(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) 'The assumption, in other words, is that "grammar" (in the sense of the rules, constraints, and categories of the language attributed to the speaker) must be an object apart from the speaker and separated from the uses which the speaker may make of it. That kind of grammar is conventionally understood to consist of sets of rules which operate on fixed categories like nouns and verbs, specify the forms of additive categories like those of case, tense, transitivity, etc., and restrict the possible orders in which words can occur in a sentence. Discourse, the actual use of language, is held to be in some sense an "implementation" of these structures, or the way in which the abstract mental system possessed in its entirety by the speaker is realized in particular utterances' .

(Hopper 1987: 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' .

(Johnson 1990: 47) 'The possibility of reading materiality, silence, space, and conflict within texts has opened up extremely productive ways of studying the politics of language.
'The writings of Western male authorities have often encoded the silence, denigration, or idealization not only of women but also of other "others"', thus, excluding them .

(Burke 1945: 319) 'This work (which would have as its motto Ad Bellum Purificandum , or Towards the Purification of War) is constructed on the belief that, whereas an attitude of humanistic contemplation is in itself more important by far than any method , only by method could it be given the body necessary for its existence even as an attitude. We would thus hold at least that an elaborate analysis of linguistic foibles is justified "in principle". Indeed, the study of linguistic action is but beginning. And we must be on our guard lest the great need for an attitude of linguistic skepticism allow us to be content with too hasty a "policy" as regards the nature of language itself. This is too serious a matter for such "dissipatory" approaches to the subject as we find among the contemporary "debunkers". And even serious approaches are invalidated when formed in keeping with the ideals of an uncriticized scientism, which is too evasive of the dramatistic to make even an adequate preparatory description of linguistic forms' .

(Burke 1945: 317) 'Our five terms are "transcendental" rather than formal (and are to this extent Kantian) in being categories which human thought necessarily exemplifies. Instead of calling them the necessary "forms of experience", however, we should call them the necessary "forms of talk about experience". For our concern is primarily with the analysis of language rather than with the analysis of " reality"' .

(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' .

(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: 65-6) 'The meaning of an utterance, I repeat, is its experience -- all of it -- and that experience is immediately compromised the moment you say something about it. It follows then that we should not try to analyze language at all. The human mind, however, seems unable to resist the impulse to investigate its own processes; but the least (and probably the most) we can do is proceed in such a way as to permit as little distortion as possible' .

(Fish 1982: 67) Good analysts will be able 'to see the value of considering effects and ... to think of language as an experience rather than as a repository of extractable meaning' .

(Fish 1982: 108) 'If deviation theories trivialize the norm and therefore trivialize everything else, a theory which restores human content to language also restores legitimate status to literature by reuniting it with a norm that is no longer trivialized' .

(Fish 1982: 106) 'There is no such thing as ordinary language' .

(Fish 1982: 109) 'Literary language may be the norm, and message-bearing language a device we carve out to perform the special, but certainly not normative, task of imparting information' .

(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: 100) 'Linguistics is positively harmful when its procedures are applied to such utterances, and it had best limit itself to the sphere of its competence, which is, of course, ordinary language' .

(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' .

(Fish 1982: 526) 'Norms are not imbedded in the language ... but inhere in an institutional structure within which one hears utterances as already organized with reference to certain assumed purposes and goals' .

(Fish 1982: 99) 'The linguist says, I have done the job of describing the language; you take it from here. The critic replies, I have no use for what you have done; you've given me at once too little and too much. Superficially, then, the two positions are firmly opposed, but only slightly beneath the surface one finds a crucial area of agreement: in their concern to characterize the properties of literary language, Schwartz [a critic] and Saporta [a linguist] simply assume a characterization of nonliterary or ordinary language, and that characterization is also a judgment' .

(Fish 1982: 108) 'What philosophical semantics and the philosophy of speech acts are telling us is that ordinary language is extraordinary because at its heart is precisely that realm of values, intentions, and purposes which is often assumed to be the exclusive property of literature' .

(Fish 1982: 101) 'By accepting the positivist assumption that ordinary language is available to a purely formal description, both sides assure that their investigations of literary language will be fruitless and arid; for if one begins with an impoverished notion of ordinary language, something that is then defined as a deviation from ordinary language will be doubly impoverished. Indeed, it is my contention that the very act of distinguishing between ordinary and literary language, because of what it assumes, leads necessarily to an inadequate account of both' .

(Fish 1982: 107-8) 'Description of that language will be inseparable from a description of ... commitments and obligations' .

(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' .

(Fish 1982: 66) 'Becoming good at the method means asking the question "what does that ------ do?" with more and more awareness of the probable (and hidden) complexity of the answer, that is, with a mind more and more sensitized to the workings of language. In a peculiar and unsettling (to theorists) way, it is a method which processes its own user, who is also its only instrument. It is self-sharpening and what it sharpens is you. It does not organize materials, but transforms minds' .

(Fish 1982: 104) 'Here again we see the moral force of the norm of ordinary language, its inevitable legislation of the ideal of logical clarity, even in context which are defined in opposition to that ideal' .

