canon, case, cataphora, category, censure, chorography, circumstance, claim, clarity, class (linguistics), clause, code, cognition, coherence, collective, comedy, communication, community, competence, composition, comprehension, concatenation, concept, conception, conclusion, concrete, condition, conjunction, connotation, consequence, consistency, constituent, constraint, construct, construction, content, contention, context, convention, conversation, conviction, copulative, correct, counterargument, criteria, criticism, culture
Under construction
(Bathrick 1992: 336) 'What is at the heart of the canon controversy, beyond the concern with this or that curriculum, are fundamental differences about the role of culture in modern society and about the responsibilities of academic intellectuals as critics of society' .
(Hopper 1987: 141) 'The assumption, in other words, is that "grammar" (in the sense of the rules, constraints, and categories of the language attributed to the speaker) must be an object apart from the speaker and separated from the uses which the speaker may make of it. That kind of grammar is conventionally understood to consist of sets of rules which operate on fixed categories like nouns and verbs, specify the forms of additive categories like those of case, tense, transitivity, etc., and restrict the possible orders in which words can occur in a sentence. Discourse, the actual use of language, is held to be in some sense an "implementation" of these structures, or the way in which the abstract mental system possessed in its entirety by the speaker is realized in particular utterances' .
(Hopper 1987: 154-5) 'There is no question that "grammar" is an infuriatingly elusive notion, and that it is very easy to have a clear idea about what "grammar" is in the sense of being able to give an abstract definition of it, but quite another to apply that definition consistently in practice. This asymmetry suggests that the notion of grammar is intrinsically unstable and indeterminate, relative to the observer, to those involved in the speech situation, and to the particular set of phenomena being focused upon. It suggests also that we need to question the supposition of a mentally representated set of rules, and to set aside as well the idea in Fromkin's statement which I quoted earlier, that speakers possess an abstract linguistic system ready and waiting to be drawn upon -- "accessed"! -- in case they should ever need to speak' .
(Burke 1945: 77-8) 'Now, it seems undeniable, by the very nature of the case, that in definition, or systematic placement, one must see things "in terms of..." And implicit in the terms chosen, there are "circumferences" of varying scope. Motivationally, they involve such relationships as are revealed in the analysis of the scene-act and scene-agent ratios whereby the quality of the context in which a subject is placed will affect the quality of the subject placed in that context' .
(Fish 1982: 354-5) 'Strictly speaking, getting "back-to-the-text" is not a move one can perform, because the text one gets back to will be the text demanded by some other interpretation and that interpretation will be presiding over its production. This is not to say, however, that the "back-to-the-text" move is ineffectual, The fact that it is not something one can do in no way diminishes the effectiveness of claiming to do it. As a rhetorical ploy, the announcement that one is returning to the text will be powerful so long as the assumption that criticism is secondary to the text and must not be allowed to overwhelm it remains unchallenged.... A wholesale challenge would be impossible because there would be no terms in which it could be made; that is, in order to be wholesale, it would have to be made in terms wholly outside the institution; but if that were the case, it would be unintelligible because it is only within the institution that the facts of literary study -- texts, authors, periods, genres -- become available' .
(Booth 1974: 10-1) 'I choose, then, to talk about the whole thing as in part a rhetorical failure, but I should make clear that I don't mean by that simply what people usually mean by a "failure of communication". That phrase seems to suggest that if we could get our words right, all would be well. By using the traditional word rhetoric I want to suggest a whole philosophy of how men succeed or fail in discovering together, in discourse, new levels of truth (or at least agreement) that neither side suspected before.... Rhetoric has almost always had a bad press, and it more often than not still carries a sense of trickery or bombastic disguise for a weak case: making the word appear the better cause. But I am groping toward something far more important, though obviously far too grandiose to be achieved in four lectures: a view of rhetoric as the whole art of discovering and sharing warrantable assertion' .
(Foucault 1986b: 157-8)
'Western thought has seen to it that discourse be permitted as little room
as possible between thought and words. It would appear to have ensured
that to discourse should appear merely as a certain interjection between
speaking and thinking; that it should constitute thought, clad in its signs
and rendered visible by words or, conversely, that the structures of
language themselves should be brought into play, producing a certain
effect of meaning.
'Whether it is the philosophy of a founding
subject, a philosophy of originating experience or a philosophy of
universal mediation, discourse is really only an activity, of writing in the first
case, of reading in the second and exchange in the third. This exchange,
this writing, this reading never involve anything but signs. Discourse thus
nullifies itself, in reality, in placing itself at the disposal of the signifier'
.
(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 12) 'To substantiate the code model of verbal communication, it would have to be shown that every case of reference assignment can be dealt with by rules which automatically integrate properties of the context with semantic properties of the utterance. It would also have to be shown that disambiguation, the recovery of propositional attitudes, figurative interpretations and implicit import can be handled along similar lines' .
(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 49) 'We will call such behaviour -- behaviour which makes manifest an intention to make something manifest -- ostensive behaviour or simply ostension. Showing someone something is a case of ostension' .
(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 59-60) 'When the communicator's informative intention involves making a particular assumption strongly manifest, then that assumption is strongly communicated. When the communicator's intention is to marginally increase the manifestness of a wide range of assumptions, then each of them is weakly communicated. There is, of course, a continuum of cases in between. In the case of strong communication, the communicator can have fairly precise expectations about some of the thoughts that the audience will actually entertain. With weaker forms of communication, the communicator cam merely expect to stir the thoughts of the audience in a certain direction. Often, in human interaction, weak communication is found sufficient or even preferable to the stronger forms' .
(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 56) 'The distortions and misperceptions introduced by the explicit communication model are also found in the study of verbal communication itself. Some essential aspects of implicit verbal communication are overlooked. ... What is implicitly conveyed by an utterance is generally much vaguer than what is explicitly expressed, and that when the implicit import of an utterance is explicitly spelled out, it tends to be distorted by the elimination of this often intentional vagueness. The distortion is even greater in the case of metaphor and other figures of speech, whose poetic effects are generally destroyed by being explicitly spelled out' .
(M. Pratt 1987: 57) 'In both the linguistic and literary conceptions of subcommunity, then, one readily discerns nostalgia for the lost totality of the larger community. In the literary case, diversity of interpretation is often spontaneously, though by no means necessarily, perceived as a lack of consensus, a loss' .
(Ricoeur 1982: 147-54) 'We explain the text in terms of its internal relations, its structure. On the other hand, we can lift the suspense and fulfil the text in speech, restoring it to living communication; in this case, we interpret the text.... Reading is the dialectic of these two attitudes' .
(Bove 1990: 53) 'We can no longer easily ask such questions as, What is discourse" or, What does discourse mean? ... But why not? Because to ask them and to force an answer would be, in advance, hopelessly to prejudice the case against understanding the function of "discourse" either in its poststructuralist context or in its existence as an institutionalized system for the production of knowledge in regulated language' .
(Derrida 1986b: 100) Derrida says that for Saussure, 'the introduction of scientific exigencies and the taste for exactitude into ordinary phonetic writing must be avoided. In this case, rationality would bring death, desolation, and monstrousness. That is why common orthography must be kept away from the notations of the linguist and the multiplying of diacritical signs must be avoided' .
(Coates and Cameron 1988: 65) The perception of women and men as different subcultures is marked. Usually subculture perception involves the use of features that are 'odd' across cultural boundaries. Yet in the case of differences in language use because of sex, men and women often seem to behave in ways that both see as 'quite natural' .
Under construction
(Hopper 1987: 141) 'The assumption, in other words, is that "grammar" (in the sense of the rules, constraints, and categories of the language attributed to the speaker) must be an object apart from the speaker and separated from the uses which the speaker may make of it. That kind of grammar is conventionally understood to consist of sets of rules which operate on fixed categories like nouns and verbs, specify the forms of additive categories like those of case, tense, transitivity, etc., and restrict the possible orders in which words can occur in a sentence. Discourse, the actual use of language, is held to be in some sense an "implementation" of these structures, or the way in which the abstract mental system possessed in its entirety by the speaker is realized in particular utterances' .
(Burke 1945: 14) 'As for "act", any verb, no matter how specific or how general, that has connotations of consciousness or purpose falls under this category. If one happened to stumble over an obstruction, that would be not an act, but a mere motion. However, one could convert even this sheer accident into something of an act if, in the course of falling, one suddenly willed his fall (as a rebuke, for instance, to the negligence of the person who had left the obstruction in the way)' .
(Burke 1945: 52) 'Positivists who would discard the category of substance assert that the only meaningful propositions are those which are capable of scientific proof; and having thus outlawed the conveniences of a substantive rhetoric they next blandly concede that the scientific proof is not always possible actually, but must be possible "in principle" -which would leave them pretty much where they began, except that their doctrine won't allow them to admit it' .
(Fish 1982: 338-9) 'The fact of agreement, rather than being a proof of the stability of objects, is a testimony to the power of an interpretive community to constitute the objects upon which its members ... can then agree.... Disagreements are not settled by the facts, but are the means by which the facts are settled. Of course, no such settling is final, and in the (almost certain) event that the dispute is opened again, the category of the facts "as they really are" will be reconstituted in still another shape. Nowhere is this process more conveniently on display than in literary criticism, where everyone's claim is that his interpretation more perfectly accords with the facts, but where everyone's purpose is to persuade the rest of us to the version of the facts he espouses by persuading us to the interpretive principles in the light of which those facts will seem indisputable' .
(Fish 1982: 527) Speaking of the need to declare the more common interpretation of the reference of an utterance as its normal meaning, Fish says 'To admit as much is not to weaken my argument by reinstating the category of the normal, because the category as it appears in that argument is not transcendental but institutional; and while no institution is so universally in force and so perdurable that the meanings it enables will be normal for ever, some institutions or forms of life are so widely lived in that for a great many people the meanings the enable seem "naturally" available and it takes a special effort to see that they are the products of circumstances....The obviousness of the utterance's meaning is not a function of the values its words have in a linguistic system that is independent of context; rather, it is because the words are heard as already embedded in a context that they have a meaning that Hirsch can then cite as obvious.... it is impossible even to think of a sentence independently of a context, and when we are asked to consider a sentence for which no context has been specified, we will automatically hear it in the context in which it has been most often encountered' .
(Virtanen 1992: 296) 'Taken too far, an attempt to find discrete categories may result in every text requiring a category of its own' .
(Bathrick 1992: 322) 'The notion of "literature" today is not an ontological category but one whose historical and institutional evolution will continue to be a legitimizing and transforming dimension of the critical enterprise' .
