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Applied Linguistics 1994 15(3):243-262; doi:10.1093/applin/15.3.243
© 1994 by Oxford University Press
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Articles

The Role of Syntactic Structure in Discourse Structure: Signaling Logical and Prominence Relations

ANDREA TYLER

Georgetown University

A qualitative investigation of varying syntactic patterns and their effects on discourse structure was undertaken. The discourse under consideration was the lectures of two first-semester teaching assistants (TAs) in a botany lab, one a native speaker of American English whose discourse was perceived as relatively easy to follow, the other of Korean whose discourse was perceived as relatively difficult to follow. Each TA gave a lecture accompanying a single set of slides. A qualitative analysis of the two texts revealed a number of differences in discourse structure, including different patterns of hypotaxis and parataxis. It is argued that the hypotactic constructions present in the NS's discourse provide explicit signals of logical and prominence relations which are missing or used in an unexpected manner in the NNS's discourse. The results offer support for a discourse framework which recognizes that particular linguistic forms function as contextualization cues (Gumperz 1982a, 1982b) which provide listeners with information concerning how to integrate information into the ongoing discourse.


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