(Foucault 1986b: 157-8) 'Western thought has seen to it that discourse be permitted as little room as possible between thought and words. It would appear to have ensured that to discourse should appear merely as a certain interjection between speaking and thinking; that it should constitute thought, clad in its signs and rendered visible by words or, conversely, that the structures of language themselves should be brought into play, producing a certain effect of meaning.
'Whether it is the philosophy of a founding subject, a philosophy of originating experience or a philosophy of universal mediation, discourse is really only an activity, of writing in the first case, of reading in the second and exchange in the third. This exchange, this writing, this reading never involve anything but signs. Discourse thus nullifies itself, in reality, in placing itself at the disposal of the signifier' .

(Foucault 1986b: 153) 'The author is he who implants, into the troublesome language of fiction, its unities, its coherence, its links with reality' .

(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' .

(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' .

(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: 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: 6) 'Two philosophers, John Austin and John Searle, developed speech act theory from the basic insight that language is used not just to describe the world, but to perform a range of other actions that can be indicated in the performance of the utterance itself' .

(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' .

(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: 63) 'We began this chapter by asking how human beings communicate with one another, Our answer is that they use two quite different modes of communication: coded communication and ostensive-inferential communication. This is how language is used in verbal communication' .

(Spellmeyer 1993: 19) Spellmeyer conceives of 'language as a way of deliberately seeing and acting on a world that is recast through seeing and acting themselves. While no one invents language ex nihilo, while no one speaks without institutional constraints -- and while, in addition, the speaking self is to some degree a linguistic "construction" -- the act of speaking or writing always exposes past knowledge to the ordeal of the present, exposes the general to the burden of the particular, and the conventional to the test of the extraconventional. Precisely because writing reconceives the given, it involves still another activity overlooked by the proponents of objective assessment -- I mean, of course persuasion. Beginning with difference, and proceeding through difference, writing constantly seeks to overcome difference retrospectively by presenting the writer's insights to an audience whose assent must be secured' .

(Spellmeyer 1993: 28) To survey every language as we need to now, from the broader, hermeneutic perspective, is not to emulate the "social sciences" of a generation past, when the stress fell on the second term, still less would our practice take its cue from somewhat harder versions of research, such as linguistics or psychology. Composition on the terms I have argued for here would more closely resemble what Turner calls processual anthropology. As a form of engaged, politicized inquiry into speech and writing, a processual composition would continually struggle to recall the larger, always changing dimension of public life. 'Through this struggle of recollection, our field might discharge its institutional task -- teaching students how to write -- while at the same time affirming the possibility of a knowledge without domination and a commonality without coercion' .

(Spellmeyer 1993: 28) 'Whatever else the everything-is-language argument might do, it gives the teacher a new ... alibi for ignoring social differences. Who needs to listen to students when language is always the speaker?' .

(Spellmeyer 1993: 10) 'We have ... an unprecedented opportunity to imagine what the field of composition might look like should everyone turn out to be partly right -- should our warring tribes at last have learned enough about language to speak together in the same conversation' .

(Spellmeyer 1993: 20) '[The] attempt to get behind culture and language presupposed the existence of an invariant "real world" writing situation -- rather than writing for business, or for history class, or for one's mother -- as well as a standard definition of success' .

(Reddy 1979: 285) 'I am going to present evidence that the stories English speakers tell about communication are largely determined by semantic structures of the language itself' .

(Reddy 1979: 287) 'Language seems...to help one person to construct out of his own stock of mental stuff something like a replica, or copy, of someone else's thoughts -- a replica which can be more of less accurate, depending on many factors' .

(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' .

(M. Pratt 1987: 61) Pratt advocates 'a linguistics of contact, a linguistics that placed at its centre the workings of language across rather than within lines of social differentiation, of class, race, gender, age. As my example suggests, it is as a critical project that I am discussing this linguistics here, that is, as a project intended to inform a critical scholarly praxis' .

(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' .

(Booth 1979: 107) 'If Burke is right here -- an I think he is, provided we understand that to "track down the variant" is in his view never easy -- we have the basis for a special kind of free-wheeling inquiry into other critics' views. Instead of thinking that we can refute a given position by showing that it cannot be experimentally or logically falsified, we are invited by it to one perspective on the world, a perspective that is likely, by the very nature of perspectives, to be self-demonstrating. Every perspective expressed in a symbolic language becomes a "terministic screen" which both reveals some truths -- obviously "demonstrated" to anyone employing the language -- and conceals others' .

(Booth 1979: 101-2) 'Crane's pluralism might lead us to "do justice" to Burke. His dramatism is one of the possible modes: his subject, language as action; his method, an assimilative dialectic; his principles, comprehensive and operational; and his purpose, actional or "rhetorical". To use his own words, he attempts "to cure" himself and society by doing verbal "therapy". His initial choice of mode enables him to answer certain questions and prevents his answering other questions. When we judge his answers as "relative to" that initial choice, we can both judge his effectiveness within his chosen mode and avoid the kind of dogmatism that would rule out his mode as illegitimate in the first place. Anyone who knows Burke at all knows that he will refuse to stay pinned and wriggling on anyone else's wall chart' .

