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DOI: 10.1177/14614456080984972009 11: 37Discourse Studies

Marvin Lam and Jonathan Websterconversation

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Lam and Webster: The lexicogrammatical reflection of interpersonal relationship 37

Discourse StudiesCopyright © 2009SAGE Publications

(Los Angeles, London, New Delhi,Singapore and Washington DC)

www.sagepublications.comVol 11(1): 37–57

10.1177/1461445608098497

The lexicogrammatical reflection of interpersonal relationship in conversation

M A R V I N L A M A N D J O N A T H A N W E B S T E R

C I T Y U N I V E R S I T Y O F H O N G K O N G , H O N G K O N G

A B S T R A C T This article reports an attempt to investigate, apart from

the semantics and the pragmatics, how much the lexis and the grammar

of a conversation can help extract interpersonal information about the

interlocutors’ orientations towards each other. The discourse analysed

was extracted from a scene in Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code and its

motion picture adaptation. The adaptation of this scene is similar to the

novel original in terms of the characters’ content of discussion and only

differs in the orientation of the characters to one another. The analysis

focuses on the determination of response types, which are generally classified

as either expected or discretionary, and contribute to the realization of

positive and negative orientations respectively. The distribution of different

types of response is visualized as the interlocutor’s ‘response profile’, which

helps in the realization of his/her orientation to the one to whom he/she is

responding.

K E Y W O R D S : adaptation, context of situation, conversation analysis, interpersonal

orientation, motion picture, novel

1. Introduction

It is a common practice for us to determine what kind of relationship people haveby observing how they talk to each other. The relation between interpersonal

relationship and language production and understanding has been recognized

by various scholars in a range of disciplines including linguistics, sociology,

social psychology, anthropology, philosophy and AI (for example, Halliday and

Hasan, 1985; Malinowski, 1923; St Clair, 2006; White, 1985 and many more).

Originating in sociology, conversation analysts more specifically ‘study the

management of social institutions in interaction’ (Heritage, 1997: 162), and look

into turn management and the repair of conversation, which enables the

extraction of extra-linguistic social/interpersonal information. Examples of thiskind of work include Markee’s investigation of the differences in conversation

A R T I C L E








38 Discourse Studies 11(1)

repair within speech exchange systems with equal and unequal power rela-tionships (Markee, 2000).

If any linguistic meanings of the conversation are involved in the analysis,they are usually the pragmatics and/or the semantics meanings. While concur-ring with the importance of the pragmatics and the semantics of the conversation

in the understanding of interpersonal relationship between the interlocutors,this article presents a study that investigates how much the lexis and the gram-mar – the more basic or concrete ‘layer’ of meaning – of the conversation canhelp with such concern. More specifically, the study looks into the lexical andgrammatical structures of conversation and examines how they can reflect theorientation of interlocutors towards each other.

To explore how interpersonal orientation is reflected in lexical and gram-matical patterns, this study adopts a comparative approach. It compares con-versations in the novel The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown with conversations in

the motion picture adaptation of the same name directed by Ron Howard froma screenplay by Akiva Goldsman. For the purposes of this article, we will usetwo ‘parallel’ conversations, one from the novel (‘the novel discourse’) and onefrom the motion picture (‘the motion picture discourse’) of the same scene. Inthis particular scene the adaptation is close to the original: in the same physicalenvironment, with the same characters discussing the same topics. The onlymajor difference lies in how the characters orient to one another in the dialogue.This allows most of the features of the conversation to be kept as constants sothat we can focus on the variation in the interpersonal orientation of the inter-locutors. The differences in the lexis and grammar of the two discourses canthus be more readily related to such differences in the orientations.

The value of the comparative approach is the reason why the study analysesconversations extracted from novel and motion picture instead of conversationsoccurring spontaneously in everyday life. The comparison between a noveland its adaptation uniquely opens up the possibility to isolate just one or a fewfeatures of the conversation (in this case, the orientation) for comparison whileother features remain unchanged. Yet the conversations are not as ‘artificial’ asthose ‘experimental’ or ‘researcher-provoked’ ones, which conversation analyststend to avoid (Ten Have, 2007: 9).

Therefore, though working with a novel and its motion picture adaptation,the study is not concerned with literary criticism. Novel and motion picture aretreated here as logs of ‘as-if ’ occurred conversations. The Da Vinci Code was chosenbecause it sets the scenes in the real world. The social interactions occurringin the plot are similar to those which take place in real life. This suggests therelation between the use of language and the interpersonal relationship inthe novel or the motion picture should be relevant to what takes place in oureveryday lives.

2. Theoretical background

2.1. THE SYSTEMIC FUNCTIONAL PERSPECTIVE

The study adopts an ethnographic-descriptive perspective in order to relate thelexical and grammatical structures of the conversations to the interpersonal








relationship of the interlocutors. Language as code (what language is) and lan-guage as behaviour (what people do with language) are brought together byusing each to explain the other, and by interpreting language in relation to itsplace in people’s lives (Halliday, 1984). Language is considered as a resource formeaning; the code as a systemic resource, a meaning potential; the behaviour

as the actualization of that meaning potential in real life situations. In this pro-cess of actualization, language functions to fulfil a range of human needs, and‘the richness and variety of its functions are reflected in the nature of languageitself, in its organization as a system’ (Halliday, 1973: 20). A systemic descriptionattempts to interpret simultaneously both the code and the behaviour, to specifythe systems from which a linguistic item is derived, that is, the choices embodiedin that item (Halliday and Martin, 1981). Therefore, in analysing instances of language in the conversations, we correlate several systems of the languageat the same time in order to provide a comprehensive linguistic account.

