It is not there, but [it] is cohesive: the case of pronominal ellipsis of

1
It is not there, but [it] is cohesive: the case of pronominal ellipsis
of subject in Portuguese
DRAFT ONLY.
P LEASE, D ON' T CITE WITHOUT PERMISSION
Leila Barbara*
Catholic University of São Paulo
(PUCSP)
Carlos A. M. Gouveia*
University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies
(ULCES)
0. Objectives
Reference has been traditionally considered as either exophoric or endophoric, with the
latter being of two different kinds, anaphoric and cataphoric, depending on whether the
reference is to previous text or sub sequent text, respectively. This framework, that
presupposes the presence of a pro-form that activates the reference, has proved adequate for
English, and for many other SVO languages, but not for all of them, as is the case of
Portuguese.
The purpose of this paper is to raise arguments for a further specification of the
Reference system so that it may also account for languages such as Portuguese, a language
where some functions of the MOOD system may not be deployed. In Portuguese the absence
of a pro-form that might correspond to Subject or Complement is also a cohesive
phenomenon at the level of Reference, thus determining the need for the consideration of
other types of Reference apart from the traditionally established ones.
We shall be examining oral data from both the Brazilian and the European varieties of
Portuguese drawn from the database of the bi-national Project "Discourse and Social Practice
in Lusitanian and Brazilian Companies", involving the University of Lisbon, the Catholic
Universities of S. Paulo and of Rio de Janeiro and the database of the Project "DIRECT —
2
Towards the Language of Business Communication" (Catholic University of S. Paulo). The
written data used will be taken from two daily newspapers: the Brazilian Folha de São Paulo
and the Portuguese Público.
For the purposes stated we will start with a characterization of the Reference system
under the systemic framework, the contents of section 1, moving then, in section 2, to the
presentation of the way the system is constructed in Portuguese. In section 3, we will
systematize the information available for a correct analytical treatment of the Reference
system in Portuguese, against and from which we will develop, in section 4, our description of
the system. Finally, in section 5, some tentative conclusions will be drawn, including a
consequent redefinition of the Reference system.
1. Reference in the systemic framework
In their influential book Cohesion in English, published in 1976, Halliday & Hasan
state what they mean by their use of the term reference: «There are certain items in every
language which have the property of reference (…); that is to say, instead of being interpreted
semantically in their own right, they make reference to something else for their interpretation.
In English these items are personals, demonstratives and comparatives» (p. 31). According to
the authors, this class of items functions as directives as they indicate the way the information
is to be retrieved from elsewhere in the text. What is idiosyncratic in reference as a cohesive
device is not the process of retrieval itself but, as the authors put it, «the specific nature of the
information that is signalled for retrieval», that is «the identity of the particular thing or class
of things that is being referred to» (p. 31).
It is this particular aspect of Reference that distinguishes it from other grammatical
devices, as opposed to lexical ones, in the system of cohesion activated by the Textual
metafunction. In fact, in an attempt to further develop this characteristic of reference the
3
authors contrast it to Substitution, the grammatical device that more easily gets mixed up with
Reference, showing that whereas Substitution is a grammatical relation, Reference is a
semantic one. According to the authors «substitution is subject to a very strong grammatical
condition: the substitute must be of the same grammatical class as the item for which it
substitutes». On the contrary, Reference does not suffer from this restriction. Because in
Reference «the rela tionship is on the semantic level, the reference item is in no way
constrained to match the grammatical class of the item it refers to. What must match are the
semantic properties» (p. 32).
