face, family, figure, floor, focus, form, formula, frame, framework, function
(Longacre 1983: 10) 'It is a fact of language that whenever surface structure becomes well crystalized and marked, i.e., whenever it is opaque rather than transparent, it may be thrown out of phase with the notional structure. We must, therefore, face the fact that a given notional structure type may encode in the form of a differing surface structure type' .
(Lanham 1976: 7) Lanham comments upon the philosophy of Plato, saying 'How flattering that we, at whatever brave cost to ourselves, penetrate to the way things are, look, at the end of our quest, upon the true face of beauty'. Then he contributes his own view: 'How humiliating to be all this time only looking in a mirror' .
(Burke 1979: 129) 'Owing to the fact that words can resemble one another tonally even when their literal meanings may be miles apart, various kinds of trick affinities can develop between them. Though I affirm absolutely that anyone who doesn't agree with this proposition lacks a feel for the sound of words, there is still plenty of room for disagreement as to its application in particular cases. The issue becomes especially risky when (thinking along psychoanalytic lines) one tinkers with the possibility that a term on its face sublime may secretly resonate with a term quite ridiculous; and thereby the kinds of "body-thinking" explicitly manifest in, say, writers like Aristophanes or Swift can figure implicitly in solemn works (particularly when one is dealing with such images as a funeral urn' .
(Coates and Cameron 1988: 27) Deuchar seems to assume a single strategy for women everywhere. 'Women tend to produce speech closer to the standard in pronunciation than that of men. The main explanations advanced for this phenomenon are in terms of sociological factors external to language such as status consciousness or solidarity. I shall show that neither of these explanations is entirely satisfactory, but that the phenomenon can be explained in terms of pragmatic, interactional notions internal to language use. The notions I shall make use of are those of face and power as used by Brown and Levinson (1978) in their model of politeness' .
(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' .
(Coates and Cameron 1988: 30) 'In order to use the notions of face and power to explain women's greater use of standard speech we need four assumptions: 1. participants in an interaction wish to protect their own face; 2. attention to other's face is affected by relative power in relation to other; 3. attention to other's face may involve damage to one's own; 4. women have less relative power than men' .
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: 21) 'The most prominent philosophic member of this family is "substance". Or at least it used to be, before John Locke greatly impaired its prestige, so that many thinkers today explicitly banish the term from their vocabularies. But there is cause to believe that, in banishing the term , far from banishing its functions one merely conceals them. Hence, from the dramatistic point of view, we are admonished to dwell upon the word, considering its embarrassments and its potentialities of transformation, so that we may detect its covert influence even in cases where it is overtly absent. Its relation to our five terms will become apparent as we proceed' .
(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' .
Under construction
(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: 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' .
(Burke 1945: 56) 'Men have talked about things in many ways, but the pentad offers a synoptic way to talk about their talk-about. For the resources of the five terms figure in the utterances about motives, throughout all human history' .
(Burke 1945: 56) 'Contemporary scientific theory, in proposing to abandon the categories of substance and causality, has done speculation a good turn. For it has made clear wherein the difference between philosophic and scientific terminologies of motivation resides. Philosophy, like common sense, must think of human motivation dramatistically, in terms of action and its ends. But a science is freed of philosophic taints only insofar as it confines itself to terms of motion and arrested motion (figure, structure). This convention, almost Puritanical in its severity (surely we should not be far wrong in calling it a secularized variant of Puritanism) has brought about such magnification of human powers that any "objection" to it would have about as much force as an attempt to "refute" Niagara Falls. But such results, however spectacular, do not justify an attempt to abide by the same terminological conventions when treating of human motives. For one could confine the study of action within the terms of motion only by resigning oneself to gross misrepresentations of life as we normally experience it. Though we here lay great stress upon the puns and other word play in men's ideas of motivation, we do not thereby conclude that such linguistic tactics are "nothing but" puns and word play' .
(Bove 1990: 61) 'Foucault grew increasingly interested in what the rise of the modern disciplines had to do with modern state power-- with what he called "governability"-- and how it displaced sovereignty as the hegemonic figure of power and authority.... In disciplinary societies, self-determination is nearly impossible, and political opposition must take the form of resistance to the systems of knowledge and their institutions that regulate the population into "individualities" ... In this understanding of governability, truth produced by these knowledge systems blocks the possibility of sapping power; it speaks for-- or... "represents"-- others' .