2.2. THE INTERPERSONAL METAFUNCTION

Functions of language that fulfil the range of human needs are categorizedunder the umbrella of three metafunctions, namely the ideational, interpersonaland textual metafunctions. The ideational metafunction refers to the ability toconstrue human experiences, naming entities and building up categories andtaxonomies; the interpersonal metafunction allows people to enact personaland social relationships with each other; the textual metafunction refers to theenabling of text construction in order to facilitate the former two metafunctions,

giving texture to the text to make it operationally relevant (Halliday, 1973;Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004). The interpersonal metafunction of language isthe most relevant to our present investigation. It ‘embodies all use of language toexpress social and personal relations, including all forms of the speaker’s intru-

sion into the speech situation and the speech act’ (Halliday, 1973: 41).

2.3. THE LEXICOGRAMMATICAL STRATUM OF MEANING

Different aspects of meaning of the three metafunctions are organized in strata.The most basic (or the most concrete) stratum of meaning concerns the phono-logical realization. Moving up along the level of abstraction, the next stratum

is the lexicogrammar, then semantics, and finally context as the most abstractstratum (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004). Choices made in a more basic stratumrealize choices in an upper stratum. Reciprocally, choices made in an upperstratum are realized by certain choices in a lower stratum. As mentioned in theIntroduction, the present study focuses on the lexicogrammatical stratum inthe analysis of the linguistic structure of the conversations. Lexicogrammaris quite literally the continuum of lexis and grammar (Halliday et al., 2004).Grammar is seen as the linguistic device for linking together the selections madein various sub-systems of language, and realizing these selections in a unified

structural form (Halliday, 1973).At the lexicogrammatical stratum, the principal grammatical systems in-

volved in the interpersonal metafunction of the English language are those of MOOD, POLARITY and MODALITY. In short, the system of mood is a grammaticalizationof the semantic system of speech function; mood terms are realized (in English)








by properties of the combination of the Subject and the Finite operator, the

presence of the Wh-element, and contrasts in tone. Clauses are categorized as

declarative, interrogative and imperative, which realize different speech func-

tions. These speech functions can be characterized in terms of the two variables

in the process of exchange in a conversation (Halliday, 1984): the roles defined

by the exchange process (giving versus demanding) and the nature of the ex-changed commodity (information versus goods-&-services). When a speaker

takes on a role of, for example, demanding, at the same time he/she assigns a

complementary role to the addressee, for example, giving (on demand). This leads

to the differentiation of expected and discretionary response by the addressee.

Whether the addressee complies with the assigned role can reflect his/her

orientation towards the role-assigning speaker. This is where lexicogrammar is

linked realizationally, through the semantics of speech function, to one of the

situational context parameters – tenor of discourse.

2.4. TENOR OF DISCOURSE IN THE SITUATIONAL CONTEXT

First proposed by Malinowski (1923), context of situation is defined as the

social functions that determine what language is like and how it has evolved.

A context consists of three features: the field of discourse, the nature of social

action that is taking place, the tenor of discourse, the nature of the relation-

ship, both in long-term and immediate senses, between participants of the social

action, and mode of discourse, the part that language contributes to the symbolic

organization of the text that allows the maintenance, or termination, of the field

and the tenor (Halliday and Hasan, 1985). The interpersonal orientation of theinterlocutors, which is the focus of the present study, is one of the features of

the tenor of discourse.

To paraphrase, this study aims at uncovering the lexicogrammatical struc-

tures of the conversations that realize the interpersonal metafunction, and

such lexicogrammatical structures are related to the realization of speech

functions, thus the orientation as part of the tenor of discourse in the situ-

ational context.

3. Methodology The scene under study involves three characters. They are Robert Langdon, Leigh

Teabing and Sophie Neveu. The scene takes place at Leigh’s private residence.

Almost all of the characters’ speakings in the novel are quoted directly. With

the help of the quotation marks indicating the quoted speech of the characters,the dialogue was extracted to form the novel discourse. What the actors in the

motion picture uttered was transcribed as the motion picture discourse. The

sentences were divided into clauses.

The similarity of the topic discussed by the characters in the two discourseswas justified by studying the clauses that appeared in both discourses, and,

taking a lexicological approach, by comparing the lexical choices of the two

discourses. To contrast the lexicogrammatical structures of the discourses in








terms of the interpersonal metafunction, mood type and corresponding speech

functions of the free major clauses were determined by Halliday and Matthiessen’s

model (2004), which will be introduced in Section 4.3.

Speech functions reflect the kind of role a speaker, as an initiator of the

exchange, assigns simultaneously to him/herself and to the addressee. With

this purpose alone speech act theory could be the most relevant framework foranalysis. For instance, Bach and Harnish (1979) provide a detailed taxonomy

of different communicative illocutionary acts. Speech act theory was not in-

corporated into the analysis because it is concerned with the pragmatics of

language, and the aim of this study is to focus on the lexis and grammar of the

conversations and see how much they can contribute to the understanding of

interpersonal orientation.

After the speech functions were determined, it was then the core step of

the analysis to categorize the response made by the upcoming speaker as a

responder. In practice, the analysis attempted to exhaust any relevant lexicaland grammatical relations exhibited by the initiating and responding clauses.

In general, these categories of response were grouped as expected, neutral

or discretionary, which realized positive, neutral and negative orientations

respectively.

The differentiation of expected and discretionary responses is very much

related to the ‘preference organization’ in conversation analysis. For example,

accepting an invitation is considered to be a preferred contribution to the talk,

while rejecting is dispreferred (Liddicoat, 2007). However, as mentioned above,

the analysis focuses on lexicology and grammar; Halliday and Matthiessen’smodel (2004) was adapted instead for response categorization.

Adapting Matthiessen’s ‘interpersonal profile’ (1995: 410), we have visualized

the distributions of different types of responses by characters’ individual ‘response

profiles’ to show how different interpersonal orientations were realized.

