aspects of repetition in discourse

Working Papers in Linguistics 13 (1993): 79-90 University of Melbourne

Aspects Of Repetition in Discourse

Thor May 1993-2015

1. Introduction

It is often claimed that language is a

system for communicating information.

In fact, language has a multiplicity of

functions, but when it comes to

information, that which is to be given

significance is always framed by the

known, hence repeated, elements. The organization of language is largely

a matter of what is repeated, when, where, why, by whom, how and how

often.

For the purposes of this analysis, I will take a much broader view of

repetition than is normally found in linguistics, considering a cline from

local (often idiosyncratic) repeating clauses or phrases to stable units

such as lexical items which have become formal, generalized tokens in

the language. This is not a paper which proposes a neat solution to some

small puzzle in a linguistic model. Rather, it outlines for further study

some properties of a very general phenomenon.

2. The concept of repetition

Some notion of repetition can be immediately understood, even by naïve

observers. On closer inspection however, the concept turns out to be

rather slippery. It is worth exploring the general characteristics of non-

Aspects Of Repetition in Discourse © Thor May 1993-2015 Working Papers in Linguistics 13 (1993): 79-90 University of Melbourne

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linguistic repetition a little in order to sharpen our approach to the

linguistic variety.

If there is an event E which is repeated, then E is understood to exist only

on the occasions of its repetition, not in the intervals between E1 and E2.

If there is an object O which occurs repeatedly, then O is normally held to

exist not only on the occasions of its appearance, but also during the

intervals when it is not observed. At least, this is the working assumption

of almost everyone in their daily lives, quantum quibbles about

Schrodinger's cat notwithstanding. Now what about a cognitive entity

such as a word. Is it an object or an event? Does it exist between spoken

repetitions? If words have the status of objects, what about phrases or

sentences? Do they exist between repetitions, or are they recreated from

something else? The language of this thesis will often appear to presume

not only the occurrence, but the duration over time of numerous entities.

This is a convenient convention, no more, and exactly what we do every

time an abstract noun is deployed. I remain open to argument about the

ontological status of such entities.

Interval duration itself is tricky. If X is repeated, typically we then

suppose its occurrence in a time frame must have been punctuated by a

period of non-X. At least two serious difficulties arise with this simple

proposition. Firstly, is repetition an artefact of the observer, or of an

operation? Imagine that you are watching a computer monitor. The image

is steady. In fact an electron gun is retracing the image thousands of

times a second. Is the assertion of repetition therefore always a

statement relative to a particular frame of reference (in this case, either

the observer or the electronic process)?

The second difficulty is a paradox of inclusion. You turn off the moving

cinema image, which to your eye has appeared seamless. The film, when

you examine it, is a series of frames, and adjacent frames seem to be the

same, repetitions in fact. Yet any two frames separated by twenty others


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are clearly different. At what increment do we say that the description of

repetition no longer occurs? Or perhaps I know you as a person. I have a

name for you, anticipate your behaviour with some success and have

some confidence that you are the same person today that I met

yesterday. Yet a biological treatise tells me that you are a crawling

mountain of cellular organisms, millions dying off at any given moment

and others being born, so that the whole squishy heap is replaced at

regular intervals. Are you a repetition of some prior self ? It all seems to

turn on scale (as in magnification) and the perspective from which we

deal with a particular phenomenon.

The problems of perspective and scale affecting a view of repetition are

central to linguistics. Yet one might surmise that few linguists have sorted

out in their own minds whether they are the person watching the

computer monitor or the electronics technician, the cinema buff or the

laboratory developer, the speaker's friend or the biologist.

3. Repetition as evidence: three perspectives

Let us suppose that two linguists are studying discourse processes. What

will they consider to be evidence? One is an enthusiast for Conversational

Analysis. He analyses transcripts in fine detail and develops an elaborate

model of dyadic exchange. He sticks to the transcript evidence and

consciously avoids speculation about cognitive processes.

