I

Booth 1974

Quotes: (11)

(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' .

(Gibbs 1987: 569) 'My main contention, then, is that Sperber and Wilson are "sneaking" mutual knowledge in the backdoor of their theory of conversational inference by appealing to the idea of mutual cognitive environments which can be manifest but not known. At a psychological level, it appears that Sperber and Wilson have adopted a framework for describing verbal communication which crucially depends on the very concept that they wish to abandon' .

(Gibbs 1987: 585) 'My arguments is favor of the mutual knowledge hypothesis and against the relevance hypothesis are grounded in five interrelated observations. First, I have suggested the Sperber and Wilson's proposal that mutual cognitive environments constitute the true context for comprehension is not sufficiently clear and distinguishable from the concept of mutual knowledge. As such, the relevance hypothesis seems to make use of the very idea that it attempts to replace. Second, mutual knowledge is possible to determine in a finite period of time via Clark and Marshall's (1981) mutual knowledge induction scheme without resorting to an infinite set of beliefs statements usually viewed as a consequence of establishing mutual knowledge. Third, it appears that mutual knowledge is indeed a necessary prerequisite for the comprehension of many kinds of utterances in conversation. This is particularly true if listeners are to distinguish between inferences that are ostensively intended or "authorized" by speakers from inferences that are "unauthorized". Conversations are only cooperative to the extent to which speakers specifically intend and listeners specifically recognize "m-intended" messages. Part of my thesis here is that how listeners are able to distinguish "authorized" versus "unauthorized" inferences must be part of a cognitive theory of conversational inferences. Fourth, parts of the processing model underlying the relevance hypothesis are not supported by contemporary psycholinguistic research. Specifically, there is little empirical evidence in favor of the idea that listeners must first decode an utterance into some propositional representation before choosing a context in which that proposition is viewed as most relevant. Finally, there is some recent psycholinguistic evidence demonstrating that speakers formulate their utterances precisely to satisfy the amount of knowledge they share with their listeners. This shared knowledge is also directly utilized by listeners when interpreting utterances in everyday discourse. These findings appear most congruent with the predictions of the mutual knowledge hypothesis' .

(Booth 1974: 33) 'Every idea -- unless of course it is "scientific" -- expresses a need or a secret wish; nothing need be taken seriously as a possible contribution to the truth. The very word truth has for many been ruled out of court, and with it the notion that one determinant of what is said can be a respect for reasons' .

(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' .

(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' .

(Bove 1990: 63) 'When viewed as an element in a historical system of institutionalized discourse, the traditional idea of the "author," and the privileged value accorded to it in literary scholarship and criticism, is one of the two or three key concepts by means of which the critical disciplines organize their knowledge around questions of subjectivity and discipline both their practitioners and those they "teach"' .

(Marshall 1992: 175) 'The idea that a text must have a single clear meaning and that interpretation should aim to state it is highly questionable, but it has deep roots in our culture' .

(van Dijk 1977: 30) 'The basic idea in all these cognitive domains is that large and highly complex amounts of information must be organized and reduced in appropriate ways, without which processing (storage, control, retrieval) would be impossible' .

(Derrida 1986c: 125) 'Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system. The idea or phonic substance that a sign contains is of less importance than the other signs that surround it' .

(White 1974: 398) 'Unless you have some idea of the generic attributes of tragic, comic, romantic, or ironic situations, you will be unable to recognize them as such when you come upon them in a literary text' .

identity

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (12)

Quotes: (14)

(Burke 1945: 96) 'Integral to the concept of scope is the concept of reduction . In a sense, every circumference, no matter how far-reaching its reference, is a reduction. A cosmology, for instance, is a reduction of the world to the dimensions of words; it is the world in terms of words. The reductive factor becomes quite obvious when we pause to realize that any terminology of motives reduces the vast complexity of life by reduction to principles, laws, sequences, classifications, correlations, in brief, abstractions or generalizations of one sort or another. And any generalization is necessarily a reduction in that it selects a group of things and gives them a property which makes it possible to consider them as a single entity . Thus, the general concept of "man" neglects an infinite number of particular differences in order to stress certain properties which many distinct individual entities have in common. Indeed, any characterization of any sort is a reduction. To give a proper name to one person, or to name a thing, is to recognize some principle of identity or continuity running through the discontinuities that, of themselves, would make the world sheer chaos. To note any order whatever is to "reduce". To divide experience into hungry and sated moments, into the pleasant and unpleasant, into the before and after, into here and there - even distinctions as broad as these translate the world's infinite particulars into terms that are a reduction of the world; in fact, as per the equating of infinity and zero, terms of such broad scope are perhaps the most drastically reductive of all' .

(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' .

(M. Pratt 1987: 59) 'I have bee suggesting that the tendency to postulate social subgroups existing separately from each other gives rise to a linguistics that seek [sic] to capture identity, but not the relationality of social differentiation. It ignores the extent to which dominant and dominated groups are not comprehensible apart from each other' .