(Frye 1957: 2xx) 'All theories of tragedy as morally explicable sooner or later run into the question: Is an innocent sufferer in tragedy ... not a tragic figure?' .
(Burke 1979: 129) 'Owing to the fact that words can resemble one another tonally even when their literal meanings may be miles apart, various kinds of trick affinities can develop between them. Though I affirm absolutely that anyone who doesn't agree with this proposition lacks a feel for the sound of words, there is still plenty of room for disagreement as to its application in particular cases. The issue becomes especially risky when (thinking along psychoanalytic lines) one tinkers with the possibility that a term on its face sublime may secretly resonate with a term quite ridiculous; and thereby the kinds of "body-thinking" explicitly manifest in, say, writers like Aristophanes or Swift can figure implicitly in solemn works (particularly when one is dealing with such images as a funeral urn' .
(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' .
(A. Pratt 1981: 22) 'In most women's novels the green world is present in retrospect, something left behind or about to be left behind as one backs into the enclosure-- a state of innocence that becomes most poignant as one is initiated into experience.... In such cases the young woman turns away from "appropriate" males toward fantasies of a figure, projected from within her own personality, more suitable to her needs' .
(White 1974: 403-4) 'Histories, then, are not only about events but also about the possible sets of relationships that those events can be demonstrated to figure. These sets of relationships are not, however, immanent in the events themselves; they exist only in the mind of the historian reflecting on them' .
(Minsky 1980: 19) 'What does it mean to expect a chair? Typically, four legs, some assortment of rungs, a level seat, an upper back. One expects also certain relations between these "parts". The legs must be below the seat, the back above. The legs must be supported by the floor. The seat must be horizontal, the back vertical, and so forth. Now suppose that this description does not match; the vision system finds four legs, a level plane, but no back. The "difference" between what we expect and what we see is "too few backs". This suggests not a chair, but a table or a bench' .
(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 .
Under construction
(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: 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' .
(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' .
(Schiffrin 1994: 7) 'Some interactional approaches ... focus on how people from different cultures may share grammatical knowledge of a language, but differently contextualize what is said such that very different messages are produces. Other interactional approaches ... focus on how language is situated in particular circumstances of social life, and on how it adds (or reflects) different types of meaning ... and structure ... to those circumstances' .
(Culler 1992: 217) 'A second major focus has been the desire of many critics and theorists to make literary and cultural criticism politically progressive' .
(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' .
(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' .
(Hopper 1987: 140) 'Critics of "radical pragmatics", and "functional grammar", assume that they and those they oppose share a common view of language, that there is a pairing of autonomous (i.e., decontextualized) grammatical forms with "functions" (whatever they might be in the abstract), and that the only point of disagreement is whether these forms might be eventually derivable from "functions" or whether the forms must be described independently of "functions". I find a certain irony in such a use of the terms "function" and "functionalism", since the very restriction of the investigation to an artificially defined level of "sentences" seems to me to be quintessentially anti-functionalist. Be that as it may, I am concerned in this paper with the more fundamental problem of the assumptions underlying the critique, especially the assumption of an abstract, mentally represented rule system which is somehow implemented when we speak' .
(Hopper 1987: 141) 'However consistently it can be predicted that a certain particle or aspectual form will function in a particular role in the discourse, it is rare that the reverse is the case -- that a particular form is restricted to a single specifiable discourse role. To cut a very long story short, and thereby probably caricature the dilemma, some way out of the vicious circle of form-to-function-to-form is needed' .
(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: 144) 'Evidently the meanings represented by the English "indefinite article" are not unified under one hyper-abstract function. Instead, an open ended set of small sub-systems has come into being, and the membership of new occurrences of forms with the indefinite article is not specifiable in advance, but is impromptu and negotiable. Even participants in the conversation may not "know" whether a specific new mention or a non-specific indefinite is intended until this has been worked out in the verbal interaction' .