Repetition here is strictly a matter of people saying things twice, and its

significance, if any, is defined as a property of the text. For example, a

text may "have" cohesion, meaning repeated or anaphoric elements. The

relationship of text cohesion to thought, memory, or even to

understanding is none of the first linguist's business. This man is the heir

(though perhaps not fully aware of it) to a tradition of scientific

behaviourism which dominated Western thought for much of the 20th

Century and generated an impressive body of research.


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The second linguist has been influenced by currents of rationalist thought.

She may concede the tidiness of the first linguist's model, but find its

interpretation distorted or sterile. Yes, the conversational analyst, within

the special selectivity of his model, may trawl up repeating elements from

a text, but so what? What significance do they really have for speaker and

listener? Are they inserted by design? At what level (morpheme, word,

clause, topic..) does a speaker have conscious control over her language

generation, including repetition? And what about the torrent of inner,

unspoken, often fragmentary language that washes the edge of her

consciousness day and night? Surely other people experience this? Surely

public spoken language is part of the same ocean as this inner voice, and

cannot properly be interpreted in isolation?

The two linguists clearly have different perspectives, which will deeply

affect the questions they ask and the answers they accept as meaningful.

The behaviourist claims to be objective. The rationalist will admit

subjective evidence. Both implicitly accept an ontological dualism which

goes back to the mind-body debates of the European Enlightenment, and

earlier.

A third view, implicit in the Madhyamika Buddhist tradition of

mindfulness-awareness, rejects the dualist position. This has been

adopted fairly recently by some cognitive scientists such as Varela,

Thompson & Rosch (1991), and is also making an impact in certain areas

of general psychology. In this view language (and thought) is not

representational, not symbolic. It is an emergent property of vast,

dynamic nets of relationships among systems of neurones, and among

ecological systems which include but extend beyond the individual.

The implications of the third approach are difficult to grasp by anyone

who has not made some study of parallel as opposed to linear problem


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processing (e.g. in computers), and connectionist models of cognitive

science. Phenomena comparable at this level to the processing of natural

language appear to be embedded in many processes found in the natural

world. Indeed, research on the mathematics of complexity and chaos

theory is really an attempt to find unifying principles which underlie such

emergent phenomena. Further explanation would take the present paper

too far afield, but readers are urged to seek out an understanding of the

basic concepts.

In an emergent-system philosophy of language, the source and meaning

of repeating entities will acquire different colouring than for those who see

language purely as representational and symbolic. This third position is

close to my own, but much of what follows will initially cover more

familiar perspectives.

4. Repetition as evidence: the scale of magnification

The introductory section raised the question of scale. I remarked that a

human being could be regarded as a squishy heap of cellular structures,

endlessly replicating themselves. Our sense that our friends (indeed,

ourselves) are the same people from day to day stems from viewing them

as unified structures rather than as an aggregate of short-lived cells. In

fact the whole is more than an aggregate of the parts, and this is true

through a whole series of stages from subatomic particle, to molecule, to

cell, to body part, and so on.

The point is worth making because it holds as well in the conceptual

structures of language as anywhere else in nature. It is critical to what

counts as explanation in a model of language.

For example, the formulaic phrase "you know" occurs 975 times in one

130,000 word corpus which I studied. The repetitions of "you" or "know"

taken individually (i.e. at a lower level of organization) could not reveal

the significance of the combination. Potentially conflicting explanations of


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this phrasal repetition might be attempted respectively at the level of

discourse context, or at a more embracing level of societal context, or in

the general psychological context of language repetition, or at an

ecological level encompassing the interrelationships of societal, cognitive

and specific discourse functions. Generative, functional-systemic,

discourse and sociolinguistic models have all settled on different levels of

explanation for repetitive phenomena, and not surprisingly may differ on

what is seen to be significantly repetitive at all.