(Booth 1979: 108) 'Consider more closely the beginning of A Grammar of Motives . Like Burke's other books, it depends on a conceptual beginning in "dramatism": if man-as-symbol-user, then action (in the sense of symbolically motivated choices between various yeses and noes -- the opposite, in short, of mere motion); : if action, then conflict; if conflict, then drama. And if drama, then surely you must want to find a critical language that deals dramatically with the great symbolic drama of the whole of man's life. But not how he says the project began, as distinct from how the finished book begins' .

(Ricoeur 1982: 154) 'The working hypothesis of any structural analysis of texts is this: in spite of the fact that writing is on the same side as speech in relation to language -- namely, on the side of discourse -- the specificity of writing in relation to speech is based on structural features which can be treated as analogues of language in discourse' .

(Lanham 1976: 4-5) 'The rhetorical view of life ... begins with the centrality of language. It conceives reality as fundamentally dramatic, man as fundamentally a role player. It synthesizes an essentially bifurcated, self-serving theory of motive. We play for advantage, but we play for pleasure, too.... Homo rhetoricus cannot, to sum up, be serious.... And if he relinquishes the luxury of a central self, a soul, he gains the tolerance, and usually the sense of humor, that comes from knowing he -- and others -- not only may think differently, but may be differently' .

(Lanham 1976: 45-6) 'Socrates never looks beyond his own coordinates. He can speak only one language. Every humanist from Plato's day to our own has praised Socrates for trying to know himself. It is legitimate to ask whether his self was especially worth knowing. Isn't it really the testy, impatient, intolerant self of the religious zealot? It is not charity to the historical Socrates to accept Plato's allegorical portrait of him as ... Serious Man.... Socrates would have recognized, had he truly known himself, the rhetorical ingredient in all human behavior, would have seen his truth as only half the human truth, half the human self, but only half of it. As it is he did not found humanism, a knowledge of the self, but only half of it' .

(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: 63-4) 'Since ours is a society which increasingly tries to ensure its political order through discursive systems that discipline our language and culture, any successful resistance to that order would seem to require strong weapons aimed to weaken that discipline.... Literary criticism, presumably always specially sensitive to the functions of language, and newly sensitive to its relationship to power on the site of institutionalized disciplines, can turn its tools to the critical examination of how, in relation to the state and its largest institutions, power operates in discourse and how discourse disciplines a population.... Discourse can turn literary studies into a full criticism, one which is skeptical, critical, oppositional, and-- when appropriate-- sustentative. It can help us to avoid reduction, either of the historical context of an event or of the rhetorically complex display of power within a textualized discourse or institutionalized discipline' .

(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: 216) 'The first general problem is the relation between psychic (or psychoanalytical), linguistic, and sociohistorical categories. Can one set of terms be mapped onto another, and if so, how? Is one set reducible to another? Which is "more basic"? Or is the language of depth and foundation part of the problem?' .

(Marshall 1992: 168) 'In the deconstructive critic Paul de Man's terms, a text's "grammar" -- the syntactic structures of its language -- contradicts its "rhetoric", its figurality and the metaphoricity it aims to project' .

(Derrida 1986b: 100) 'Why does a project of general linguistics, concerning the internal system in general of language in general, outline the limits of its field by excluding, as exteriority in general, a particular system of writing, however important it might be, even were it to be in fact universal?' .

(Derrida 1986b: 110) 'Without this reduction of phonic matter, the distinction between language and speech, decisive for Saussure, would have no rigor'. Thus, Derrida says, Saussure needs to remove actual sound from language in order to maintain the langue/parole dichotomy. .

(Derrida 1986b: 102) Derrida quotes Rousseau as saying that 'the tyranny of writing goes even further. By imposing itself upon the masses, spelling influences and modifies language' .

(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' .

(Winograd 1977: 76) 'Each speaker of a language possesses a large and rather diverse set of schemas dealing with the process of natural language communication' .

(Winograd 1977: 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: 293-4) 'I shall deal with some of the criteria that have been used in the study of language to group texts for various purposes. I shall then briefly touch upon the notion of prototype, before proceeding to a discussion of a two-level typology of texts. To round off, I shall consider the status of narrative among the different types of text' .

(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' .

(Bakhtin 1986: 668) 'The centripetal forces of the life of language, embodied in a "unitary language", operate in the midst of heteroglossia. At any give moment of its evolution, language is stratified not only into linguistic dialects in the strict sense of the word ... but also-- and for us this is the essential point-- into languages that are socio-ideological: languages of social groups, "professional" and "generic" languages, languages of generations and so forth. From this point of view, literary language itself is only one of these heteroglot languages-- and in its turn is also stratified into languages... And this stratification and heteroglossia, once realized, is not only a static invariant of linguistic life, but also what insures its dynamics: stratification and heteroglossia widen and deepen as long as language is alive and developing. Alongside the centripetal forces, the centrifugal forces of language carry on their uninterupted work; alongside verbal-ideological centralization and unification, the uninterrupted processes of decentralization and disunification go forward' .

(Bakhtin 1986: 668) 'Linguistics, stylistics and the philosophy of language that were born and shaped by the current of centralizing tendencies in the life of language have ignored this dialogized heteroglossia, in which is embodied the centrifugal forces in the life of language' .

