Wallace Chafe's light subject constraint in conversational discourse in the immediate mode of consciousness

Abstract

Wallace Chafe reports that 81 percent of grammatical subjects in a 10,000-word conversational sample were verbalized as given information and that virtually all of the 81 percent were pronouns. Of the remaining 19 percent of grammatical subjects, 16 percent were verbalized as accessible. The final 3 percent, while being verbalized as new information, were mentioned only once and never again. To explain these findings, he has proposed a “light subject constraint”, which entails that all subjects in conversational discourse are “either (a) not new, or (b) of trivial importance”. Chafe distinguishes two modes of consciousness: immediate and displaced. The immediate mode relates to perceiving, acting on, and evaluating what is in the environment of a conversation; the displaced mode focuses on remembering and imagining. The present research analyzed a 4,200-word conversation conducted virtually exclusively in the immediate mode of consciousness and found that Chafe's light subject constraint was even more manifest in it: Of 488 subjects, none was new; 79.5 percent were given (most of those pronouns), and 20.5 percent were accessible. These results confirm that Chafe's light subject constraint exists, that a strong version of it is manifest in conversational discourse in the immediate mode of consciousness, and that the immediate and the displaced modes of consciousness are indeed distinct.