4. Findings and discussions

4.1. GENERAL INFORMATION OF THE DISCOURSES AND THEIR SIMILARITIES

The similarities of the novel and motion picture discourses will be discussed first.All examples, unless otherwise specified, are taken from these two discourses.

The scene under study starts from Leigh’s first entrance in the plot and ends

when Leigh’s manservant intrudes on the discussion (pp. 246–80 in the novel

published by Doubleday in 2003, and 0:58–1:13 in the motion picture, ac-

cording to the DVD recording distributed by Columbia Picture Industries, Inc.in 2006). Both discourses are initiated by Leigh in a similar manner: ‘Sir Robert!

I see you travel with a maiden’ (novel) and ‘Robert. And you travel with a maiden,

it seems’ (motion picture), and end in the same way by Leigh’s saying, ‘Some-

times I wonder who is serving whom.’ Some 817 and 304 clauses were extractedfrom the novel and the motion picture respectively. Within these clauses, there

are 62 minor clauses in the novel discourse and 46 in that of the motion

picture. The proportions of the speakers’ major clauses, as major moves of the








exchange, are shown in Figure 1. The charts indicate how differently characterscontribute to the content of the conversations. Although Robert is 5 per cent

more ‘talkative’ (and Leigh is 5% less ‘talkative’) in the motion picture than

in the novel, both discourses are similar in that Leigh dominates the conver-

sation as an active speaker, while Sophie and Robert both contribute about the

same amount of speech.Venturing into the content of discussion, we did a comparison in terms of the

ideational metafunction, that is, how similar the two discourses are in construing

the experiences and ideas of the characters. The relevant lexicogrammatical

structure is that of transitivity, involving different types of process, their

participants and circumstances. A total of 84 clauses (28%) in the motion

pictures are similar, or even identical, to clauses in the novel discourse, in that

the similar clauses have the same processes and participants. These clauses

spread out evenly in the motion picture discourse, which shows that the major

moves in the two discourses are similar. Example 1 illustrates how a cluster of clauses is ‘copied’ quite directly from the novel original. Interestingly, the last

orthographic sentence spoken by Robert in the novel extract is spoken by Leigh

in the motion picture.

Example 1The novel discourse (punctuations as original)

Robert: This symbol is the original icon for male, A rudimentary phallus.

Sophie: Quite to the point,

Leigh: As it were,

Robert: This icon is formally known as the blade, and it represents aggression and manhood.

In fact, this exact phallus symbol is still used today on modern military uniforms

to denote rank.

Leigh: Indeed. The more penises you have, the higher your rank. Boys will be boys.

Robert: Moving on, the female symbol, as you might imagine, is the exact opposite. This

is called the chalice. The chalice resembles a cup or vessel, and more important,it resembles the shape of a woman’s womb.

The motion picture discourse

Robert: This is the original icon for male. It’s a rudimentary phallus.

Sophie15%

Robert

15%

Leigh70%

Robert20%

Sophie15%

Leigh65%

The novel discourse The motion picture discourse

F I G U R E 1 . Proportions of major-clause speakers









Sophie: Quite to the point.

Leigh: Yes, indeed.

Robert: This is known as the Blade, it represents aggression and manhood. The symbol

is still used today on modern military uniforms.

Leigh: Yes, the more penises you have, the higher your rank. Boys will be boys.

Robert: Now, as you would imagine, the female symbol is the exact opposite. This is calledthe Chalice.

Leigh: And the Chalice resembles a cup, or vessel, and more importantly, the shape of

a woman’s womb.

The similarity of the content of discussion is also evident from a comparison

of the most frequently appearing lexical items (‘content words’) in the two

discourses. The lexical items listed in Table 1 appear as frequently as the gram-

matical items (‘function words’). This suggests they represent the topic of

discussion.

Seven lexical items appear most frequently in both discourses. For theremaining ones (underlined), ‘holy’ and ‘God ’ are closely linked to the seven

items in their lexical meanings. These nine lexical items show that religion isthe common topic of discussion in the two discourses.

Figure 2 demonstrates how collocations can be detected by a concordancer.

The concordance shows that ‘ Jesus’ and ‘Christ’, which are related in that they

form a name, accompany 30 percent of the occurrences of ‘document(s)’. The

frequency for them to coexist is higher than by chance, so they are considered

as collocations. Note that some other lexical items listed in Table 1 also appear

in the concordance (e.g. ‘Grail’ and ‘Constantine’). This suggests that they may

be collocations with ‘document(s)’ as well.

The characters contribute similar portions of moves in both the novel andthe motion picture discourses on the same topic – religion. Such similarity

ensures more accurate comparison of different realizations of orientation in

the discourses.

T A B L E 1 . Most frequent lexical items

The novel discourse Grail, Jesus, Magdalene, Christ, holy, Mary, Church,

document, bloodline, Constantine

The motion picture discourse Jesus, Mary, Grail, Robert, Christ, Magdalene, God,

Church, Constantine, Leigh

Four centuries after death, thousand of

In addition to telling the true Grail story, these

the modern Church’s desire to suppress these

one of the cornerstones of the Sangreal

The Sangreal

pages of unaltered, pre-Constantine

Jesus’ already existed chroniclingHis lif e

speak of ’s ministry in very human terms.

comes from a sincere belief in their established view of .

, a complete genealogy of the early descendants of .

simply tell the other side of the story.

, written by the early followers of , revering Him(listing 6 of the 20 occurrences of ‘ ’

Christ

Christ

Christ

Christ

Jesus

d ocument(s)

documents

documents

documents

documents

documents

documents

F I G U R E 2 . Short-listed concordance of ‘document(s)’ in the novel discourse









4.2. THE SCRIPT AND THE ACTUAL ACTING IN THE MOTION PICTURE

Before we move on to the dif ferences in the two discourses, a few points need to

be made about the script. One way of adapting the novel into a motion picture

and shifting the orientations of characters to the negative was to add dialogue

of characters swearing or verbally confronting each other, as Example 2

illustrates.

