Exemplifying and enumerating

Exemplifying and enumerating concerns the two means of presenting lists in English. Exemplification is evident where items are used to provide examples of a category, and where no claim is made for comprehensiveness. Examples of exemplifying consist of a list of similar linguistic items (such as noun phrases), and their status as examples is made explicit by a phrase such as „for example‟, as in “Many of Showalter‟s candidates for places in the „feminist intellectual heritage‟ would be selected by all: Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman […] and Simone de Beauvoir, for example” (Times

01a). Enumerating involves thorough, itemised lists, which are presented as though they are

comprehensive (Jeffries, 2014, p. 414), for example in “the Church is intent on aligning itself against gays, feminists and North London Lefties” (Independent 07c). What is notable about this example of enumeration is that it does not make an explicit claim to be complete; rather, the lack of an exemplifying phrase such as „for instance‟ simply gives the impression of comprehensiveness.

Our tendency to view lists of three or more items such as “gays, feminists and North London lefties” as in some sense complete has been recognised by scholars such as Beard (2000), who notes that the three-part list “is embedded in certain cultures as giving a sense of unity and completeness” (p. 38). Jeffries (2007) notes that three-part lists are common in women‟s magazines, with their use providing a sense of “reassuring” (p. 125) completeness even though the three items may simply reiterate a single point, or have been plucked at random. In the present study,

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exemplifying and enumerating are of interest for the way they “create categories and category members” (Jeffries, 2007, p. 120) of which „feminist/s/ism‟ is a member. As Jeffries (2007, p. 120) notes, the way in which lists – whether they serve an exemplifying or enumerating function – draw a connection between members of a list (for example, types of people against home the Church is aligned) has a similar effect to the sense of equation achieved through relational intensive processes and apposition. This is of particular interest in the investigation of other adjectives with which „feminist‟ frequently occurs in lists, for example in the use of lists to help construct the idea of things and people that are either „new/young/modern‟ and „feminist‟ or „early/old/original‟ and „feminist‟ (see section 7.5).

3.1.6 Prioritising

Prioritising takes into account how the structure of a clause serves to foreground some information while backgrounding other information (Jeffries, 2014, p. 415). Jeffries (2010a, p. 87) notes that there is a range of ways in which information can be prioritised in English sentences, each of which has the effect of making some parts of a sentence more prominent than others. Jeffries (2010a, p. 80) focuses on three ways in which elements may be prioritised in English: through the arrangement of information structure, transformations in clause structure, and subordination. The present study bases its annotation and analysis of prioritising on these three forms of prioritising.

Analysis of the information structure of a sentence involves looking at a sentence and distinguishing which is the last compulsory element, which carries the focus of a sentence. For example, in the sentence “feminism was at a crossroads” (Times 04b), the adverbial is the last compulsory element, carrying the focus; if fronting is used to rearrange the sentence to produce “at a crossroads was feminism”, then “feminism” becomes the focus of the clause. The focus of the information structure can also be changed through clefting, whereby a certain element is placed in the focal position through an „it is…‟ or „it was… structure, placing the focus on the clausal complement, for example in “it is feminism which loses its power” (Guardian 02a).

Transformations in English relate to the underlying structure of a sentence. This underlying structure can be changed in a number of ways that change the focus of a sentence. Jeffries (2010a, pp. 84-85) observes two particular transformations that are of interest to the present study. Adjectival transformations, which involve the placing of an adjective within a noun phrase, are one of the aspects of naming discussed in section 3.1.1 above: the transformation from predicative to attributive position allows a text producer to place the focus on other parts of the clause, for example in the shift from “Feminists are angry [and] don‟t like men” (Guardian 07a) to „Angry feminists don‟t like men‟. Passive transformations involve a shift from an active to a passive sentence structure, which makes the subject of a sentence disposable (Jeffries, 2010, p. 84), for example in the change from “feminists have driven women into a corner” (Times 03a) to „women have been driven into a corner by feminists‟.

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The third means of changing the focus in an English sentence is subordination. This concerns the way in which something that is at a higher syntactic level receives a greater degree of focus than those at a lower level. As Jeffries (2010, p. 86) notes, placing something at a lower level makes it less open to questioning, as with the clause concerning feminism in “I was fascinated by that period because it was a society where feminism and lesbianism were starting to emerge” (Sun 03b). In this example, the clause in which “feminism and lesbianism” is the subject comes at a low level of the clause structure: there is a main clause (“I was fascinated by that period”) with an optional adverbial clause (“because it was a society”) in which the complement is postmodified by a relative clause with “feminism and lesbianism” as the subject.

The present study looks at how prioritising is used to assume certain information about „feminist/s/ism‟. There are overlaps with the textual-conceptual functions of naming and assuming and implying. For example, the analysis of „feminist‟ looks at how prioritising is used to assume the feminism of particular speakers through postmodifying relative clauses: in examples such as “Katha Pollitt – who is the author of several books on feminism […] – welcomes the book” (Independent 01c), the fact of an individual‟s feminism is assumed, and places the significance of what they say in a certain light (if someone who writes about feminism says this, then the welcome must be significant) (see section 5.4.1).