education, effect, embedded, emergent, empirical, entailment, epiphany, epiphenomenal, essentialist, ethnicity, eulogistic, event, evidence, explanation, exposition, expression
Under construction
(Lanham 1993: xiii) 'Unlike most humanists discussion technology, I argue an optimistic thesis. I think electronic expression has come not to destroy the Western arts and letters, but to fulfill them. And I think too that the instructional practices built upon the electronic word will not repudiate the deepest and most fundamental currents of Western education in discourse but redeem them' .
(Lanham 1976: 8) 'Perhaps we can see now why the Western paideia has always been a mixed one. The Sophists cannot have grounded it alone, nor the philosophers. The best education has always put the two views of life into profound and fruitful collision. Divorce and domination present equal dangers' .
(Kinneavy 1971: 16) 'Only recently, however, with the work of Christensen, Harris, and Pike have structural and generative grammars moved into areas relevant to discourse education' .
(Coates and Cameron 1988: 18) Coates and Cameron report a study 'which finds social ambition a better predictor than occupation, or even education, of linguistic behaviour' .
(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' .
(Said 1986: 605) 'We defend the classics, the virtues of a liberal education, and the precious pleasures of literature even as we also show ourselves to be silent (perhaps incompetent) about the historical and social world in which all these things take place' .
Under construction
(Burke 1945: 187) 'By utilizing a function of our term agent , we can transform this problem into a solution. Namely: we can say that people interpret natural sequences in terms of cause and effect not because of something in the natural scene requiring this interpretation, but because they are the sort of agents that see things in terms of necessary relations . In this view we do not derive our ideas of cause and effect from experience; all that we can derive from experience is the observation that certain happenings seem likely to follow certain happenings. But our ideas of cause and effect are derived from the nature of the mind' .
(Burke 1945: 85-6) 'Though we have stressed the contrast between theology and behaviorism because it so readily illustrates the "circumferential logic" (that is, the effect of scope in a given terminology of motives), we should note that a writer's vocabulary is usually set somewhere between these two extremes. His aims are usually less thoroughgoing, more "monographic", as with the selection of some "thesis"' .
(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: 77) 'When "defining by location", one may place the object of one's definition in contexts of varying scope. And our remarks on the scene-act ratio, for instance, suggest that the choice of circumference for the scene in terms of which a given act is to be located will have a corresponding effect upon the interpretation of the act itself. Similarly, the logic of the scene-agent ratio will figure in our definition of the individual, insofar as principles of dramatic consistency are maintained' .
(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'
.
(Foucault 1986b: 159) 'What is significant is that history does not consider an event without defining the series to which it belongs, without seeking out the regularity of phenomena and the probable limits of their occurrence, without enquiring about variations, inflexions and the slope of the curve, without desiring to know the conditions on which these depend. History has long since abandoned its attempts to understand events in terms of cause and effect in the formless unity of some great evolutionary process, whether vaguely homogeneous or rigidly hierarchised' .
(Lanham 1976: 27) 'The rhetorical stylist has no central self to be true to.... He feels at home in his roles and to live must play them. When he poses, he is being himself. The more artistic his performance, the more authentically representative it is. Rhetorical man is an actor and insincerity is the actor's mode of being. The wider his range of impersonations, the fuller his self. The more smoothly he can manage a sudden role-change, the more genuine the effect and the effort' .
(Lanham 1976: 56) 'The only element common to both is Ovid's deplorable, superficial, excessive, glib show-off style. It is true that without his style Ovid would be nothing. The Ars's two parts are held together by poetic virtuosity. The same couplet can compass the high style and the low. For the Ars was intended, we must remember, to be a showcase of Ovid's talents. He makes a point of playing every note on the organ, mimicking every effect. The couplet was indeed ... Ovid's criticism of life. It represented an allegory of control. The two worlds could be held together by a virtuoso act of style. Such a style had to be opaque, hold us at a distance, prevent entrance into either orchestration unreservedly' .
(Bove 1990: 64) 'When the tools of opposition, useful to a point and in a specific local struggle against a particular form of power, lose their negative edge-- when their critical effect makes no difference and they simply permit the creation of new texts, new documents recording the successful placement of the previously "oppositional" within the considerable unchanged institutional structures of the discipline -- at that point criticism must turn skeptical again and genealogically recall how the heretical became orthodox' .