(Hopper 1987: 149) 'It is not a question of an invariant hyperform from which different clauses are derived by processes of deletion and movement. Instead it seems that constructions spread outwards from a small nucleus and in turn form new nuclei (something like the metastasis of malignant cells, to coopt a metaphor of Bolinger's), and the resultant array of clauses are in "family resemblance" relationships to one another' .
(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: 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: 569-70) 'The first task facing a listener in understanding an utterance, according to Sperber and Wilson's relevance hypothesis is to identify its propositional form.... They assume that the initial parse of a sentence begins in some sort of input module ... which results in its literal, context-free, representation' .
(Foucault 1986b: 155) 'Disciplines constitute a system of control in the production of discourse, fixing its limits through the action of an identity taking the form of a permanent reactivation of the rules' .
(Foucault 1986b: 151) 'True discourse, liberated by the nature of its form from desire and power, is incapable of recognising the will to truth which pervades it; and the will to truth, having imposed itself upon us for so long, is such that the truth it seeks to reveal cannot fail to mask it' .
(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' .
(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' .
(Longacre 1983: 10) 'It is a fact of language that whenever surface structure becomes well crystalized and marked, i.e., whenever it is opaque rather than transparent, it may be thrown out of phase with the notional structure. We must, therefore, face the fact that a given notional structure type may encode in the form of a differing surface structure type' .
(Longacre 1983: 11) 'An example of this occurred in a news story in the Dallas Morning News ... Its notional intent was to give a first person account of an apartment fire in Dallas, but it is cast in the form of procedural discourse' .
(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' .
(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' .
(Bove 1990: 61) 'Foucault grew increasingly interested in what the rise of the modern disciplines had to do with modern state power-- with what he called "governability"-- and how it displaced sovereignty as the hegemonic figure of power and authority.... In disciplinary societies, self-determination is nearly impossible, and political opposition must take the form of resistance to the systems of knowledge and their institutions that regulate the population into "individualities" ... In this understanding of governability, truth produced by these knowledge systems blocks the possibility of sapping power; it speaks for-- or... "represents"-- others' .
(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' .
(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'
.
(Virtanen 1992: 294-5) 'The present article is concerned with text types that are characterizable with the help of text-internal criteria. Such criteria are connected with the form or content of texts' .
(Virtanen 1992: 306) 'Narratives, for example, can be used for argumentation, or descriptions for instruction. Such an apparent mismatch of discourse type and text type may be accounted for in terms of the suggested two levels. Any discourse type may surface in the form of a narrative: Narratives may be used to instruct ... explain things ... describe activities or circumstances ... The ease of the indirect or secondary usage manifested by this type of text, and its potential to realize the widest array of discourse types may, indeed, be regarded as arguments for the "basic" status of narrative among the different types of text' .
(Frye 1957: 189) 'The central form of quest-romance is the dragon-killing theme exemplified in the stories of St. George and Perseus' .
(Frye 1957: 187) 'The complete form of the romance is clearly the successful quest, and such a completed form has three main stages: the stage of the perilous journey and the preliminary minor adventures; the crucial struggle, usually some kind of battle in which either the hero of his foe, or both, must die; and the exaltation of the hero' .
(Frye 1957: 208-9) 'In its most elementary form, the vision of law (dike) operates as lex talionis or revenge. The hero provokes enmity, or inherits a situation of enmity, and the return of the avenger constitutes the catastrophe' .
(Frye 1957: 186) 'The essential element of plot in romance is adventure, which means that romance in naturally a sequential and processional form' .
(Coates and Cameron 1988: 66) A single form does not imply a single function .
(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' .
(Geertz 1973: 5-6) 'In understanding what ethnography is, or more exactly what doing ethnography is, that a start can be made toward grasping what anthropological analysis amounts to as a form of knowledge. This, it must immediately be said, is not a matter of methods. From one point of view, that of the textbook, doing ethnography is establishing rapport, selecting informants, transcribing texts, taking genealogies, mapping fields, keeping a diary, and so on. But it is not these things, techniques and received procedures, that define the enterprise. What defines it is the kind of intellectual effort it is: an elaborate venture in, to borrow a notion from Gilbert Ryle, "thick description"' .