After this general characterization, Halliday & Hasan establish a categorization of
Reference according to the way it is activated in the English language. They establish a
separation between two different cases of Reference, Exophora and Endophora, with the
former being referred to as situational, and the latter as textual. As the authors put it (p. 33):
Exophora is not simply a synonym for referential meaning. Lexical items like
John or tree or run have referential meaning in that they are names for some
thing: object, class of objects, process and the like. An exophoric item, however,
is one which does not name anything; it signals that reference must be made to
the context of situation. Both exophoric and endophoric reference embody an
instruction to retrieve from elsewhere the information necessary for interpreting
the passage in question (…). What is essential to every instance of reference
whether endophoric (textual) or exophoric (situational) is that there is a
presupposition that must be satisfied; the thing referred to has to be identifiable
somehow.
What we have summarized so far can be represented as:
Exophora
Reference
Anaphora
Endophora
Ellipsis
Gramatical
Substitution
Cohesion
etc.
etc.
Lexical
Cataphora
4
The main difference between Exophora and Endophora, for the purpose of the system
of cohesion, is that Exophora is not cohesive. By linking the language to the context of
situation, it contributes in fact for the creation of text, but is does not help the establishment of
links between different passages in a text. That is, exophoric reference does not contribute
directly to the implementation of cohesion in a text, since it does not contribute, as the authors
put it, «to the
INTEGRATION
of one passage with another so that the two together form part of
the SAME text» (p. 37).
Endophora, on the contrary, is cohesive, since it is a device that contributes for the
texture of a text, that is, it helps establishing links between different passages of a text. As a
cohesive device, endophoric reference establishes itself in two different ways, depending on
whether its signalling is to previous or subsequent text. When the signalling is to previous
text, reference is said to be anaphoric, and when it is to subsequent one, reference is said to be
cataphoric.
In An Introduction to Functional Grammar, Halliday (1986, 1994) does not introduce
any change in this categorization of the system of cohesion. On the contrary, he further says
that Reference first evolved as an exophoric relation and that, «more often than not, in all
languages as we know them», items that may be used exophorically (e.g. the category of
person and particularly the third person forms he, she, it, they) are used anaphorically, or, we
would rather say, endophorically (cf. Halliday, 1994: 312). Furthermore, by stressing that, in
the case of Reference, both cohesion and structure contribute to the quality of texture,
Halliday definitely links endophoric reference also to structure, which being important for
English is particularly vital for languages other than English, as we shall see:
The quality of texture depends partly on cohesion and partly on structure. If
the pronoun and its referent are within the same clause complex, this is already
one text by virtue of the structural relationship between the clauses; the
cohesion merely adds a further dimension to the texture. If on the other hand
5
there is no structural relationship, the cohesion becomes the sole linking feature,
and hence critical to the creation of text. The cohesive relationship itself is not
affected by considerations of structure; Peter… he form an identical pattern
whether they are within the same clause complex or not. But they carry a greater
load in the discourse if they are not (Halliday, 1994: 312).
2. What happens in Portuguese
When considering the system of cohesion from the point of view of the Portuguese
language, in particular the case of Reference, we can see that the overall system has a
correspondence in Portuguese. In fact, like in English, in Portuguese we have both cases of
endophorical reference, Anaphora and Cataphora. Here are two examples, one of each, taken
from the Portuguese daily newspaper Público:
Marguerite Duras escreveu o argumento. E, sobre ele, Alain Resnais, o
realizador de "Noite e Nevoeiro" e "Providence", fez o filme.
O documentário a transmitir foi realizado por Tony Palmer. E eis como a RTP o
apresenta: "A tristeza do envelhecimento, a desilusão e a pergunta sobre
se ‘as coisas valerão a pena’ caracteriza esmagadoramente o perfil
miserável que Tony Palmer fez de Sir William Walton."
But apart from these cases, we also have in Portuguese a third possibility of Reference,
motivated by a specific characteristic of that language. Because of this characteristic,
Portuguese has been described in formal linguistics as a “pro -drop” language.
Elsewhere we have discussed the status of the pro -drop in Portuguese (Gouveia &
Barbara, 2000), with respect to the definition of Theme. The relevant point to the discussion
then was the absence of a pronoun deploying the function of Subject in Portuguese, leaving
the Finite (sometimes conflated with the Predicator) in the beginning of the clause. We do not
intend to go here into the same discussion, but we cannot avoid stressing the fact that both
things are related, that is, the question of Theme in Portuguese and the question of Reference.