(Lanham 1976: 58) 'Anthropological understanding of myth began when scholars ceased to force scientific coordinates on it, stopped trying to "make sense of it" and let it make its own kind of sense. Ovid's Metamorphoses could not be plainer about the kind of invitation it extends. a poem about changes, it insists on dynamic rhetorical premises, not static serious ones. Identity is, by nature in this poem, as fluid as the other categories of life. The underlying assumption here is unity of life, not aristocratic domination of one species by another' .

(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' .

(Bove 1990: 52) 'It is the very utility of the discourse that must be seen as functional and regulative. It hierarchizes not only poetry and prose but, implicitly, identity and difference, authority and subservience, taste and vulgarity, and continuity and discontinuity as well' .

(Bove 1990: 50) 'For the New Critics, "discourse" marked differences and established identities....Each "discourse", in itself,... has an identity to be discovered, defined, and understood; in addition, each discourse established the limits of a particular genre' .

(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?' .

(Bathrick 1992: 337) 'In his anthology, Nation and Narration, Homi K. Bhabha raises fundamental issues about the future of cultural studies in relation to national identity: What forms of narrative express the ideology of the modern nation? How do questions of race and gender, class and colonialism change the boundaries of national identity? How is national identity itself the construction of a particular historical imaginary?' .

(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' .

(Jehlen 1990: 265) 'In proposing gender as a basic problem and an essential category in cultural and historical analysis, feminists have recast the issue of women's relative identity as equally an issue for men, who, upon ceasing to be mankind, become, precisely, men. Thus gender has emerged as a problem that is always implicit in any work. It is a quality of the literary voice hitherto masked by the static of common assumptions. And as a critical category gender is an additional lens, or a way of lifting the curtain to an unseen recess of the self and of society. Simply put, the perspective of gender enhances the critical senses; let us try to see how' .

(Ordonez 1989: 84) 'Showalter replaced traditional literary periods with three stages in women's literary history, stages marked by an increasing growth of feminist consciousness: the first or feminine is characterized by an imitation of prevailing modes of the dominant tradition; the second or feminist protests against these standards and values and advocates minority rights and values; the female turns inward toward a search for identity and self-discovery' .

(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: 621) 'Were I to use one word consistently along with criticism ... it would be oppositional....its identity is its difference from other cultural activities and from systems of thought or of method' .

ideology

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (5)

Quotes: (6)

(Fish 1982: 111) 'The attempt to specify once and for all the properties of literature and locate the boundaries of style should be either abandoned ... or recognized for what it is: not a disinterested investigation but the reflection of an ideology; not a progress toward a theory but the product of one; not a question but an answer' .

(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' .

(Jehlen 1990: 273) 'Because an ideology of gender is basic to virtually all thought while, by most thinkers, unrecognized as such, gender criticism often has a confrontational edge. One has to read for gender; unless it figures explicitly in story or poem, it will seldom read for itself. On the other hand "interpretation" is an ambiguous word meaning both to translate and to explain. Literary interpretation does both inextricably ... They also interpret who only think to explicate. Literary criticism involves action as much as reflection, and reading for gender makes the deed explicit.... The term "gender" in literary criticism refers to a set of concerns and also to a vocabulary ... that contributes its own meanings to everything that is said or written' .

(White 1974: 40x) 'It may be observed that if historians were to recognize the fictive element in their narratives, this would not mean the degradation of historiography to the status of ideology or propaganda. In fact, this recognition would serve as a potent antidote to the tendency of historians to become captive of ideological preconceptions which they do not recognize as such but honor as the "correct" perception of "the way things really are."' .

idiom

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (0)

Quotes: (0)

image

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (4)

Quotes: (5)

(Burke 1945: 123) 'In strict logic, perhaps, the "love" and "knowledge" are simply in different planes, rather than being in opposition to each other. But as regards matters of Symbolic, since words have also incantatory effects, inviting men to make themselves over in the image of their imagery, the purely logical implications of reductionist terminologies take on new attributes, when translated into their equivalents in the realm of the imagination' .

(Minsky 1980: 6-7) 'People have great difficulty keeping track of the faces of a six-colored cube if one makes them roll it around in their mind. If one uses more "intrinsic" relations like next-to and opposite-to, then turning the object on its side disturbs the "image" much less' .

(Lanham 1993: xi) 'One of the computer screen's routine marvels is manipulation of scale, and such manipulation stands at the center of postmodern art. As we shall see in chapter 2, wherever you touch twentieth-century visual art and architecture, it seems both to foreshadow electronic expression and to provide and aesthetic ready-made for it. as I point out in chapter 1, the composition, notation, and performance of music have been transformed by digital expression. Because word, image, and sound are expressed in a common digital code, the arts take on a new and radical convertibility that threatens both their present compartmentalization and its academic departmental embodiment. So, too, poststructuralist literary theory, which has precipitated the current streetfight between Left and Right, turns out to be just such another proleptic aesthetic; poststructuralism and the common digital code seem part of the same event. As I suggest here, the whole Aristotelian basis of literary criticism is undermined by electronic expression, and so pre structuralist literary theory is similarly transformed' .