(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: 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' .
(Jameson 1981: 76) 'Both the individual text and its ideologemes know a final transformation, and must be read in terms of what I will call the ideology of form, that is, the symbolic messages transmitted to us by the coexistence of various sign systems which are themselves traces or anticipations of modes of production' .
(Said 1986: 613) 'All this, then, shows us the individual consciousness placed at a sensitive nodal point, and it is this consciousness at that critical point which this book attempts to explore in the form of what I call criticism' .
Under construction
(Hopper 1987: 144) 'The point about the retention of archaisms in proverbial language has of course often been made. But it has less often been noted that proverbial language is only an extreme case of repetition in discourse, at the other end of which are the morphological and syntactic repetitions some of which are called grammar; this point is made cogently by Lambrecht 1984. In other words, real live discourse abounds in all sorts of repetitions which have nothing to do with grammar as this is usually understood: for instance, idioms, proverbs, clichÈs, formulas, specialist phrases, transitions, openings, closures, favored clause types, and so on. There is no consistent level at which these regularities are statable. They are not necessarily "sentences", or "clauses", with recurrent internal structure, but they are often used holistically. Their boundaries may or may not coincide with the constituent boundaries of our grammatical descriptions: subject and predicate, noun phrase, prepositional phrase. Moreover, what is a formulaic expression in one context may not be in another' .
(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' .
(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' .
(Hopper 1987: 147) 'The systematicity which linguists have come to expect in language still exists, of course, but in a more complex way. The linguistic system is now not to be seen as something complete and homogeneous, in which, "exceptional" phenomena must be set aside as inconvenient irregularities, but as a growing together of disparate forms. This convergence takes place through lateral associations of real utterances. Similarities spread outwards from individual formulas, in ways that are motivated by a variety of factors ... They do not, however, merge into the kind of uniform grammar which would lead one to posit a uniform mental representation to subtend them' .
(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: 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
(Reddy 1979: 286) 'We are engaged perforce in frame restructuring' .
(Minsky 1980: 1) 'A frame is a data-structure for representing a stereotyped situation ... Collections of related frames are linked together into frame systems' .
(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
.
(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' .
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' .
(Schiffrin 1994: 7) 'Although speech act theory was not first developed as a means of analyzing discourse, particular issues in speech act theory ... lead to discourse analysis. Speech act theory also provides a means by which to segment texts, and thus a framework for defining units that could then be combined into larger structures' .
(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: 291) 'The "minor" framework overlooks words as containers and allows ideas and feelings to flow, unfettered and completely disembodied, into a kind of ambient space between human heads.... There are three categories of expressions in the minor framework. The categories imply, respectively, that: (1) thoughts and feelings are ejected by speaking or writing into an external "idea space"; (2) thoughts and feelings are reified in this external space, so that they exist independent of any need for living human beings to think of feel them; (3) these reified thoughts and feelings may, or may not, find their way bank into the heads of living humans' .
(Reddy 1979: 290) 'Our examples thus far have been drawn from the four categories which constitute the "major framework" of the conduit metaphor. The core expressions in these categories imply, respectively, that: (1) language functions like a conduit, transferring thoughts bodily from one person to another; (2) in writing and speaking, people insert their thoughts or feelings in the words; (3) words accomplish the transfer by containing the thoughts or feelings and conveying them to others; and (4) in listening or reading, people extract the thoughts and feelings once again from the words' .
(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: 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'
.
(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' .
(Hopper 1987: 140) 'Critics of "radical pragmatics", and "functional grammar", assume that they and those they oppose share a common view of language, that there is a pairing of autonomous (i.e., decontextualized) grammatical forms with "functions" (whatever they might be in the abstract), and that the only point of disagreement is whether these forms might be eventually derivable from "functions" or whether the forms must be described independently of "functions". I find a certain irony in such a use of the terms "function" and "functionalism", since the very restriction of the investigation to an artificially defined level of "sentences" seems to me to be quintessentially anti-functionalist. Be that as it may, I am concerned in this paper with the more fundamental problem of the assumptions underlying the critique, especially the assumption of an abstract, mentally represented rule system which is somehow implemented when we speak' .