In fact, the absence of a pronoun deploying the function of Subject, with the consequences it
brings into the definition of Theme, is a matter of Reference.
6
In order to make clear what we are talking about, let us look at a passage taken from
the Brazilian newspaper Folha de São Paulo:
Justo Calisto voltou à varandinha. Deitado na rede, esperou o sono, esperou o
próximo fim-de-semana... No começo da tarde deste domingo, ele abriu a gaiola:
os dois pássaros voaram na mesma direção. Enrolou a rede em que dormira
mais de vinte anos e saiu de casa. Percorreu a pé o caminho que o separava da
beira do rio. Agora, no alto da colina, ele pensa no que vai acontecer, no que
pode acontecer... Ao divisar o barco vermelho, ele desceu a colina e aproximouse da canoa. Mais perto dele, mais perto da margem, o barco diminuiu a marcha
e parou. Então ele viu o rosto da mulher, e quase ao mesmo tempo leu o nome
de um rio na quilha ve rmelha, o rio em que ele nascera. Justo Calisto teve a
impressão de que esta seria a última viagem, a última passagem do barco
vermelho... Ele não acenou para a mulher. (João Gilberto Noll, “Açai e Acerola”,
10-04-94. Editoria: mais!, p. 6)
The extract presents a chain of anaphoric ties, where several occurrences of the
pronoun ele, in bold, refer back to Justo Calisto, the only chain we are considering, for the
sake of simplicity. But those who are familiar with Portuguese will immediately recognise in
the text another way of referring back to Justo Calisto.
The presentation of the same passage, below, highlights not the anaphoric pronouns
but their absence in places where English would naturally have them. Let us look at this other
way of referring, bac kgrounding for now the cases highlighted before:
Justo Calisto voltou à varandinha. Deitado na rede, Ø esperou o sono, Ø
esperou o próximo fim-de-semana... No começo da tarde deste domingo, ele
abriu a gaiola: os dois pássaros voaram na mesma direção. Ø Enrolou a rede em
que Ø dormira mais de vinte anos e Ø saiu de casa. Ø Percorreu a pé o caminho
que o separava da beira do rio. Agora, no alto da colina, ele pensa no que vai
acontecer, no que pode acontecer... Ao divisar o barco vermelho, ele desceu a
colina e Ø aproximou-se da canoa. Mais perto dele, mais perto da margem, o
barco diminuiu a marcha e parou. Então ele viu o rosto da mulher, e quase ao
mesmo tempo Ø leu o nome de um rio na quilha vermelha, o rio em que ele
nascera. Justo Calisto teve a impressão de que esta seria a última viagem, a
última passagem do barco vermelho... Ele não acenou para a mulher.
If the pronouns were there, they would contribute for the cohesion of the text just as
the ones presented before do. But since they are not there, due to the possibility brought into
Portuguese by its pro-drop characteristic, the question we must ask is: are these cases of
7
Reference or not? Notice for that matter that we have seven pronouns referring back to Justo
Calisto, but we have also eight cas es of omission of the same pronoun in different parts of the
text.
Now, the important thing about any appreciation of our question must bring into
consideration another possibility of presenting the passage, this time with some alterations.