(Foucault 1986a: 146) 'Chomsky in his book on Cartesian grammar "rediscovered" a form of knowledge that had been in use from Cordemoy to Humboldt. It could only be understood from the perspective of generative grammar because this later manifestation held the key to its construction: in effect, a retrospective codification of an historical position' .
(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' .
(Jardine 1986: 564) 'To designate that process, I have suggested a new name, what I hope to be a believable neologism: gynesis-- the putting into discourse of "woman" as that process beyond the Cartesian Subject, the Dialectics of Representation, or Man's Truth. The object produced by this process is neither a person nor a thing, but a horizon, that towards which the process is tending: a gynema. This gynema is a reading effect, a woman-in-effect, never stable, without identity' .
Under construction
(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' .
(Fish 1982: 526) 'The meaning of the utterance would be severely constrained, not after it was heard but in the ways in which it could, in the first place, be heard. An infinite plurality of meanings would be a fear only if sentences existed in a state in which they were not already embedded in and had come into view as a function of, some situation or other' .
(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' .
(Minsky 1980: 16) 'We can now imagine the memory system as driven by two complementary needs. On one side are items demanding to be properly represented by being embedded into larger frames; on the other side are incompletely-filled frames demanding terminal assignments' .
(Jehlen 1990: 272) 'Gender is both an embedded assumption and functions as a touchstone for others.... From the perspective of gender, ... a critic sees both deeper and more broadly. Both the views may also appear more obstructed, exactly the enhancement of critical vision seeming to hinder it, or to interpose a mew obstacle between critic and text' .
(Said 1986: 609) 'In this book I shall use the word culture to suggest and environment, process, and hegemony in which individuals (in their private circumstances) and their works are embedded, as well as overseen at the top by a superstructure and at the base by a whole series of methodological attitudes' .
Under construction
(Hopper 1987: 141-2) 'This is, then, roughly the context in which the term Emergent Grammar is being proposed. The term "emergent" itself I take from an essay by the cultural anthropologist James Clifford, but I have transferred it from its original context of "culture" to that of "grammar". Clifford remarks that "Culture is temporal, emergent, and disputed" (Clifford 1986:19). I believe the same is true of grammar, which like speech itself must be viewed as a real-time, social phenomenon, and therefore is temporal; its structure is always deferred, always in a process but never arriving, and therefore emergent; and since I can only choose a tiny fraction of data to describe, any decision I make about limiting my field of inquiry (for example in regard to the selection of texts, or the privileging of the usage of a particular ethnic, class, age, or gender group) is very likely to be a political decision, to be against someone else's interests, and therefore disputed' .
(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: 142) 'The notion of emergence is a pregnant one. It is not intended to be a standard sense of origins or genealogy, not a historical question of "how" the grammar came to be the way it "is", but instead it takes the adjective emergent seriously as a continual movement towards structure, a postponement or "deferral" of structure, a view of structure as always provisional, always negotiable, and in fact as epiphenomenal, that is, as least as much an effect as a cause' .
(Hopper 1987: 150) 'A major pustulate, or working hypothesis, of Emergent Grammar is that the more useful a construction is, the more it will tend to become structuralized, in the sense of achieving cross-textual consistency, and serving as a basis for variation and extension' .
(Hopper 1987: 147-8) 'No principled line can be drawn between the emergent regularities designated to be "grammatical" and other regularities deemed to be "rhetorical", "formulaic", etc.' .
(Hopper 1987: 147) 'What I've been saying up to now has had the purpose of re-contextualizing the notion of grammar -- not to abolish it, but rather to suspend it with a view to isolating those regularities in discourse which we will agree to call emergent grammatical regularities. But as we have seen, the doctrine of Emergent Grammar assignes an entirely different status to grammar from what might be called A Priori Grammar' .
(Schiffrin 1994: 134) 'Interactional sociolinguistics views discourse as a social interaction in which the emergent construction and negotiation of meaning is facilitated by the use of language. Although the interactional approach is basically a functional approach to language, its focus on function is balanced in important ways. The work of Goffman forces structural attention to the contexts in which language is used: situations, occasions, encounters, participation frameworks, and so on, have forms and meanings that are partially created and/or sustained by language. Similarly, language is patterned in ways that reflect those contexts of use. Put another way, language and context co-constitute one another: language contextualizes and is contextualized, such that language does not just function "in" context, language also forms and provides context. One particular context is social interaction. Language, culture, and society are grounded in interaction: they stand in a reflexive relationship with the self, the other, and the self-other relationship, and it is out of these mutually constitutive relationships that discourse is created' .
