Discourse analysis

How are they different from the fronting which occurs in the examples in Activity l?

Why do you think speakers introduce people into conversations in this way in Activity l?

1. 
   This friend of ours, his son's just gone to university.
   
2. 
   Madge, one of the secretaries at work, her daughter got married last weekend.
   
3. 
   Pat was really upset; apparently, Brian, they suspect he's got heart disease.
   
4. 
   The chap in Cardiff I bought the car from, his brother was saying they're going to close down the school.
   
5. 
   His cousin in London, her boyfriend, his parents bought him a Mercedes for his birthday.
   

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  Heads help listeners to comprehend better by highlighting key information for them at the beginning of a sentence or clause.
  
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  Heads occur in spoken and in written English but are more common in speech. Fronting units can serve as a kind of frame for narratives, jokes and sayings in speech.
  
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  Fronting can involve objects (e.g. 'Berlin I really want to visit'); complements (e.g. 'Very strong they are'); wh-clauses (e.g. 'Who bought the car I don't know').
  
• 
  In speech the pre-posed unit is often a head. It normally consists of a non-finite structure, often followed by a pronoun (e.g. The teacher with glasses, he seems very nice').
  
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  Sometimes another topic or subject is created from the fronting unit (e.g. Madge, one of the secretaries at work, her daughter got married last week). Such forms do not normally occur in written English.
  

Activity5 Fronting in narratives. Work in groups underline the main pre-posed unit at the beginning of these narratives.
(a) and (c) are people telling stories, (b) is from a TV cookery programme and (d) is the opening to a joke.
Why does the speaker focus on the topic in this way?

1. 
   I didn't tell you, did I, that time on the way back from Hong Kong, well, we were just about to land in Bahrain when ...
   
2. 
   So, just the milk, the flour and two eggs and you mix the milk and flour together and then ...
   
3. 
   Now, listen, an old country proverb, if the plants don't grow on the same ground, find new ground.
   
4. 
   Right, a man in a pub with a parrot on his shoulder, he asks for a pint of beer and the parrot, he asks for a gin and tonic
   

• 
  Heads help a speaker (or writer) to show what or who is significant.
  

• 
  The amount of information fronted depends on how much the speaker thinks the listener(s) already knows.
  
• 
  The fronting process links new information to what is already known. For example, in the following:
  

'Carol's friend in Tokyo, her sister, her son is coming to stay With us next week.' the speaker and listener both know Carol, and know or have already spoken about the fact that she has a friend in Tokyo. Although the final element in the sequence, the son, is the relevant information (i.e. he will be arriving soon), putting her son at the start of the sentence would not be 'listener friendly':
'The son of the sister of the friend of Carol who lives in Tokyo is coming to stay next week.'
This is grammatically correct, but difficult to comprehend because the word son is so distant from the main verb.

• 
  In narrative, pre-posed units can highlight the main characters, or setting, or even give a summary of a key point.
  

Summary: Revise the ideas in this lesson by writing out at least three observations about heads based on your study of this lesson. One observation has been made for you. Cover the Observations and Summary until you have completed your own observations then read all the observations and the summary to see if you have remembered the main ideas

1. 
   Heads can help listeners to comprehend better by highlighting key information for them at the beginning of a sentence or utterance.
   
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3. 
   
4.