Example 2

The script

Leigh: Impossible. No, I simply cannot believe that Robert Langdon, Professor Robert

Langdon, would want to know a single thing about such, what was the phrase,

wing-nut nonsense.

Robert: Did I really say wing-nut? Okay, I haven’t been particularly receptive to your

ideas.

Leigh: I have never held your lack of imagination against you. But to arrive so late, with

no explanation – (interrupted)

However, this kind of addition to the conversation only exists in the script

(published by Bantam Press in 2006), and almost all of them were left out in the

actual acting. In keeping the content of discussion the same to accord with

the main plot, which was illustrated in the last section, grammar remains the

major resource to make the difference in the orientations. In the following

sections, the two discourses will be contrasted in terms of their lexical and

grammatical structures in relation to their differences in realizing characters’

orientations.

4.3. IDENTIFICATION OF MOOD TYPE AND SPEECH FUNCTION

To contrast the two discourses, we first identify the mood type of all free major

clauses, and then relate them to the corresponding speech functions. Three

types of clauses have not been treated in this step of the analysis: minor clauses,

as they do not recognize major speech functions; elliptical clauses, as their

mood structures are not explicit; and bound clauses, because they cannot freely

select speech function in the system of MOOD.

The analysis here adopts Halliday and Matthiessen’s (2004) account of the system of MOOD and categorizes free major clauses as shown in the system

network in Figure 3.

If a clause contains both Subject and Finite, it realizes the feature

‘indicative’, otherwise ‘imperative’. For indicative clause, if Subject comes

clause

major

minor

indicative

declarative

interrogative

imperative

yes/no

WH-

(Halliday andMatthiessen, 2004: 23)

F I G U R E 3 . Simplified system network of MOOD1









before Finite, that realizes ‘declarative’, and the reversed order realizes ‘yes/

no interrogative’. The presence of WH-element before the Finite realizes

‘WH-interrogative’. Examples of these mood types are shown below.

Example 3

indicative: declarative: Childbirth was mystical and powerful.indicative: yes/no-interrogative: Is that hand wielding a dagger?

indicative: WH-interrogative: What was the Church’s reaction to the book?

imperative: Stay with me.

(italics: Subject or WH-element; underlined: Finite)

Speech functions are categorized according to two dimensions: the role in the

exchange and the commodity exchanged, which are represented in the matrix

in Table 2.

Declarative clause realizes ‘statement’; interrogative clauses realizes ‘ques-

tion’; imperative clauses realizes ‘command’; and, although theoretically variousmood structures can realize ‘offer’, very limited lexicogrammatical patterns in

the discourses emerge to realize this speech function: ‘may I . . .’, ‘let me . . .’,

‘I would like to . . .’ and ‘it will be (is) my honor to . . .’. Besides, a few fixed expres-

sions realize certain speech functions. For example, ‘I beg your pardon?’ and ‘If

you’d be so kind as to . . .’ realize commands. It is worth noting that speech act

theory could be of great help here, but as mentioned above, the analysis focuses

on the lexicogrammar approach.

Tone is equally fundamental in realizing speech function. How a clause

actually functions in the exchange depends greatly on the punctuation inthe novel and the tone uttered by the actors in the motion picture. When a de-

clarative clause ends with a question mark, or is uttered with an ‘uncertain’ rising

tone, it realizes ‘question’ instead of ‘statement’. Tone also helps in realizing

speech function of elliptical clause, in which the mood structure is left out.

Consider the following examples.

Example 4

Leigh: Now my dear, the word in French for Holy Grail?

Sophie: Saint-Graal.

Leigh: My dear, that is Mary Magdalene.

Sophie: The prostitute?

Leigh: She was no such thing.

This transcription, as throughout the motion picture discourse, is punctuated

to reflect some aspects of the tones chosen by the actors. The accuracy of the

T A B L E 2 . The speech function matrix

commodity

role goods-&-services information

giving offer statement

demanding command question









transcript can be increased by adding annotation marking tone selection.Nevertheless, the punctuations here are useful enough to indicate ‘Saint-Graal’as a statement, ‘the word in French for Holy Grail’ and ‘the prostitute’ as ques-tions. Determination of what kind of interrogative these two elliptical clausesare depends on the subsequent answers. A WH-interrogative clause expects

a declarative clause as the answer, so ‘the word in French for Holy Grail’ is con-sidered to be a WH-interrogative. A yes/no-interrogative clause expects apolarity indicator to be the answer. The ‘no’ in Leigh’s response indicates that‘the prostitute?’ is a yes/no-interrogative. This relation between questions andanswers will be elaborated in detail in the next section.

The distribution of speech functions in the characters’ contributions to thedialogue is shown in Figure 4. Between the characters, both Leigh and Robert’scontributions predominantly give information, while Sophie more often makesdemands. In comparing the two discourses, Robert’s proportion of speech

functions are almost the same; the proportion of demands in Leigh and Sophie’sspeeches in the motion picture discourse are significantly greater than in thenovel discourse.

With more ‘demanding’ clauses, the addressees are put under greater pres-sure in the motion picture discourse in revealing their orientations towards theaddressers. This is because the addressee of a demand is obligated to contributeto the next move by giving information or goods-and-services. He/she can onlychoose between complying with the demand or not, which shows clearly his/herorientation towards the initiator. On the other hand, a minor clause realizing aminor move can serve as a possible initiation, and in most of the cases no responseis expected. In such a situation, it is possible for the addressee to show a moreneutral orientation towards the initiator. The following sections will explore howthese responses are categorized and realized, and how they are related to thecharacters’ orientations towards each other.