(Derrida 1986b: 119) Thus, as Derrida says, 'the graphic image is not seen; and the acoustic image is not heard'. There is, rather, the perception of differences. .

implicit

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (8)

Fish 1982

Quotes: (11)

(Burke 1945: 77-8) 'Now, it seems undeniable, by the very nature of the case, that in definition, or systematic placement, one must see things "in terms of..." And implicit in the terms chosen, there are "circumferences" of varying scope. Motivationally, they involve such relationships as are revealed in the analysis of the scene-act and scene-agent ratios whereby the quality of the context in which a subject is placed will affect the quality of the subject placed in that context' .

(Burke 1945: 37) 'In theological and metaphysical works, we can recognize the paradox of the absolute readily enough. Often, in fact, it is explicitly discussed. But in historicist writings it more easily goes unnoticed. Yet the paradox may be implicit in any term for a collective motivation, such as a concept of class, nation, the "general will," and the like. Technically, it becomes a "pure" motive when matched against some individual locus of motivation. And it may thus be the negation of an individual motive.... What we are here considering formally, as a paradox of substance, can be illustrated quickly enough by example. A soldier may be nationally motivated to kill the enemies of his country, whereas individually he is motivated by a horror of killing his own enemies. Or conversely, as a patriot he may act by the motive of sacrifice in behalf of his country, but as an individual he may want to profit' .

(Burke 1945: 6-7) 'From the motivational point of view, there is implicit in the quality of a scene the quality of the action that is to take place within it. This would be another way of saying that the act will be consistent with the scene. Thus, when the curtain rises to disclose a given stage-set, this stage-set contains, simultaneously, implicitly, all that the narrative is to draw out as a sequence, explicitly. Or, of you will, the stage-set contains the action ambiguously (as regards the norms of action)- and in the course of the play's development this ambiguity is converted into a corresponding articulacy . The proportion would be: scene is to act as implicit is to explicit' .

(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' .

(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 12) 'To substantiate the code model of verbal communication, it would have to be shown that every case of reference assignment can be dealt with by rules which automatically integrate properties of the context with semantic properties of the utterance. It would also have to be shown that disambiguation, the recovery of propositional attitudes, figurative interpretations and implicit import can be handled along similar lines' .

(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 56) 'The distortions and misperceptions introduced by the explicit communication model are also found in the study of verbal communication itself. Some essential aspects of implicit verbal communication are overlooked. ... What is implicitly conveyed by an utterance is generally much vaguer than what is explicitly expressed, and that when the implicit import of an utterance is explicitly spelled out, it tends to be distorted by the elimination of this often intentional vagueness. The distortion is even greater in the case of metaphor and other figures of speech, whose poetic effects are generally destroyed by being explicitly spelled out' .

(Spellmeyer 1993: 25) 'Implicit in Habermas' schema is the recognition that a disciplinary practice, on the part of either individuals or entire communities, does not make sense in itself and cannot be studies exclusively from an insider's point of view. The purpose of medicine, for example, is not the practice of medicine' .

(Lanham 1976: 61) 'Ovid saw the fraud implicit in any act of writing and wanted to declare it. What strikes us is the force of Ovid's sincerity. Formal pleasure represents a fundamental ingredient in any reconstruction of the past. It is not declared, the poet is not truly engaged. He has become a propagandist. Ovid's strategy in the Metamorphoses seems plain. He builds a mythic reality and then plays sophisticated games with it' .

(van Dijk 1977: 7) 'The propositions implied by the discourse need not be expressed. Some propositions may remain implicit, even though they are essential in the establishment of linear coherence in texts' .

(Greenblatt 1995: ?227) 'Here we can make our first tentative move toward the use of culture for the study of literature... to recover a sense of the stakes that once gave readers pleasure and pain. An awareness of culture as a complex whole can help us to recover that sense by leading us to reconstruct the boundaries upon whose existence the works were predicated.... What kinds of behavior, what models of practice, does this work seem to enforce? Why might readers at a particular time and place find this work compelling? Are there differences between my values and the values implicit in the work I am reading? Upon what social understandings does the work depend? Whose freedom of thought or movement might be constrained implicitly or explicitly by this work? What are the larger social structures with which these particular acts of praise or blame might be connected?' .

inference

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (2)

Quotes: (7)

(Gibbs 1987: 562) 'My purpose in this article is to assess the role of mutual knowledge and beliefs in a psychological theory of conversation inference. I will attempt to support what I call the mutual knowledge hypothesis, which assumes that listeners use the knowledge and beliefs they share with speakers in the process of interpreting utterances in conversation' .

(Gibbs 1987: 579) 'Perhaps the most fundamental difference between the mutual knowledge hypothesis and the relevance hypothesis concerns the constraints each places on the kinds of inference generated during utterance interpretation. Consider the following exchange:
'He: Are you going to the party tonight?
'She: I hear Jack's coming.' .