5. Past studies of repetition in linguistics

Repetition has been almost ignored (under that label) in syntactic

research, although grammatical rules themselves catalogue a type of

repetition, and studies of anaphora etc. approach the more regular forms

of lexical repetition. Less regular repetition, and that occurring above

clause level has held little interest for sentential grammarians.

The mention of repetition has become fairly common in various kinds of

text and discourse studies. Some discussion of this (Halliday & Hasan

1976, Hoey 1991, and others) occurs in a later section of this paper.

Text linguists will mention repetition in the context of cohesion, and what

they discuss generally are words with some informational salience in an

utterance which can be shown to have applied at some prior place in the

utterance. This is said to create a "tie" which in some way assists

communication. Whether this tie enters into the consciousness of the

interlocutors is moot. They may also note the reuse of a syntactic

structure when it occurs in close proximity (usually greater proximity than

the word ties), and prosodic repetition relating to intonation, rhythm or

rhyme.

Such text analyses will not often speculate on the "tie" status of a highly

grammaticalized item such as “the”, probably the most repeated word in

English, on the grounds that it is syntactically motivated. This would be


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another judgement about applying explanatory scale. We could query the

judgement by noting that every word in the language is an encoded unit

that has been set aside for global repetition. At what point does a lexical

repetition cease to be important as a cohesive tie?

6. Uses of repetition in this study

This paper tries to make no a priori assumptions about the repetitive

status of particular linguistic elements. It begins by recognising that

repetition is a complex phenomenon with a whole range of consequences

depending upon whether it is global (as with codified lexical forms),

contextual (within the topic reach of a particular discourse) or proximate

(within the purview of something like short term memory).

It also attempts to account for the paradox of inclusion by treating all

linguistic elements which may be unitary at one level of operation, as

potentially reducible to clusters of collocating indices - in effect the

contributing properties and relationships which give that element its

definition. Particular collocating indices from one linguistic element (such

as a word itself, or a feature like [+animate], or a discourse sub-context

like [+intimate]) may repeat or assume greater or lesser weight in the

balance of relationships in a succeeding linguistic element. For example,

the force of you in "you should come" will have a quite different weight

from you in "you know".

The broadest notion of repetition can be articulated by a very general

linguistic entity. I have called this general entity a “repeating entity” (RE

in shorthand). Repeating entities are codified forms which may subsume

complex associative relationships. For example, I have just argued that

lexical items at the micro level are concatenations of collocating indices of

various weights.

Hypotheses about the general properties of repeating entities promise to

be very productive. More discussion of RE properties will be pursued later.


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For the moment an initial example will give a sense of the possibilities.

Some iconic imagery will assist the description here. I propose that

repeating entities "migrate" across cognitive space in language generation,

and that they introduce collocation drag into the generative process.

Collocation drag means that An RE will carry with it its whole evolutionary

history of use and meaning for both speaker and listener. This multiplies

the probability on reuse of eliciting other collocations (in whole or in part)

which have occurred previously in the text, or in experience.

Take the following, from a genuine conversation:

a) I want a trannie$ mum for Christmas

b) Want a cup of coffee mum

($ In the pre-iPod, pre-Internet world, trannie was slang for transistor radio)

These utterances occur twenty-three lines apart in a corpus. Both are

pseudo-quotations, "recalled" by the mother forty years after the event.

Neither has the simple meaning we might infer out of context. The first is

in the context of an inquisitive boy who takes everything electronic to

pieces and reinvents it. The second introduces a trick coffee pot which

"talks back" to the user. The linguistic point is that [I] want X has

"migrated" for reuse in the discourse, and carried with it connotations of

electronic trickery.

