ACLARACIONES IMPORTANTES

The description and quantification of FEIs and their characteristics helps to define them in relation to the lexicon, but not in relation to discourse. An analysis of the worm turns in OHPC shows that it occurs 6 times, or once in every 3 million words, just above the significance threshold; that its clausal structure of fixed lexical subject and verb occurs in only 1% of predicate FEIs in the database; that it is metaphorical; and that while its lexical verbal process is material and denotes an event, its deep process is also relational as it

implies an attribute. A look at the expression in context, however, suggests other aspects. For example, a newspaper article concerns the predilection of fashion writers and others for wearing black, but observes evidence that brighter colours may come into vogue. The last two paragraphs read:

Rifat Ozbek, whose spring collection includes some brilliantly coloured Turkish jackets believes that the tide may be turning. 'I think that black will continue, but it won't be as strong. It'll lose that fashion victim thing that it's had for the last three years. We'll be mixing it with colour and not wearing it in the black- on-black, high techy sort of way any more.'

The signs are that the worm may indeed be on the turn . 1 Fashion people are at last expressing boredom with their dour wardrobes and seeing

something of the silly side of their obsession with black. I've even gone and bought myself a jacket in pillar box red, and after settling down from the hysteria at my own daring, I have to announce that it feels rather good. ( The

Compare two of the examples from OHPC:

The petit-bourgeoisie was an easy target for governments keen to raise a little more in taxes. Their common-sense ideas about life, good housekeeping and the rest were ignored by government after government, who regarded them as an over-productive milch-cow. There was a cultural bias

____________________

1_{This form of the FEI, the worm (is) on the turn, rather than the worm is}

turning, is itself a manipulation, showing cohesion with the tide may be turning in the previous paragraph, since on the turn typically collocates with tide, not worm. This further strengthens the cohesive ties in the text.

-215-

against them too: much of British theatre and cinema in the fifties and sixties was peopled by heroes and anti-heroes wrestling with the smallmindedness of the lower-middle class. It was predictable, if not predicted, that one day the worm would turn . Mrs Thatcher was a natural to lead the revolt of the petite-bourgeoisie. (OHPC:

non-fiction)

Unlike Americans, the British never had much of a grounding in rugged individualism. They went from forelock touching feudalism to the we'lllook-after-you welfare state without a decent period of aggressive citizenship in between. The worm has turned and demand now swells for a separate green ministry and a food

watchdog agency far from the clutches of the Ministry of Agriculture. (OHPC: journalism)

The FEI has an important evaluative component: in particular, it evaluates positively the action or behaviour of a person or group who has been

negatively evaluated, typically as weak, dull, passive, or submissive (in the first example, people unimaginative enough to wear black). The worm relexicalizes, incorporating evaluation, the group already discussed. The

predicator turn contrasts with the inaction or inertia previously mentioned, and refers forward to an action or situation that will be positively evaluated. The FEI functions as a discourse signal, acting as a bridge between statements of the status quo and of a new state of things, thus providing both anaphoric and cataphoric reference.

Studies of FEIs from pragmatic perspectives can of course be found. For example, those by Strässler ( 1982) and Lattey ( 1986) are rooted in the pragmatics of interaction; Sadock ( 1972, 1974), Morgan ( 1978), Gibbs ( 1986b) and others discuss idioms as speech acts and speech acts as idioms, because of their specialized language forms; Nattinger and DeCarrico ( 1992) discuss semifixed strings with respect to discoursal function; Aijmer ( 1996) discusses conversational routines in spoken interaction; Fraser ( 1996) discusses and categorizes pragmatic markers, including many examples of FEIs; and Fernando (forthcoming) will make a particular study of the discoursal

properties and behaviour of idioms. But in general, studies of FEIs focus more often on their formal properties, whereas pragmatics-based lexical and

collocational studies focus on the interactional properties of semi-fixed strings rather than FEIs. One of my principal aims in establishing a database was to inventorize the functions of FEIs in (corpus) text in order to explore those functions and establish correlations between function, form, and frequency. This chapter reports the findings.

8.1 A CLASSIFICATION OF TEXT FUNCTIONS

The text functions of FEIs may be classified according to the way in which they contribute to the content and structure of a text. The precise contribution is instantial and bound up with context, but it is nevertheless possible to generalize and to chart typical functions. In the model I developed for the database, I categorized FEIs according to five functions (see Table 8.1 ). I will discuss these functions in more detail in the following sections. Note that organizational FEIs in particular and some modalizing ones reflect the process of grammaticalization (compare Hopper and Closs Traugott 1993), whereby a string develops a specific grammatical or semi-grammatical function.

The functions of FEIs can be related to Halliday's model of the semantic components of language (for example, in Halliday 1978: