Consideraciones y Recomendaciones

In linguistics, motive has been broadly understood in terms of purpose (i.e. the functional aspect of motives that focuses on the situational aspect and omits psychological,

emotional and contextual (pragmatic) drives), especially in relation to the conveyance of cohesion and coherence relations in text (Halliday, 2014; Halliday & Hasan, 1976; J. Martin, 1984, 1992). Purpose clauses and circumstantials correspond to different discourse markers that build cohesion and coherence in a text. It is important to distinguish that these purpose markers correspond to one way of expressing causality. Causal relations work in conjunction with implications and can be categorized into seven main types: cause, reason, means, consequence, purpose, condition, and concession. Renkema (2004) summarizes their functions as follows:

A cause indicates a consequence that is outside the domain of volition. A reason always indicates that a volitional aspect is present. A means is deliberate utilization of a cause in order to achieve a volitional consequence. A purpose is a volitional consequence. A condition is a necessary or possible cause or reason for a possible consequence. A concession is a cause or a reason for which the expected consequence fails to occur, or the yielding of a point (p. 109).

The understanding of purpose remained untheorized in discourse analysis until van Leeuwen proposed a model to analyse the purpose of social actions within his Social Actor Approach to discourse analysis (2000, 2008). Van Leeuwen proposes a model to analyse the “construction of the purposes of social practices (including discursive practices)” (2008, p. 124, emphasis in original). For him, purpose is a key feature in determining what appropriate behaviour is in relation to social (and discursive) practices. Hence, there is an inherent power struggle in determining which actors are purposeful and which are not (p. 135).

Throughout his model, van Leeuwen highlights that purpose is an attribute people ascribe to action and, hence, discursively constructed, drawing a parallel with

legitimation. On this, van Leeuwen categorically rejects the idea that all purposes are legitimating. He draws on Habermas’ work to explain that purpose constructions can be legitimating only if they draw on higher moral values “in a frame of instrumentality”

42 (1976, p. 22, in van Leeuwen 2008, p. 125). From this distinction, he identifies two types of social actions that can account for purpose constructions: generalized and moralized actions. While generalized actions correspond to “micro-actions” that contribute to achieving a non-moralising action (non-legitimating), moralized actions correspond to actions that appeal to moral values intertextually or interdiscursively (legitimating). He exemplifies these actions as follows:

[7.1] His mother joins the queue to pay his dinner money to the teacher.

[7.3] the following strategies were employed to make the introduction to PE more smooth. (p. 125).

In the first one, van Leeuwen explains that queuing to pay the dinner money is not legitimating as it refers to a routine practice (generalized action). However, in the second example, drawing on abstract qualities such as smoothness helps legitimate the strategies undertaken by the teacher (e.g. discourse of efficiency). Moralized actions and qualities tend to be realized implicitly within a text: “they are treated as common sense and do not make explicit the religious and philosophical traditions from which they ultimately draw their values and on which their legitimating capacity ultimately rests” (van Leeuwen, 2008, p. 126). In order to be a purpose construction, these actions need to contain three elements that account for what van Leeuwen calls a Grammar of Purpose: These

elements are: a) a purposeful action, b) a purposeful link; and c) a purpose (2008, p. 126). He uses the following examples to illustrate three overarching purpose categories: goal- oriented; means-oriented; and effect-oriented constructions of purpose; respectively,

(1) Mothers take their tots to the clinic to check their health. (2) Mothers check their babies' health by taking them to the clinic.

(3) Mothers take their babies to the clinic, so the doctors can check their health (2008, p. 131).

These categories foreground the functionality of the actions described, mainly because of the nature of his data (i.e. first-day-at-school texts) which have greatly shaped van

Leeuwen’s overall conceptualization of purpose. In the first one, mothers are represented as having a clear goal (i.e. having their children’s health checked). In the second one,

43 agency is blurred as the emphasis is on the measures undertaken to check their children’s health. Finally, in the last example, agency is attributed to another actor who is more qualified than the mother. In this, the emphasis is not on the actions undertaken by

mothers, but the effect/result this action will have on somebody else (i.e. their children)4. Apart from distinguishing between generalized and moralized actions, van Leeuwen also distinguishes between two different kinds of purposes that are context dependent. On the one hand, he claims that there are purposes that stem from, and are determined by, tradition, aesthetic, or emotional factors. He claims that these purposes are not

discursively interesting to analyse as their impact is reduced to the private sphere (2008, p. 125). On the other hand, he foregrounds the importance of discursively analysing the purposes for doing new things and/or updating old ways of doing something as they have a greater impact in the public sphere (2008, p. 125). Notwithstanding, and similarly to the evolution of the understanding of motive in sociology, van Leeuwen’s conceptualization of purpose is restricted to the influence of instrumentality and institutional contexts, rationalizing social actions once again.

One question that needs to be asked, however, is whether purpose is the same as motive. What van Leeuwen proposes is a framework in which motive is restricted to functional aspects of social practices. In this vein, cognitive and emotional aspects that might determine why people react to situations in a particular way are not purposeful per se, yet they are still motivated. Thus, the linguistic conceptualization of motive in

Linguistics is not helpful in targeting the aspects I want to study in this thesis either. However, it does provide a methodological framework, which is further developed in section 5.1 below and Ch. 4; sections 4.1 and 4.2.