Collocation drag is a symptom of very interesting cognitive processes. A

probably related phenomenon is that words or phrases and/or syntactic

patterns which do not usually have high density in an idiolect may occur

in clusters throughout a corpus when they are used. Various items seem

to have characteristic repetition cluster patterns. I have found much

evidence for this, both informally and in a large corpus of Australian

speech. Some of this repetition stems from concentration on a particular

current topic of conversation, as might be expected. Much however,


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seems to derive from more fundamental cognitive processes which I have

called mnemonic resonance (May 1992: Unclever Talk: Mnemonic

Resonance and God Knows What). It is as if an item in recent use has a

“resonance” which is easily picked up and amplified for discourse re-use,

even if it is not the ideal tool for a given context.

At this point it may lend perspective if I return to tracking some of the

more conventional analyses of repetition, particularly notions of cohesion

in recent traditions of British textual studies. This material pays special

attention to the (cognitively) more complex phenomenon of repetition

expressed through various kinds of equivalent or related substitution.

7. Repeating entities as cohesive devices

Since about the time of Halliday and Hasan's Cohesion in English (1976),

cohesion has been a major area of study in British text linguistics. Earlier

work concentrated on identifying a large number of cohesive categories.

The following set is typical. Categories of lexical cohesion (Hoey 1991: 8,

from Hasan 1984:202):

a) General

i) repetition leave, leaving, left

ii) synonymy leave, depart

iii) antonymy leave, arrive

iv) hyperonymy travel, leave (including co-

hyponyms, leave, arrive)

v) meronymy hand, finger (including co-

meronyms, finger, thumb)


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b) Instantial

i) equivalence the sailor was their daddy

ii) naming the dog was called Toto

iii) semblance the deck was like a pool

Later work by Hasan in particular concluded that categories of cohesion

were less significant than their collective interaction in a text (Winter

1974:79 from Hoey 1991: 16) :

"Hasan's contribution to answering the question of the relationship

between cohesion and coherence is twofold. Firstly she provides

evidence that greater insight into text can be achieved if one

abandons the classificatory view of cohesion in favour of an

integrated approach, and secondly, she shows that it is the

contribution of ties that is significant, not their occurrence in

isolation. ..." (Hoey 1991:16)

Winter (1974) chose to treat cohesion more inclusively than Hasan and

others and, crucially, to relate it to repetition:

"[Winter's] interest is in how the grammar of sentences contributes

to their interpretation in context. For him, therefore, it is much

more important to recognise the common function of the variety of

cohesive ties than to distinguish them, the common function being

to repeat. As he notes:

"A commonplace observation that everyone can make for

themselves is that many clauses are repeated, either partially or

(almost) entirely, in speech and in writing, the most obvious kind of

repetition being the very common partially repeated structures of

the clause. This repetition may however, be disguised by the

grammatical form which it takes; that is, either by substitution, by

deletion, or by a combination of both forms. (Winter 1979:101)."

" ... what Winter counts as repetition is broader than, for example,

Halliday & Hasan's category of reiteration. He uses the term

repetition to stand for ellipsis (which he prefers to refer to as

deletion), substitution (the label used by Quirk et al. 1972, to


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describe what Halliday and Hasan term as reference) and lexical

repetition (broadly equivalent to Halliday and Hasan's reiteration)."

These quoted models may be familiar to many readers. Their mention

here is to identify a common ground which can be approached for

different levels of explanation. Hoey's summary of Winter's views is also

useful (Hoey 1991: 20):

<> "If cohesion is to be interpreted correctly, it must be interpreted

in the context of the sentences where it occurs.

<> We are more likely to arrive at a satisfactory account of how

cohesion works if we concentrate on the way repetition clusters in

pairs of sentences.

<> It is the common repeating function of much cohesion that is

important, not the classificatory differences between types of

cohesion.

<> There is informational value to repetition, in that it provides a

framework for interpreting what has changed.

<> Relations between sentences established by repetition need not

be adjacent and may be multiple."

The present study is congenial to many of Winter's and Hasan's (later)

observations. However, it goes further even than Winter in treating

repetition and cohesion as very general phenomena which become

significant in a multiplicity of ways. There would be a difference in

emphasis in interpreting some of Winter's points above. Whereas Winter,

Hoey and Hasan are essentially interested in the surface properties of text,

this writer is interested in the cognitive properties which coexist with

those surface patterns.

