nits tend to be marked by non-linguistic elements. Therefore, written languages display their typical patterns of discourse structures very differently from spoken languages.
To get a comprehensive understanding of discourse structures of written texts, we establish the link between discourse structures and textual relationships within discourse. The functional relations holding between discourse segments may be included under two broad categories: logical sequence and matching relations. This approach to the overall configuration of discourse structures is provided as the base for our definition of discourse units. In the present study, we define a discourse unit as “a discourse segment which bears a functional relation with one another”.
In this study, we believe that in addition to the factors such as information status of NPs and syntactic-semantic types of Restrictive Relative Clauses, discourse structures may play a crucial role in determining the discourse functions of Restrictive Relative Clauses in written texts. Thus, we will employ the notions ‘information status of NPs’, ‘syntactic types of Restrictive Relative Clauses’ and ‘discourse structures’ to investigate the discourse functions of Restrictive Relative Clauses and their relations to their occurrences in discourse units.
There is a important view is from Prince’s works which are concerned with givenness defined on the basis of shared knowledge or assumed familiarity. She notes that an understanding of givenness in the sense of shared knowledge is prerequisite to the understanding to other kinds of givenness delineated above. She proposes a taxonomy in terms of what she calls assumed familiarity. In the present study, we follow Prince very closely.
Prince notes that when a writer/speaker firstly introduces an entity into a text, the entity is new. A new discourse entity has two natures. One is that addressees may have to extract it from their existing knowledge for building the discourse model. To put it simply, addressees know it but may not attend to it until it is introduced in the text.
Another category of discourse entities is what Prince calls evoked entities. An evoked entity is a referent which is already in the discourse model. There are two ways in which an entity can have come to be evoked: either already introduced on textual grounds or evoked by the situational reasons. Prince call the first type textually evoked and the second type situationally evoked. He in “A guy I worked with says he knows your sister.” represents the textually evoked whereas you in “Pardon, would you have change of a quarter?” is situationally evoked.
The most complex category of discourse entities is what Prince calls inferables. She notes that an entity is inferable if the reader/listener can infer it by means of logical and plausible reasoning from the discourse entities which have been already evoked. For example, readers/listeners are able to infer the driver from the fact that every bus has a driver in “I got on a bus yesterday and the driver was drunk”. Prince further proposes a subclass of inferable entities, which she calls containing inferables. A typical example is “Hey, one of these eggs is broken!”. The NP one of the eggs is a containing inferable which is contained within the other NP these eggs which is situationally evoked.
Prince’s taxonomy then includes the following seven subclasses: unanchored brand-new, anchored brand-new, unused, inferables, containing inferables, textually evoked and situationally evoked. The first three can be classified as new, the