(Enkvist 1981: 102) 'I have spoken about text strategies and must therefore digress to explain the background of this concept....It is practical as well as theoretically defensible to classify text models into four major categories. The first category of models is sentence-based. A sentence-based model uses ready-made sentences as its input and cannot therefore manipulate sentence boundaries. It can only explain how features within and between sentences, such as anaphoric and cataphoric references and theme-rheme-focus structures, link sentences to one another.... The second type of model is predication-based. Here the input consists of a set of predications of some kind together with their temporal, causal or spatial, and perhaps social, relations, and a strategy which controls their textualization and linearization into sentences through grouping, conjunction, and embedding' .
(Jehlen 1990: 265) 'In proposing gender as a basic problem and an essential category in cultural and historical analysis, feminists have recast the issue of women's relative identity as equally an issue for men, who, upon ceasing to be mankind, become, precisely, men. Thus gender has emerged as a problem that is always implicit in any work. It is a quality of the literary voice hitherto masked by the static of common assumptions. And as a critical category gender is an additional lens, or a way of lifting the curtain to an unseen recess of the self and of society. Simply put, the perspective of gender enhances the critical senses; let us try to see how' .
(A. Pratt 1981: 15-6) 'The authors' varied attitudes towards young women's social development are also reflected in the mix of genres within the broader category of the novel of initiation' .
Under construction
(Hopper 1987: 145) 'Looking at language this way involves a serious adjustment for the linguist, since we have developed the habit of seeing utterances in terms of a fixed framework of rules, and especially because we have been raised on the doctrine of the free generability of sentences, and the privileging of novelty over prior texts. Indeed, novelty is a prized virtue in our society altogether, ... and we have many ways, some more subtle than others, of censuring perceived repetitions of others' behavior and an enormous vocabulary dealing with repetition (copying, imitation). Yet when one examines actual specimens of speech from the formulaic point of view the effect is a striking one, perhaps even a memorable one, in that it is then extremely difficult to revert to the old rule-governed syntactic view of discourse' .
Under construction
(Ulmer 1994: 48) 'Here is a principle of chorography: do not choose between the different meanings of key terms, but compose by using all the meanings (write the paradigm)' .
Under construction
(Lanham 1976: 48-9) 'Begin with illusion. Reality will dependably follow. Contrive external circumstance. Begin by allegorizing your own behavior. It is the situation which convinces. Arrange the external coordinates carefully and to your liking. The reality you desire will be established by them. They are not superficial embellishments. They are everything' .
Under construction
(Fish 1982: 338-9) 'The fact of agreement, rather than being a proof of the stability of objects, is a testimony to the power of an interpretive community to constitute the objects upon which its members ... can then agree.... Disagreements are not settled by the facts, but are the means by which the facts are settled. Of course, no such settling is final, and in the (almost certain) event that the dispute is opened again, the category of the facts "as they really are" will be reconstituted in still another shape. Nowhere is this process more conveniently on display than in literary criticism, where everyone's claim is that his interpretation more perfectly accords with the facts, but where everyone's purpose is to persuade the rest of us to the version of the facts he espouses by persuading us to the interpretive principles in the light of which those facts will seem indisputable' .
(Fish 1982: 101-2) 'The trivialization of ordinary language is accomplished as soon as one excludes from its precincts matters of purpose, value, intention, obligation, and so on -- everything that can be characterized as human. What, then, is left to it? The answers to this question are various. For some, the defining constituent of ordinary language, or language, is its capacity to carry messages; for others, the structure of language is more or less equated with the structure of logic ... Still others hold instrumental views: language is used to refer either to objects in the real world or to ideas in the mind ... But whatever the definition, two things remain constant: (1) the content of language is an entity that can be specified independently of human values... and (2) a need is therefore created for another entity or system in the context of which human values can claim pride of place.... Once you've taken the human values out of the language, and yet designated what remains as the norm, the separated values become valueless, because they have been removed from the normative center' .
(Fish 1982: 350) 'The discovery of the "real point" is always what is claimed whenever a new interpretation is advanced, but the claim makes sense only in relation to a point (or points) that had previously been considered the real one. This means that the space in which a critic works has been marked out for him by his predecessors, even though he is obliged by the conventions of the institution to dislodge them.... it is only because something has already been said that he can now say something different' .
(Fish 1982: 353) 'The basic gesture, then, is to disavow interpretation in favor of simply presenting the text; but it is actually a gesture in which one set of interpretive principles is replaced by another that happens to claim for itself the virtue of not being an interpretation at all' .
(Booth 1974: 39-40) 'None of us in this room really believes that all of his own commitments are equally indefensible in the eyes of other men. Everyone, no matter how thoroughly committed to motivism he may claim to be, always exempts at least a part of himself and his values from the dogmas. For the motivist, for example, the commitment to motivism and the command to respect its conclusions as truth are found and supported "rationally", not simply by following blind drives. One "ought" to conduct one's mental life in their light, even though to say so is to assert a value. There seems something fishy about this one exemption, surely. What if the whole edifice were plainly, destructively, and tragically wrong- not wrong in the sense that there are no good reasons for respecting it on some occasions for some purposes, but in the snesen that it is totally misleading when applied indiscriminately to the whole of life' .
(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 49) 'Our claim is that all human beings automatically aim at the most efficient information processing possible' .
(Booth 1979: 104) 'What has annoyed many people besides Crane is not simply Burke's frequent pursuit of scatology or his free-wheeling delivery.... What is troublesome, surely, is precisely Burke's claim to make connections in what appears disparate -- the claim, for example, to connect bodily functions to surroundings hitherto seen as "poetic". The trouble, in short, is not that turds are flung at us but that they come labeled as truth. Burke seems to be claiming to know better that Keats himself something of what the poem "means", and the meaning he finds is antithetical not just to the poet's intentions but to any intentions Keats might conceivably have entertained' .
(Lanham 1976: 48) 'If seriousness can acknowledge Socrates as its saint, the rhetorical ideal may claim Ovid as its martyr. He suffered as an exile in Tomis, and in modern commentaries he has suffered yet more. He wrote too much and was too fond of what he wrote, showed sensibility but no principles, no sincerity, no heart. His universe was superficial, his religious sense undeveloped, his grasp of abstract thought shaky at best' .
(Culler 1992: 213) 'One of the continuing contentions of the sorts of theory styled "poststructuralist" -- possibly the only claim by which poststructuralism can be identified and distinguished -- has been that theories are caught up in and affected by the phenomena they claim to theorize' .
(Bathrick 1992: 324) 'Central to the strategic evolution of cultural criticism has been a programmatic effort to challenge what it sees as the claim to universalism at the heart ... of existing literary theory.... Although the emergence of cultural studies clearly results from a breakdown of one kind of theoretical generality, the proposed countermodel-- while accepting, and sometimes welcoming, the impossibility of theoretical unanimity-- has sought to establish common ground around expanded notions of literature, rhetoric, textuality, theory, culture, discursive practice, or interdisciplinarity. And it is at this point, of course, that the fireworks begin' .
(Coates and Cameron 1988: 29) 'Brown and Levinson ... define the notion of face as "the public self-image that every member wants to claim for himself". ... Negative face involves the desire for freedom of action and freedom from imposition, while positive face involves the desire for approval. Power ... means that in an interaction, the speaker can be characterised as relatively more or less powerful than the addressee' .
(Schor 1992: 263) 'Two chief axioms of feminist criticism state that all acts of language area grounded in the dense network of partial positions (e.g., sexual, class, racial) occupied by speaking subjects and that to claim to speak for all (women, feminists, literary critics) is to speak from a position of assumed mastery and false universality. This position is precisely the one we as feminists seek to interrogate and dismantle, even though, as many of us have discovered, assumed mastery and false universality constantly reassert themselves' .
(Fish 1982: 104) 'Here again we see the moral force of the norm of ordinary language, its inevitable legislation of the ideal of logical clarity, even in context which are defined in opposition to that ideal' .
(Lanham 1976: 20-1) 'Of all the unexamined premises rhetoric took over from serious philosophy, clarity has perplexed the most. Since Aristotle it has figured as a central goal for verbal expression. Theorists, without giving the matter special thought, seem to have considered clarity a property of the text. Yet clarity describes many styles and audiences. Used to describe a particular verbal configuration, clarity cannot mean anything at all....The most intellectual, conceptual, scientific virtue of style turns out to be entirely emotional. If everyone is happy, clarity has arrived.... Clarity is at least partly, and often predominantly, a temporal phenomenon, a problem of period. One century's brightness becomes murk for the next. Clarity no more permits objective standards than custom itself' .
(Lanham 1976: 22) 'The real deceiver is the plain stylist who pretends to put all his cards on the table. Clarity, then, is a cheat, an illusion. To rhetorical man at least, the world is not clear, it is made clear. The clear stylist does it with a conjuring trick. For this trick we return thanks. We are reassured. The world is made like our minds' .
Under construction
(Hopper 1987: 153) 'What I have wanted to stress here is the need to understand not only the formal process but the way in which that formal process emerges from a discourse context, in other words, is anchored in particular, concrete utterances. It is this "prior textuality" of the construction which explains why it has retained properties of a separate, external clause. What we see emerging, then, is a new strategy for permitting a lexical agent to be incorporated into a nuclear clause under certain contextual conditions, presumable involving differences of topic continuity' .
(Schiffrin 1994: 41-2) 'I began this chapter with a brief description of two different paradigms underlying our conception of language.... After comparing two different definitions of discourse stemming from these two paradigms -- discourse as language above the sentence or clause, ... discourse as language use ... -- I proposed a third definition that sits at the intersection of structure and function -- discourse as utterances ...Actual analyses of discourse reveal an interdependence between structure and function ... The distinction between structure and function also bears on two other issues that I discuss later. One is the relationship between text and context: structural definitions focus upon text and functional definitions upon context ... Another is the way linguists view communication: structural definitions take a narrower view of communication than do functional definitions, and place a higher priority on the role of the code (cf. text) in communication' .
(van Dijk 1977: 13) 'Another interesting by-product of this rule is that we now have a formal means to determine that some sentence (or expression) is thematic or topical. A sentence or clause the thematic if it expresses a macro-proposition of the discourse' .
Under construction
(Hopper 1987: 147) 'All discourse is in some sense specialist discourse, moulded to the speaker's personality (i.e. personal history), the situation, and the topic. It is precisely the point about Emergent Grammar that such "heteroglossic" aspects of language necessarily become integral parts of the linguistic description, and are not set aside as a separate agenda irrelevant to the linguistic code and its structure' .