(Jameson 1981: 140-1) 'To limit ourselves to generic problems, what this model implies is that in its emergent, strong form a genre is essentially a socio-symbolic message, or in other terms, that form is immanently and intrinsically an ideology in its own right' .
Under construction
(Burke 1945: 214-5)
'All told, throughout these pages we have been considering five major
aspects of science:
'(1) high development of technological
specialization
'(2) involvement with rationale of money
(accountancy)
'(3) progressive departure from natural conditions,
usually saluted in the name of "naturalism"
'(4) reduction of scenic
circumference to empirical limits (the reason why the technological powers
that take us farthest from natural conditions have been called "naturalistic")
'(5) stress upon the "problem of knowledge" as the point of
departure for philosophic speculation'
.
(Burke 1945: 195-6) 'To grant that these unknowns can be thought of, however, is further to allow for a very ingenious verbalism. If they can be thought of, of we can employ our intelligence on them, let us call them the "intelligible". Whereupon, lo! whereas empiricism took its start in equating the intelligible with the sensible, the intelligible is now so named precisely because it can't be sensed. Beginning in empiricism, making a line-up that will permit the pursuit of each empirical science in its own terms, we have nonetheless managed to so wangle things that we make allowance for terms beyond the scope of empirical science' .
(Burke 1945: xxiii) 'It is not our purpose to import dialectical and metaphysical concerns into a subject that might otherwise be free of them. On the contrary, we hope to make clear the ways in which dialectical and metaphysical issues necessarily figure in the subject of motivation. Our speculations, as we interpret them, should show that the subject of motivation is a philosophic one, not ultimately to be solved in terms of empirical science' .
(Burke 1945: 195) 'Since we began our enterprise with all respect for the requirements of empirical science, we have defined knowledge by empirical tests. Knowledge by definition, then, is the knowledge of conditions and relations. It is the knowledge of appearances , the knowledge of objects as they necessarily appear when seen in terms of our human categories (the categories of the mind in general). So, by definition, the transcendent realm of the unconditioned things-in-themselves (the scene that contains the possibilities of freedom) cannot be known . Hence, we must restrict the claims we can make about it. But whereas it can't be known , it can be thought about , for we are now thinking about it' .
(Burke 1945: 58) 'The design on a piece of primitive pottery may be wholly symbolic or allegorical. But a drawing that accurately reproduces this design in a scientific treatise would be not symbolic or allegorical, but realistic. And similarly, even when statements about the nature of the world are abstractly metaphysical, statements about the nature of these statements can be as empirical as the statement, "This is Mr. Smith", made when introducing Mr. Smith in the accepted manner' .
(Burke 1945: 190) 'But look where we now are. We have described intellectual synthesis as "active". Yet what kind of "act" is this? The empirical scene has derived its character from the nature of the agent; but though we have called this action of the mind "spontaneous" and "original", we might just as well have called it "inevitable". It is compulsory , lacking the elements of freedom necessary for action. The mind cannot see otherwise than in terms of the categories. To observe is an act, in that one can choose either to observe it or not to observe it. But to observe in terms of the categories is not an act in this sense, since we must consider it in such terms, whether we choose to observe it or not. Conversely, though the sensibility is "passive", we find space and time called the "forms" of sensibility. And in the tradition from which Western philosophy stems, "form" is the act word par excellence. So the "passive" begins to look as active as the avowedly active' .
(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' .
(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' .
(Coates and Cameron 1988: 24) 'As always, there is a need for more empirical research. But this must not be done in a framework which assumes that male behaviour and male norms are prototypical' .
(Derrida 1986c: 121) 'There is no purely and rigorously phonetic writing. So-called phonetic writing, by all rights and in principle, and not only due to an empirical or technical insufficiency, can function only by admitting into its system nonphonetic "signs" (punctuation, spacing, etc.)' .
Under construction
(van Dijk 1977: 10) The generalization rule: 'a sequence N of propositions may be substituted by a proposition p if p is entailed by each of the members of N. We see that the rule is based on an entailment relation' .