(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 3) 'The code model and the inferential model are not incompatible; they can be combined in various ways.... Both the code model and the inferential model can contribute to the study of verbal communication. However, it is usually assumed that one of the two models must provide the right overall framework for the study of communication in general.... Against these reductionist views, we maintain that communication can be achieved in ways which are as different from one another as walking is from plane flight. In particular, communication can be achieved by coding and decoding messages, and it can be achieved by providing evidence for an intended inference. The code model and the inferential model are each adequate to a different mode of communication; hence upgrading either to the status of a general theory of communication is a mistake....We will propose what we hope is an improved inferential model. However, we do not regard this model as the basis for a general theory of communication' .

(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 9) 'It is true that a language is a code which pairs phonetic and semantic representations of sentences and the thoughts actually communicated by utterances. This gap is filled not by more coding, but by inference. Moreover, there is an alternative to the code model of communication. Communication has been described as a process of inferential recognition of the communicator's intentions. We will try to show how this description can be improved and made explanatory' .

(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 21) 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 .

infinity

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (2)

Quotes: (3)

(Burke 1945: 87) 'It may often be the works of wider circumference that give us the faultiest interpretation of a particular motivational cluster. People tend to think that when they speak of "the Universe", they are actually speaking of the Universe - yet "world views" can easily be the narrowest of all in circumference, possibly ... in accordance with a law of formal logic whereby "concepts become poorer in contents or intension in proportion as their extension increases, so that the content zero must correspond to the extension infinity"' .

(Gibbs 1987: 575) 'Clark and Marshall (1981)... have attempted to show that mutual knowledge can be established in practice by arguing that the apparent paradox of mutual knowledge is base on two incorrect assumptions. The first is the assumption that mutual beliefs must be represented in a mental model as an infinite series of belief statements'. What they propose is that 'if A and B make certain assumptions about each other's rationality, they can use certain states of affairs as a basis for inferring the infinity of conditions all at once' .

influence

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (3)

Bakhtin 1986

Quotes: (3)

(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' .

(Schiffrin 1994: 13) 'The origin of an approach provides different theoretical and metatheoretical premises that continue to influence assumptions, concepts, and methods. For example, different origins may be responsible for different assumptions and beliefs about language -- assumptions about the stability of linguistic meaning, the role of speaker intentionality, the degree to which language is designed for communicative purposes, and the contribution of linguistic meaning to interactive meaning' .

(Bakhtin 1986: 666) 'Once rhetorical discourse is brought into the study with all its living diversity, it cannot fail to have a deeply revolutionizing influence on linguistics and on the philosophy of language. It is precisely those aspects of any discourse (the internally dialogic quality of discourse, and the phenomena related to it), not yet sufficiently taken into account and fathomed in all the enormous weight they carry in the life of language, that are revealed with great external precision in rhetorical forms, provided a correct and unprejudiced approach to those forms is used. Such is the general methodological and heuristic significance of rhetorical forms for linguistics and for the philosophy of language' .

instance

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (3)

Lanham 1993

Foucault 1986a

Quotes: (9)

(Burke 1945: 14) 'As for "act", any verb, no matter how specific or how general, that has connotations of consciousness or purpose falls under this category. If one happened to stumble over an obstruction, that would be not an act, but a mere motion. However, one could convert even this sheer accident into something of an act if, in the course of falling, one suddenly willed his fall (as a rebuke, for instance, to the negligence of the person who had left the obstruction in the way)' .

(Burke 1945: 48) 'One of the most common fallacies in the attempt to determine the intrinsic is the equating of the intrinsic with the unique. We recall an instance of this nominalist extreme in an essay by a literary critic who exhorted his fellows to discern the quality of a given poet's lines by finding in exactly what way they were distinct from the lines of every other poet (somewhat as advertisements recommending rival brands of the same product play up some one "talking point" that is said to distinguish this brand from all its competitors). Yet the intrinsic value of a poet's lines must also reside, to a very great degree, in attributes that his work shares with many other poets. We cannot define by differentia alone; the differentiated also has significant attributes as members of its class' .

(Burke 1945: 189) 'If then, you would talk profoundly and intelligently about the conditions of the possibility of the knowledge of nothing, what do you have that you can talk about? You have the knower . You can say, for instance, "Whatever an object in general may or may not look like, you can be sure that when you do come across one you are going to have to encounter it in terms of space and/or time". And since you can't here be talking about an object (if you are, what is it?) what you must be talking about is the nature of your own mind' .

(Burke 1945: 79) 'We cherish the behaviorist experiment precisely because it illustrates the relation between the circumference and the circumscribed in mechanistic terms; and because the sharpest instance of the way in which the altering of the scenic scope affects the interpretation of the act is to be found in the shift from teleological to mechanistic philosophies. Christian theology, in stressing the rational, personal, and purposive aspects of the Creation as the embodiment of the Creator's pervasive will, had treated such principles as scenic, That is, they were not merely traits of human beings, but extended to the outer circumference of the ultimate ground. Hence, by the logic of the scene-act ratio, they were taken as basic to the constitution of human motives, and could be "deduced" from the nature of God as an objective, extrinsic principle defining the nature of human acts. But when the circumference was narrowed to naturalistic limits, the "Creator" was left out or account, and only the "Creation" remained (remained not as an "act", however, but as a concatenation of motions)' .