Whereas previous models have assumed repetition to occur solely in

actual generated discourse, this study accepts the likelihood that what it

terms repeating entities may remain latent. That is, REs can remain

invisible on the surface of the text while playing an important part in the


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cognitive process. Ellipsis would be a non-controversial example, but it

could be argued that even non-recoverable repeating entities are

significant items of cohesion and coherence for both speaker and

listener.

Incoherence in spoken or written discourse is readily apparent to

interlocutors, but the defining properties of overall coherence have

remained much more intractable for linguists than markers of cohesion.

There is a good reason for this. Traditional analyses have considered

coherence a subjective quality (in the mind of the decoder), but cohesion

as an objective (i.e. observable) property of generated text. As Hoey

(1991: 11) says:

"..coherence is only measurable in terms of a reader's assessment.

This allows us to make a simple distinction..... We will assume that

cohesion is a property of the text, and that coherence is a facet of

the reader's evaluation of a text. In other words, cohesion is

objective ...".

The present study differs. I made the point earlier that it was possible to

reject the subjective/objective dichotomy in favour of an emergent view

of consciousness in which cognition and the apparent external world co-

generate our realities, including language. For the problem on hand

(coherence and cohesion) we can note that if cohesion is a significant

property of text, then it is also a significant property of mind, though we

may not yet have properly explained that significance. Equally, if

coherence is a property of cognition (in ways not yet well understood),

then it will be represented somehow in the relationship between text and

cognition. One link in that relationship may well be latent repeating

entities. The analysis to follow will offer some rationale for this position.

Firstly I will have to make a comment in passing on wider issues. This

paper is part of a much larger study on cognitive processing which I

christened the Generative Oscillation (GO) model (May 2004: a doctoral


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dissertation which I later discontinued, but nevertheless placed online in

draft form). The is no space here to properly explain the reach of the GO

model, but central to it is the hypothesis that language is processed not

as a continuous stream, but rather in more or less discrete clusters of

features. These clusters, called Local-Time Processing Constellations

(LTPCs) in the model, are related to but not quite identical with intonation

units in speech, and less closely to clauses in text. The “migrating”

repeating entities discussed earlier would in fact traverse between LTPCs.

From a cognitive perspective, coherence would have much to do with

relationships between successive Local-Time Processing Constellations,

and cohesion with the way in which migrating repeating entities reacted

with different LTPCs.

Interlocutors recognise that clauses (one output of LTPCs) conform to

strict rules internally, and are able partly on that basis to find them

meaningful. The perceived unity of an extended discourse however is not

essentially dependent upon syntactic rules (although their violation inter-

clausally can cause considerable confusion). Rather, a text is considered

to be coherent if, amongst other things, it conforms to topic reference in

ways that may be idiosyncratic, but which remain comprehensible to and

accepted by speaker and listener. It is common for much of a topic

reference to remain latent, that is, non-explicit. Hence my earlier

reference to the importance of latent repeating entities.

One easy way to grasp this argument is the extreme example of the

double entendre conversation. Think of a politician talking in code, or a

woman fishing for the attention of a man where convention forbids her to

proposition him directly. Both may be insistent, repetitive and logically

progressive within the sub-text. In fact, this sort of thing also infuses

normal discourse in a multiplicity of ways, so that an eavesdropping

stranger will find much of what he hears only sparsely meaningful. The


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linguistic analysis which deals only with the surface text will be as poorly

informed as the spy with his ear to the wall.

There is a second kind of discourse unity which is non-topic dependent,

although it draws heavily on topical reference, and that is cohesion. A

rough definition of cohesion in the GO model environment would be an

implicit recognition by either speaker or listener that certain linguistic

elements in play have been met before in some incarnation, or are about

to be met again. It is not required that these visitations have any

propositional connection, and their individual importance may range from

trivial to consuming interest. Thus while some repeating entities may do

their work beyond conscious attention, cohesion is a quality that carries

direct interpretive significance for each of the communicating parties.