4.4. CATEGORIZATION AND REALIZATION OF RESPONSES

Table 3 is a summary of the adpoted model (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004) of how responses can be categorized. Another model (Halliday and Hasan, 1976)is also incorporated to better describe how ‘question rejoinders’ (as a kind of

acknowledgement) and ‘answers’ are being realized, which will be discussedin the following sub-sections.

Before the realizations of the response categories are illustrated in thefollowing sub-sections, it is important to emphasize that the analysis has notexhausted all the possibilities in realizing responses. As a natural semioticsystem, language has great elasticity to allow almost an infinite number of realization. The analysis seeks to find as many realizations as the discoursesexhibit. In fact, some of the response categories do not have enough instancesto make reliable generalizations about lexicogrammatical realization. This

will be discussed in 4.4.5.

4.4.1. Acknowledgement Unless a statement is tagged, the addressee is not obligated to provide aresponse. However, un-tagged statements were responded to most of the time.

Acknowledgement is the expected response to a statement.









The novel discourse Themotion picture discourse

Question;5%

Question;3%

Question;40% Question;

49%

Giving Demanding

Question;2%

Off er;1%

Leigh

Robert

Sophie

Off er;1%

Off er;2%

Off er;2%

Statement;77%

Statement;89%

Statement;94%

Statement;94%

Statement;39%Statement;

50%

Question;11%

Command;5%

Command;2%

Command;10%

Command;12%

Command;2%

Command;10%

F I G U R E 4 . Speech function profiles of characters

T A B L E 3 . Speech functions and responses

response

initiation expected discretionary

statement

he’s giving her the teapot

acknowledgement

is he?

contradiction

no, he isn’t

question

What is he giving her?

answer

a teapot

disclaimer

I don’t know

offerShall I give you this teapot?

acceptanceyes, please do!

rejectionno, thanks

command

give me that teapot!

undertaking

here you are

refusal

I won’t

(Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004: 108)









Minor clauses that manage the continuity of exchanges may realize acknowl-

edgements. As Examples 4 and 5 show, this kind of minor clause is realized by a

limited set of words that has the lexical linkage of being positive (e.g. ‘okay’, ‘yes’,

‘great’, ‘splendid ’, etc.). Besides, the combination of a first-person pronoun and a

mental process with the polarity in accordance with the statement (as illustrated

by Example 6: ‘I know’, or ‘I agree’, ‘I admit’, etc.) can also realize acknowledge-ment. Example 7 demonstrates that the polarity of an acknowledgement is not

always positive. The ‘nobody’ in the initiating statement realizes negative polarity.

If the response is in positive polarity, it will be considered as a contradiction.

Examples 4–7

(4) Leigh: History has never had a definitive version of the book.

Sophie: Okay.

(5) Sophie: The Merovingians founded Paris.

Leigh: Yes.(6) Leigh: You’ve robbed her of the climax!

Robert: I know, I thought perhaps you and I could . . .

(7) Sophie: I assume nobody is claiming they are proof of Jesus’ marriage to

Magdalene.

Leigh: No, no, as I said earlier, the marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene is part

of the historical record.

In Example 8, the ‘that’ in Leigh’s response refers to the whole of Sophie’s

statement. With a positive polarity, and the textual linkage of ‘so’, Leigh’s state-

ment is considered as an acknowledgement. Shift to the lexicological side of

the lexicogrammatical continuum, the response in Example 9 is considered as

acknowledgement because there is lexical linkage between ‘ poor ’ and ‘whore’,‘Magdalene’ is repeated and the polarity is kept consistent in the response.

Examples 8 and 9

(8) Sophie: I studied at the Royal Holloway.

Leigh: So then, that explains it.

(9) Sophie: But I was under the impression Magdalene was poor.

Leigh: Magdalene was recast as a whore

All the acknowledgements mentioned above are statements by themselves.However, very often responders acknowledge the preceding statement by de-

manding further information. Borrowing Halliday and Hasan’s terminology

(1976: 214–15), this kind of response is referred to as ‘question rejoinders’.Questions that are directed to the preceding statement, as in Examples 10 and 11,

are considered as question rejoinders. Lexical ties (such as ‘gospels’ in Example

11) are often found in such questions. Fixed expressions demanding information,

such as those in Examples 12 and 13, are also considered as question rejoinders

(a reduced version of Sophie’s response in Example 12 is ‘meaning?’).

Examples 10–13

(10) Robert: If that was true, it’s adding insult to injury.

Sophie: Why?









(11) Leigh: More than eighty gospels were considered for the New Testament, and yet

only a relative few were chosen for inclusion – Matthew, Mark, Luke, and

John among them.

Sophie: Who chose which gospels to include?

(12) Leigh: Even Christianity’s weekly holy day was stolen from the pagans.

Sophie: What do you mean?(13) Leigh: More specifically, her marriage to Jesus Christ.

Sophie: I beg your pardon?

Example 14 illustrates a kind of question rejoinder that is different from those

mentioned above. It simply repeats the preceding clause, but uses a rising tone

to turn it into a question. Sophie often makes such question rejoinders in both

discourses. Such may be interpreted to convey the responder’s uncertainty about

the preceding statement. This kind of question rejoinder lies between positively

responding to the preceding statement and a negative response as contradiction,

which will be discussed in the next sub-section.Examples 14

Leigh: The Holy Grail is not a thing. It is, in fact . . . a person.

Sophie: The Holy Grail is a person?

4.4.2. ContradictionAs compared with Example 14, Example 15 shows a question rejoinder that

realizes a contradiction. It reverses the polarity and relates to the preceding

statement with an antonym-like lexical item (‘mortal’ versus ‘God ’). It is a

weaker form of contradiction than those which will be described next, becauseresponder still shows his/her uncertainty. According to their relation with the

preceding statements, question rejoinders can be acknowledging, neutral, or

contradicting.