Under construction
(Frye 1957: 203) 'One important detail in poetic symbolism remains to be considered. This is the symbolic presentation of the point at which the undisplaced apocalyptic world and the cyclical world of nature come into alignment, and which we propose to call the point of epiphany' .
(A. Pratt 1981: 16-7) 'The adolescent girl, writes Simone de Beauvoir, will devote a special love to Nature... she worships it.... Later, the mature woman hero tends to look back to moments of naturistic epiphany as touchstones in a quest for her lost selfhood so that when she readies herself for her midlife rebirth journey, images of the green world remembered once more come to the fore.... Although most authors depict the green world of the woman hero as a place from which she sets forth and a memory to which she returns for renewal, there are a significant number of novels in which nature is the protagonist's entire world' .
Under construction
(Hopper 1987: 142) 'The notion of emergence is a pregnant one. It is not intended to be a standard sense of origins or genealogy, not a historical question of "how" the grammar came to be the way it "is", but instead it takes the adjective emergent seriously as a continual movement towards structure, a postponement or "deferral" of structure, a view of structure as always provisional, always negotiable, and in fact as epiphenomenal, that is, as least as much an effect as a cause' .
Under construction
(Fish 1982: 110) 'The search for style, like the search for an essentialist definition of literature, proceeds in the context of an assumption that predetermines its shape' .
(Culler 1992: 219) 'The fourth topic of debate ...involves a number of questions: What is the relation between critiques of essentialist conceptions of identity (of a person or group) and the psychic and political demands for identity? How de the urgencies of emancipatory politics conflict with or engage psychoanalytic and poststructuralist critiques of the subject's identity? In what terms should critics and theorists seek to define women's writing or Chicano literature, for example?' .
Under construction
(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
(Booth 1979: 105-6) 'We can at least begin with Burke's own kind of defense when under attack. Having seen man's world as a drama of symbolic actions, convinced that man's "symbolicity" is disastrous whenever any symbolic direction is followed to some kind of logical "perfection", he has consistently sought ways of mitigating, or undermining, the rage for perfection that each monistic mode of thought exhibits. We can see what this means in his fairly recent defense of his excremental talk about Keats. We must think of him as seeking always to modulate the excesses both of eulogistic languages, which would treat man as a creature or pure mind or spirit, and of "dislogistic" languages, which would reduce him to mere body, never acting but only reacting. In that light, what he calls his "joycing" of Keats can indeed be seen, in his words, as "but heuristic, suggestive, though it may put us in search of corroborative observations. And any such bathos, lurking behind the poem's pathos, is so alien to the formal pretenses of the work, if such indecorous transliterating of the poem's decorum had occurred to Keats, in all likelihood he would have phrased his formula differently, to avoid this turn"' .
Under construction
(Burke 1945: 64) 'In sum: we are discussing the Creation not as a temporal event, but as the logical prototype of an act. Indeed, even if one believed it literally, one would hardly be justified in treating it as a temporal event, since it was itself the positing of time; it was the act that set up the conditions of temporal development; hence a terminology that reduced it to terms of time would lack sufficient scope. Thus, even a literal believer would have to treat it in terms that placed it, rather, at an intersection of time and the timeless- a point at which we place ourselves when we discuss it in terms of those non-temporal firsts called "principles"' .
(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: 25) The sentence 'is no longer an object, a thing-in-itself, but an event, something that happens to, and with the participation of, the reader. And it is this event, this happening -- all of it and not anything that could be said about it or any information one might take away from it -- that is, I would argue, the meaning of the sentence' .
(Foucault 1986b: 158) 'I believe we must resolve ourselves to accept three decisions which our current thinking rather tends to resist, and which belong to the three groups of function I have just mentioned: to question our will to truth; to restore to discourse its character as an event; to abolish the sovereignty of the signifier.... One can straight away distinguish some of the methodological demands they imply. A principle of reversal, first of all.... Next, then, the principle of discontinuity .... Discourse must be treated as a discontinuous activity, its different manifestations sometimes coming together, but just as easily unaware of, or excluding each other. The principle of specificity declares that a particular discourse cannot be resolved by a prior system of significations...We must conceive discourse as a violence that we do to things, or, at all events, as a practice we impose upon them; it is in this practice that the events of discourse find the principle of their regularity. The fourth principle, that of exteriority, holds that we are not to burrow to the hidden core of discourse, to the heart of the thought or meaning manifested in it; instead, taking the discourse itself, its appearance and its regularity, that we should look for its external conditions of existence, for that which gives rise to the chance series of these events and fixes its limits' .