(Bakhtin 1986: 667) 'A common unitary language is a system of linguistic norms. But these norms do not constitute an abstract imperative; they are rather the generative forces of linguistic life, forces that struggle to overcome the heteroglossia of language, forces that unite and centralize verbal-ideological thought... What we have in mind here is not an abstract linguistic minimum of a common language, in the sense of a system of elementary forms (linguistic symbols) guaranteeing a minimum level of comprehension in practical communication. We are taking language not as a system of abstract grammatical categories, but rather language conceived as ideologically saturated, language as a world view, even as a concrete opinion, insuring a maximum of mutual understanding in all spheres of ideological life. Thus a unitary language gives expression to forces working toward concrete verbal and ideological unification and centralization, which develop in vital connection with the processes of sociopolitical and cultural centralization' .

(Bakhtin 1986: 668) 'Heteroglossia, as organized in these low genres, was not merely heteroglossia vis-�-vis the accepted literary language (in all its various generic expressions), that is, vis-�-vis the linguistic center of the verbal-ideological life of the nation and the epoch, but was a heteroglossia consciously opposed to this literary language. It was parodic, and aimed sharply and polemically against the official languages of its given time. It was heteroglossia that had been dialogized' .

(Kinneavy 1971: ) 'There are different kinds of thinking relevant to different uses of language' .

(Kinneavy 1971: 8) 'In Antiquity, three main aims of language structured the training in the art of discourse: the literary, the persuasive (rhetorical), and the pursuit of truth (dialectical)' .

(Enkvist 1981: 109) 'Information dynamics and experiential iconicism ... conspire without being identical. In addition, we cannot discard iconicism as but another manifestation of salience in the usual sense of that term ... Salience is a result of a set of universal psychological principles which people use when translating their experiences into language' .

(Enkvist 1981: 110) 'Salience involves basic strategies of cognition which are reflected in language rather than such text-strategic alternatives whose task it is to illustrate in iconic terms the structure of the world' .

(Enkvist 1981: 110) 'So far I have concentrated on empirically verifiable patterns of order in the worlds of nature and of society. But iconicism can be used to evoke orders of a less readily verifiable kind -- processes of association in an individual's mind..., and imaginary patterns in imaginary universes and fantasies. Thus the very ordering of a text can turn into a semiotic subsystem, or perhaps rather into a potential hierarchy of such subsystems because there can be simultaneous iconicism at various macro- and microlevels of text structure. Indeed iconicism is potentially conceivable at every level where the structure of the text and of language allows a choice between different patterns of linearization' .

(Coates and Cameron 1988: 65) The perception of women and men as different subcultures is marked. Usually subculture perception involves the use of features that are 'odd' across cultural boundaries. Yet in the case of differences in language use because of sex, men and women often seem to behave in ways that both see as 'quite natural' .

(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 .

(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: 59) Thomas studied speakers of a Welsh community where [E:] in certain words is beginning to be lost in favor of a shift to [A:]. She observed that women who use the feature more tend to attend a chapel on the end of town where the dialect is more prevalent. Though most of those who retain this feature in their language also live at that end of the community, there are some who do not live in the east end of the town, but attend church there. 'To summarize, use of the [E:] variant is confined to older women, whose social networks are more community-based that those of their male contemporaries and younger villagers of both sexes' .

(Coates and Cameron 1988: 14-5) Women are often not the most conservative speakers of a language, so notions that they are more conservative than men are not generally valid .

(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' .

(Derrida 1986c: 126) 'We will designate as differance the movement according to which language, or any code, any system of referral in general, is constituted "historically" as a weave of differences' .

(Ijsseling 1976: 116) 'Many outhors adopt the position whereby a redical separation is made between a metaphorical, figurative and transferential use of language, and an exact, adequate, literal and non-metaphorical use. Science and philosophy essentially exclude any metaphorical use of language' .

(Ijsseling 1976: 125) 'Philosophers who conceive of philosophy as philosophy of language -- both objective and subjective genitive -- are convinced that something can only be delineated by language signs' .

(Ijsseling 1976: 19) 'Isocrates states that the logos directs ... all thought and action.... An orator is one who, on the basis of long study and constant practice gains complete control over the logos and has a perfect command of his language' .

(Schor 1992: 263) 'Two chief axioms of feminist criticism state that all acts of language area grounded in the dense network of partial positions (e.g., sexual, class, racial) occupied by speaking subjects and that to claim to speak for all (women, feminists, literary critics) is to speak from a position of assumed mastery and false universality. This position is precisely the one we as feminists seek to interrogate and dismantle, even though, as many of us have discovered, assumed mastery and false universality constantly reassert themselves' .

(White 1974: 405) 'The fruitfulness of Jakobson's theory lies in its suggestion that the various forms of both poetry and prose, all of which have their counterparts in narrative in general and therefore in historiography too, can be characterized in terms of the dominant trope which serves as the paradigm, provided by language itself, of all significant relationships conceived to exist in the world by anyone wishing to represent those relationships in language' .

language choice

Definition

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level

Definition

Under construction

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References: (10)

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(Burke 1945: 210) 'Let us, then, put the matter this way: So far as our dramatistic terminology is concerned, the Marxist philosophy began by grounding agent in scene , but by reason of its poignant concern with the ethical, it requires the systematic featuring of act . On the Symbolic level, it does feature act implicitly but intensely, in having so dramatic a pattern. On the Rhetorical level, its scientist and anti-scholastic vocabulary is needed for purposes of political dynamism (for the use of an ethical terminology would fail to differentiate the doctrine sufficiently from non-secular ways of salvation). But if, as an experiment, you try a systematic development of terms generated from act , the entire system falls quickly into place' .

