Text and pragmatics in Natural Linguistics

Natural Linguistics (and its application to phonology, morphology and syntax) conceives ‘natural’ as cognitively simple, easily accessible and therefore universally preferred. The Theory of Natural Linguistics (Dressler 1985, Dressler et al. 1987; Dziubalska-Kołaczyk 1996), therefore, appears relevant to model text/discourse accessibility and communicability, in terms of universal semiotic principles regulating access to meaning. In this study, we investigate text/discourse naturalness, defined as the most natural/least marked choices possible at the level of text/discourse on the basis of textual principles. By ‘textual principles’ we refer to Beaugrande & Dressler’s (1981) textual standards of surface cohesion, conceptual coherence, informativity (i.e. novelty of the text), producer’s intentionality, receiver’s acceptability, situationality (i.e. suitability of the text to the situation), and intertextuality (or adherence to text type). Textual naturalness is not to be equated with optimality at discourse level, corresponding to Optimality Theory (OT) as developed within generative phonology (Prince & Smolensky 1993) and later extended to syntax (Pesetsky 1997). Within OT, surface forms represent resolutions of conflicts between competing constraints; hence, according to this view, a text is optimal if “it incurs the least serious violations of a set of constraints taking into account their hierarchical ranking” (Kager 1999: xi). By contrast, in our approach, the most natural choice for text/discourse exploits semiotic principles (Peirce 1965) including iconicity/diagrammaticity (structural and cognitive), text indexicality (endophoric and exophoric), biuniqueness and transparency (both semantic and pragmatic interpretability). Unlike constraints in OT, semiotic principles (or parameters) and the above-mentioned standards of textuality for measuring and grading natural choices are kept separate and remain autonomous. Hence, a text can be natural on the parameter of indexicality/principle of cohesion if it makes use of endophoric (esp. anaphoric) reference, but its transparency would be downgraded compared to a text which exhibits lexical repetition (a more marked choice on the principle of informativity). As such, textual naturalness is juxtaposed to markedness (Merlini Barbaresi 1988), determined by textual complexity and resulting in difficulty in text interpretation (Merlini Barbaresi 2003). Text/discourse is here viewed as an emergent dynamic system with interacting agents which organize themselves and mutually adjust towards optimal efficiency. Put in these terms, natural texts seem to be ideal and not realistic, as it is unplausible that a text producer always makes the most natural/least marked choice to render his/her message entirely accessible to receivers. Hence, naturalness is a gradual concept, and text/discourse may opt for less natural/more marked solutions if this condition proves to be more favourable for the success of the speech event as a whole (Merlini Barbaresi 2003: 26). This study compares more natural with more marked solutions in different text types and genres (Biber 1988; Dressler & Eckkrammer 2001), namely, directive/instructional type (recipes), narrative type (fictional fragments), argumentative type (fragments of economic discourse), and free conversation (excerpts of film scripts). While the former (recipes) is a highly conventionalised type, with predefined (asymmetrical) roles of participants, the latter (free conversation) is unplanned and generally symmetrical. Hence, in conventionalised types, natural choices are those attaining to the typical features of the type/genre, allowing a very restricted range of accidents departing from naturalness. By contrast, in less conventionalised types, natural choices are less easy to identify and analysts should set up limited perspectives and investigate each principle separately in order to distinguish marked from natural solutions and to predict the form of more natural and accessible texts.