Retrievability and Activation Cost
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2000 |
| Type | Article in Proceedings |
| Conference | 6th Conference of British, American and Canadian Studies (Proceedings) |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Field | Linguistics |
| Keywords | Chafe; Firbas; information flow; FSP; activation cost; retrievability; |
| Description | The present paper is a contribution to the study of context in communication. It compares two approaches to the interpretation of given and new information, Jan Firbas's conception of retrievability/irretrievability and Wallace Chafe's conception of activation cost. Both scholars have on several occasions expressed certain reservations concerning some aspects of the other's approach to the analysis of language and defended their own conception (see Chafe 1974:120, 1976:33, 1994:161-164, and Firbas 1987:51-59, 1992:105-107). The aim of the present paper is neither criticism nor defense of either of the two conceptions but rather the localization of potential common ground in the two approaches. The presentation of the two approaches in this paper draws mainly on Firbas's (1992) book Functional sentence perspective in written and spoken communication, Chafe's (1994) book Discourse, Consciousness, and Time; and several papers by the two authors (Firbas 1990, 1995; Chafe 1974, 1976, 1986). |