given by society to literature,
one of whose realizations is the short story writing. Thus, the sender's structuring knowledge, motivated by communicative
metafunctions, affects the text structure of the language used, which correspondingly affects the receiver's knowledge
structuring strategies by means of modifying inferred expectations.
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The short stories analysed, and more, can be read in:
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