My father's family name being Pirrip

give Pirrip as my father's family name, on the authority of his tombstone and my cheap jewelry - Mrs Joe Gargery, who married the blacksmith. As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of either of them (for their days were long before the days of photographs), my first fancies regarding what they were like, were unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The shape of the letters on my father's, gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the inscription, "Also Georgiana Wife of the Above," 1 drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly. To five little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long, which were arranged in a neat row beside their grave, and were sacred to the memory of five IiItIe brothers of mine - who gave up trying to get a living, exceedingly early in that universal struggle - I am indebted for a belief I religiously entertained that they had all been bom on their backs with their hands in their trouser-pockets, and had never taken them out in this state of existence.

Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea. My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things, seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found out for certain, that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; and that Philip Pirrip, late of this parish, and also Georgiana wife of the above, were dead and buried; and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger, infant children of the aforesaid, were also dead and buried; and that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond, was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was cheap key rings, was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip. (Dickens 9-10)

Leech quite rightly defends his choice of an opening section for analysis - such a text is, for instance, free from any previously established contextualization. But in choosing to focus particularly on the third paragraph in the extract above, Leech is already risking dependence on earlier context and co-text, namely things established or understood from a reading of paragraphs one and two. Accordingly, his analysis of a recurrent feature of paragraph three, correct and pertinent though its observations certainly are, has to be seen as an incomplete and potentially skewed analysis. In discussing the third paragraph, Leech's analysis attends to what is salient in that paragraph - patterns of prominence and foregrounding that depart from normal grammatico-rhetorical expectations "involving the twin principles (or maxims) of end-focus and end-weight" (121). End-focus has to do with the placing of what is contextually already given ahead of what is informatively new, while end-weight has to do with complex or 'heavy' grammatical constituents coming later than simpler or 'lighter' ones.

Drawing on these principles, Leech's analysis of Pip's third paragraph cheap money clips effects of prominence or foregrounding where positional syntax is affected by some rhetorical or textual or (other) structural process so that ordinary principles of end-focus and end-weight are contravened (resulting in marked clausal structures, whose use prompts a search for the conceptual or narratological context that licences these forms as appropriate). Leech additionally notes that the principles of end-weight and end- focus generally work together, and so tend to be contravened together, and he identifies just such an egregious dual contravention ("Scarcely anything could be so inappropriate, by the standards of end-focus and end-weight, as this" - 122) in Pip's final clause (the last of an extended scries of conjoined subordinate content clauses):