(Foucault 1986b: 159) 'What is significant is that history does not consider an event without defining the series to which it belongs, without seeking out the regularity of phenomena and the probable limits of their occurrence, without enquiring about variations, inflexions and the slope of the curve, without desiring to know the conditions on which these depend. History has long since abandoned its attempts to understand events in terms of cause and effect in the formless unity of some great evolutionary process, whether vaguely homogeneous or rigidly hierarchised' .
(Minsky 1980: 14) 'Almost any event, action, change, flow of material, or even flow of information can be represented to a first approximation by a two-frame generalized event' .
(Minsky 1980: 16)
'In any event, the individual statements of a discourse lead to temporary
representations -- which seem to correspond to what contemporary
linguists call "deep structures" -- which are then quickly rearranged or
consumed in elaboration the growing scenario representation. In order of
"scale", among the ingredients of such a structure there might be these
kinds of levels':
surface syntactic frames -- mainly verb and noun
structures;
prepositional and word-order indicator conventions;
surface semantic frames -- action-centered meanings of words;
qualifiers and relations concerning participants, instruments,
trajectories and strategies, goals, consequences and side-effects;
thematic frames -- scenarios concerned with topics, activities, portraits,
setting; outstanding problems and strategies commonly connected with
topics;
narrative frames -- skeleton forms for typical stories,
explanations, and arguments; conventions about foci, protagonists, plot
forms, development, etc., designed to help a listener construct a new,
instantiated thematic frame in his own mind
.
(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' .
(Bove 1990: 63-4) 'Since ours is a society which increasingly tries to ensure its political order through discursive systems that discipline our language and culture, any successful resistance to that order would seem to require strong weapons aimed to weaken that discipline.... Literary criticism, presumably always specially sensitive to the functions of language, and newly sensitive to its relationship to power on the site of institutionalized disciplines, can turn its tools to the critical examination of how, in relation to the state and its largest institutions, power operates in discourse and how discourse disciplines a population.... Discourse can turn literary studies into a full criticism, one which is skeptical, critical, oppositional, and-- when appropriate-- sustentative. It can help us to avoid reduction, either of the historical context of an event or of the rhetorically complex display of power within a textualized discourse or institutionalized discipline' .
(van Dijk 1977: 8) 'Characteristically, the relation of the macro-structure to the micro-structure involves notions such as importance or relevance: the macro-interpretation defines the most important or essential object or event denoted by a sequence of propositions' .
Under construction
(Burke 1945: 52) 'We may even go a step further and note that one may say "it is substantially true" precisely at a time when on the basis of the evidence, it would be much more accurate to say, "it is not true"....What handier linguistic resource could a rhetorician want than an ambiguity whereby he can say "The state of affairs is substantially such-and-such," instead of having to say "The state of affairs is and/or is not such-and-such"?' .
(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' .
(Fish 1982: 342) 'A pluralist is committed to saying that there is something in the text which rules out some readings and allows others ... His best evidence is that in practice "we all in fact" do reject unacceptable readings and that more often than not we agree on the readings that are to be rejected....but if, as I have argued, the text is always a function of interpretation, then the text cannot be the location of the core of agreement by means of which we reject interpretations' .
(Fish 1982: 340) Remarking on Raine's and Hirsch's use of the word forest from Blake's The Tyger to defend opposing interpretations, Fish says that 'what we have here than are two critics with opposing interpretations, each of whom claims the same word as internal and confirming evidence. Clearly they cannot both be right, but just as clearly there is no basis for deciding between them. One cannot appeal to the text, because the text has become an extension of the interpretive disagreement that divides them' .
(Booth 1974: 5) 'You may even have been taught, as I was, that to be reasonable in such a situation means taking an absolutely neutral ground until solid proof is available- which in fact amounts to making the negative decision, to deny credence. Since nothing has been proved, an educated man will wait for real evidence. It is part of my point in these lectures that we were taught wrong' .
(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' .
(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' .
(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' .
