语料库语言学研究系列讲座

语料库语言学研究系列讲座

Title：Intratextuality and Discourse Harmony（内文性与话语和谐）
Speaker：Wenzhong Li（李文中教授）
Time：1:30 pm – 3:30 pm, September 28th, 2016
Place：Room 214, Building Yang Yongman

Contact: Zhen Fengchao

Abstract:
In Sinclair’s framework language has two aspects in its use: in spoken discourse language works on an interactive plane which operates in real time through negotiation of meaning for sharing of one’s own experience or fulfilling the goals of each individual participant in the discourse, whereas in written discourse language works on an autonomous plane which is but a developing record of experience (Sinclair 2004: 52-53). It therefore follows that an independent written text forms an intratextual unity oriented to sharing the author’s experience or fulfilling his or her goals even though he or she is not present. Such intratextuality serves to hold the text together and makes it meaningful and accessible to corresponding interpretations, which, according to Teubert, falls into two parts, namely “the narrow interpretation of textual evidence, and a wide, free interpretation leading to the emergence of new ideas” (Teubert 2015). While it is true that intertextual interpretations adds new meanings to the discourse of a text, the intratextual development of meaning as evidenced in recurrent patterning of phraseological expressions and paraphrasing makes up a centripetal presentation of ideas and thoughts achieving discourse harmony: the assumption being that a text, in its development of ideas, is unlikely to contradict itself by allowing conflicting accounts of the same idea, even though it may elaborate, expound, and exemplify what has been already said in previous sentences. Such intratextuality can be best demonstrated in Analects, in which comparatively negative and cautious attitude towards yan (言) and se (色) is well articulated in the recurrent patterns and contexts around the nodes. The research questions are thus formulated as: 1) To what extent are the two words associated to each other through their co-occurrence in the text? 2) How is the discourse prosody established by way of intratextual paraphrasing and attitudinal context? And 3) What interpretive conclusion can be drawn of the Confucian ideas of yan and se throughout the text in terms of intratextuality and discourse harmony? A close examination of concordance lines on the node words reveals that the two terms are tight associates of each other indicating human external behavior, upon which Confucius places great emphasis and admonition. While they share some identical cotexts and co-occur in similar context, each of the node words keeps its own paraphrases in collocations, of which the attitudinal meaning more often than not pervades a larger extent well beyond a single unit of meaning. The intratextual consistence is evident in the overall presentation of the key ideas which are made to be associated to each other, and accordingly the semantic prosody of segmental units of meaning contributes to the general discourse prosody of the topics to the effect of discourse harmony.
Key words: intratextuality; intertextuality; discourse prosody; discourse harmony

主讲人简介：李文中，男，1963年12月出生，河南开封人；1999年上海交通大学外国语言学及应用语言专业学文学博士学位；北京外国语大学中国外语教育研究中心教授，博士生导师；研究方向为语料库语言学、应用语言学，计算机辅助语言教学。