Cohesive nets of repeating entities can participate selectively in building

coherence, but need not. It is possible in theory to have a text with a very

high cohesive index but a very low coherence index, that is, a poor

integration of topics. In plain language, such a text could contain many

repeated propositions, but little logical argument to sustain them.

It may be a curious fact of human psychology that many people relate

positively to a high cohesive index, but negatively to an excessively

coherent presentation. This is my informal observation (although some

colleagues have expressed skepticism). It may be that while coherence

entails a certain logical coercion in interpretation for a listener, cohesion

merely offers the warm inner glow of recognising tokens, and leaves the

listener to interpret them as he will. Politicians are notorious for trading

on this kind of preference. Choose your own favourite example.

8. Relations among cohesive elements

Although cohesive nets may lack a logical connectedness sometimes,

those texts which are highly coherent are also likely to have closely


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integrated cohesive nets. Hasan has proposed two kinds of cohesive

chains which are relevant to this question:

"Hasan reports the results of research into the relationship between

coherence and cohesion in children's writing, the level of coherence

being measured in terms of reader response. She shows that there

is no easy correlation between the number of cohesive ties and the

degree of coherence awarded a text by readers. She concludes that

a better explanation of the way cohesion contributes to the

recognition of coherence lies (in part) in the fact that cohesive ties

form chains that interact with each other; this interaction she terms

cohesive harmony."

"Hasan recognises two general classes of chain: the identity chain

and the similarity chain. Both types of chain, but particularly the

identity chain, override the careful sub-categorizations and

distinctions that make up much of the earlier work on cohesion... An

identity chain is made up of cohesive ties that all share the same

referent(s), whether the ties in question are pronominals,

reiterations, or instantial equivalents... Similarity chains are chains

of ties where issues of identity cannot arise, for example, parallel

processes or descriptions. ... if three occurrences arise of someone

running away, there will be a similarity chain formed between the

occurrences or ran away, irrespective of whether the same person

did the running on each occasion." (Hasan 1984; and with Halliday

1985, quoted by Hoey 1991: 14)

Hoey takes the linking notion further with his proposal for cohesive nets:

".. network already does heavy duty in systemic linguistics in a

quite different sense; the term that will be adopted here to describe

both the complete set of bonded sentences and any sub-set of them

is, therefore, the related one of net." (Hoey 1991:92)

The general concepts employed by Hasan and Hoey here are very

instructive in their patterned outline of how texts hang together. Once

again however, the surface textual analysis seems to this writer to lack

some crucial insight. We are, as it were, in a mountain lookout, with a

great panorama of industry spread across the plain below, but we don't

really know what it means. We don't understand the forces which give


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rise to what we are witnessing, and have no credible way to predict how it

might change and develop. I will now try to take a one tentative step

down the mountain to the plain, to the level of human cognition where it

is all happening.

9. Cohesion and discourse presupposition

A brief reference was made earlier to latent repeating entities. These

LREs may play a part in connotation, that is, in the sub-text of discourse.

We mentioned the double entendre conversation as an example. A more

formal linguistic expression of these ideas is found in work on discourse

presupposition. The notion of the latent repeating entity as an organizing

device has explanatory power in this context. I will borrow Hoey's concept

of a cohesive net, but cast it more widely to embrace latent repeating

entities. Consider a conversation on a familiar topic between two intimate

friends, perhaps husband and wife:

Utterance Decoded Meaning

+ Tomorrow The meeting is on tomorrow. I'll be late home

- Are you sure? Are you sure the meeting will be on?

+ George was

late again

As you know, George is only late when he goes to

divisional headquarters, and that is always followed by

a meeting.

- OK. I'll talk to

Wendy.

I'll talk to Wendy to put off our dinner party.