(Burke 1945: 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: 193) 'We have thus arrived at the transcendent realm as a realm of things "in themselves" (that is, with whatever nature they may have intrinsically, not as they are determined by the terms in which we see them). Whereat we might profitable pause to consider the grammar of the intrinsic. It is the puzzle we encountered when discussing the paradox of substance. As soon as one considers things in relation to other things, one is uncomfortably on the way to dissolving them into their context, since their relations lead beyond them. A thing in itself for instance can't be "higher" or "heavier" than something or "inside" or "outside" something, or "derived from" something, etc. For though such descriptions may apply to it, they do not apply to it purely as a thing in itself ; rather, they are contextual references, pointing beyond the thing' .

(Lanham 1993: 8) 'But if you are going to read books any more, or are going to read them in different ways, you must decide what it is that happens when you do read them. You must know this if you are to recreate that ineffable something in another medium. You must decide what business you are really in. You can conclude, of course, that that ineffable something cannot be transplanted, that the business you are really in is Reading Books. Many areas of endeavor in America pressured by technological change have already had to decide what business they were really in, and those making the narrow choice have usually not fared well. The railroads had to decide whether they were in the transportation business or the railroad business; they chose the latter and gradual extinction. Newspapers had to decide whether they were in the information business or only the newspaper business; most who chose the newspaper business are no longer in it. A fascinating instance of the choice is now taking place in the piano industry. Steinway used to own the market, and it has decided to stay in the piano business. Yamaha decided it was in the keyboard business- acoustic and electronic- and has, with Roland, Korg, and other manufacturers, redefined the instrument. Time has yet to tell who will win, financially or musically. For all its fastidious self-distancing from the world of affairs, literary study faces the same kind of decision. If we are not in the codex book business, what business are we really in?' .

(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' .

integrity

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (2)

Booth 1974

Frye 1957

Quotes: (2)

(Booth 1974: 52) 'The view of man, the puny, neaningless insect, prevailed, then- except of course whenever Russell felt impelled to defend values to which he was himself deeply committed, values like that of scientific inquiry or of integrity in its pursuit. Then we meet the two other Russells, the vital, idealistic, even Utopian prophet of reason and the passionate mystic and man of action who became famous among nonprofessionals. Russell I still dominated in the sense of setting the definitions, distinctions, and terms in which argument and action take place. But Russell II, the courageous partisan of truth, and Russell III, the savior of the world, never allowed themselves to be silenced by the cold logician for long. They knew that man's life could not be lived without values, and they feared that the scientific world picture which Russell I preached would, when popularized, produce impoverished dehumanized man' .

(Frye 1957: 198-202) 'Romance, like comedy, has six isolatable phases': 1) '...the myth of the birth of the hero'; 2) '...the innocent youth of the hero'; 3) '...the normal quest theme'; 4) '...the maintaining of the integrity of the innocent world against the assault of experience'; 5) '...a reflective, idyllic view of experience from above'; and 6) '...the end of a movement from active to contemplative adventure' .

intellect

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (0)

Quotes: (0)

intelligence

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (2)

Winograd 1977

Quotes: (2)

(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' .

(Winograd 1977: 84-6) 'The concepts presented in the sections above have been developed by researchers working at three different sorts of tasks: data exploration (primarily by linguists); model building (primarily in artificial intelligence); and model verification (primarily by psychologists).... Current research tends to lie in clusters along these separate lines. There is little work which combines the linguist's sophistication in recognizing the complexity of the data with the computer system builder's concern with the properties of the system as a whole, and the psychologist's demand that the resulting analysis be verifiable through experiments. If we are ever to really understand natural discourse, we have to develop methodologies which span these approaches, providing both scope and rigor in their theories' .

intention

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (7)

Fish 1982

Derrida 1986a

van Dijk 1977

Leitch [n.d.]

Quotes: (15)

(Burke 1945: xxii-xxiii) 'The titular word for our own method is "dramatism", since it invites one to consider the matter of motives in a perspective that, being developed from the analysis of drama, treats language and thought primarily as modes of action. The method is synoptic, though not in the historical sense. A purely historical survey would require no less that a universal history of human culture; for every judgment, exhortation, or admonition, every view of natural or supernatural reality, every intention or expectation involves assumptions about motive, or cause. Our work must be synoptic in a different sense: in the sense that it offers a system of placement, and should enable us, by the systematic manipulations of the terms, to "generate" or "anticipate" the various classes of motivational theory. And a treatment in these terms, we hope to show, reduces the subject synoptically while still permitting us to appreciate its scope and complexity' .

(Fish 1982: 103) 'My intention is not to criticize the work of the men, but to point out the extent to which the decision to separate ordinary and literary language dictates the shape of other decisions even before there is any pressure to make them' .