Example 15

Leigh: Until that moment in history, Jesus was viewed by many of his followers as a mighty

prophet, a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless. A mortal man.

Sophie: Not the Son of God?

As Example 16 illustrates, typical contradiction may be made by reversing thepolarity of the preceding statement. Such can be done either by a ‘no’ directed

to the preceding statement, or repeating the preceding clause with the polarityreversed (or attribute the repeated statement with an opposite degree of

modality, such as the use of ‘hardly’ in Example 19). Another way is to attribute

negative lexical meaning to the preceding clause, such as Leigh’s use of the word

‘semantics’ in Example 16 and ‘misunderstanding’ in Example 17. The opposing

pairs in Examples 18–20 (i.e. ‘many’ and ‘some’, ‘ pagan’ and ‘Christian’, and ‘royal’

and ‘ poor ’) show that the preceding statements can be contradicted by using

contrasting lexical pairs.Examples 16–20

(16) Robert: Constantine did not create Jesus’ divinity. He simply sanctioned an already

widely held idea.









Leigh: Semantics.

Robert: No, it’s not semantics.

(17) Leigh: The Priory is charged with a single task. To protect the greatest secret in

modern history.

Sophie: The source of God’s power on earth.

Leigh: Ah, a common misunderstanding.(18) Leigh: Fact, for many Christians, Jesus was mortal one day and divine the next.

Robert: For some Christians, his divinity was enhanced.

(19) Leigh: The Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman emperor

Constantine the Great.

Sophie: I thought Constantine was a Christian,

Leigh: Hardly, he was a lifelong pagan who was baptized on his deathbed, too weak

to protest.

(20) Leigh: Indeed, Mary Magdalene was of royal descent.

Sophie: But I was under the impression Magdalene was poor.

4.4.3. Answer Answering a yes/no question simply needs to provide the polarity or modality asshown in Examples 21 (‘yes’) and 22 (‘may’) respectively. For WH-interrogative,

the limited set of WH-elements set the criteria on what can be the answer. In

Example 23, ‘where’ signals the answer to be a circumstance (‘in the middle’),

‘how many’ signals the answer to be numeral (‘one’), for ‘what’, it is necessary

for the question and the nominal group in the response to have a lexical tie

(‘drink’ and ‘wine’). For ‘why’, though the possibilities are more variable, a

lexical or grammatical linkage between the question and the response (as the

repeated ‘Constantine’ and ‘Christianity’ in Example 24 and ‘it’ in Example 25)

is still essential.

Examples 21–25

(21) Leigh: I assume you recognize this fresco?

Sophie: I know the fresco, yes.

(22) Sophie: She wrote a gospel?

Robert: She may have.

(23) Leigh: Now, mademoiselle, where is Jesus sitting?

Sophie: In the middle.Leigh: Good.

Leigh: He and his disciples are breaking bread. And what drink?

Sophie: Wine. They drank wine.

Leigh: Splendid.

Leigh: Now a final question. How many wineglasses on the table?

Sophie: One?

(24) Sophie: Why would a pagan emperor choose Christianity as the official religion?

Leigh: Constantine was a very good businessman. He could see that Christianity

was on the rise, and he simply backed the winning horse.

(25) Sophie: Why is it there?Leigh: Conspiracy theorists will tell you it stands for Matrimonio or Mary

Magdalene.

The answers described above are all direct ones. However, questions are

not always answered directly. Halliday and Hasan (1976) provides a detailed








discussion on the ‘indirect response’ to question with three categories: com-

mentary (comment on the question), disclaimer (refusal of answering question,

which is regarded as a discretionary response to question and will be discussed

below), and supplementary response (implying answer). No commentary exists in

the discourses and the supplementary responses are always responding to yes/no

questions. The following are some examples of supplementary responses.

Examples 26 and 27

(26) Sophie: Da Vinci is talking about the Bible?

Leigh: Leonardo’s feelings about the Bible relate directly to the Holy Grail.

(27) Sophie: You’re saying Jesus’ divinity was the result of a vote?

Leigh: A relatively close vote at that.

No explicit polarity indicator (i.e. ‘yes’ or ‘no’) exists in the responses above,

neither is the polarity or modality of the initiating question clarified in the

responses. However, the collocations ‘Da Vinci’ and ‘Leonardo’ (for identificationof collocations, please refer to 4.1.) and the repeated ‘Bible’ and the ‘vote’ in thetwo examples, together with the positive polarity of the responses imply that the

answers to these yes/no questions are positive. Compare with a direct answer, a

supplementary response is less expected, but nonetheless it provides the answer

by implication. This contrast with the category discussed next – disclaimer – in

which the responder does not provide any answer.

4.4.4. Disclaimer

Very broadly speaking, disclaimers refer to responses that appear irrelevant tothe questions raised. In example 26, Sophie asked two questions. The first oneis a WH-interrogative requiring a nominal group to be the answer (realized by

‘what’), and the second one is a yes/no interrogative that requires the clarifi-

cation of polarity or modality as the answer.

Example 26

Sophie: I don’t understand. What power? Some magic dishes?

Leigh: Oh, Robert. Has he been telling you that the Holy Grail is a cup?

No lexical tie exists between the first question (‘power’) and the response, andthere is no polarity or modality given in the response for the yes/no question.

It maybe argued that there is lexical tie between ‘dishes’ and ‘cup’, but in the

response the clause containing the item ‘cup’ itself is a question, which the po-

larity is still inexplicit, so it cannot be considered as a supplementary response.

Therefore, such response is considered to be a disclaimer.