(Hopper 1987: 141) 'However consistently it can be predicted that a certain particle or aspectual form will function in a particular role in the discourse, it is rare that the reverse is the case -- that a particular form is restricted to a single specifiable discourse role. To cut a very long story short, and thereby probably caricature the dilemma, some way out of the vicious circle of form-to-function-to-form is needed' .
(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: 144) 'Evidently the meanings represented by the English "indefinite article" are not unified under one hyper-abstract function. Instead, an open ended set of small sub-systems has come into being, and the membership of new occurrences of forms with the indefinite article is not specifiable in advance, but is impromptu and negotiable. Even participants in the conversation may not "know" whether a specific new mention or a non-specific indefinite is intended until this has been worked out in the verbal interaction' .
(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' .
(Fish 1982: 341) 'Whenever a critic prefaces an assertion with a phrase like "without doubt" or "there can be no doubt", you can be sure that you are within hailing distance of the interpretive principles which produce the facts that he presents as obvious.... As one obvious and indisputable interpretation supplants another, it brings with it a new set of obvious and indisputable facts. Of course each new reading is elaborated in the name of the poem itself, but the poem itself is always a function of the interpretive perspective from which the critic "discovers" it' .
(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: 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' .
(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' .
(Schiffrin 1994: 90-1) 'The essential insight of speech act theory is that language performs communicative acts. ... Speech act theory, then, is basically concerned with what people "do" with language -- with the functions of language. ... The conditions underlying and defining speech acts are central to speech act theory: they are the basis for the way we recognize and classify speech acts ... and for the way a single utterance can have more than one function ... In sum, by focusing upon the meaning of utterances as acts, speech act theory offers an approach to discourse analysis in which what is said is chunked (or segmented) into units that have communicative functions that can be identifies and labelled. Although we can describe such acts in different ways ... the import of such acts for discourse is that they both initiate and respond to other acts' .
(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: 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: 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' .
(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 .
(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' .
(Bove 1990: 62) 'The contemporary use of "discourse" turns literary critics away from questions of meaning; it also turns us from questions of "method" to the description of function. It suggests that a new set of questions should replace the interpretive ones that have come to constitute criticism and the normal practice of teachers and scholars. We might ask such things as, How does language work to produce knowledge? How is language organized in disciplines? Which institutions perform and which regulative principles direct this organization?' .
(Culler 1992: 223) 'Finally, an issue in recent theory is the nature and function of the aesthetic' .
(Culler 1992: 213) Responding to Knapp and Michaels, who maintain that 'Beliefs cannot be grounded in some deeper condition of knowledge' (1982.Against theory. Critical inquiry 8: 738), Culler posits, 'this might be true for such things as religious beliefs, but the various beliefs that function as principles, criteria, and premises in people's work on literature most probably belong to a structure of knowledge and argumentation' .
(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' .
(van Dijk 1977: 15) 'The macro-rule of construction is perhaps most characteristic of all macro-rules. It organizes micro-information by combining sequences of propositions that function as one unit at some macro-level; it reduces information without simply deleting it; and it introduces information at the macro-level that is "new" in the sense of not being part of the text base or entailed by individual propositions of the text base' .
(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' .
(Coates and Cameron 1988: 66) A single form does not imply a single function .
(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.)' .
(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' .
(Jameson 1981: 106) 'Genres are essentially literary institutions, or social contracts between a writer and a specific public, whose function is to specify the proper use of a particular cultural artifact' .
(Jameson 1981: 105) 'The strategic value of generic concepts for Marxism clearly lies in the mediatory function of the notion of a genre, which allows the coordination of immanent formal analysis of the individual text with the twin diachronic perspective of the history of forms and the evolution of social life' .
(White 1974: 402) 'Levi-Strauss concludes: "In spite of worthy and indispensable efforts to bring another moment in history alive and to possess it, a clairvoyant history should admit that it never completely escapes from the nature of myth." It is this mediative function that permits us to speak of a historical narrative as an extended metaphor' .
Last Modified: July-12-96 16:27:36
Reply to randy_radney@sil.org