(Schiffrin 1994: 41-2) 'I began this chapter with a brief description of two different paradigms underlying our conception of language.... After comparing two different definitions of discourse stemming from these two paradigms -- discourse as language above the sentence or clause, ... discourse as language use ... -- I proposed a third definition that sits at the intersection of structure and function -- discourse as utterances ...Actual analyses of discourse reveal an interdependence between structure and function ... The distinction between structure and function also bears on two other issues that I discuss later. One is the relationship between text and context: structural definitions focus upon text and functional definitions upon context ... Another is the way linguists view communication: structural definitions take a narrower view of communication than do functional definitions, and place a higher priority on the role of the code (cf. text) in communication' .
(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 3) 'The code model and the inferential model are not incompatible; they can be combined in various ways.... Both the code model and the inferential model can contribute to the study of verbal communication. However, it is usually assumed that one of the two models must provide the right overall framework for the study of communication in general.... Against these reductionist views, we maintain that communication can be achieved in ways which are as different from one another as walking is from plane flight. In particular, communication can be achieved by coding and decoding messages, and it can be achieved by providing evidence for an intended inference. The code model and the inferential model are each adequate to a different mode of communication; hence upgrading either to the status of a general theory of communication is a mistake....We will propose what we hope is an improved inferential model. However, we do not regard this model as the basis for a general theory of communication' .
(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 9) 'It is true that a language is a code which pairs phonetic and semantic representations of sentences and the thoughts actually communicated by utterances. This gap is filled not by more coding, but by inference. Moreover, there is an alternative to the code model of communication. Communication has been described as a process of inferential recognition of the communicator's intentions. We will try to show how this description can be improved and made explanatory' .
(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 21) 'We see the mutual-knowledge hypothesis as untenable. We conclude, therefore, that the code theory must be wrong, and that we had better worry about possible alternatives' .
(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 12) 'To substantiate the code model of verbal communication, it would have to be shown that every case of reference assignment can be dealt with by rules which automatically integrate properties of the context with semantic properties of the utterance. It would also have to be shown that disambiguation, the recovery of propositional attitudes, figurative interpretations and implicit import can be handled along similar lines' .
(Lanham 1993: xi) 'One of the computer screen's routine marvels is manipulation of scale, and such manipulation stands at the center of postmodern art. As we shall see in chapter 2, wherever you touch twentieth-century visual art and architecture, it seems both to foreshadow electronic expression and to provide and aesthetic ready-made for it. as I point out in chapter 1, the composition, notation, and performance of music have been transformed by digital expression. Because word, image, and sound are expressed in a common digital code, the arts take on a new and radical convertibility that threatens both their present compartmentalization and its academic departmental embodiment. So, too, poststructuralist literary theory, which has precipitated the current streetfight between Left and Right, turns out to be just such another proleptic aesthetic; poststructuralism and the common digital code seem part of the same event. As I suggest here, the whole Aristotelian basis of literary criticism is undermined by electronic expression, and so pre structuralist literary theory is similarly transformed' .
(Derrida 1986c: 126) 'We will designate as differance the movement according to which language, or any code, any system of referral in general, is constituted "historically" as a weave of differences' .
(Leitch [n.d.]: 151) 'When it studies discourse, archeology does not seek a hidden or overt "intention," "will," or "meaning" in or behind the discourse ... Its object of analysis is not the author, the linguistic code, the reader, or the individual text. but the limited set of texts constituting the regulated discourse of a discipline' .
Under construction
(Spellmeyer 1993: 22) According to Spellmeyer, constructionists would have us believe: 'Each community has its own distinctive mode of cognition, its own characteristic "flow chart" for problem solving. Psychologists do not think first and then practice psychology: strictly speaking, the discipline of psychology preordains the nature of thought for its practitioners. Whatever we perceive, then, is a construct, something constructed by communities, and whatever we have learned derives not from experience but from a process of initiation into those rituals of community life that create both selves and worlds' .
(Enkvist 1981: 104) 'If we wish to relate instances of experiential iconicism in text generation or in text interpretation and comprehension to our general knowledge of the world (as we must), a cognitive model becomes necessary. And we must cite principles of human interaction if we can to detect the motives for the preference of one text strategy to another. In brief, we shall need the whole gamut of models if we wish to explain why somebody opts for an iconic arrangement of his text and how he carries out his iconic strategy through text patterning and, ultimately, syntax. This is simply another way of saying that experiential iconicism can be discussed in terms of examples brought from various levels: syntax, text patterning, cognition, interaction' .
(Enkvist 1981: 110) 'Salience involves basic strategies of cognition which are reflected in language rather than such text-strategic alternatives whose task it is to illustrate in iconic terms the structure of the world' .
Under construction
(Foucault 1986b: 153) 'I believe there is another principle of rarefaction, complementary to the first: the author. Not, of course, the author in the sense of the individual who delivered the speech or wrote the text in question, but the author as the unifying principle in a particular group of writings or statements, lying at the origins of their significance, as the seat of their coherence' .
(Foucault 1986b: 153) 'The author is he who implants, into the troublesome language of fiction, its unities, its coherence, its links with reality' .
(Booth 1979: 104) 'I must emphasize how strongly the surface of Burke's writing seems to violate two of Crane's criteria for good criticism, even though to do so may initially seem like the experience of crawling backward into a world of exuberant dancers. He often seems blithely indifferent to Crane's insistence on coherence and common-sensical correspondence with what is "really there". His paths are seldom straight and clear; his allusions are often obscure; his arguments often seem to depend on puns or questionable etymologies or on conjectures so wild that he does not even try to defend them. Whatever the accepted canons are for organizing a proof seem as often violated as honored. His notorious translation of Keats's last line into "Body is turd, turd body", is only one of thousands of what have seemed debasements -- or, at best, irrelevant private translations -- of what "everyone knows" about the works he discusses' .
(van Dijk 1977: 7) 'The propositions implied by the discourse need not be expressed. Some propositions may remain implicit, even though they are essential in the establishment of linear coherence in texts' .
(van Dijk 1977: 6) 'Discourse coherence is not primarily a matter of meaning, but of reference' .
Under construction
(Burke 1945: 38) Such histories can be imagined in an endless variety of details. What we are suggesting here is that they all embody a grammatical form in accordance with which we should not expect a dualism of motives to be automatically dissolved, as with those apologists of science who believe that in a scientific world ethics become unnecessary. However, to consider these possibilities further, we should move into the areas of Symbolic, involving modes of transubstantiation, rituals of rebirth, whereby the individual identifies himself in terms of the collective motive (an identification by which he both is and is not one with that with which and by which he is identified). At present it is enough to note in a general way how the paradox of the absolute figures grammatically in the dialectic, making for a transcending of none term by its other, and for the reversed ambiguous derivation of the term from its other as ancestral principle' .
(Burke 1945: 37) 'In theological and metaphysical works, we can recognize the paradox of the absolute readily enough. Often, in fact, it is explicitly discussed. But in historicist writings it more easily goes unnoticed. Yet the paradox may be implicit in any term for a collective motivation, such as a concept of class, nation, the "general will," and the like. Technically, it becomes a "pure" motive when matched against some individual locus of motivation. And it may thus be the negation of an individual motive.... What we are here considering formally, as a paradox of substance, can be illustrated quickly enough by example. A soldier may be nationally motivated to kill the enemies of his country, whereas individually he is motivated by a horror of killing his own enemies. Or conversely, as a patriot he may act by the motive of sacrifice in behalf of his country, but as an individual he may want to profit' .
(Fish 1982: 109) 'All aesthetics, then, are local and conventional rather than universal, reflecting a collective decision as to what will count as literature, a decision that will be in force only so long as a community of readers or believers ... continues to abide by it' .
(Ricoeur 1982: 147) 'Writing preserves discourse and makes it an archive available for individual and collective memory' .
(Jameson 1981: 115) 'An ideologeme, that is, a historically determinate conceptual or semic complex which can project itself variously in the form of a "value system" or "philosophical concept," or in the form of a protonarrative, a private of collective narrative fantasy' .
(Jameson 1981: 76) 'Our object of study will prove to be the ideologeme, that is, the smallest intelligible unit of the essentially antagonistic collective discourses of social classes' .
Under construction
(Burke 1945: xvii) 'In our original plans for this project, we had no notion of writing a "Grammar" at all. We began with a theory of comedy, applies to a treatise on human relations. Feeling that competitive ambition is a drastically over-developed motive in the modern world, we thought this motive might be transcended if men devoted themselves not so much to "excoriating" it as to "appreciating" it. Accordingly, we began taking notes on the foibles and antics of what we tended to think of as "the Human Barnyard"' .
(Frye 1957: 207) 'It is a commonplace of criticism that comedy tends to deal with characters in a social group, whereas tragedy is more concentrated on a single individual' .
(Frye 1957: 207) 'Like comedy, tragedy is best and most easily studied in drama, but it is not confined to drama, nor to actions that end in disaster' .
(Frye 1957: 198-202) 'Romance, like comedy, has six isolatable phases': 1) '...the myth of the birth of the hero'; 2) '...the innocent youth of the hero'; 3) '...the normal quest theme'; 4) '...the maintaining of the integrity of the innocent world against the assault of experience'; 5) '...a reflective, idyllic view of experience from above'; and 6) '...the end of a movement from active to contemplative adventure' .
(Frye 1957: 192) 'The four mythoi that we are dealing with, comedy, romance, tragedy, and irony, may now be seen as four aspects of a central unifying myth....conflict is the basis or archetypal theme of romance ...catastrophe ... is the archetypal theme of tragedy....the sense that heroism and effective action are absent, disorganized or foredoomed to defeat, and that confusion and anarchy reign over the world, is the archetypal theme of irony and satire....recognition of a newborn society rising in triumph around a still somewhat mysterious hero and his bride, is the archetypal theme of comedy' .
Under construction
(Gibbs 1987: 569) 'My main contention, then, is that Sperber and Wilson are "sneaking" mutual knowledge in the backdoor of their theory of conversational inference by appealing to the idea of mutual cognitive environments which can be manifest but not known. At a psychological level, it appears that Sperber and Wilson have adopted a framework for describing verbal communication which crucially depends on the very concept that they wish to abandon' .
(Gibbs 1987: 581) 'Although Sperber and Wilson (1986) comment that it is easy enough to modify [their] definition [of communication] ... and make intentionality a defining feature of communication, it is not at all clear how this modification can be made without acknowledging the specific role mutual knowledge has on the determination of ... inferences' .