(Fish 1982: 101-2) 'The trivialization of ordinary language is accomplished as soon as one excludes from its precincts matters of purpose, value, intention, obligation, and so on -- everything that can be characterized as human. What, then, is left to it? The answers to this question are various. For some, the defining constituent of ordinary language, or language, is its capacity to carry messages; for others, the structure of language is more or less equated with the structure of logic ... Still others hold instrumental views: language is used to refer either to objects in the real world or to ideas in the mind ... But whatever the definition, two things remain constant: (1) the content of language is an entity that can be specified independently of human values... and (2) a need is therefore created for another entity or system in the context of which human values can claim pride of place.... Once you've taken the human values out of the language, and yet designated what remains as the norm, the separated values become valueless, because they have been removed from the normative center' .

(Fish 1982: 107) 'Philosophical, psychological, and moral concepts ... are built into the language we use... The significance of this is that the language system is not characterized apart for the realm of value and intention but begins and ends with that realm' .

(Schiffrin 1994: 9) 'Grice proposed distinctions between different types of meaning and argued that general maxims of cooperation provide inferential routes to a speaker's communicative intention. Pragmatics is most concerned with analyzing speaker meaning at the level of utterances and this often amounts to a sentence, rather than text, sized unit of language use. But since an utterance is, by definition, situated in a context (including a linguistic context, i.e. a text), pragmatics often ends up including discourse analyses and providing means of analyzing discourse along the way' .

(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 54) 'Ostensive-inferential communication consists in making manifest to an audience one's intention to make manifest a basic layer of information. It can therefore be described in terms of an informative and a communicative intention' .

(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 58) 'We want to suggest that the communicator's informative intention is better described as an intention to modify directly not the thoughts but the cognitive environment of the audience. The actual cognitive effects of a modification of the cognitive environment are only partly predictable' .

(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 49) 'We will call such behaviour -- behaviour which makes manifest an intention to make something manifest -- ostensive behaviour or simply ostension. Showing someone something is a case of ostension' .

(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 60-1) 'To communicate by ostension is to produce a certain stimulus with the aim of fulfilling an informative intention, and intending moreover ... to make it mutually manifest to audience and communicator that the communicator has this informative intention' .

(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 59-60) 'When the communicator's informative intention involves making a particular assumption strongly manifest, then that assumption is strongly communicated. When the communicator's intention is to marginally increase the manifestness of a wide range of assumptions, then each of them is weakly communicated. There is, of course, a continuum of cases in between. In the case of strong communication, the communicator can have fairly precise expectations about some of the thoughts that the audience will actually entertain. With weaker forms of communication, the communicator cam merely expect to stir the thoughts of the audience in a certain direction. Often, in human interaction, weak communication is found sufficient or even preferable to the stronger forms' .

(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 50) 'The main thesis of this book is that an act of ostension carries a guarantee of relevance, and that this fact -- which we will call the principle of relevance -- makes manifest the intention behind the ostension. We believe that it is this principle of relevance that is needed to make the inferential model of communication explanatory' .

(Derrida 1986a: 88) 'Levi-Strauss will always remain faithful to this double intention: to preserve as an instrument something whose truth value he criticizes'. Derrida says that Levi-Strauss advocates the use of bricolage, a strategy of using whatever is at hand, to analyze .

(van Dijk 1977: 31) 'We have not provided the details to substantiate the speculative remarks of this final section. Out intention is merely to suggest that the notions of macro-structure and macro-rule in discourse processing may be special cases of more general cognitive principles underlying higher-order processing' .

(Leitch [n.d.]: 151) 'When it studies discourse, archeology does not seek a hidden or overt "intention," "will," or "meaning" in or behind the discourse ... Its object of analysis is not the author, the linguistic code, the reader, or the individual text. but the limited set of texts constituting the regulated discourse of a discipline' .

intentionality

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (2)

Quotes: (2)

(Gibbs 1987: 581) 'Although Sperber and Wilson (1986) comment that it is easy enough to modify [their] definition [of communication] ... and make intentionality a defining feature of communication, it is not at all clear how this modification can be made without acknowledging the specific role mutual knowledge has on the determination of ... inferences' .

interaction

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (5)

Hopper 1987

Enkvist 1981

Coates and Cameron 1988

Quotes: (10)

(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' .

(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' .

(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 9-10) 'It is not legitimate to ignore the differences between the semantic representations of sentences and the thoughts that utterances are used to convey.... The semantic representation of a sentence deals with a sort of common core of meaning shared by every utterance of it.... The grammar can say nothing about how the hearer, using non-linguistic information, determines on a particular occasion what the time of utterance actually is, who the speaker is, which Bill or Betsy the speaker has in mind, etc., and hence which thought is actually being expressed. These aspects of interpretation involve an interaction between linguistic structure and non-linguistic information, only the former being dealt with by the grammar' .

