Form and Function

1.
2 Form and Function
The famous British comedy duo, Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise, started
one' of their shows in 1973 with the following dialogue:
(1.1) Ernie: Tell 'em about the show.

Eric (to the audience): Have we got a show for you might folks! Have we got
a show for you! (aside to Ernie) Have we got a show for them?
This short dialogue raises a number of problems for anyone wishing to

do a linguistic analysis of it; not least is the question of why it is funny (the
audience laughed at Eric's question to Ernie). Most people would agree that it
is funny because Eric is playing with a grammatical structure that seems to be
ambiguous: 'Have we got a show for you!' has an inverted verb and subject.
Inversion of the verb and its subject happens only under restricted conditions
in English; the most typical circumstances in which this happens is when
questions are being asked, but it also happens in exclamations (e.g. 'Wasn't
my face red!'). So Eric's repeated grammatical form clearly under- goes a
change in how it is interpreted by the audience between its second and third
occurrence in the dialogue. Eric's inverted grammatical form in its first two
occurrences clearly has the function of an exclamation, telling the audience
something, not asking them anything, until the humorous moment when he
begms.to doubt whether they do have a show to offer, at which point he uses
the same grammatical form to ask Ernie a genuine qucstion. There seems,
then, to be a lack of one-to-one correspondence between grammatical form
and communicative function; the inverted form in itself does not inherently
carry an exclamatory or a questioning function. By the same token, in other
situations, an' uninverted declarative form (subject before verb), typically
associated with 'statements', might be heard as a question requiring an answer:
(1.2) A: You're leaving for London.
B: Yes, immediately.
So how we interpret grammatical forms depends on a number of factors, some
linguistic, some purely situational. One linguistic feature that may affect our
interpretation is the intonation. In the Eric and Ernie sketch, Eric's intonation
was as follows:
(1.3) Eric (to the audience): Have we got a SHOW for you tonight folks!
Have we got a SHOW for you! (aside to Ernie)
HAVE we got a show for them?
Two variables in Eric's delivery change. Firstly, the tone contour, i.e.
the direction of his pitch, whether it rises or falls, changes (his last utterance,
'have we got a show for them' ends -in a rising tone). Secondly, his voice
jumps to a higher pitch level (represented here by writing have above the
line). Is it this which makes his utterance a question? Not necessarily. Many
questions have only falling tones, as in the following:
(1.4) A: What was he wearing?

B: An anorak.
A: But was it his?
So the intonation does not inherently carry the function of question

either, any more than the inversion of auxiliary verb and subject did.
Grammatical forms and phonological forms examined separately are
unreliable indicators of function; when they are taken together, and looked at
in context, we can come to some decision about function. So decisions about
communicative function cannot solely be the domain of grammar or
phonology. Discourse analysis is not entirely separate from the study of
grammar and phonology, as we shall see in Chapters 2 and 4, but discourse
analysts are interested in a lot more than linguistic forms. Their concerns
include how it is that Eric and Ernie interpret each other's grammar
appropriately (Ernie commands Eric to tell the audience, Eric asks Ernie a
question, etc.), how it is that the dialogue between the two comics is coherent
and not gobbledygook, what Eric and Ernie's roles are in relation to one
another, and what sort of 'rules' or conventions they are following as they
converse with one another. Eric and Ernie's conversation is only one example
(and a rather crazy one at that) of spoken interaction; most of us in a typical
week will observe or take part in a wide range of different types of spoken
interaction: phone calls, buying things in shops, perhaps an interview for a
job, or with a doctor, or with an employer, talking formally at meetings or in
classrooms, informally in cafes or on buses, or intimately with our friends and
loved ones. These situations will have their own formulae and conventions
which we follow; they will have different ways of opening and closing the
encounter, different role relationships, different purposes and different
settings. Discourse analysis is interested in all these different factors and tries
to account for them in a rigorous fashion with a separate set of descriptive
labels from those used by conventional grammarians. The first fundamental
distinction we have noted is between language forms and discourse functions;
once we have made this distinction a lot of other conclusions can follow, and
the labels used to describe discourse need not clash at all with those we are all
used to in grammar. They will in fact complement and enrich each other.
Chapters 2,3 and 4 of this book will therefore be concerned with examining
the relationships between language forms (grammatical, lexical and
phonological ones), and discourse functions, for it is language forms, above
all, which are the raw material of language teaching, while the overall aim is
to enable learners to use language functionally.

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1.

2 Form and Function

(1.1) Ernie: Tell 'em about the show.

This short dialogue raises a number of problems for anyone wishing to

(1.4) A: What was he wearing?

So the intonation does not inherently carry the function of question

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