(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' .

(Fish 1982: 532) 'On one level this counterargument is unassailable, but on another level it is finally beside the point. It is unassailable as a general and theoretical conclusion: the positing of context- or institution-specific norms surely rules out the possibility of a norm whose validity would be recognized by everyone, no matter what his situation. But it is beside the point for any particular individual, for since everyone is situated somewhere, there is no one for whom the absence of an asituational norm would be of any practical consequence, in the sense that his performance or his confidence in his ability to perform would be impaired. So that while it is generally true that to have many standards is to have none at all, it is not true for anyone in particular ... In other words, while relativism is a position one can entertain, it is not a position one can occupy.... The point is that there is never a moment when one believes nothing, when consciousness is innocent of any and all categories of thought, and whatever categories of thought are operative at a given moment will serve as an undoubted ground' .

(Booth 1974: 37-8) 'Attacks on various forms of motivism have been many and forceful; in my view they have often been convincing. And yet motivism thrives. How can that be? Without pretending to have any final answers to such a question, I would suggest that any intellectual habit survives as a habit only so long as it is useful- which is to say, reversing the position of motivists, only so long as it can point to "consequences", whether intellectual or practical successes, that seem to provide good reason for continuing in the habit, regardless of other consequences that may be unpleasant. A given habit will seem useful provided it seems to answer important questions more successfully than any rival habit. And the fact is that though motivism is both internally inconsistent and destructive of much that we cannot live without, it is buttressed by an impressive chain of intellectual successes at what might be called the local level' .

(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' .

(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' .

(Virtanen 1992: 298) 'The resulting multi-level model has to be viewed in terms of recursive choices at its various levels....Decision processes probably work in much the same fashion irrespective of what kinds of parameters are inserted in them and at what level of text production' .

(Enkvist 1981: 107-8) 'How, then, does experiential iconicism relate to some other major text-strategic principles, at sentence level most notably information dynamics and saliency? ... Information dynamics is concerned with the distribution of old and new information, or more precisely, of information which the speaker/writer assumes or knows is familiar to the receptor and information he assumes or knows will be new. Should we wish to regard such assumptions, and hence the distribution of old and new information in the text, as part of the universe of discourse, information dynamics might merge with experiential iconicism'. But if we maintain a distinction between the text and the world it describes, such a merger will not take place' .

lexicon

Definition

Under construction

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linguistics

Definition

Under construction

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References: (8)

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(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' .

(Culler 1992: 203) 'The genre of theory includes works of anthropology, art history, gender studies, linguistics, philosophy political theory, psychoanalysis, social and intellectual history, and sociology. Its works are tied to argument in these fields, but they become theory because their visions or arguments have been suggestive or productive for people not working primarily or professionally in those disciplines' .

(Derrida 1986b: 103) 'A linguistics is not general as long as it defines its outside and inside in terms of determined linguistic models' .

(van Dijk 1977: 3) 'In linguistics, macro-structures have been postulated in order to account for the "global meaning" of discourse such as it is intuitively assigned in terms of the "topic" or "theme" of a discourse or conversation. The assumption is that these notions cannot be accounted for in terms of current logical, linguistic, and cognitive semantics for isolated sentences or sequences of sentences. In disciplines such as rhetorics and narrative theory, macro-structures may constitute the semantic basis for specific categories and rules' .

(Harris 1990: 22) 'Modern linguistics proceeded to demonstrate its indebtedness to Saussure by remaining profoundly segregationalist both in its methodology and in its attitude to neighboring disciplines' .

(Harris 1990: 22) 'The basic contention of the present paper is that the fundamental error in contemporary linguistics is still the fundamental error of Saussure's original thesis. It involves a crude process of abstraction by which certain phenomena are segregated from the continuum of human communication, and these segregated phenomena are then, rather capriciously, set up for academic purposes as constituting the linguistic part of communication' .

listener

Definition

Under construction

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References: (2)

Gibbs 1987

Minsky 1980

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(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' .

(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 .

literal

Definition

Under construction

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References: (6)

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(Burke 1945: 165) 'I refer to the fact that the Latin word for the Carthaginians is Poeni , while the Latin word for the goddesses of vengeance is Poenae . In the dative and ablative forms, the two would be exactly the same, Poenis . And the word is thus used in Lucretius:
ad confligendum venientibus undique Poenis,
a line which, taken in itself, could be translated, with equal justice, either as "when the Carthaginians were coming to the attack from all sides" or as "when the goddesses of Vengeance were coming to the attack from all sides". There is no doubt that literally the reference is to the Carthaginians. But if we consider it in keeping with such studies of ambiguity as Empson has given us, may we not legitimately hear effects even more resonant than the literal meaning itself?' .