(Fish 1982: 531) 'The point of my analysis has been to show that while "Is there a text in this class?" does not have a determinate meaning, a meaning that survives the sea change of situations, in any situation we might imagine the meaning of the utterance is either perfectly clear or capable, in the course of time, of being clarified. What is it that makes this possible, if it is not the "possibilities and norms" already encoded in the language? How does communication ever occur if not by reference to a public and stable norm? The answer, implicit in everything I have already said, is that communication occurs within situations and that to be in a situation is already to be in possession of (or to be possessed by) a structure of assumptions, of practices understood to be relevant in relation to purposes and goals that are already in place; and it is within the assumption of these purposes and goals that any utterance is immediately heard.... What I have been arguing is that meanings come already calculated, not because of norms embedded in the language but because language is always perceived, from the very first, within a structure of norms. That structure, however, is not abstract and independent but social; and there fore it is not a single structure with a privileged relationship to the process of communication as it occurs in any situation but a structure that changes when one situation, with its assumed background of practices, purposes, and goals, has given way to another' .
(Booth 1974: 10-1) 'I choose, then, to talk about the whole thing as in part a rhetorical failure, but I should make clear that I don't mean by that simply what people usually mean by a "failure of communication". That phrase seems to suggest that if we could get our words right, all would be well. By using the traditional word rhetoric I want to suggest a whole philosophy of how men succeed or fail in discovering together, in discourse, new levels of truth (or at least agreement) that neither side suspected before.... Rhetoric has almost always had a bad press, and it more often than not still carries a sense of trickery or bombastic disguise for a weak case: making the word appear the better cause. But I am groping toward something far more important, though obviously far too grandiose to be achieved in four lectures: a view of rhetoric as the whole art of discovering and sharing warrantable assertion' .
(Schiffrin 1994: 15) 'To enhance the comparative value of my descriptions of the approaches, I have decided to orient my sample analysis around two phenomena: (a) questions (and the sequences they initiated) to be analyzed in terms of speech act theory, interactional sociolinguistics, and ethnography of communication; (b) referring expressions (in referring sequences) to be analyzed in terms of pragmatics, conversation analysis, and variation analysis. We see not only that the different approaches provide different answers to some of the same questions, but that they highlight different facets of both questions and referring expressions' .
(Schiffrin 1994: 8) '"Communication" cannot be assumed to be constant across cultures. Cultural conceptions of communication are deeply intertwined with conceptions of person, cultural values, and world knowledge -- such that instances of communication behavior are never free of the cultural belief and action systems in which they occur' .
(Schiffrin 1994: 18) 'All approaches take a stand (albeit often implicitly) on the relationship between structure and function, text and context, and discourse and communication, simply because these conceptual distinctions are all variants of the dichotomy between what is considered part of language and what is not' .
(Schiffrin 1994: 8) In the ethnography of communication approach, Dell Hymes proposed 'that scholarship focus on communicative competence: the tacit social, psychological, cultural, and linguistic knowledge governing appropriate use of language (including, but not limited to, grammar). Communicative competence includes knowledge of how to engage in everyday conversation as well as other culturally constructed speech events' .
(Schiffrin 1994: 41-2) 'I began this chapter with a brief description of two different paradigms underlying our conception of language.... After comparing two different definitions of discourse stemming from these two paradigms -- discourse as language above the sentence or clause, ... discourse as language use ... -- I proposed a third definition that sits at the intersection of structure and function -- discourse as utterances ...Actual analyses of discourse reveal an interdependence between structure and function ... The distinction between structure and function also bears on two other issues that I discuss later. One is the relationship between text and context: structural definitions focus upon text and functional definitions upon context ... Another is the way linguists view communication: structural definitions take a narrower view of communication than do functional definitions, and place a higher priority on the role of the code (cf. text) in communication' .
(Schiffrin 1994: 5) 'The goals of this book are to describe and compare several different approaches to the linguistic analysis of discourse: speech act theory, interactional sociolinguistics, ethnography of communication, pragmatics, conversation analysis, and variation analysis. My aim is not to reduce the vastness of discourse analysis: I believe that at relatively early stages of an endeavor, reduction just for the sake of simplification can too drastically limit the range of interesting questions that can and should be asked' .
(Schiffrin 1994: 19) 'As I will make clear in chapter 12, the order of chapters, and thus the type of inquiry for each area of empirical focus, is not random: they reflect a transition ... from a focus upon the individual (whether the actions, knowledge, or intentions of a self) to a focus upon interaction (how self and other together construct what is said, meant, and done) to a focus upon the semiotic systems shared and used by self and other during their interaction (language, society, and culture). An ability to build such transitions ... into one's theory, and to allow and account for them in one's practice, is a crucial part of a discourse analysis that seeks to integrate what speech act theory, interactional sociolinguistics, ethnography of communication, pragmatics, conversation analysis, and variation analysis can offer, both individually and together, to the analysis of utterances' .
(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 3) 'The code model and the inferential model are not incompatible; they can be combined in various ways.... Both the code model and the inferential model can contribute to the study of verbal communication. However, it is usually assumed that one of the two models must provide the right overall framework for the study of communication in general.... Against these reductionist views, we maintain that communication can be achieved in ways which are as different from one another as walking is from plane flight. In particular, communication can be achieved by coding and decoding messages, and it can be achieved by providing evidence for an intended inference. The code model and the inferential model are each adequate to a different mode of communication; hence upgrading either to the status of a general theory of communication is a mistake....We will propose what we hope is an improved inferential model. However, we do not regard this model as the basis for a general theory of communication' .
(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 9) 'It is true that a language is a code which pairs phonetic and semantic representations of sentences and the thoughts actually communicated by utterances. This gap is filled not by more coding, but by inference. Moreover, there is an alternative to the code model of communication. Communication has been described as a process of inferential recognition of the communicator's intentions. We will try to show how this description can be improved and made explanatory' .
(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 54) 'Ostensive-inferential communication consists in making manifest to an audience one's intention to make manifest a basic layer of information. It can therefore be described in terms of an informative and a communicative intention' .
(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 55) 'Treating linguistic communication as the model of communication in general has led to theoretical distortions and misperceptions of the data' .
(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 21) Sperber and Wilson summarize a basic inference model of communication to be that a speaker means something by an utterance when she intends (1) that her utterance will produce a certain response in the audience, (2) that the audience will recognize her intention, and (3) that the audience's recognition of her intention will function as at least part of the reason for the response .
(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 26) 'Purely inferential communication exists' .
(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 38) 'The communication process gives rise to shared information' .
(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 12) 'To substantiate the code model of verbal communication, it would have to be shown that every case of reference assignment can be dealt with by rules which automatically integrate properties of the context with semantic properties of the utterance. It would also have to be shown that disambiguation, the recovery of propositional attitudes, figurative interpretations and implicit import can be handled along similar lines' .
(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 45) 'We assume, then, that communication is governed by a less-than-perfect heuristic. On this approach, failures in communication are to be expected: what is mysterious and requires explanation is not failure but success' .
(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 57) 'No one has any clear idea how inference might operate over non-propositional objects: say, over images, impressions or emotions.... We see it as a major challenge for any account of human communication to give a precise description and explanation of its vaguer effects. Distinguishing meaning from communication, accepting that something can be communicated without being strictly speaking meant by the communicator or the communicator's behaviour, is a first essential step' .
(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 60) 'One of the advantages of verbal communication is that it gives rise to the strongest possible form of communication; it enables the hearer to pin down to speaker's intentions about the explicit content of her utterance to a single strongly manifest candidate, with no alternative worth considering at all' .
(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 61) 'Mere informing alters the cognitive environment of the audience. Communication alters the mutual cognitive environment of the audience and communicator. Mutual manifestness may be of little cognitive importance, but it is of crucial social importance' .
(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 59-60) 'When the communicator's informative intention involves making a particular assumption strongly manifest, then that assumption is strongly communicated. When the communicator's intention is to marginally increase the manifestness of a wide range of assumptions, then each of them is weakly communicated. There is, of course, a continuum of cases in between. In the case of strong communication, the communicator can have fairly precise expectations about some of the thoughts that the audience will actually entertain. With weaker forms of communication, the communicator cam merely expect to stir the thoughts of the audience in a certain direction. Often, in human interaction, weak communication is found sufficient or even preferable to the stronger forms' .
(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 50) 'The main thesis of this book is that an act of ostension carries a guarantee of relevance, and that this fact -- which we will call the principle of relevance -- makes manifest the intention behind the ostension. We believe that it is this principle of relevance that is needed to make the inferential model of communication explanatory' .
(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 56) 'The distortions and misperceptions introduced by the explicit communication model are also found in the study of verbal communication itself. Some essential aspects of implicit verbal communication are overlooked. ... What is implicitly conveyed by an utterance is generally much vaguer than what is explicitly expressed, and that when the implicit import of an utterance is explicitly spelled out, it tends to be distorted by the elimination of this often intentional vagueness. The distortion is even greater in the case of metaphor and other figures of speech, whose poetic effects are generally destroyed by being explicitly spelled out' .
(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 27) 'We maintain, then, that there are at least two different modes of communication: the coding-decoding mode and the inferential mode' .
(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 63) 'We began this chapter by asking how human beings communicate with one another, Our answer is that they use two quite different modes of communication: coded communication and ostensive-inferential communication. This is how language is used in verbal communication' .
(Reddy 1979: 285) 'I am going to present evidence that the stories English speakers tell about communication are largely determined by semantic structures of the language itself' .
(Ricoeur 1982: 146) 'The book divides the act of writing and the act of reading into two sides, between which there is no communication' .
(Ricoeur 1982: 147-54) 'We explain the text in terms of its internal relations, its structure. On the other hand, we can lift the suspense and fulfil the text in speech, restoring it to living communication; in this case, we interpret the text.... Reading is the dialectic of these two attitudes' .
(van Dijk 1977: 27-30) 'We will briefly state a number of hypotheses regarding ... processing implications....It will be assumed that in discourse comprehension fragments of the morpho-phonological and syntactic surface structure of the sentence sequence are stored only in short-term memory to construct a proposition sequence.... It is assumed that beyond a limited number of propositions, the proposition sequence of the text base is not fully accessible for recall.... Given a sequence of assigned propositions, the reader will make hypotheses about the relevant macro-structure proposition covering the sequence by applying the macro-rules to the sequence.... Macro-structure formation takes place in the course of reading the text, not a posteriori. The same holds true for the assignment of conventional categories to the macro-propositions. Both the assignment of macro-structures and of conventional super-structures is recursive. As soon as a first level becomes too complex. a second level is formed, and so forth. The macro-structure is available when it is necessary to explicitly summarize a text.... The macro-structure is also the basis for recall of the discourse immediately after presentation. The macro-structure is directly available in episodic memory. It then yields, by inverse macro-rule application and recognition, access to lower-level macro-structures and possibly to some text base propositions if the discourse was not too long.... Macro-structures may also constitute "plans for speaking".... Macro-structure formation is a highly complex process, so it can hardly be expected that effective comprehension exactly follows the rules formulated above: expedient strategies are used in the global interpretation of discourse.... Finally, there are strategies based on contextual cues and knowledge of the general communication situation. We may know the speaker so well that we may easily predict the main themes of his discourse, even with very scanty information.... Familiarity with the relevant macro-structures will certainly facilitate the task of global comprehension' .