Below we have again the original passage, but this time omitting all the 7 occurrences of the
pronoun ele originally inscribed by the author. This leaves us with 15 omissions altogether,
which, for clarity we highlighted. Let us look then at this version with no pronouns:
Justo Calisto voltou à varandinha. Deitado na rede, Ø esperou o sono, Ø
esperou o próximo fim-de-semana... No começo da tarde deste domingo, Ø abriu
a gaiola: os dois pássaros voaram na mesma direção. Ø Enrolou a rede em que
Ø dormira mais de vinte anos e Ø saiu de casa. Ø percorreu a pé o caminho que
o separava da beira do rio. Agora, no alto da colina, Ø pensa no que vai
acontecer, no que pode acontecer... Ao divisar o barco vermelho, Ø desceu a
colina e Ø aproximou-se da canoa. Mais perto Ø, mais perto da margem, o barco
diminuiu a marcha e parou. Então Ø viu o rosto da mulher, e quase ao mesmo
tempo Ø leu o nome de um rio na quilha vermelha, o rio em que Ø nascera.
Justo Calisto teve a impressão de que esta seria a última viagem, a última
passagem do barco vermelho... Ø Não acenou para a mulher.
As any speaker of Portuguese will attest, this version with the omission of all the
pronouns that refer to Justo Calisto do not operate any change to the text in either meaning or
function. The choices for the occurrence or omission of the pronoun can only be attributed to
style. In fact, since we are dealing with a sample of written language, this version might even
be considered better and clearer than the original by some speakers of Portuguese, as they do
not repeat the Subject or Object unless that is absolutely necessary in order do avoid
ambiguity.
Notice that in Portuguese, and in much the same way in English, the possibility of
omission of Subject within the clause complex is a matter of structure. The difference
between the two languages is not, in this precise aspect, a matter of structure but a matter of
creation of texture by Reference, since Portuguese has also the possibility of behaving in
8
between different clause complexes the same way it does within a clause complex. As the
new version of the Justo Calisto passage shows, one can go on omitting the Subject in
different clause complexes because the referent for the omission is the same and that is clear
from the rest of the text.
What is important to refer is that in Portuguese the choice between deploying the
referent or not in different clause complexes, will not result in ambiguity, change of meaning
or, for that matter, agrammaticality. Also, the two possibilities do not involve different
wordings. What we want to say is that the possibility of having the personal pronoun either
expressed or omitted is not a matter of choice in Portuguese, if by that we mean choice in
meaning. In fact, these are not entirely different ways of saying, in the sense that they are not
functionally different.
3. What has been said about reference in Portuguese
The expansion of the model for describing Reference in the general system of
cohesion in Portuguese has been attempted before, having in mind the problems and
consequences posed by the fact of Portuguese being a pro-drop language. Those attempts,
though, have been tried from the point of view either of formal linguistics, with some
misunderstandings of the concept of cohesion, which is mixed up with the concept of
structure, or of text linguistics, bringing into discussion different theoretical models, including
the one developed by Halliday & Hasan in Cohesion in English, which, as we all know, does
not stand in isolation but rather integrated in a functional-systemic description of language as
an interrelation of different metafunctions.
Mateus et alii. (1989), for instance, is an example of the first perspective,
determinating most of what has been said afterwards, as it stands as the fundamental
grammar, in terms of modern Linguistics, for European Portuguese. Parker & Coimbra
9
(1990), although not treating directly the problems of Reference in Portuguese, but rather
dealing with general aspects of the adaptation of the Cohesion in English model into
Portuguese, follow what we might call a formal perspective in their consideration of those
aspects.
Marcuschi (1983), Koch (1989) and Fávero (2000), on the other hand, follow the other
perspective, that is, the one from text linguistics and their models bring together different
views of the system of cohesion, some of them not always properly identified or properly put
together. Fávero (2000), for instance, constructs a model that does not accept the existence of
a difference between grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion. She only considers the
existence of three types of cohesion, Reference being one of them, which may be operated
either by substitution or for reiteration. The phenomenon we are dealing with in this paper is
constructed by Fávero (2000: 23) as a phenomenon of Reference by substitution, in this case
substitution by an empty category.
Although we are not reviewing here all the literature on the subject, we are able to
conclude that no matter the perspective adopted, the result is more or less the same: reference
activated by a pro-form that is not textually deployed is either seen as a case of Substitution
by an empty category or as a case of Ellipsis. The question, though, is not a question of
simply re-arranging different cases of grammatical cohes ion. In fact, these authors usually put
together under the label of Substitution and of Ellipsis cases that in functional-systemic terms
are perfectly separated as cases of lexical cohesion.
