-ING suplementive clauses and discourse prominence in literary journalism

Abstract

This study explores the role of –ing supplementive clauses as markers of discourse prominence in literary journalism. These apparently minor linguistic units - “Using them as cups, they sip the filthy water” (Time,14 January 2013: 18) - stubbornly resist sentence-level syntactic and semantic description (Hengenveld 1997; Greenbaum and Quirk 2007; Huddleston and Pullum 2007: 207; Biber et al. 2010: 829). However, suprasentential studies within a cognitive-functional paradigm suggest that phenomena such as profiling (Verhaert 2006) and discourse prominence (Martínez 2012) may be crucial to their understanding. In the analysis, based on a collection of reportages from the American journal Time, these constructions actually seem to be frequently attached to the most prominent discourse entities, and to often combine with one another in the highlighting of sequences of logically connected events and situations. This indicates that they might intervene in referential and focus management in discourse.

Keywords

• -ing supplementive clauses
• foregrounding
• literary journalism
• narrative
• discourse management
• non-finite clauses.