(Winograd 1977: 63)
'While the field is not yet at a stage where it is possible to lay out a precise
unifying theory, this paper attempts to provide a beginning framework for
studying discourse.... Its four sections attempt to:
1. Delimit the
range of problems covered by the term "discourse".
2. Characterize
the basic structure of natural language based on a notion of
communication.
3. Propose a general approach to formalisms for
describing the phenomena and building theories about them.
4. Lay
out an outline of the different schemas involved in generating and
comprehending language'
.
(Winograd 1977: 76) 'Each speaker of a language possesses a large and rather diverse set of schemas dealing with the process of natural language communication' .
(Winograd 1977: 66) It is obvious that Winograd assumes the basic conduit model of communication when he says that there is a 'need to transmit meaning through a sequential medium'. Apparently the arrangement is not a particularly happy one for 'the message is forced into a linearized channel in order to be conveyed by speaking' .
(Winograd 1977: 75)
Winograd speaks of 'the schemas that form part of the cognitive structure
of speaker and hearer' saying that 'the schemas can be grouped into
three major areas:
1. the objects, events, and abstractions being
discussed
2. the communication situation
3. the standard
patterns of discourse in the language'
.
(Bakhtin 1986: 667) 'A common unitary language is a system of linguistic norms. But these norms do not constitute an abstract imperative; they are rather the generative forces of linguistic life, forces that struggle to overcome the heteroglossia of language, forces that unite and centralize verbal-ideological thought... What we have in mind here is not an abstract linguistic minimum of a common language, in the sense of a system of elementary forms (linguistic symbols) guaranteeing a minimum level of comprehension in practical communication. We are taking language not as a system of abstract grammatical categories, but rather language conceived as ideologically saturated, language as a world view, even as a concrete opinion, insuring a maximum of mutual understanding in all spheres of ideological life. Thus a unitary language gives expression to forces working toward concrete verbal and ideological unification and centralization, which develop in vital connection with the processes of sociopolitical and cultural centralization' .
(Harris 1990: 22) 'The basic contention of the present paper is that the fundamental error in contemporary linguistics is still the fundamental error of Saussure's original thesis. It involves a crude process of abstraction by which certain phenomena are segregated from the continuum of human communication, and these segregated phenomena are then, rather capriciously, set up for academic purposes as constituting the linguistic part of communication' .
Under construction
(Fish 1982: 338-9) 'The fact of agreement, rather than being a proof of the stability of objects, is a testimony to the power of an interpretive community to constitute the objects upon which its members ... can then agree.... Disagreements are not settled by the facts, but are the means by which the facts are settled. Of course, no such settling is final, and in the (almost certain) event that the dispute is opened again, the category of the facts "as they really are" will be reconstituted in still another shape. Nowhere is this process more conveniently on display than in literary criticism, where everyone's claim is that his interpretation more perfectly accords with the facts, but where everyone's purpose is to persuade the rest of us to the version of the facts he espouses by persuading us to the interpretive principles in the light of which those facts will seem indisputable' .
(Fish 1982: 109) 'All aesthetics, then, are local and conventional rather than universal, reflecting a collective decision as to what will count as literature, a decision that will be in force only so long as a community of readers or believers ... continues to abide by it' .
(Schiffrin 1994: 10-1) 'A variationist approach to discourse ... stems from studies of linguistic variation and change....Fundamental assumptions of variationist studies are that linguistic variation ... is patterned both socially and linguistically, and that such patterns can be discovered only through systematic investigation of a speech community' .
(Spellmeyer 1993: 22) According to Spellmeyer, constructionists would have us believe: 'Each community has its own distinctive mode of cognition, its own characteristic "flow chart" for problem solving. Psychologists do not think first and then practice psychology: strictly speaking, the discipline of psychology preordains the nature of thought for its practitioners. Whatever we perceive, then, is a construct, something constructed by communities, and whatever we have learned derives not from experience but from a process of initiation into those rituals of community life that create both selves and worlds' .
(Spellmeyer 1993: 23) However, Spellmeyer posits: 'Were it not for differences between individuals, and for miscarriages in practical application, knowledge might indeed be communal and self-referential just as the constructionists believe. But regardless of how carefully we draw the boundaries of a community, regardless of how like-minded its members may seem, these members will sometimes find themselves at odds over fundamental issues.... The history of any discipline is a history of just such discordant moments because knowledge can never entirely escape its historical and institutional blindnesses, and our own everyday practice takes those blindnesses into account' .
(M. Pratt 1987: 56) 'What the "subcommunity" approach does not do, however, is see the dominated and dominant in their relations with each other -- this is the limitation imposed by the imaginings of community' .
(M. Pratt 1987: 55) Referring to the dedication of the Statue of Liberty with dignitaries on the island surrounded by suffragists in boats protesting, Pratt says, 'To include both the island full of dignitaries and the boatload of suffragists in the same picture is to introduce a deep cleavage indeed into the imagined community' .
(M. Pratt 1987: 57) 'In both the linguistic and literary conceptions of subcommunity, then, one readily discerns nostalgia for the lost totality of the larger community. In the literary case, diversity of interpretation is often spontaneously, though by no means necessarily, perceived as a lack of consensus, a loss' .
(Coates and Cameron 1988: 59) Thomas studied speakers of a Welsh community where [E:] in certain words is beginning to be lost in favor of a shift to [A:]. She observed that women who use the feature more tend to attend a chapel on the end of town where the dialect is more prevalent. Though most of those who retain this feature in their language also live at that end of the community, there are some who do not live in the east end of the town, but attend church there. 'To summarize, use of the [E:] variant is confined to older women, whose social networks are more community-based that those of their male contemporaries and younger villagers of both sexes' .
(Coates and Cameron 1988: 23) Coates and Cameron report that Nichols has found a correlation between occupations of speakers and whether they use Gullah or 'standard English'. After describing that older black women and men of all ages work in jobs which allow them to speak Gullah, while job opportunities for younger women have opened up which require them to speak standard English, 'Nichols claims that in the South Carolina Black community, labour market forces are the single most important factor influencing linguistic choices' .
(Coates and Cameron 1988: 24) Coates and Cameron pose the question to us: 'Given differing vernacular norms for the two sexes, what happens to the definition of the speech community as a group with shared linguistic norms'? .
(Jameson 1981: 74) 'A social hermeneutic will ... wish to keep faith with its medieval precursor in just this respect, and must necessarily restore a perspective in which the imagery of libidinal revolution and of bodily transfiguration once again becomes a figure for the perfected community' .
Under construction
(Hopper 1987: 154) 'It will be seen that "grammar" begins life on page 2 [of Radford 1981] in its theoretically correct style, as a "model" of the native speaker's "linguistic competence". But notice that by page 3, "grammar" is suddenly no longer a linguists construct, a formal characterization of the abilities presumed to underlie the speaker's behavior, but the knowledge itself. It has gone from a linguist's theory to something the speaker possesses. One would not blame Radford, were it not that formal grammarians are quick to castigate discourse linguists for alleged "confusion" over the notion of "grammar", and often accuse them of not understanding this supposedly elementary concept' .
(Fish 1982: 100) 'Linguistics is positively harmful when its procedures are applied to such utterances, and it had best limit itself to the sphere of its competence, which is, of course, ordinary language' .
(Schiffrin 1994: 8) In the ethnography of communication approach, Dell Hymes proposed 'that scholarship focus on communicative competence: the tacit social, psychological, cultural, and linguistic knowledge governing appropriate use of language (including, but not limited to, grammar). Communicative competence includes knowledge of how to engage in everyday conversation as well as other culturally constructed speech events' .
Under construction
(Spellmeyer 1993: 28) To survey every language as we need to now, from the broader, hermeneutic perspective, is not to emulate the "social sciences" of a generation past, when the stress fell on the second term, still less would our practice take its cue from somewhat harder versions of research, such as linguistics or psychology. Composition on the terms I have argued for here would more closely resemble what Turner calls processual anthropology. As a form of engaged, politicized inquiry into speech and writing, a processual composition would continually struggle to recall the larger, always changing dimension of public life. 'Through this struggle of recollection, our field might discharge its institutional task -- teaching students how to write -- while at the same time affirming the possibility of a knowledge without domination and a commonality without coercion' .
(Spellmeyer 1993: 10) 'We have ... an unprecedented opportunity to imagine what the field of composition might look like should everyone turn out to be partly right -- should our warring tribes at last have learned enough about language to speak together in the same conversation' .
(Lanham 1993: xi) 'One of the computer screen's routine marvels is manipulation of scale, and such manipulation stands at the center of postmodern art. As we shall see in chapter 2, wherever you touch twentieth-century visual art and architecture, it seems both to foreshadow electronic expression and to provide and aesthetic ready-made for it. as I point out in chapter 1, the composition, notation, and performance of music have been transformed by digital expression. Because word, image, and sound are expressed in a common digital code, the arts take on a new and radical convertibility that threatens both their present compartmentalization and its academic departmental embodiment. So, too, poststructuralist literary theory, which has precipitated the current streetfight between Left and Right, turns out to be just such another proleptic aesthetic; poststructuralism and the common digital code seem part of the same event. As I suggest here, the whole Aristotelian basis of literary criticism is undermined by electronic expression, and so pre structuralist literary theory is similarly transformed' .
(Enkvist 1981: 103) 'If we want to derive predications out of the model too, instead of accepting them as part of the input, we must adopt a device of the third, cognitive, type. In such cognitive models the predications are usually derived out of a cognitive network, again under the control of a text strategy.... But in addition to all this we may also wish to look into the motives and reasons why a certain speaker/writer has opted for one particular text strategy in his particular context of situation. If so, we must once again enlarge our perspective and adopt a model of a fourth type which is sensitive not only to strategies of text composition but also to principles of human interaction. Such models try to explain how human beings communicate as part of their attempts at social cooperation' .