4.4.5. Responses for the exchange of goods-&-servicesThe discussion between characters in this scene is not based on the immediate

physical environment (cf. discussing how to cook a dish in a cooking lesson).Therefore, moves involving the exchange of goods-&-services only bear a

small portion. There are only three offers in each of the two discourses (0.6%

and 1.5% in the novel and motion picture discourse respectively), allowing

too few instances of responses (acceptance and rejection) for generalizing of








lexicogrammatical realization. There are 30 (5.7%) and 18 (8.9%) commands in

the novel and motion picture discourses respectively, making the generalization

of realization slightly more possible:

For commands (‘I beg your pardon?’ and ‘Can you translate for our friend?’) to

be undertaken, the responses must have lexical ties with the previous moves

(‘the Bible’ in Example 27 and the collocations ‘Sangreal’ and ‘Sang Real’ in

Example 28).

Examples 27 and 28

(27) Leigh: The Bible did not arrive by fax from heaven.

Sophie: I beg your pardon?

Leigh: The Bible is a product of man, my dear. Not of God.

(28) Leigh: From the Middle English Sangreal, of the original Arthurian legend. Now

as two words. Can you translate for our friend?

Sophie: Sang Real. It means Royal blood.

In Example 29, Robert tries to refuse Leigh’s command by responding with

a move without any relevant lexical meaning, but eventually he undertakes the

command, as the linkages between ‘symbols’ and ‘icon’ and ‘man’ and ‘male’ indi-

cate. In Example 30, it is clear that Robert’s response is a refusal because of its

weak lexical relation with Leigh’s command.

Examples 29 and 30

(29) Leigh: Robert, you can be of help to us. If you’d be so kind as to show us

the symbols for man and woman, please?Robert: Oh no ballon animals? I can make a great duck. This is the original

icon for male. It’s a rudimentary phallus.

(30) Leigh (to Sophie): My dear, if you would close your eyes.

Robert: Oh Leigh, save us the parlor tricks?

If the exchange occurs purely on the material plane (e.g. asking people to

do something physically), it is difficult to realize, simply from the conversation,

how command is being undertaken. The responder may just perform the action

without any verbal response. However, there are descriptions of the characters’

physical actions in the novel, which provide important information aboutwhether and how the commands are being undertaken. In Example 31, the lexical

ties between ‘closer ’ and ‘look’ in the command with ‘closer ’ and ‘scanning’ in the

description of Sophie’s action confirm that she undertakes Leigh’s command.

This suggests that physical movements of the interlocutors should be taken

into account as well if real-life conversation is analysed by this methodology.

Example 31 (The Da Vinci Code, pp. 262–3)

“Hold on,” Sophie said. “You told me the Holy Grail is a woman. The Last Supper is a

painting of thirteen men.”

“Is it?” Teabing arched his eyebrows. “Take a closer look.”Uncertain, Sophie made her way closer to the painting, scanning the thirteen figures

– Jesus Christ in the middle, six disciples on His left, and six on His right. “They’re

all men,” she confirmed.









As Table 3 shows and the above sub-sections illustrate, most of the responses

are either expected or discretionary. They exert different impacts onto the

initiators, which reflect the responders’ orientations. The next section will relate

different types of responses to differences in orientations.

4.5. THE RESPONSE PROFILE

It is obvious that expected response realizes positive orientation of the responders’

orientation towards the initiators, while discretionary responses realize a

negative orientation. However, different kinds of response realize orientation

in different extents. For example, a responder shows greater positive orientation

by undertaking a command than acknowledging a statement, because it takes

him/her more effort to give goods-&-services than to give information. In

general, for both positive and negative orientations, a response involving goods-

&-services realizes orientation in greater extent than that involving informa-

tion; responding to a demanding initiation realizes orientation in greater extentthan that to a giving initiation. Therefore, responses can be distributed along the

continuum of orientation, as shown in Figure 5.

By intention the ‘neutral’ category occupies a larger space in the continuum,

because it contains several sub-categories. For example, as pointed out in 4.4.2,

question rejoinders can be acknowledging, neutral or contradicting, which are

included in the ‘neutral’ category because they realize less extent of orientation

than contradiction and acknowledgement.

In fact this is a much reduced version of the continuum because it does not

reflect the influence of turn taking management. Consider Example 32 below.Example 32

Leigh: Even Christianity’s weekly holy day was stolen from the pagans.

Sophie: What do you mean?

Robert: Originally, Christianity honored the Jewish Sabbath of Saturday, but Constantine

shifted it to coincide with the pagan’s veneration day of the sun.

Sophie’s question is addressing Leigh, but it is Robert who answers. This

contributes to realizing Robert’s positive orientation towards Sophie. At the same

time, it also reflects his positive orientation towards Leigh, because he is helping Leigh by assuming the obligatory role of giving information and acknowledging

Leigh’s statement preceding Sophie’s question.

– +Orientation

R e

f u s a

l

D i s c

l a i m e r

R e

j e c

t i o n

C o n

t r a d i c t i o n

A c k n o w l e

d g e m e n t

A c c e

p t

A n s w e r

U n d e r t a k

i n g

Neutral

F I G U R E 5 . Continuum of orientation








Furthermore, addressee management can also complicate the above

continuum. For example, the addressee of a contradiction should be the speaker of

the preceding statement. If, as illustrated by Example 33, the addressee is not

the speaker of the preceding statement (realized by the use of the third-person

pronoun ‘he’ instead of the second-person pronoun ‘you’), that increases the

negative extent in the realized orientation because that signals the responderis trying to ignore the initiator, even though he/she is responding.

Example 33

Robert: There’s virtually no empirical proof.

Leigh: He knows as well as I do there’s much evidence to support it

In order to derive a more comprehensive continuum of orientation, con-

versation analysis would be very significant because turn management and

addressee management is what it is specialized for. Nonetheless, with the concerns

of the present study, the simplified version of the continuum as in Figure 5 isadequate to visualize characters’ orientation towards each other. As the contin-

uum suggests, the polarity of orientation is not in absolute terms. In Figure 6,

the percentages of different response types are plotted along the orientation

continuum. The distributions of the bars reflect the speakers’ orientations: barsclustering towards the left-hand side reflect a more negative orientation, on

the right-hand side more positive and, if the bars cluster in the centre, then a

neutral orientation.

