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下文选自上海外语教育出版社出版的《英语阅读技巧教学》（Teaching Reading Skills in a Foreign Language，作者Christine Nuttall）第二章“Text and discourse 文本和话语”。 选文翻译：武太白 Four kinds of meaning 四种意义 In order to investigate how sentences combine to produce discourse, we will look at the kinds of meaning a single sentence may have. There are at least four, which sometimes we must distinguish. Let us use a very short text to clarify this. 为弄明白句子是怎样结合起来产生话语的，我们来看看单独的一个句子可能有的几种意义。至少有四种，有时我们必须对其进行区分。我们来用一个很短的句子说明这一点。 You should not expel my son just because he has failed. Examination results can be misleading. We will examine how this text embodies each kind of meaning: conceptual, propositional, contextual and pragmatic. Conceptual meaning: the meaning a word can have on its own Concepts can be found at any level, from a whole text down to a single morpheme. Every lexical item embodies a concept, sometimes simple (eg son), sometimes complex (eg should). Whole books are written on complex concepts such as probability or truth. Others can be expressed by the smallest meaning units, such as the concept of plurality, commonly expressed in English by the suffix -s (eg results). All other kinds of linguistic meaning rest on conceptual meaning. Making a text normally involves putting concepts together to form propositions, which are then put together into larger units which in turn combine to constitute the whole text. Propositional meaning: the meaning a sentence can have on its own This is also known as signification or plain sense. It is the meaning a clause or sentence can have even if it is not being used in a context. A word on its own, eg misleading, carries no propositional meaning; we cannot affirm it, deny it, question it. But as soon as the word is put into a proposition, these operations become possible: Examination results are misleading. We can now deny the proposition (Examination results are not misleading), doubt it, question it and so on. This is the meaning that is common to every occurrence of a sentence, irrespective of context, and (with rare exceptions) the only kind of meaning a sentence can have when it is cited without a context (as we have just cited the sentence about examination results). (But, as we shall see, even to understand the plain sense, we usually need to understand the context.) Contextual meaning: the meaning a sentence can have only when in context This is also known as force, or functional value. As soon as a sentence is used in a context, it takes on a value derived from the writer's reason for using it, and from the relationship between it and the other sentences in the same text. For instance, in our example text (p20), the proposition Examination results can be misleading has the force of an explanation or justification of the claim that expulsion would be wrong. Explaining, justifying and so on are often called rhetorical acts (or speech acts). In a text, they are sequenced and organized into patterns conveying the writer's thoughts. We shall return to this rhetorical organization later. Interpreting contextual meaning is crucial to effective reading; it is no use understanding the plain sense of a sentence if we cannot work out why the writer said it and how it connects with the rest of the text. I shall say more about this later in the chapter, and especially in Chapter 7. Pragmatic meaning: the meaning a sentence has only as part of the interaction between writer and reader This last kind of meaning is not always easily distinguished from contextual meaning. It is the meaning that reflects the writer's feelings, attitudes and so on, and her intention in setting these down to be read. It therefore includes the intended effect of the utterance on the reader. Let us return to the sample text on p20. Suppose a mother utters this to the headteacher who is proposing to expel her son. If the head responded only to the propositional meaning of the second sentence (Examination results can be misleading), he might reply How true! But the mother clearly intends the remark as a plea or protest, to which the head has not replied at all. In any normal conversation, his reply would be construed as a sarcastic way of refusing to discuss the matter. If the head did not mean to be offensive, he has got the pragmatics badly wrong. Pragmatic meaning involves interaction and can be seen most clearly in conversation. But it can also be found in texts, in the writer's interaction with the reader. We shall look at some examples later on. ------------------------ 如方便，请将本文转发给需要的朋友。感谢你们！ “英语教学法原著选读”系列文章2017年总目录（含2016年总目录链接） 阅读文本难度的几个方面 What Makes a Text Difficult? - 英语教学法原著选读0127 小站维护不易，请朋友们长按下面图片，在弹出的菜单中选择“识别图中的二维码”，给我打赏一点。 感谢你们！ |
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