(Foucault 1986a: 144-5) 'In a novel narrated in the first person, neither the first person pronoun, the present indicative tense, nor, for that matter, its signs of localization refer directly to the writer, either to the time when he wrote, or to the specific act of writing; rather, they stand for a "second self" whose similarity to the author is never fixed and undergoes considerable alteration within the course of a single book. It would be as false to seek the author in relation to the actual writer as to the fictional narrator; the "author-function" arises out of their scission-- in the division and distance of the two. One might object that this phenomenon only applies to novels or poetry, to a context of "quasi-discourse," but, in fact, all discourse that supports this "author-function" is characterized by this plurality of egos. In a mathematical treatise, the ego who indicates the circumstances of composition in the preface is not identical, either in terms of his position or his function, to the "I" who concludes a demonstration within the body of the text. The former implies a unique individual who, at a given time and place, succeeded in completing a project, whereas the latter indicates an instance and plan of demonstration that anyone could perform provided the same set of axioms, preliminary operations, and an identical set of symbols were used. It is also possible to locate a third ego: one who speaks of the goals of his investigation, the obstacles encountered, its results, and the problems yet to be solved and this "I" would function in a field of existing or future mathematical discourses. We are not dealing with a system of dependencies where a first and essential use of the "I" is reduplicated, as a kind of fiction, by the other two. On the contrary, the "author-function" in such discourses operates so as to effect the simultaneous dispersion of the three egos' .
Under construction
(Gibbs 1987: 571-2) Gibbs claims that 'These results [of Ortony et al. (1978) on comprehension of metaphors] strongly demonstrate that context plays a crucial role in the interpretation of metaphoric language. With sufficient linguistic and social context, people understand the nonliteral interpretations of metaphoric utterances directly without first analyzing their putative literal meanings' .
(Gibbs 1987: 574-5) 'Even if one assumes that mutual knowledge is not necessary for comprehension, there is much psychological evidence which is not in accord with many of the basic assumptions underlying the relevance hypothesis. The weight of this evidence suggests that it may be premature to accept the relevance hypothesis as a reasonable model of the psychological processes used in working out conversational inferences' .
(Gibbs 1987: 585) 'My arguments is favor of the mutual knowledge hypothesis and against the relevance hypothesis are grounded in five interrelated observations. First, I have suggested the Sperber and Wilson's proposal that mutual cognitive environments constitute the true context for comprehension is not sufficiently clear and distinguishable from the concept of mutual knowledge. As such, the relevance hypothesis seems to make use of the very idea that it attempts to replace. Second, mutual knowledge is possible to determine in a finite period of time via Clark and Marshall's (1981) mutual knowledge induction scheme without resorting to an infinite set of beliefs statements usually viewed as a consequence of establishing mutual knowledge. Third, it appears that mutual knowledge is indeed a necessary prerequisite for the comprehension of many kinds of utterances in conversation. This is particularly true if listeners are to distinguish between inferences that are ostensively intended or "authorized" by speakers from inferences that are "unauthorized". Conversations are only cooperative to the extent to which speakers specifically intend and listeners specifically recognize "m-intended" messages. Part of my thesis here is that how listeners are able to distinguish "authorized" versus "unauthorized" inferences must be part of a cognitive theory of conversational inferences. Fourth, parts of the processing model underlying the relevance hypothesis are not supported by contemporary psycholinguistic research. Specifically, there is little empirical evidence in favor of the idea that listeners must first decode an utterance into some propositional representation before choosing a context in which that proposition is viewed as most relevant. Finally, there is some recent psycholinguistic evidence demonstrating that speakers formulate their utterances precisely to satisfy the amount of knowledge they share with their listeners. This shared knowledge is also directly utilized by listeners when interpreting utterances in everyday discourse. These findings appear most congruent with the predictions of the mutual knowledge hypothesis' .
(Foucault 1986b: 162) 'And now, let those who are weak on vocabulary, let those with little comprehension of theory call all this-- if its appeal is stronger than its meaning for them-- structuralism' .
(Haberlandt and Bingham 1982: 36) 'Scripts are assumed to provide privileged access to information in memory wherever it is located and to facilitate comprehension if subsequent sentences (Schank 1978). The mechanism for privileged access in reading comprehension is "spreading activation"' .
(Haberlandt and Bingham 1982: 39) 'The purpose of the present experiment was to evaluate the hypothesis that judgments of target sentences would be faster and more accurate in Same pairs that in Different pairs. Using this technique we made the following two assumptions: that judgment latencies were an estimate of ease of comprehension, and that, in this task, sentences were processed against the background of the preceding sentence, although the sentence judgment task was a single-sentence task as far as our subjects were concerned' .
(Haberlandt and Bingham 1982: 30) 'Comprehension is a joint function of textual aspects and of the reader's knowledge where both textual features and reader knowledge exist at various levels of abstractness....In the present paper we examine "scriptal" relatedness, which is one of the many intersentence relationships described by linguists. The paper consists of three parts. The first part discusses the script construct in the context of other constructs and illustrates how scripts provide connectivity between sentences. The second treats the role of scripts in the retention of texts, and the third addresses the role of scripts in reading comprehension' .
(Haberlandt and Bingham 1982: 44) 'We think that the critical contribution of script theory was to focus attention of the role of events and on reader knowledge of events in reading comprehension. The script concept will probably change as a result of future research, but the underlying theme of reader knowledge of events will remain an important part of theories of text comprehension' .
(van Dijk 1977: 4) 'In this paper, we will show that some fundamental problems of cognitive psychology can be accounted for in terms of macro-processing of complex semantic information.... Comprehension (as well as production) probably takes place at several levels, such that lower-level information is organized, reduced, and represented at higher levels. These processes involve the use of macro-rules; the input to the macro-rules is the micro-structure, and the output is the macro-structure. Macro-structures help to explain the ability to summarize discourse, and in general to use information from discourse for other cognitive tasks' .
(van Dijk 1977: 27-30) 'We will briefly state a number of hypotheses regarding ... processing implications....It will be assumed that in discourse comprehension fragments of the morpho-phonological and syntactic surface structure of the sentence sequence are stored only in short-term memory to construct a proposition sequence.... It is assumed that beyond a limited number of propositions, the proposition sequence of the text base is not fully accessible for recall.... Given a sequence of assigned propositions, the reader will make hypotheses about the relevant macro-structure proposition covering the sequence by applying the macro-rules to the sequence.... Macro-structure formation takes place in the course of reading the text, not a posteriori. The same holds true for the assignment of conventional categories to the macro-propositions. Both the assignment of macro-structures and of conventional super-structures is recursive. As soon as a first level becomes too complex. a second level is formed, and so forth. The macro-structure is available when it is necessary to explicitly summarize a text.... The macro-structure is also the basis for recall of the discourse immediately after presentation. The macro-structure is directly available in episodic memory. It then yields, by inverse macro-rule application and recognition, access to lower-level macro-structures and possibly to some text base propositions if the discourse was not too long.... Macro-structures may also constitute "plans for speaking".... Macro-structure formation is a highly complex process, so it can hardly be expected that effective comprehension exactly follows the rules formulated above: expedient strategies are used in the global interpretation of discourse.... Finally, there are strategies based on contextual cues and knowledge of the general communication situation. We may know the speaker so well that we may easily predict the main themes of his discourse, even with very scanty information.... Familiarity with the relevant macro-structures will certainly facilitate the task of global comprehension' .
(Winograd 1977: 64) 'This paper approaches the problem of studying discourse as one of understanding the cognitive structures and processes of language users. There are alternative approaches, such as text-based studies ... This paper ... proposes instead to focus on the cognitive processes of language production and comprehension. From this point of view, the text is a concrete trace of the processes, and its structure needs to be understood in terms of the processing structure ... There are clear advantages to having a framework which emphasizes the psychological processes, rather than the traces they leave, since any psycholinguistic model must deal first and foremost with the cognitive processing' .
(Winograd 1977: 74) 'We can look at schemas as providing a guide for structuring the processes of production and comprehension. In the process of production, a schema ... lists the different parts and properties of a structure which must be decided upon in order to produce it.... In comprehension, the set of stored schemas is actively used in a process of "pattern recognition"' .
(Bakhtin 1986: 667) 'A common unitary language is a system of linguistic norms. But these norms do not constitute an abstract imperative; they are rather the generative forces of linguistic life, forces that struggle to overcome the heteroglossia of language, forces that unite and centralize verbal-ideological thought... What we have in mind here is not an abstract linguistic minimum of a common language, in the sense of a system of elementary forms (linguistic symbols) guaranteeing a minimum level of comprehension in practical communication. We are taking language not as a system of abstract grammatical categories, but rather language conceived as ideologically saturated, language as a world view, even as a concrete opinion, insuring a maximum of mutual understanding in all spheres of ideological life. Thus a unitary language gives expression to forces working toward concrete verbal and ideological unification and centralization, which develop in vital connection with the processes of sociopolitical and cultural centralization' .
(Enkvist 1981: 104) 'If we wish to relate instances of experiential iconicism in text generation or in text interpretation and comprehension to our general knowledge of the world (as we must), a cognitive model becomes necessary. And we must cite principles of human interaction if we can to detect the motives for the preference of one text strategy to another. In brief, we shall need the whole gamut of models if we wish to explain why somebody opts for an iconic arrangement of his text and how he carries out his iconic strategy through text patterning and, ultimately, syntax. This is simply another way of saying that experiential iconicism can be discussed in terms of examples brought from various levels: syntax, text patterning, cognition, interaction' .
(Jameson 1981: 75) 'The present book, which rather seeks to argue the perspectives of Marxism as necessary preconditions for adequate literary comprehension. Marxist critical insights will therefore here be defended as something like an ultimate semantic precondition for the intelligibility of literary and cultural texts' .
Under construction
(Burke 1945: 79) 'We cherish the behaviorist experiment precisely because it illustrates the relation between the circumference and the circumscribed in mechanistic terms; and because the sharpest instance of the way in which the altering of the scenic scope affects the interpretation of the act is to be found in the shift from teleological to mechanistic philosophies. Christian theology, in stressing the rational, personal, and purposive aspects of the Creation as the embodiment of the Creator's pervasive will, had treated such principles as scenic, That is, they were not merely traits of human beings, but extended to the outer circumference of the ultimate ground. Hence, by the logic of the scene-act ratio, they were taken as basic to the constitution of human motives, and could be "deduced" from the nature of God as an objective, extrinsic principle defining the nature of human acts. But when the circumference was narrowed to naturalistic limits, the "Creator" was left out or account, and only the "Creation" remained (remained not as an "act", however, but as a concatenation of motions)' .
