Implicatures and grammatical choice

There are three grammatical alternatives here and which is used depends on the writer's take on this event.

If the intention is to represent it as something that just happens to the refugees, then the structure to go for would be the passive with the agent deleted and the refugees as theme. This choice would then indicate an attitude favourable to the police.

if, on the other hand, the writer wanted to focus on what the police did to the refugees, then the preferred structure would be the active variant with the police thematized, thereby reflecting an unfavourable attitude to them.

Only when we look at textual continuity can we decide on whether or not the writer is conforming to the quantity maxim. 

How a particular part of a text is understood depend on its connection with what has gone before.

Cohesive devices we considered there follow a least effort principle. As such they serve an essentially co-operative purpose, for their function is to regulate information in relation to what is already given or known to make it easier to process. 

 the point is that we cannot tell from the simple fact of its occurrence in a text. The structure alone does not signal its own significance.

Conclusion

Developments in corpus linguistics over recent years have revealed other kinds of co-textual connections. What these are, and how far they contribute to a better informed and more critical understanding of discourse are matters taken up in Unit 8.

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