Linguists would identify the material in italics as discourse presuppositions,

or in “Are you sure?” as ellipsis. Formal grammars have an insoluble

problem with discourse presuppositions since they are not manifest in

generated strings and may be paraphrased in any number of ways. Are

they therefore non-linguistic in spite of their controlling influence on the

strings that are actually surface generated ?

In the GO model a discourse presupposition is a latent repeating entity

which was in the process of becoming a Local-Time Processing


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Constellation. This process would normally entail the accumulation of a

critical mass of collocating indices (associations) until at a certain

threshold an intonation unit was generated. Again, these are processes

which we can’t explore here. The significant point to make for this

analysis is that in a discourse presupposition, the generative process is

aborted prior to surface expression. What triggers abortion here?

Informally we know that an omission (say, ellipsis) is possible because

the interlocutors can both supply the missing surface language. In

cognitive processing terms, we could say that the threshold for surface

generation has been raised by a special executive signal that substantive

indices in the LTPC do not need to be communicated.

Is the cohesive net among fully generative LTPCs (i.e. ones which produce

intonation units) usually more complete than the cohesive net amongst

expressively truncated LTPCs (i.e. discourse presuppositions)? On the

contrary, it seems to me that the latter net is so secure that elements are

permitted to remain latent. Even the most explicit language contains

discourse presuppositions, and therefore has a latent cohesive net.

The ratio between latent and manifest cohesion is surely significant

however. I hypothesise that the overall cohesive index is normally highest

where the latency potential in cognitive processing is greatest. In plain

language this would mean that where shared knowledge between

participants is greatest, cohesion will also be greatest, and that

unexpressed cohesive factors will be much more important than the

surface markers of cohesion.

10. Conclusion

This paper has scarcely brushed the edges of an enormous topic. It has

introduced the idea of repetition as a central organizing phenomenon in

nature generally, and in linguistics in particular. The questions we ask

about repetition will deeply influence the development of the linguistics


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discipline itself. The paper has argued that linguists need to be explicit at

all times about the philosophical perspective from which they approach

their subject. With a topic like repetition, that includes being explicit

about the scale (magnification) at which explanations are sought. Thus,

for example, the study of a pattern of repeating phrases will not

necessarily have explanatory power for a pattern of repeating morphemes

which are embedded in the phrases (the whole exceeds the meaning of

the parts, while the parts may have some meaning unexploited in the

whole).

Three major philosophical perspectives on linguistic analysis were

identified. The first was the objective/positivist bias which has been

expressed through behaviourist schools of thought, early structural

linguistics, much descriptive and applied linguistics, discourse, text and

conversational analysis, most cognitive science until quite recently, and so

on. The second philosophical approach was a fresh defence of the value of

subjective-rationalist insight, most notably championed by the Chomskian

school of generative grammar (with strong sources in formal logic), but

also favoured in much cognitive psychology and some branches of

European philosophy. A third approach was said to be both very old, from

the Madhyamika Buddhist tradition of mindfulness-awareness, and also

very new in cognitive science. Historically in the West, the third approach

drew on a refinement of the phenomenological philosophies of Husserl,

Merleau-Ponty and others. This approach rejected mind-body dualism,

and argued for an emergent cognition that was co-evolutionary with and

inseparable from the wider world.

The paper argued that the three philosophical approaches often dealt with

data that overlapped. To this extent, linguists working within one tradition

could inform the research of those working within other traditions.

However, the questions asked, and the levels of explanation sought, were

often quite different.