Clearly the characters’ orientations towards each other realized by the novel

discourse tend more toward neutral-positive because there is no bar appearingat the left-hand side of the profiles. The profiles realized by the motion picture

discourse are considerably different: both Leigh and Robert’s orientations

towards each other shift slightly to the negative end; Leigh and Sophie’s orient-

ations towards each other remain neutral-positive, but the distributions of the neutral and expected responses are more even in the motion picture; that

between Robert and Sophie undergo dramatic change to the positive side in the

motion picture.

5. Conclusion

One’s orientation towards the other can be realized from a visualized response

profile of their conversation, such as those illustrated in Figure 6. These response

profiles are produced based on the lexicogrammatical structure of the con-

versations in the two discourses.

However, the situational contexts of these conversations are heavily in-

clined to the verbal plane of interaction, that is, the commodities exchanged

are mostly information. To further explore the potential of how different types

of response can be realized, conversations in situational contexts in which ex-changes are made on the material plane of interaction can be a good comple-mentary source of the lexicogrammatical structures of response types that are

not raised in the present discussion.









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The novel discourse The motion picture discourse

Leigh to Robert

Leigh to Sophie

Robert to Leigh

Robert to Sophie

Sophie to Leigh

Sophie to Robert

F I G U R E 6 . The response profiles

As the response profiles may suggest, it is difficult to quantify orientation

in very accurate points and only an overall tendency can be shown. This may

reflect the indeterminate feature of the interpersonal aspect of language and

social interaction. Even so, information in other strata of meaning obtainedfrom analysis with other approaches (such as conversation analysis and speech

act theory) can help make the response profile more comprehensive, and

thus interpersonal orientation can be described more clearly.









This study attempts to show that in a conversation, besides the semantics,

the pragmatics, etc., the lexis and grammar may reflect some information

about the interpersonal relationship between the interlocutors; for instance,

their orientations towards each other.

A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T

We would like to thank Professor Christian Matthiessen for his invaluable comments.

N O T E

1. System network organizes grammatical categories as choices linked to each other.

Consult Halliday (1973: 47) for its notational conventions.

R E F E R E N C E S

Bach, K. and Harnish, R.M. (1979) Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts. Cambridge,

MA: The MIT Press.

Halliday, M.A.K. (1973) Explorations in the Functions of Language. London: Edward

Arnold.

Halliday, M.A.K. (1984) ‘Language as Code and Language as Behaviour: A Systemic-

Functional Interpretation of the Nature and Ontogenesis of Dialogue’, in R.P. Fawcett,

M.A.K. Halliday, S.M. Lamb and A. Makkai (eds) The Semiotics of Culture and Language,

Volume 1, Language as Social Semiotic, pp. 3–35. London: Frances Pinter. (Reprinted in

J. Webster (ed.) Collected Works of M. A. K. Halliday, Volume 4, The Language of EarlyChildhood , pp. 226–49. New York: Continuum.)

Halliday, M.A.K. and Hasan, R. (1976) Cohesion in English. London: Longman.

Halliday, M.A.K. and Hasan, R. (1985) Language, Context, and Text: Aspects of Language in

a Social-Semiotic Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Halliday, M.A.K. and Martin, J.R. (1981) Readings in Systemic Linguistics. London: Batsford

Academic and Educational.

Halliday, M.A.K. and Matthiessen, C.M.I.M. (2004) An Introduction to Functional Grammar .

London: Hodder Arnold.

Halliday, M.A.K., Teubert, W., Yallop, C. and Cermáková, A. (2004) Lexicology, A Short

Introduction. New York: Continuum.Heritage, J. (1997) ‘Conversation Analysis and Institutional Talk: Analysing Data’, in

D. Silverman (ed.) Qualitative Research: Theory, Method and Practice, pp. 161–82.

London: SAGE.

Liddicoat, A.J. (2007) An Introduction to Conversation Analysis. London: Continuum.

Malinowski, B. (1923) ‘The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Language’, supplement

I to C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning. London: Routledge and

Kegan Paul.

Markee, N. (2000) Conversation Analysis. London: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Matthiessen, C. (1995) Lexicogrammatical Cartography: English Systems. Tokyo: Inter-

national Language Sciences Publishers.St Clair, R.N. (2006) The Sociology of Knowledge as a Model for Language Theory: Language

as a Social Science. New York: Edwin Mellen.









ten Have, P. (2007) Doing Conversation Analysis. London: SAGE.

White, R. (1985) ‘Thoughts on Social Relationships and Language in Hominid Evolution’,

Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 2(1): 95–115.

M A R V I N L A M is currently a research student in the Department of Chinese, Trans-

lation and Linguistics at City University of Hong Kong, and a visiting lecturer in the

Department of English, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His research interest is

to investigate, by the means of discourse analysis, the relation between the immediate

environment for language production and the lexical and grammatical structures of

the text produced in that environment. A D D R E S S : Department of Chinese, Translation

and Linguistics, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong. [email:

[email protected]]

J O N A T H A N W E B S T E R received his PhD in Linguistics from the State University of

New York at Buffalo. He is currently Head of Department of Chinese, Translation and

Linguistics, and Director of the Halliday Centre for Intelligent Applications of Language

Studies, City University of Hong Kong. He is also the Editor of the 10-volume Collected

Works of M.A.K. Halliday. His research interests include text linguistics and computational

linguistics. A D D R E S S : Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics, City University

of Hong Kong, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong. [email: [email protected]]

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