Clauses of Time (Temporal Clauses)

The number of conjunctions used to introduce temporal clauses is very considerable, and it seems to be growing still at the expense of nouns denoting time units, with the definite article, such as the moment, the instant, etc. Temporal clauses are used much more frequently than clauses of space.

On the one hand, time relations are much more varied than space relations. If we want to indicate the time when an action occurred by referring it to another action, the time relations between the two may be various. The one action may be taking place at the very lime when the other action was being carried out; or it may have begun a short while after the other action was finished, or it may have ended just as the other action was about to begin, etc., etc.

On the other hand, it is a very common occurrence to indicate the time of an action by referring it to the time of another action, with which it happens to be connected either by some causal link or by a fortuitous coincidence in time. The speaker or writer may in many cases use this way of indicating the time of an action, rather than an adverbial modifier of time in a simple sentence (such as, at five o'clock, etc.), because the exact time may be either unknown (this especially refers to actions in the future), or irrelevant. The time relation between the action of the main clause and that of the subordinate clause may be expressed with a very great degree of exactness: the two actions may be simultaneous, or the one may precede the other, or follow it, or it may last until the other has begun, etc.

There is one more point to be noted here. The action of the head clause may be connected with that of the temporal clause by some causal tie, that is, if the action of the temporal clause did not take place, that of the main clause would not take place either; or the connection may be purely temporal, with no causal relation implied. This is especially characteristic of temporal clauses indicating-natural phenomena, such as sunrise, sunset, etc., which are not the cause of anything happening in human relations but merely an external method of reckoning time, as it passes. The cases of the first kind (with causal relation implied) are to be seen in the following examples: She made a little curtsy as he bowed... (M. MITCHELL) So, between sport and pedantry, she was busy enough, and on most nights her eyes closed the minute her head touched the pillow. (R. WEST) A case of the second kind (with no causal relation implied) is seen in an example of a different character: As she stood hanging to the sill, a deafening explosion burst on her ears, louder

than any cannon she had ever heard. (M.MITCHELL) Of course this difference depends entirely on the lexical meanings of the words making up the main and the subordinate clause.

Lecture 15 text

The object of text linguistic is the text. Under the term "text" scholars may mean - a word, a phrase, any supra-phrasal unit, a novel and so on. Such terms are interconnected with the term "Text" -discourse, context, supra-phrasal unit, sentence, utterance, and a word. M.A.K-Halliday says: "Every text is also a context for itself. A text is characterized by coherence; it hangs together. An important contribution to coherence comes part of the

COHESION: the set of lingustic resources that every language has for linking one part of the text to another. .. Every part of a text is at once both text and context. Each element in the discourse, whether just one phrase or an entire chapter or a book, has a value (1) as text, in itself, and (2) as context, to other text that is to come. We have identified five periods in the cycle of text and context:

I.The text, as a metafuntional construct: a complex of ideational, interpersonal, and textual meanings; 2.The context of situation: the configuration of field, tenor, and mode features that specify the register of the text; 3.The context of culture: the institutional and ideological background that give value to the text and constrain its interpretation; 4.The 'intertextual' context: realations with other texts, and assumptions that are carried over therefrom; 5.The 'intratextual'context: coherence within the text, including the linguistic cohesion that embodies the internal semantic relationships." He says that the main unit we use in speech is not a word or a sentence but a text. There are a lot of definitions of the text, the term "text" is used in two meanings - with reference to any utterance consisting of two or more sentences, on the one hand, and with reference to such units as a story, a novel, a monograph, etc.

To avoid ambiguity O.I.Moskalskaya suggests differentiating two main objects of text linguistics: macrotext, i.e. a complete speech composition and microtext, i.e. a supra-sententical unit, which is a sequence of sentences characterized by semantico-syntactic cohesion and communicative purpose. Together with the word text some scholars use the term: 'disourse* as a synonym to the word "text".

But some scholars mean the discourse as a border unit which lies between the sentence and the text. In any case all the scholars agree that the text is a structural unit used in language communication. The text is a lingual entity with its two distinguishing features: sematic (topical) unity and semantico-syntactic cohesion. The semantic integrity of a supra-phrasal unit (text) is reflected in the existence of the micrrotheme, i.e. the semantic topic.

There are two maun principal types of texts: the monologue and the dialogue.

In the monologue the interrelated utterances are grouped into super-phrasal units, or paragraphs. The monologue text , or "discourse", is then a topical entity. On the one hand, it presupposes a succession of spoken or written utterances irrespective of their forming or not forming a coherent complex. On the other hand, it implies a strictly topical stretch of talk.

The first scholars who identified a succession of such sentences as a special syntactic unit were Russian linguists N.S.Pospelov and L/A/Buiakhovsky. The forme called the unit in a question a "complex syntactic unity", the latter, a "super-phrasal unity", now it is called a "supra-sentential unit". In printed text this is normally represented by a paragraph, these two units are not identical. The paragraph in a monologue speech can contain more one dicteme.

In the dialogue the utterance are grouped into "minimal conversations". The dialogue text, or "conversation, is an exchange-topical entity: question-answer, statement-confirmation/negation, order, request-agreement/disagreement.