(Burke 1945: 64) 'In sum: we are discussing the Creation not as a temporal event, but as the logical prototype of an act. Indeed, even if one believed it literally, one would hardly be justified in treating it as a temporal event, since it was itself the positing of time; it was the act that set up the conditions of temporal development; hence a terminology that reduced it to terms of time would lack sufficient scope. Thus, even a literal believer would have to treat it in terms that placed it, rather, at an intersection of time and the timeless- a point at which we place ourselves when we discuss it in terms of those non-temporal firsts called "principles"' .

(Schiffrin 1994: 9) 'What hearers do is supplement the literal meaning of utterances with an assumption of human rationality and cooperation' .

(Booth 1979: 107) 'He [Burke] in fact rejects more than conventional norms, His dialectic of similarities and differences is so deliberately flexible and so aggressively opposed to neatly fixed meanings that in a sense all literal proof is made suspect. In the opening pages of A Grammar of Motives we find a series of claims that any action or statement can be considered as evidence for or against almost any concept. In defining any substance, for example, we necessarily place it in its context, its scene , which is to define it in terms of what it is not , leading to the "paradox of substance": "every positive is negative". Before we know it, Burke has moved through statements like "any tendency to do something is ...a tendency not to do it" (32) to a series of paradoxes and oxymorons and "ambiguities of substance" that stagger the literal-minded' .

(Booth 1979: 112-3) 'We shall therefore always look, in every human situation, for the elements of drama, the five most obvious being the action itself, the agent doing the action, the agency or means by which he performs it, the scene in which it is performed, and the purpose it is intended to achieve. Sometimes we may want to add others, like time as a distinguishable part of the scene and attitude as a subdivision of agency, but usually the dramatistic pentad will do our job. We shall use these elements, however, not as some use Aristotle's four causes -- unvarying, frozen, literal categories -- but as fluid reagents, applicable in different "ratios" for different problems. What is one agent's action is another agent's scene. A given agent can be of someone else's agency -- a tool to other ends -- or he can be, again, a part of someone's scene' .

(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' .

(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' .

literary

Definition

Under construction

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References: (22)

Quotes: (42)

(Johnson 1990: 39) 'A comprehensive treatment of the question of writing is obviously beyond the scope of the present essay. I will therefore concentrate on a particular recent moment of reflection about writing -- the theoretical "revolution" in France in 1967-- which has had a decisive impact upon the shape of literary studies today' .

(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' .

(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: 342-3) 'While there is no core of agreement in the text, there is a core of agreement ... concerning the ways of producing the text. Nowhere is this set of acceptable ways written down, but it is a part of everyone's knowledge of what it means to be operating within the literary institution as it is now constituted.... This does not mean that these rules and the practices they authorize are either monolithic or stable' .

(Fish 1982: 109) 'Literary language may be the norm, and message-bearing language a device we carve out to perform the special, but certainly not normative, task of imparting information' .

(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: 351) 'It is assumed that the truth about a work will be what penetrates to the essence of its literary value' .

(Fish 1982: 105-6) 'When Roman Jakobson declares that the chief task of literary theory is to discover "what makes a verbal message a work of art", whether he knows it or not he has delivered himself of an answer masquerading as a question. What makes a verbal message a work of art? Whatever it is, it will presumably not be what makes it a verbal message' .

(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' .

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

(Lanham 1993: 56) 'The most obvious area of rhetoric's revival -- literary theory -- is so familiar as hardly to need elaboration. The "architectonic" view of rhetoric that Kenneth Burke developed from the 1930s onward has underwritten the Derridean explosion -- there is no other word for it -- of literary theory since the Hopkins symposium in 1966 put it on the map. Although, incredibly, Derrida appears not to have known Burke's work, deconstruction's enfranchising hypothesis that rhetorical analysis can be used on nonliterary texts and on the conventions of social life itself is the pivotal insight of Burkean dramatism. And if Burke's work does not fall in our period, certainly the realization of its importance does' .

(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?' .

(Lanham 1993: 8-9) 'We have for a long time misread and mistranslated the Greek and Latin classics according to the philosophical coordinates of print rather than their native rhetorical orality. The electronic word is hastening this long-overdue revaluation. Literary history, that is, like literature and literary criticism, is being changed both forward and backward' .

(Lanham 1993: 129-30) 'The late, and now much disputed, literary theorist Paul de Man spent a lot of time glossing the great American rhetorician Kenneth Burke's apothegm that "every way of seeing is a way of not seeing". Electronic text allows us to see that this version of "blindness" and "insight" is often a matter of scaling-choice. That choice we can now manipulate ourselves; we can dial in a different scale of difficulty, of "readability". That will often defuse, if not solve, the difficulty. If scaling won't work, and we come to an irreducible aporia, we can include both alternatives in a toggle switch and move on. Problem solved. Electronic text is intrinsically a bi-stable medium, one made to accommodate exactly this difficulty. Texts, Derrida argued, are not "a store of ready-made 'concepts' but an activity resistant to any such reductive ploy". No need to argue that for electronic text- it is manifestly true. The same popular commentary on deconstruction defines it this way: "Deconstruction is therefore an activity performed by texts which in the end have to acknowledge their own partial complicity with what they denounce" Kenneth Burke said the same thing in 1935, but without the political spin of "denunciation" and "complicity": "Even when one attempts to criticize the structure, one must leave some parts of it intact in order to have a point of reference for his criticism. However, for all the self-perpetuating qualities of an orientation, it contains the germs of its dissolution". Electronic text, by its very manipulability, builds in a maximum of the textual self-consciousness such declarations point to. Add all this reflection together (and a lot more one could do), and it is hard not to think that, at the end of the day, electronic text will seem the natural fulfillment of much current literary theory, and resolve many of its questions' .