(Burke 1945: 76-7) 'We might sum up the matter thus: Theologically , nature has attributes derived from its origin in an act of God (the Creation), but God is more than nature. Dramatistically , motion involves action, but action is more than motion. Hence theologically and/or dramatistically, nature (in the sense of God's Creation) is to nature (in the sense of naturalistic science) as action is to motion, since God's Creation is an enactment , whereas nature as conceived in terms of naturalistic science is a sheer concatenation of motions. But inasmuch as the theological ration between God (Creator) and Nature (Creation) is the same as the dramatistic ration between action and motion, the pantheistic equating of God and Nature would be paralleled by the equating of action and motion. And since action is a personal principle while motion is an impersonal principle, the pantheistic equation leads into the naturalistic position which reduces personalistic concepts to depersonalized terms' .
Under construction
(Hopper 1987: 154) 'It will be seen that "grammar" begins life on page 2 [of Radford 1981] in its theoretically correct style, as a "model" of the native speaker's "linguistic competence". But notice that by page 3, "grammar" is suddenly no longer a linguists construct, a formal characterization of the abilities presumed to underlie the speaker's behavior, but the knowledge itself. It has gone from a linguist's theory to something the speaker possesses. One would not blame Radford, were it not that formal grammarians are quick to castigate discourse linguists for alleged "confusion" over the notion of "grammar", and often accuse them of not understanding this supposedly elementary concept' .
(Burke 1945: 96) 'Next, within the verbal, there is the reduction of one terminology to another. Any word or concept is a reduction in this sense. One reduces this to that by discussing this in terms of that' .
(Burke 1945: 26) 'There is another strategy of definition, usually interwoven with the contextual sort, yet susceptible of separate observation. This is the "tribal" or "familial" sort, the definition of a substance in terms of ancestral cause....The Aristotelian genus is originally not a logical, but a biological, concept' .
(Burke 1945: 21) 'There is a set of words comprising what we might call the Stance family, for they all derive from a concept of place, or placement. In the Indo-Germanic languages the root for this family is sta , to stand (Sanscrit, stha ). And out of it there has developed this essential family, comprising such members as: consist, constancy, constitution, contrast. destiny, ecstasy, existence, hypostasize, obstacle, stage, state, status, statute, stead, subsist, and system. In German, an important member of the Stance family is stellen , to place, a root that figures in Vorstellung , a philosopher's and psychologist's word for representation, conception, idea, image' .
(Burke 1945: 37) 'In theological and metaphysical works, we can recognize the paradox of the absolute readily enough. Often, in fact, it is explicitly discussed. But in historicist writings it more easily goes unnoticed. Yet the paradox may be implicit in any term for a collective motivation, such as a concept of class, nation, the "general will," and the like. Technically, it becomes a "pure" motive when matched against some individual locus of motivation. And it may thus be the negation of an individual motive.... What we are here considering formally, as a paradox of substance, can be illustrated quickly enough by example. A soldier may be nationally motivated to kill the enemies of his country, whereas individually he is motivated by a horror of killing his own enemies. Or conversely, as a patriot he may act by the motive of sacrifice in behalf of his country, but as an individual he may want to profit' .
(Burke 1945: 66) 'We are reasoning as follows: we are saying that, to study the nature of the term, act , one must select a prototype, or paradigm of action. This prototype we find in the conception of a perfect or total act, such as the act of "the Creation". Examining this concept, we find that it is "magic", for it produces something out of nothing. This enables us to equate magic with novelty - and leads us to look for a modicum of magic in every act to the extent that the act possesses a modicum of novelty. This consideration also admonishes us, however, to make a distinction between "true" and "false" magic. "False" magic is a quasi-scientific ideal that would suspend the laws of motion , as in the attempt to coerce natural forces by purely ritualistic means. "True" magic is an aspect not of motion but of action' .
(Burke 1945: 96) 'Integral to the concept of scope is the concept of reduction . In a sense, every circumference, no matter how far-reaching its reference, is a reduction. A cosmology, for instance, is a reduction of the world to the dimensions of words; it is the world in terms of words. The reductive factor becomes quite obvious when we pause to realize that any terminology of motives reduces the vast complexity of life by reduction to principles, laws, sequences, classifications, correlations, in brief, abstractions or generalizations of one sort or another. And any generalization is necessarily a reduction in that it selects a group of things and gives them a property which makes it possible to consider them as a single entity . Thus, the general concept of "man" neglects an infinite number of particular differences in order to stress certain properties which many distinct individual entities have in common. Indeed, any characterization of any sort is a reduction. To give a proper name to one person, or to name a thing, is to recognize some principle of identity or continuity running through the discontinuities that, of themselves, would make the world sheer chaos. To note any order whatever is to "reduce". To divide experience into hungry and sated moments, into the pleasant and unpleasant, into the before and after, into here and there - even distinctions as broad as these translate the world's infinite particulars into terms that are a reduction of the world; in fact, as per the equating of infinity and zero, terms of such broad scope are perhaps the most drastically reductive of all' .
(Burke 1945: 40) 'But to consider an act in terms of its grounds is to consider it in terms of what it is not, namely, in terms of motives that, in acting upon the active, would make it a passive, We could state the paradox another way by saying that the concept of activation implies a kind of passive-behind-the-passive; for an agent who is "motivated by his passions" would be "moved by his being-movedness", or "acted upon by his state of being acted upon"' .
(Gibbs 1987: 569) 'My main contention, then, is that Sperber and Wilson are "sneaking" mutual knowledge in the backdoor of their theory of conversational inference by appealing to the idea of mutual cognitive environments which can be manifest but not known. At a psychological level, it appears that Sperber and Wilson have adopted a framework for describing verbal communication which crucially depends on the very concept that they wish to abandon' .
(Gibbs 1987: 585) 'My arguments is favor of the mutual knowledge hypothesis and against the relevance hypothesis are grounded in five interrelated observations. First, I have suggested the Sperber and Wilson's proposal that mutual cognitive environments constitute the true context for comprehension is not sufficiently clear and distinguishable from the concept of mutual knowledge. As such, the relevance hypothesis seems to make use of the very idea that it attempts to replace. Second, mutual knowledge is possible to determine in a finite period of time via Clark and Marshall's (1981) mutual knowledge induction scheme without resorting to an infinite set of beliefs statements usually viewed as a consequence of establishing mutual knowledge. Third, it appears that mutual knowledge is indeed a necessary prerequisite for the comprehension of many kinds of utterances in conversation. This is particularly true if listeners are to distinguish between inferences that are ostensively intended or "authorized" by speakers from inferences that are "unauthorized". Conversations are only cooperative to the extent to which speakers specifically intend and listeners specifically recognize "m-intended" messages. Part of my thesis here is that how listeners are able to distinguish "authorized" versus "unauthorized" inferences must be part of a cognitive theory of conversational inferences. Fourth, parts of the processing model underlying the relevance hypothesis are not supported by contemporary psycholinguistic research. Specifically, there is little empirical evidence in favor of the idea that listeners must first decode an utterance into some propositional representation before choosing a context in which that proposition is viewed as most relevant. Finally, there is some recent psycholinguistic evidence demonstrating that speakers formulate their utterances precisely to satisfy the amount of knowledge they share with their listeners. This shared knowledge is also directly utilized by listeners when interpreting utterances in everyday discourse. These findings appear most congruent with the predictions of the mutual knowledge hypothesis' .
(Booth 1979: 107) 'He [Burke] in fact rejects more than conventional norms, His dialectic of similarities and differences is so deliberately flexible and so aggressively opposed to neatly fixed meanings that in a sense all literal proof is made suspect. In the opening pages of A Grammar of Motives we find a series of claims that any action or statement can be considered as evidence for or against almost any concept. In defining any substance, for example, we necessarily place it in its context, its scene , which is to define it in terms of what it is not , leading to the "paradox of substance": "every positive is negative". Before we know it, Burke has moved through statements like "any tendency to do something is ...a tendency not to do it" (32) to a series of paradoxes and oxymorons and "ambiguities of substance" that stagger the literal-minded' .
(Booth 1979: 108) 'Obviously such talk is nonsense to anyone who insists on a literal meaning for phrases like "the same as" and "amounts to". Burke seldom uses such words in a sense that would satisfy someone like Crane as strictly literal; even the word "literal" is not quite literal; thinking about the concept as Burke might, we would no doubt extend my questioning of Crane's usage in chapter 2 [of this work]. Indeed, a major part of his persistent program is to remind literalists that behind their claims to precision lurk confusions that can be acknowledged and lived with only by qualifying every copulative verb with some sense of ambiguity. It is not just that the words need semantic scouring. What something is is always too rich and complex for any one statement. Thus Burke can, without violating his own canons, say at one point that literary form as the gratification of needs is the appeal in poetry and, in other contexts, say that literary form is a disguise for the true appeal; and he can really mean both statements' .
(Ricoeur 1982: 147) 'I propose to show that the concept of the text, such as we have formulated it in the first part of this essay, demands a renewal of the two notions of explanation and interpretation and, in virtue of this renewal, a less contradictory conception of their interrelation' .
(Bove 1990: 55) 'There is a broad political purpose to this project that develops out of a radical skepticism about "truth" and the correspondence of fact and concept' .
(Haberlandt and Bingham 1982: 32) 'Anderson [1981] distinguishes between concepts, propositions, and schemata, with the latter including scripts. A concept is the "unanalyzable building block or primitive" of semantic memory.... Propositions are formed by relating concepts through predicates. They are the smallest units of meaning, assertions about the world which can be judged true or false. A schema is a set of related propositions and a script is a stereotyped sequence of propositions involving concepts, namely people or roles, objects or props, and settings. The script was conceived to be a very flexible mechanism' .
(Haberlandt and Bingham 1982: 44) 'We think that the critical contribution of script theory was to focus attention of the role of events and on reader knowledge of events in reading comprehension. The script concept will probably change as a result of future research, but the underlying theme of reader knowledge of events will remain an important part of theories of text comprehension' .
(van Dijk 1977: 5) 'The phrase the book has an intensional meaning, namely the individual concept of a book, which may take various extensions, i.e. actual books referred to, in particular situations. Both intensional and extensional interpretations are necessary in an account of the semantic structures of discourse' .
(Winograd 1977: 72) 'A schema is a description of a complex object, situation, process, or structure. It is a collection of knowledge related to the concept, not a definition in the formal sense' .
(Bakhtin 1986: 666) 'The novel is an artistic genre. Novelistic discourse is poetic discourse, but one that does not fit within the frame provided by the concept of poetic discourse as it now exists. The concept has certain underlying presuppositions that limit it' .