Therefore, what we are proposing here is novel way of looking at the phenomenon of
reference in Portuguese that may be considered a functional-systemic one, as opposed to
others that of systemic functional linguistics only are familiar with the model developed in
Halliday & Hasan, most of the times ignoring that that model is framed by a theoretical and
descriptive model know as Systemic-Functional Grammar. The way to address the problem,
10
then, is to move on to systemic functional descriptions of English (and other languages) and
to research on the Portuguese language at the light of those descriptions.
4. Our proposal
In an article about the Weri language of Papua New Guinea, Maurice Boxwell (1995)
uses the term ellipsis to refer to this same phenomenon we have been talking about. One
should bear in mind though that the term ellipsis is already used in systemics to refer to the
absence of an element determined by textual factors, i. e., to «a relationship that is not
semantic but lexicogrammatical — a relationship in the wording rather than directly in the
meaning» (Halliday, 1994: 316). This is the first difference between the phenomena described
by Halliday & Hasan (1976) as Ellipsis and what is observed in the data of Portuguese and of
Weri. In Portuguese and, as it seems, in Weri, the phenomenon studied is made possible by
the structure of the language and therefore it is not entirely a phenomenon of discourse,
whereas Ellipsis as analysed by Halliday & Hasan (1976) is totally bound to discourse. Also,
in the cases studied by Halliday & Hasan the ellipsis of a structural element leaves the
sentence or clause incomplete and therefore it cannot stand in isolation.
One may wonder why Ellipsis and Reference are separated by Halliday & Hasan and
brought together by Boxwell. The answer found will stress the fact that the two are looking at
different things, in a general sense of the word different. In fact, Halliday & Hasan are dealing
with the ways a text may be cohesive and they see at least two different ways, among others:
Reference and Ellipsis. These are two different processes for the creation of texture and they
are not mixed up neither at that level nor theoretically. Boxwell, on the contrary, is looking at
a phenomenon that occurs in Weri and he calls it ellipsis because it shares with Ellipsis, in the
Hallidayan sense, some characteristics.
11
The difficulty with this way of looking at the problem is that, as a texture creation
device, the phenomenon Boxwell is talking about is not a phenomenon of Ellipsis but of
Reference. The main property of the phenomenon, as Boxwell rightly points out, is that of coreferentiality. Nevertheless, by putting it under the label of ellipsis, Boxwell is giving more
importance to the structural process the phenomenon undergoes than to the semantic process
it discloses. That this is so is understood by his explanation of the differences between coreferentiality and co-classification. They are meant not to stress the difference between
Reference and Ellipses as cohesive devices but to incorporate under ellipsis not only cases of
co-classification but also cases of co-referentiality, as it is the case of the so called “ellipsis”
of Subject and, for that matter, also the cases of “ellipsis” of Complement. But if we consider
that the main function of these “ellipses”, in cohesive terms, is to point to the relevance of the
sameness of referent, what we are dealing with here are cases of Reference and not cases of
Ellipsis.
In fact, we are talking about a phenomenon of Reference realised by an “ellipsis” of a
pro-form that by its presence should point out «the identity of the particular thing or class of
things that is being referred to» (Halliday & Hasan, 1976: 31). The fact is that the pro-form is
elided, but that should not be sufficient to call the process Ellipsis, in the same way we call
Ellipsis the phenomena observed in I must have left my pen at home. Can I borrow yours
(example from Boxwell, 1996: 134). To put things straightforwardly what we have in Weri
and in Portuguese are cases of “ellipsis” of Reference; but in the general system o f cohesion,
as proposed by Halliday and Hasan (1976), are we to put that phenomenon under the label of
Ellipsis or under the label of Reference? Boxwell chooses the first alternative. We prefer the
second one, since the cases we are dealing with are phenomena of omission of Reference in
situations where the Reference could be shown or not. From our point of view, then, the
answer to the question we addressed before is a positive one: yes, the cases we are analysing
12
are cases of Reference and we must treat them as such, even if we have to expand the
Reference system as it was proposed by Halliday & Hasan, which, as we all know, was meant
for English and not for other languages, such as pro-drop ones. In order to distinguish this
process from the ones called substitution and ellipsis in Halliday & Hasan (1976) we propose
to name deployed the presence of referent and not deployed, its absence.
