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Discourse, Consciousness and Time: The Flow and Displacement of Conscious Experience in Speaking and Writing
By Wallace Chafe. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994. xii+327 pp. Paper, $27.95
In his new book Discourse, Consciousness and Time, Wallace Chafe argues that the concept of consciousness has a crucial role to play in explaining why we talk the way we do. The main idea is that in speaking we convey the contents of our consciousness to our hearers; therefore, the structure of consciousness will have a lot to do with what we say.
This general thesis is illustrated in Chafe's theory of intonation units. Intonation units are short stretches of speech (usually no more than four words) that the speaker emphasizes through loudness, pitch, or duration. Chafe hypothesizes that "an intonation unit verbalizes the speaker's focus of consciousness at that moment" (p. 63). Thus consciousness provides a principle by which speech is segmented into chunks. The chunks correspond to the ideas illuminated by the focus of consciousness. This hypothesis is put to work in explaining an empirical finding, namely, that an intonation unit will normally express at most one new idea. The explanation is that at most one new idea at a time will be illuminated by consciousness (p. 119).
Another finding is that speakers will tend to put an accent on noun phrases that they judge to verbalize information that is new to the listener. The data show that this newness cannot consist in the listener's being totally unacquainted with the idea. A better definition can be formulated in terms of consciousness, thus: What is new to the listener in the relevant sense is only what is not presently "active" in the listener's consciousness (p. 72). But accents also serve other functions, such as drawing contrasts (p. 77).
Here is how Chafe explains the use of the definite and indefinite articles: In both the speaker and the listener, a certain collection of objects will be accessible to consciousness. When the speaker uses a phrase of the form, an F he or she thereby circumscribes a certain subcollection of these, the F's. By saying something about one of these, the speaker makes that one salient. When subsequently the speaker uses the phrase the F, the speaker...