(Lanham 1976: 12) 'Context ... is crucial in rhetorical literary documents. What seems a sublime, if superficial, interruption may be a profound comic corrective. Only a sense of context can show how the best history builds into itself a dialogue between the two ways of knowing' .

(Lanham 1976: 34-5) 'The task of the critic, as of the cultural or literary historian, is not to choose sides and then ignore the other half. Nor is it to try, however tempted, to adjudicate the dispute, decide who is right and then simplify....We must ... rehearse again the quarrel between philosophy and rhetoric. And this time around, we must do more than use philosophy to debunk rhetoric, as the scientific world view has done.... Seeing Western literature correctly depends on controlling these two contradictory theories of knowledge, of self, of style.... Upon seeing Western literature aright depends our ability to hold together the two different ways of knowing which together make us human' .

(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"' .

(Culler 1992: 222) 'Fifth, a good deal of the most interesting work in theory has focused on structures common to literary and nonliterary discourses' .

(Culler 1992: 217) 'A second major focus has been the desire of many critics and theorists to make literary and cultural criticism politically progressive' .

(Frye 1957: 186) 'The romance is nearest of all literary forms to the wish fulfilment dream, and for that reason it has socially a curiously paradoxical role' .

(Greenblatt 1995: 227) 'Cultural analysis has much to learn from scrupulous formal analysis of literary texts because those texts are not merely cultural by virtue of reference to the world beyond themselves; they are cultural by virtue of social values and contexts that they have themselves successfully absorbed....Cultural analysis must be opposed on principle to the rigid distinction between that which is within a text and that which lies outside' .

(Greenblatt 1995: 230-1) 'Great works of art are not neutral relay stations in the circulation of cultural materials. Something happens to objects, beliefs and practices when they are represented, reimagined, and performed in literary texts, something often unpredictable and disturbing. That "something" is the sign both of the power of art and of the embeddedness of culture in the contingencies of history' .

(Kinneavy 1971: 8) 'In Antiquity, three main aims of language structured the training in the art of discourse: the literary, the persuasive (rhetorical), and the pursuit of truth (dialectical)' .

(Bathrick 1992: 324) 'Central to the strategic evolution of cultural criticism has been a programmatic effort to challenge what it sees as the claim to universalism at the heart ... of existing literary theory.... Although the emergence of cultural studies clearly results from a breakdown of one kind of theoretical generality, the proposed countermodel-- while accepting, and sometimes welcoming, the impossibility of theoretical unanimity-- has sought to establish common ground around expanded notions of literature, rhetoric, textuality, theory, culture, discursive practice, or interdisciplinarity. And it is at this point, of course, that the fireworks begin' .

(Ijsseling 1976: 130-1) 'Foucault ... claims that "the author neither exactly owns nor is responsible for his texts; he neither produces nor discovers them." This may be somewhat extreme as other formulations of Foucault's tend to be. However. in asking oneself what exactly literary outputy is, one soon begins to realize that Foucault is more correct than was at first supposed' .

(Jameson 1981: 75) 'The present book, which rather seeks to argue the perspectives of Marxism as necessary preconditions for adequate literary comprehension. Marxist critical insights will therefore here be defended as something like an ultimate semantic precondition for the intelligibility of literary and cultural texts' .

(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' .

(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' .

(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' .

(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' .

(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' .

(Said 1986: 617-8) 'What I am criticizing is two particular assumptions. There is first the almost unconsciously held ideological assumption that the Eurocentric model for the humanities actually represents a natural and proper subject matter for the humanistic scholar.... Second is the assumption that the principal relationships in the study of literature-- those I have identified as based on representation-- ought to obliterate the traces of other relationships within literary structures that are based principally upon acquisition and appropriation.... Two alternatives propose themselves for the contemporary critic. One is organic complicity with the pattern I have described.... The second alternative is for the critic to recognize the difference between instinctual filiation and social affiliation, and to show how affiliation sometimes reproduces filiation, sometimes makes its own forms' .

(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' .

logic

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (4)

Quotes: (14)

(Burke 1945: 45-6) 'The socialist revolution is designed first to reverse the state (during the "dictatorship of the proletariat") and next to abolish it, or let it "wither away". But our grammar would lead us to doubt whether a "state" can ever really "wither away", and least of all in a complex industrial society. Though it may take strategically new forms, we expect the logic of the actus-status pair to continue manifesting itself. The selection of the proletariat as the vessel of the new act that transcends the bourgeois state may or may not be correct as a casuistry, but it violates no law of "grammar". The belief in the withering away of the state, however, does seem to violate a law of grammar. For no continuity of social act is possible without a corresponding social status; and the many different kinds of act required in an industrial state, with its high degree of specialization, make for corresponding classifications of status' .

(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"' .