(Enkvist 1981: 103) 'If we want to derive predications out of the model too, instead of accepting them as part of the input, we must adopt a device of the third, cognitive, type. In such cognitive models the predications are usually derived out of a cognitive network, again under the control of a text strategy.... But in addition to all this we may also wish to look into the motives and reasons why a certain speaker/writer has opted for one particular text strategy in his particular context of situation. If so, we must once again enlarge our perspective and adopt a model of a fourth type which is sensitive not only to strategies of text composition but also to principles of human interaction. Such models try to explain how human beings communicate as part of their attempts at social cooperation' .

(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' .

interlocutor

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (2)

Hopper 1987

Jardine 1986

Quotes: (2)

(Jardine 1986: 570) 'I have tried to outline here some of the reasons why we might not want to qualify the "new directions" in contemporary French thought as feminist and, most especially, as feminist only when and because they are being developed by women. At the same time, I feel that French thought can be an extremely important interlocutor for what we call feminist literary criticism in the United States' .

interpretation

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (11)

Fish 1982

Quotes: (30)

(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' .

(Gibbs 1987: 571-2) Gibbs claims that 'These results [of Ortony et al. (1978) on comprehension of metaphors] strongly demonstrate that context plays a crucial role in the interpretation of metaphoric language. With sufficient linguistic and social context, people understand the nonliteral interpretations of metaphoric utterances directly without first analyzing their putative literal meanings' .

(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: 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: 355) 'So it would seem, finally, that there are no moves that are not moves in the game, and this includes ever the move by which one claims no longer to be a player.... What I have been saying is that whatever they do, it will only be interpretation in another guise because, like it or not interpretation is the only game in town' .

(Fish 1982: 346-7) A given interpretation will be unacceptable, Fish says, if 'there is at present no interpretive strategy for producing it.... [Thus,] while there are always mechanisms for ruling out readings, their source is not the text but the presently recognized interpretive strategies for producing the text' .

(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: 354-5) 'Strictly speaking, getting "back-to-the-text" is not a move one can perform, because the text one gets back to will be the text demanded by some other interpretation and that interpretation will be presiding over its production. This is not to say, however, that the "back-to-the-text" move is ineffectual, The fact that it is not something one can do in no way diminishes the effectiveness of claiming to do it. As a rhetorical ploy, the announcement that one is returning to the text will be powerful so long as the assumption that criticism is secondary to the text and must not be allowed to overwhelm it remains unchallenged.... A wholesale challenge would be impossible because there would be no terms in which it could be made; that is, in order to be wholesale, it would have to be made in terms wholly outside the institution; but if that were the case, it would be unintelligible because it is only within the institution that the facts of literary study -- texts, authors, periods, genres -- become available' .

(Fish 1982: 350) 'The discovery of the "real point" is always what is claimed whenever a new interpretation is advanced, but the claim makes sense only in relation to a point (or points) that had previously been considered the real one. This means that the space in which a critic works has been marked out for him by his predecessors, even though he is obliged by the conventions of the institution to dislodge them.... it is only because something has already been said that he can now say something different' .

(Fish 1982: 341) 'While "The Tyger" is obviously open to more than one interpretation, it is not open to an infinite number of interpretations' .

(Fish 1982: 353) 'The basic gesture, then, is to disavow interpretation in favor of simply presenting the text; but it is actually a gesture in which one set of interpretive principles is replaced by another that happens to claim for itself the virtue of not being an interpretation at all' .

(M. Pratt 1987: 57) 'In both the linguistic and literary conceptions of subcommunity, then, one readily discerns nostalgia for the lost totality of the larger community. In the literary case, diversity of interpretation is often spontaneously, though by no means necessarily, perceived as a lack of consensus, a loss' .

(Ricoeur 1982: 147) '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' .

(Ricoeur 1982: 158) 'Interpretation retains the feature of appropriation ... By "appropriation", I understand this: that the interpretation of a text culminates in the self-interpretation of a subject who thenceforth understands himself better' .

(Marshall 1992: 161) 'In the description I propose, these [basic] components [of interpretation] are text, interpreter, the audience to whom interpretation is directed, meaning, and the resources that help achieve understanding' .

(Marshall 1992: 162) 'The term text ...encompasses the continuous substance of all human signifying activities and allows us to point to something very general, namely, to whatever seems to invite interpretation or to whatever the interpreter sets up as an object for interpreting' .

(Marshall 1992: 170) 'Interpreters do not freely elicit meanings from texts; rather, they make interpretation the means of synthesizing and carrying on a whole culture' .

(Marshall 1992: 170) 'Interpretation ...presupposes that a text does not speak its meaning for itself. It holds itself back from us in some ways' .

(Marshall 1992: 175) 'The idea that a text must have a single clear meaning and that interpretation should aim to state it is highly questionable, but it has deep roots in our culture' .

(Derrida 1986a: 93) 'There are two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign, of play. The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin which escapes play and the order of the sign, and which lives the necessity of interpretation as an exile. The other, which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms play and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name of man being the name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or of ontotheology -- in other words, throughout his entire history -- has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of play' .

