| 2) Lately Markus always had dinner late. However he is still healthy. Brown (1983) classified conjunctions into 4 as follows: a. additive : and, or , furthermore, similarly, in addition b. adversative : but, however, on the other hand, nevertheless c. causal : so, consequently, for this reason, it follows from this d. temporal : then, after that, an hour later, finally, at last We need to realize that although there may be no formal linguistic links connecting contiguous linguistic strings, the fact of their contiguity leads us to interpret them as connected. It means that the discourse is coherent. In a discourse, context, information, and meaning are related very closely. A context is a situation that has certain setting, activity, and relation. Setting covers the time, the place, and the things around the place where the activity occurs. The activity is all the behaviors happen there. Other things that are included here are impressions, feeling, interpretation, and the perception of the speaker and the listener. Relation is the relation between the members of the participants. The relation is influenced by sex, age, position, status, role, kinship, etc. 5.3. Implicature, Presupposition, Inference, and Reference In analyzing a discourse we need to know the relationship between the speaker and the listener. Implicature means that the ability of the listener to understand what the speaker means, is something else or different from what he says. Presupposition is the common knowledge between the speaker and the listener that the speaker does not need to say clearly. Inference is the process where the listener has to make conclusion from the available data from the speaker, because he does not understand what the speaker means. It is also used when there is a missing link. Reference means the object the speaker means in using certain word, in other words the thing the speaker refers to. Example: A. Excuse me, my car stalled. B. The garage is three blocks down the road In this conversation speaker A actually does not ask the garage, but speaker B knows what he wants by saying the sentence. He knows what the speaker means by inference, and speaker A does not need to say all what he means because he thinks that speaker B undertands what he means. So there is presupposition as well. Another example: A. What time are you leaving tomorrow? B. The pilots strike. Here also speaker B does not actually answer the real question. But he thinks speaker A must understand the utterance by making inference, that he is not leaving because pilots strike. Topic, theme/thesis, title A discourse usually has a purpose or a message. As a guide to understand a discourse we use the topic, thesis, and the theme of the discourse. The topic is the main matter or the centre of a discourse. According to Alwi et.al (1993), topic is the proposition in the form of phrase or sentence which constitutes the center of discourse. The theme or the thesis larger than the topic, it is like an abstract. Title is narrower, in the form of phrase. Some people think that title is usually not important in oral discourses. References: Parera (1991), Payne (1988), Kaswanti Purwo (1993), Chaer (1994), Alwi (1993) Thomas (1975), Couthard and Montgomery (1981), Gillian Brown and George Yule |
| Introductory Linguistics by Theodorus T. Purba |