It is worth mentioning that not deployed Reference can occur exophorically, in
Portuguese, being quite frequent in face-to-face communication, where a lot of situational
knowledge is presupposed. For instance, the example below could occur say when two
parents are talking face-to-face looking at their baby:
Como dorme bem depois do almoço!
* How sleeps well after lunch!
5. Conclusion
In the light of the problems and data presented above we are forced to conclude that in
Portuguese, in terms of cohesion, the presence of pro-forms referring to something else for
their interpretation cannot be distinguished from its elision. Furthermore, both the presence
and the absence of pro-forms work anaphorically and cataphorically and within the sentence
and across sentences. They can also occur endophorically and exophorically. Therefore one
has to say that Reference may manifest itself in the use of certain items that have the property
of reference, but also in the absence of those items
In more general linguistic terms, this lead us to suggest an expansion of the model
proposed by Halliday & Hasan. This expansion would be in the direction of stating that
reference can be exophoric and endophoric; with the latter being either anaphoric or
cataphoric; depending on the type of language, all three forms can be textually deployed or
not, as represented in the following diagram:
13
Deployed
Exophora
Not deployed
Reference
Deployed
Anaphora
Not deployed
Endophora
Deployed
Cataphora
Not deployed
REFERENCES
BOXWELL, Maurice, 1995: “’Nothing’ Makes Sense in Weri: A Case of Extensive Ellipsis
of Nominals in a Papuan Language”. In HASAN & FRIES, 1995: 123-150.
FÁVERO, Leonor Lopes, 2000: Coesão e Coerência Textuais. 9th ed., 2nd Reimp.. São
Paulo: Editora Ática.
GOUVEIA, Carlos A.M. & BARBARA, Leila, 2000: “Marked or unmarked that is NOT the
question, the question is: Where’s the theme?”. Paper Presented at the 12th EuroInternational Systemic Functional Linguistics Workshop. University of Glasgow,
19-22 July 2000.
HALLIDAY, M. A. K., 1994: An Introduction to Functional Grammar. 2nd Ed.. London
Edward Arnold.
HALLIDAY, M. A. K., & HASAN, Ruqaiya, 1976: Cohesion in English. London: Longman.
HASAN, Ruqaiya & FRIES, Peter, 1995: On Subject and Theme: A Discourse Functional
Perspective. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
KOCH, Ingedore G. V., 1989: A Coesão Textual. São Paulo: Contexto.
MARCUSCHI, Luiz Antônio, 1983: Linguística textual, o que é e como se faz. Recife:
Universidade Federal de Pernambuco.
MATEUS, Maria Helena Mira et alii., 1989: Gramática da Língua Portuguesa. 2ª ed., rev. e
aumentada. Lisboa: Caminho.
PARKER, John Morris & COIMBRA, Rosa Lídia, (1990): "Halliday e Hasan "à portuguesa":
alguns casos problemáticos". Workshop sobre Anáfora: Ofir, 29-30 Set. 1990.
Lisboa: APL.
* Leila Barbara is a Full Professor at the Catholic University of S. Paulo, Brazil. Carlos A. M.
Gouveia is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Lisbon,
Portugal. All correspondence regarding this paper should be sent via e-mail to:
[email protected] or [email protected] We would appreciate any comments
or criticisms you may have.