(Burke 1945: 192) 'The great departures in human thought can be eventually reduced to a moment where the thinker treats as o pposite, key terms formerly considered a pposite, or v.v. So we are admonished to be on the look-out for those moments when strategic synonymizings or desynonymizings occur. And, in accordance with the logic of our ratios, when they do occur, we are further admonished to be on the look-out for a shift in the source of derivation, as terms formally derived from different sources are now derived from a common source, or v.v.' .

(Burke 1945: 85-6) 'Though we have stressed the contrast between theology and behaviorism because it so readily illustrates the "circumferential logic" (that is, the effect of scope in a given terminology of motives), we should note that a writer's vocabulary is usually set somewhere between these two extremes. His aims are usually less thoroughgoing, more "monographic", as with the selection of some "thesis"' .

(Burke 1945: 9) 'The logic of the scene-agent ratio has often served as an embarrassment to the naturalistic novelist. He may choose to "indict" some scene (such as bad working conditions under capitalism) by showing that it has a "brutalizing" effect upon the people who are indigenous to this scene. But the scene-agent ratio, if strictly observed here, would require that the "brutalizing" situation contain "brutalized" characters as its dialectical counterpart. And thereby, in his humanitarian zeal to save mankind, the novelist portrays characters which, in being as brutal as their scene, are not worth saving. We could phrase this dilemma in another way: our novelist points up his thesis by too narrow a conception of scene as the motive-force behind his characters; and this restricting of the scene calls in turn for a corresponding restriction upon personality, or role' .

(Burke 1945: xviii) 'A perfectionist might seek to evolve terms free of ambiguity and inconsistency (as with the terministic ideals of symbolic logic and logical positivism). But we have a different purpose in view, one that probably retains traces of its "comic" origin. We take it for granted that, insofar as men cannot themselves create the universe, there must remain something essentially enigmatic about the problem of motives, and that this underlying enigma will manifest itself in inevitable ambiguities and inconsistencies among the terms for motives. Accordingly, what we want is not terms that avoid ambiguity, but terms that clearly reveal the strategic spots at which ambiguities necessarily arise' .

(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: 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' .

(Burke 1945: 74-5) 'There are two primary generalizations that characterize the quality of motives: freedom and necessity. And whenever they appear, we may know that we are in the presence of "God-terms", or names for the ultimates of motivation. Doctrines wherein Creator and Creation are not ontologically collapsed into a unity give us a kind of double genesis for motives. Consideration in terms of the Creation leads to "necessity" when, in accordance with the logic of geometric substance, all the parts of nature are treated as necessarily related to one another in their necessary relationship to the whole. For "necessity" names the extrinsic conditions that determine a motion and must be taken into account when one is planning an action. And consideration in terms of the Creator leads to "freedom" when, in accordance with the logic of tribal substance, men "substantially" derive freedom (or self-movement) from God as its ancestral source. This double genesis allows for free will and determinism simultaneously, rather than requiring a flat choice between them' .

(Booth 1974: 66) 'The notion that we have reason to believe only what has been proved, in the sense of withstanding all possible doubts, cannot be lived with by most of us for even a moment. There is nothing shameful in this, unless logic, mathematics, and physical science, which are also based on "unprovable" assumptions, are shameful. Life would be impossible if it were not so' .

(Booth 1974: 53) 'Then this clever, subtle, sensitive but divided man does an amazing thing. Russell I has said he ought to be a behaviorust but can't quite make it. Russell II has worried about the effects of popular behaviorism on mass man. Now Russell III, the man of action, retreats from the whole problem by recommending as his practical solution that ordinary men (whose misreading of the ethical consequences of behaviorism he fears) should be "taught logic": they should be taught logic so that they will learn not to reason. "For, if they reason, they will almost certainly reason wrongly" (p.98)- that is, they will conclude that if man is a machine, certain ethical consequences follow!' .

(Kinneavy 1971: 37) 'Each of the modes has its own peculiar logic. It also has its own organizational patterns and, to some extent, its own stylistic characteristics' .

lucidity

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (1)

Booth 1979

Quotes: (1)

(Booth 1979: 99) 'I must admit that both Crane and Burke sometimes push very close to my own limits of patience, Crane chewing on bones long after I think all marrow has been extracted, Burke juggling Indian clubs that I am not quite sure are even there. Clearly, neither of them had managed to hit the one right ratio of theory to practice that I have always maintained in my own work. The rule is, of course, as follows: my abstract theory is essential, concrete groundwork; his is frequently quixotic indulgence in a perhaps harmless but irrelevant hobby-horse; and M. Jacques Lacan's is lamentable proof that when the Germans conquered France in World War II Hegel came swirling in with them and sent traditional French lucidity forever underground' .

Last Modified: July-12-96 16:40:3

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L

language

References: (29)

Quotes: (91)

language choice

References: (0)

Quotes: (0)

level

References: (10)

Quotes: (11)

lexicon

References: (0)

Quotes: (0)

linguistics

References: (8)

Quotes: (12)

listener

References: (2)

Quotes: (2)

literal

References: (6)

Quotes: (10)

literary

References: (22)

Quotes: (42)

logic

References: (4)

Quotes: (14)

lucidity

References: (1)

Quotes: (1)

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