(Harris 1990: 49) 'For purposes of an integrational analysis, however, the concept of meaning may be dispensed with and replaced by that of communicational function. The crucial difference is that the communicational function of a sign is always contextually determined and derives from the network of integrational relations which obtain in a particular situation' .
(Enkvist 1981: 102) 'I have spoken about text strategies and must therefore digress to explain the background of this concept....It is practical as well as theoretically defensible to classify text models into four major categories. The first category of models is sentence-based. A sentence-based model uses ready-made sentences as its input and cannot therefore manipulate sentence boundaries. It can only explain how features within and between sentences, such as anaphoric and cataphoric references and theme-rheme-focus structures, link sentences to one another.... The second type of model is predication-based. Here the input consists of a set of predications of some kind together with their temporal, causal or spatial, and perhaps social, relations, and a strategy which controls their textualization and linearization into sentences through grouping, conjunction, and embedding' .
(Coates and Cameron 1988: 19) 'Whatever the solution, it can hardly be denied that there is a problem for sociolinguistics in using the traditional model which takes the family as the primary unit of social stratification at a time when our traditional concept of the family ... is breaking down' .
(Geertz 1973: 5) 'The concept of culture I espouse, and whose utility the essays below attempt to demonstrate, is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning' .
(Jameson 1981: 115) 'An ideologeme, that is, a historically determinate conceptual or semic complex which can project itself variously in the form of a "value system" or "philosophical concept," or in the form of a protonarrative, a private of collective narrative fantasy' .
(A. Pratt 1981: 13) 'A considerable portion of mythology, religion, and literature is devoted to the quest of the youthful self for identity, an adventure often formalized in a ritual initiation into the mysteries of adulthood.... The concept of 'adolescence,' as a period of some five to seven years following puberty in which a young person learns the roles he or she must play in society, is a fairly recent development, even more recent for girls than for boys.... Since adolescence, as a period of education, was a late development in concepts of womanhood, many early 'coming-of-age' novels were structured around childhood initiation' .
Under construction
(Burke 1945: 21) 'There is a set of words comprising what we might call the Stance family, for they all derive from a concept of place, or placement. In the Indo-Germanic languages the root for this family is sta , to stand (Sanscrit, stha ). And out of it there has developed this essential family, comprising such members as: consist, constancy, constitution, contrast. destiny, ecstasy, existence, hypostasize, obstacle, stage, state, status, statute, stead, subsist, and system. In German, an important member of the Stance family is stellen , to place, a root that figures in Vorstellung , a philosopher's and psychologist's word for representation, conception, idea, image' .
(Burke 1945: 118-9) 'And we should infer that the original conception of the powers of motives in things is not exactly animistic. The evidences of animism which nineteenth-century anthropologists found so profusely among primitive tribes are, to our way of thinking, mainly indications of how thoroughly most of such anthropologists were imbued with the terms typical of nineteenth-century idealist philosophy, so that they saw things in these terms. We should expect, rather, that the basic perception of motives is a perception of things not as possessing the souls and personalities of agents , but as being essentially active. That is, they were not felt to be people ; they were felt to be actions' .
(Burke 1945: 9) 'The logic of the scene-agent ratio has often served as an embarrassment to the naturalistic novelist. He may choose to "indict" some scene (such as bad working conditions under capitalism) by showing that it has a "brutalizing" effect upon the people who are indigenous to this scene. But the scene-agent ratio, if strictly observed here, would require that the "brutalizing" situation contain "brutalized" characters as its dialectical counterpart. And thereby, in his humanitarian zeal to save mankind, the novelist portrays characters which, in being as brutal as their scene, are not worth saving. We could phrase this dilemma in another way: our novelist points up his thesis by too narrow a conception of scene as the motive-force behind his characters; and this restricting of the scene calls in turn for a corresponding restriction upon personality, or role' .
(Burke 1945: 66) 'We are reasoning as follows: we are saying that, to study the nature of the term, act , one must select a prototype, or paradigm of action. This prototype we find in the conception of a perfect or total act, such as the act of "the Creation". Examining this concept, we find that it is "magic", for it produces something out of nothing. This enables us to equate magic with novelty - and leads us to look for a modicum of magic in every act to the extent that the act possesses a modicum of novelty. This consideration also admonishes us, however, to make a distinction between "true" and "false" magic. "False" magic is a quasi-scientific ideal that would suspend the laws of motion , as in the attempt to coerce natural forces by purely ritualistic means. "True" magic is an aspect not of motion but of action' .
(Schiffrin 1994: 41-2) 'I began this chapter with a brief description of two different paradigms underlying our conception of language.... After comparing two different definitions of discourse stemming from these two paradigms -- discourse as language above the sentence or clause, ... discourse as language use ... -- I proposed a third definition that sits at the intersection of structure and function -- discourse as utterances ...Actual analyses of discourse reveal an interdependence between structure and function ... The distinction between structure and function also bears on two other issues that I discuss later. One is the relationship between text and context: structural definitions focus upon text and functional definitions upon context ... Another is the way linguists view communication: structural definitions take a narrower view of communication than do functional definitions, and place a higher priority on the role of the code (cf. text) in communication' .
(Ricoeur 1982: 147) 'I propose to show that the concept of the text, such as we have formulated it in the first part of this essay, demands a renewal of the two notions of explanation and interpretation and, in virtue of this renewal, a less contradictory conception of their interrelation' .
(Lanham 1976: 60) 'It was not that Ovid was a bad plotter. The rhetorical view denies that plot is possible. It was not that Ovid "had no taste for heroes and certainly, no capacity for creating them", as Brooks Otis charges. He did not believe in heroes, or the self they were based on. He was not bad at transitions; he wanted to lose the reader. He was not incapable of tracing a coherent genealogy for Rome; he did not believe in the Virgilian conception of history upon which such descent was based. He was not too dense to master a suitable repertoire of Augustan philosophical clichÈs; he denied the theory of knowledge from which they grew. Too skeptical to think the whole truth contained in a single myth, he thought the epic genre a fraud, an obvious pretense that the world makes more sense than it does' .
(Bakhtin 1986: 665) 'Stylistics and the philosophy of discourse indeed confront a dilemma: either to acknowledge tha novel (and consequently all artistic prose tending in that direction) an unartistic or quasi-artistic genre, or to radically reconsider that conception of poetic discourse in which traditional stylistics is grounded and which determines all its categories' .
Under construction
(Fish 1982: 532) 'On one level this counterargument is unassailable, but on another level it is finally beside the point. It is unassailable as a general and theoretical conclusion: the positing of context- or institution-specific norms surely rules out the possibility of a norm whose validity would be recognized by everyone, no matter what his situation. But it is beside the point for any particular individual, for since everyone is situated somewhere, there is no one for whom the absence of an asituational norm would be of any practical consequence, in the sense that his performance or his confidence in his ability to perform would be impaired. So that while it is generally true that to have many standards is to have none at all, it is not true for anyone in particular ... In other words, while relativism is a position one can entertain, it is not a position one can occupy.... The point is that there is never a moment when one believes nothing, when consciousness is innocent of any and all categories of thought, and whatever categories of thought are operative at a given moment will serve as an undoubted ground' .
(Coates and Cameron 1988: 69) Could Wood's study lead to the conclusion that 'floor time' and other language behavior that is often considered 'power' language is not a significant factor in promotions? The woman in higher status does not need to dominate her male subordinate. We could conclude that language dominance is irrelevant to status in the women's behavior .
(Ordonez [n.d.]: 62) 'Many roads thus lead to the same conclusion: that the traditional split between body and soul is no longer viable and that its pernicious legacy for women is being erased by today's woman, writing affirmatively and with a common purpose across the boundaries of nationality and ethnicity' .
Under construction
(Hopper 1987: 142) 'The notion of Emergent Grammar is meant to suggest that structure, or regularity, comes out of discourse and is shaped by discourse as much as it shapes discourse in an on-going process. Grammar is hence not to be understood as a pre-requisite for discourse, a prior possession attributable in identical form to both speaker and hearer. Its forms are not fixed templates, but are negotiable in face-to-face interaction in ways that reflect the individual speakers' past experience of these forms, and their assessment of the present context, including especially their interlocutors, whose experiences and assessments may be quite different. Moreover, the term Emergent Grammar points to a grammar which is not abstractly formulated and abstractly represented, but always anchored in the specific concrete form of an utterance' .
(Hopper 1987: 153) 'What I have wanted to stress here is the need to understand not only the formal process but the way in which that formal process emerges from a discourse context, in other words, is anchored in particular, concrete utterances. It is this "prior textuality" of the construction which explains why it has retained properties of a separate, external clause. What we see emerging, then, is a new strategy for permitting a lexical agent to be incorporated into a nuclear clause under certain contextual conditions, presumable involving differences of topic continuity' .
(Booth 1974: 40) 'But I ask you to think a bit, as I turn now from motivism to the remaining four dogmas, about what would happen to your intellectual and moral life if you reversed that formula, cultivating a benign acceptance- perhaps temporary and tentative, but real- of every belief that can pass two tests: you have no particular, concrete grounds to doubt it (as distinct from the abstract principle to doubt what cannot be proved); and you have good reason to think all men who understand the problem share your belief' .
(Booth 1979: 99) 'I must admit that both Crane and Burke sometimes push very close to my own limits of patience, Crane chewing on bones long after I think all marrow has been extracted, Burke juggling Indian clubs that I am not quite sure are even there. Clearly, neither of them had managed to hit the one right ratio of theory to practice that I have always maintained in my own work. The rule is, of course, as follows: my abstract theory is essential, concrete groundwork; his is frequently quixotic indulgence in a perhaps harmless but irrelevant hobby-horse; and M. Jacques Lacan's is lamentable proof that when the Germans conquered France in World War II Hegel came swirling in with them and sent traditional French lucidity forever underground' .
(Winograd 1977: 64) 'This paper approaches the problem of studying discourse as one of understanding the cognitive structures and processes of language users. There are alternative approaches, such as text-based studies ... This paper ... proposes instead to focus on the cognitive processes of language production and comprehension. From this point of view, the text is a concrete trace of the processes, and its structure needs to be understood in terms of the processing structure ... There are clear advantages to having a framework which emphasizes the psychological processes, rather than the traces they leave, since any psycholinguistic model must deal first and foremost with the cognitive processing' .
(Bakhtin 1986: 668) 'Every concrete utterance of a speaking subject serves as a point where centrifugal as well as centripetal forces are brought to bear' .
(Bakhtin 1986: 667) 'A common unitary language is a system of linguistic norms. But these norms do not constitute an abstract imperative; they are rather the generative forces of linguistic life, forces