Under construction
(Hopper 1987: 144-5) 'It has been noted before that to a very considerable extent everyday language is built up out of combinations of such prefabricated parts. Language is, in other words, to be viewed as a kind of pastiche, pasted together in an improvised way out of ready-made elements. Language is thus to be treated, in Wittgenstein's words, "from outside" (cf. Wittgenstein 1958: para. 120) -- not as governed by internalized mentally represented rules, but by pre-existent material with which discourses can be devised ... Evidently an entirely parallel way of viewing language is to be attributed to Jacques Derrida with his metaphor of language as "graft": new speech acts are "grafted onto" old ones and of course serve in turn as the stock onto which further new speech acts are grafted ... Becker's idea of "prior texts" ... is also crucial here: previous actual utterances form the basis of new utterances. Similar observations have been made by Bolinger, by Andrew Pawley, and others. It is this pre-patterned, pre-fabricated aspect of speech which accounts best for the characteristic of language for which no dualistic, double-tiered theory can provide an intuitively satisfying explanation: in natural discourse we compose and speak simultaneously (Smith 1980:60). There is no room -- no need -- for mediation by mental structures. It is in this sense that, as Bolinger has pointed out (Bolinger 1976), speaking is more similar to remembering procedures and things than it is to following rules. It is a question of possessing a repertoire of strategies for building discourses and reaching into memory in order to improvise and assemble them. Grammar is now not to be seen as the only, or even the major, source of regularity, but instead grammar is what results when formulas are re-arranged, or dismantled and re-assembled, in different ways' .
(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' .
(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' .
(Coates and Cameron 1988: 17) 'Women use fewer stygmatised forms and more prestige forms in every class; it is no more justified to class this pattern of female usage hypercorrect than it would be to call the usage of the middle class hypercorrect in relation to that of the working class. The notion of women's sensitivity to prestige norms is an explanation that arises from the intrinsic maleness of the norms. Men's behaviour is seen as normal; when women's differs, it has to be explained' .
Under construction
(Burke 1945: 179) 'We here sum up briefly a position for which Berkeley argues with considerable thoroughness. One must consult the original if he would do justice to the various steps in the exposition. But whether or not one is convinced by Berkeley's arguments, one must agree that they are statements saying what can be said about "matter" (that is, scene ) when considered in terms of "ideas" (that is, agent )' .
(Lanham 1976: 52) 'The Ars read in so schoolmasterly a way is not the poem Ovid wrote, but it is part of it and the part we must see first. It provides a clear exposition of rhetorical reality. Critics have often called love, for Ovid, only a pretext. When the think it a pretext for showing off, the are only partly right. Of course he was a show-off. Such posing was endemic to the rhetorical view, it created identity. But beyond this self-conscious cleverness, which runs through everything Ovid wrote, the poem offers a straightforward exposition of love sub specie rhetoricae' .
Under construction
(Burke 1945: xvii) 'We sought to formulate the basic stratagems which people employ in endless variations, and consciously or unconsciously, for the outwitting or cajoling of one another. Since all these devices had a "you and me" quality about them, being "addressed" to some person or to some advantage, we classed them broadly under the heading of a Rhetoric. There were other notes, concerned with modes of expression and appeal in the fine arts, and with purely psychological or psychoanalytic matters. These we classed under the heading of Symbolic' .
(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' .
(Lanham 1993: xi-xii) 'The main intellectual debate of our time, I argue in chapter 3, is best understood as a resurrection of the ancient quarrel between the philosophers and the rhetoricians. This fundamental polarity depends heavily, it turns out, on the mode of presentation. Print- if I may telescope an argument presented more fully later- is a "philosophic" medium, the electronic screen a deeply "rhetorical" one. Once again, the quarrel, the item on the intellectual agenda, preceded the means of expression it so badly needs in order to sort itself out. Technology is following the main "operating system" disagreement in our time, not driving it' .
(Lanham 1993: xiii) 'Unlike most humanists discussion technology, I argue an optimistic thesis. I think electronic expression has come not to destroy the Western arts and letters, but to fulfill them. And I think too that the instructional practices built upon the electronic word will not repudiate the deepest and most fundamental currents of Western education in discourse but redeem them' .
(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' .
(Derrida 1986b: 114) Derrida quotes Hjelmslev referring to the writing of Bertrand Russell as saying that 'we have no means of deciding whether writing or speech is the older form of human expression' .
(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' .
(Greenblatt 1995: 229) 'This mobility is not the expression of random motion but of exchange' .
(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' .
(Kinneavy 1971: 32) 'The reintegration of thought to expression is one of the major attempts of this book' .
Last Modified: July-12-96 16:20:25
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