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Some examples of repetitive phenomena were used as a vehicle to

compare analytic methods. The paper looked at fairly recent examples of

British textual analysis, notably for the treatment of cohesion. The surface

analysis of text by these British linguists showed up interesting patterns,

and highlighted some important general properties of repetition in

cohesive features. I argued however that the level of explanation offered

by such surface analysis was unsatisfying. In particular, it failed to

provide any insight into the cognitive processes which coexist with surface

cohesive phenomena. The beginning of an alternative analysis based on

emergent-system philosophy was hinted at. Since a coherent linguistic

model for such an emergent-system philosophy is not yet in the public

domain, this short paper could not develop extensive argument in this

direction, but it is hoped that some researchers will be encouraged to

enquire further.

~~~~~~~~~~


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References (these references obviously represent the vintage of the original article,

but many are still worthwhile. I have added a useful recent book by Holland on

complexity theory)

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https://independent.academia.edu/ThorMay/Papers/1664426/Unclever_Talk_Mnemonic_Resonance_and_God_Knows_What

https://independent.academia.edu/ThorMay/Papers/1664426/Unclever_Talk_Mnemonic_Resonance_and_God_Knows_What


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http://thormay.net/lxesl/MnemonicResonance.html

https://independent.academia.edu/ThorMay/Papers/1654307/Generative_Oscillation_-_A_Cognitive_Model_for_the_Emergence_of_Language





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Postscript

This paper has been extracted from a discontinued doctoral dissertation at the University

of Melbourne in the mid 1990s. The entire dissertation content itself has already been

put online: “Generative Oscillation - A Cognitive Model for the Emergence of Language”

(https://www.academia.edu/1588339/Generative_Oscillation_-

_A_Cognitive_Model_for_the_Emergence_of_Language and also

http://thormay.net/lxesl/go1.html ). It seems worthwhile to place the chapter on

discourse repetition into the public domain independently since the approach adopted

has not, to my knowledge, received wide attention, yet seems to hold quite a lot of

promise. Note that originally it was also a conference presentation, and published as part

of a set of the University of Melbourne’s Working Papers in Linguistics 13 (1993): 79-90.

Professional bio: Thor May has a core professional interest in cognitive linguistics, at which he has

rarely succeeded in making a living. He has also, perhaps fatally in a career sense, cultivated an

interest in how things work – people, brains, systems, countries, machines, whatever… In the

world of daily employment he has mostly taught English as a foreign language, a stimulating

activity though rarely regarded as a profession by the world at large.

Thor’s eventually awarded PhD dissertation, Language Tangle, dealt with language teaching

productivity. Language Tangle (2010) is aimed at professional educators and their institutional

keepers, and accordingly adopts a generally more discursive style than the Aspects of Repetition in

Discourse analysis. Thor’s first shot at a PhD dissertation was on Grammatical Agency in the

1980s, based on the generative syntax models of the time which he eventually rejected and

withdrew from the candidature after publishing some professional papers. Also in cyberspace

(representing even more lost years!) is yet another sprawling, unfinished PhD dissertation draft in

cognitive linguistics from the university of Melbourne in the early 1990s, parts of which can be

seen in the Academia.edu repository as The Generative Oscillation Model, Postsupposition and

Pastiche Talk, this piece on Discourse Repetition and a couple of other papers.

Thor has been teaching English to non-native speakers, training teachers and lecturing linguistics,

since 1976. This work has taken him to seven countries in Oceania and East Asia, mostly with

tertiary students, but with a couple of detours to teach secondary students and young children. He

has trained teachers in Australia, Fiji and South Korea. In an earlier life, prior to becoming a

teacher, he had a decade of finding his way out of working class origins, through unskilled jobs in

Australia, New Zealand and finally England (after backpacking across Asia in 1972).

contact: http://thormay.net [email protected]

academic repository: Academia.edu at http://independent.academia.edu/ThorMay

Aspects Of Repetition in Discourse © Thor May 1993-2015

https://www.academia.edu/1588339/Generative_Oscillation_-_A_Cognitive_Model_for_the_Emergence_of_Language

https://www.academia.edu/1588339/Generative_Oscillation_-_A_Cognitive_Model_for_the_Emergence_of_Language


mailto:[email protected]

http://independent.academia.edu/ThorMay

aspects of repetition in discourse

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