(van Dijk 1977: 11) The irrelevance deletion rule: 'we assume that each proposition expressed by a discourse should be considered as relatively unimportant if it is not a condition for the interpretation of another proposition' .

(van Dijk 1977: 27-30) 'We will briefly state a number of hypotheses regarding ... processing implications....It will be assumed that in discourse comprehension fragments of the morpho-phonological and syntactic surface structure of the sentence sequence are stored only in short-term memory to construct a proposition sequence.... It is assumed that beyond a limited number of propositions, the proposition sequence of the text base is not fully accessible for recall.... Given a sequence of assigned propositions, the reader will make hypotheses about the relevant macro-structure proposition covering the sequence by applying the macro-rules to the sequence.... Macro-structure formation takes place in the course of reading the text, not a posteriori. The same holds true for the assignment of conventional categories to the macro-propositions. Both the assignment of macro-structures and of conventional super-structures is recursive. As soon as a first level becomes too complex. a second level is formed, and so forth. The macro-structure is available when it is necessary to explicitly summarize a text.... The macro-structure is also the basis for recall of the discourse immediately after presentation. The macro-structure is directly available in episodic memory. It then yields, by inverse macro-rule application and recognition, access to lower-level macro-structures and possibly to some text base propositions if the discourse was not too long.... Macro-structures may also constitute "plans for speaking".... Macro-structure formation is a highly complex process, so it can hardly be expected that effective comprehension exactly follows the rules formulated above: expedient strategies are used in the global interpretation of discourse.... Finally, there are strategies based on contextual cues and knowledge of the general communication situation. We may know the speaker so well that we may easily predict the main themes of his discourse, even with very scanty information.... Familiarity with the relevant macro-structures will certainly facilitate the task of global comprehension' .

introduction

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (4)

Quotes: (4)

(Booth 1974: xi) 'We seem to conduct much of our practical controversy on "modern" assumptions that many recent theorists would repudiate. If the assumptions are correct, controversy about values and commitments is essentially nonrational, and rhetoric is simply the art of winning. If they are at best questionable, if in fact the whole modernist edifice has been undermined by its own rhetoric of systematic doubt, we may hope now to construct rhetorics of a kind of assent that cannot be dismissed as "mere faith". These lectures, originally given in the Ward-Phillips series at the University of Notre Dame in April of 1971, are intended as an introduction to one of many possible directions in which postmodernist rhetoric about values can earn its legitimacy' .

(Foucault 1986b: 159-60) 'In the sense that this slender wedge I intend to slip into the history of ideas consists not in dealing with meanings possibly lying behind this or that discourse, but with discourse as regular series and distinct events, I fear I recognise in this wedge a tiny (odious, too, perhaps) device permitting the introduction, into the very roots of thought, of notions of chance, discontinuity and materiality' .

(Longacre 1983: 1) 'This chapter deals with broad concerns of monologue discourse and leaves the matter of the relations of monologue and dialogue to the introduction to the next chapter. One initial concern in the analysis of monologue discourse is discourse typology. Characteristics of individual discourses can be neither described, predicted, nor analyzed without resort to a classification of discourse types' .

(Derrida 1986b: 100) Derrida says that for Saussure, 'the introduction of scientific exigencies and the taste for exactitude into ordinary phonetic writing must be avoided. In this case, rationality would bring death, desolation, and monstrousness. That is why common orthography must be kept away from the notations of the linguist and the multiplying of diacritical signs must be avoided' .

invalidation

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (0)

Quotes: (0)

investigation

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (6)

Quotes: (6)

(Burke 1945: xv) 'We shall use five terms as generating principle of our investigation. They are: Act, Scene, Agent, Agency, Purpose. In a rounded statement about motives, you must have some word that names the act (names what took place, in thought or deed), and another that names the scene (the background of the act, the situation in which it occurred); also, you must indicate what person or kind of person ( agent ) performed the act, what means or instruments he used ( agency ), and the purpose . Men may violently disagree about the purposes behind a given act, or about the character of the person who did it, or how he did it, or in what kind of situation he acted; or they may even insist upon totally different words to name the act itself. But be that as it may, any complete statement about motives will offer some kind of answers to these five questions: what was done (act), when or where it was done (scene), who did it (agent), how he did it (agency), and why (purpose)' .

(Schiffrin 1994: 10-1) 'A variationist approach to discourse ... stems from studies of linguistic variation and change....Fundamental assumptions of variationist studies are that linguistic variation ... is patterned both socially and linguistically, and that such patterns can be discovered only through systematic investigation of a speech community' .

(Ricoeur 1982: 145) 'I should like to pause at a preliminary question which in fact dominates the whole of our investigation. The question is this: what is a text?... Let us say that a text is any discourse fixed by writing' .

(Kinneavy 1971: 24) 'The justification for the autonomy of textual study is the same as the justification for any scientific abstraction: by focusing on one aspect of a reality, science can set up tools for isolated analysis which is possible only within this particular vacuum. Then the object of investigation can be reinserted into the stream of life, more intelligible for its academic isolation.' .

irony

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (2)