C

Quotes: (15)

(Hopper 1987: 141) 'The assumption, in other words, is that "grammar" (in the sense of the rules, constraints, and categories of the language attributed to the speaker) must be an object apart from the speaker and separated from the uses which the speaker may make of it. That kind of grammar is conventionally understood to consist of sets of rules which operate on fixed categories like nouns and verbs, specify the forms of additive categories like those of case, tense, transitivity, etc., and restrict the possible orders in which words can occur in a sentence. Discourse, the actual use of language, is held to be in some sense an "implementation" of these structures, or the way in which the abstract mental system possessed in its entirety by the speaker is realized in particular utterances' .

(Hopper 1987: 154-5) 'There is no question that "grammar" is an infuriatingly elusive notion, and that it is very easy to have a clear idea about what "grammar" is in the sense of being able to give an abstract definition of it, but quite another to apply that definition consistently in practice. This asymmetry suggests that the notion of grammar is intrinsically unstable and indeterminate, relative to the observer, to those involved in the speech situation, and to the particular set of phenomena being focused upon. It suggests also that we need to question the supposition of a mentally representated set of rules, and to set aside as well the idea in Fromkin's statement which I quoted earlier, that speakers possess an abstract linguistic system ready and waiting to be drawn upon -- "accessed"! -- in case they should ever need to speak' .

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

(Fish 1982: 354-5) 'Strictly speaking, getting "back-to-the-text" is not a move one can perform, because the text one gets back to will be the text demanded by some other interpretation and that interpretation will be presiding over its production. This is not to say, however, that the "back-to-the-text" move is ineffectual, The fact that it is not something one can do in no way diminishes the effectiveness of claiming to do it. As a rhetorical ploy, the announcement that one is returning to the text will be powerful so long as the assumption that criticism is secondary to the text and must not be allowed to overwhelm it remains unchallenged.... A wholesale challenge would be impossible because there would be no terms in which it could be made; that is, in order to be wholesale, it would have to be made in terms wholly outside the institution; but if that were the case, it would be unintelligible because it is only within the institution that the facts of literary study -- texts, authors, periods, genres -- become available' .

(Booth 1974: 10-1) 'I choose, then, to talk about the whole thing as in part a rhetorical failure, but I should make clear that I don't mean by that simply what people usually mean by a "failure of communication". That phrase seems to suggest that if we could get our words right, all would be well. By using the traditional word rhetoric I want to suggest a whole philosophy of how men succeed or fail in discovering together, in discourse, new levels of truth (or at least agreement) that neither side suspected before.... Rhetoric has almost always had a bad press, and it more often than not still carries a sense of trickery or bombastic disguise for a weak case: making the word appear the better cause. But I am groping toward something far more important, though obviously far too grandiose to be achieved in four lectures: a view of rhetoric as the whole art of discovering and sharing warrantable assertion' .

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Ricoeur 1982: 147-54) 'We explain the text in terms of its internal relations, its structure. On the other hand, we can lift the suspense and fulfil the text in speech, restoring it to living communication; in this case, we interpret the text.... Reading is the dialectic of these two attitudes' .

(Bove 1990: 53) 'We can no longer easily ask such questions as, What is discourse" or, What does discourse mean? ... But why not? Because to ask them and to force an answer would be, in advance, hopelessly to prejudice the case against understanding the function of "discourse" either in its poststructuralist context or in its existence as an institutionalized system for the production of knowledge in regulated language' .

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

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

cataphora

Definition

See also

References: (0)

Quotes: (0)

censure

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (1)

Quotes: (1)

(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' .

chorography

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (1)

Ulmer 1994

Quotes: (1)

(Ulmer 1994: 48) 'Here is a principle of chorography: do not choose between the different meanings of key terms, but compose by using all the meanings (write the paradigm)' .

circumstance

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (1)

Lanham 1976

Quotes: (1)

(Lanham 1976: 48-9) 'Begin with illusion. Reality will dependably follow. Contrive external circumstance. Begin by allegorizing your own behavior. It is the situation which convinces. Arrange the external coordinates carefully and to your liking. The reality you desire will be established by them. They are not superficial embellishments. They are everything' .

claim

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (9)

Booth 1974

Schor 1992

Quotes: (12)

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

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

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

(Booth 1974: 39-40) 'None of us in this room really believes that all of his own commitments are equally indefensible in the eyes of other men. Everyone, no matter how thoroughly committed to motivism he may claim to be, always exempts at least a part of himself and his values from the dogmas. For the motivist, for example, the commitment to motivism and the command to respect its conclusions as truth are found and supported "rationally", not simply by following blind drives. One "ought" to conduct one's mental life in their light, even though to say so is to assert a value. There seems something fishy about this one exemption, surely. What if the whole edifice were plainly, destructively, and tragically wrong- not wrong in the sense that there are no good reasons for respecting it on some occasions for some purposes, but in the snesen that it is totally misleading when applied indiscriminately to the whole of life' .

(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 49) 'Our claim is that all human beings automatically aim at the most efficient information processing possible' .

(Booth 1979: 104) 'What has annoyed many people besides Crane is not simply Burke's frequent pursuit of scatology or his free-wheeling delivery.... What is troublesome, surely, is precisely Burke's claim to make connections in what appears disparate -- the claim, for example, to connect bodily functions to surroundings hitherto seen as "poetic". The trouble, in short, is not that turds are flung at us but that they come labeled as truth. Burke seems to be claiming to know better that Keats himself something of what the poem "means", and the meaning he finds is antithetical not just to the poet's intentions but to any intentions Keats might conceivably have entertained' .

(Lanham 1976: 48) 'If seriousness can acknowledge Socrates as its saint, the rhetorical ideal may claim Ovid as its martyr. He suffered as an exile in Tomis, and in modern commentaries he has suffered yet more. He wrote too much and was too fond of what he wrote, showed sensibility but no principles, no sincerity, no heart. His universe was superficial, his religious sense undeveloped, his grasp of abstract thought shaky at best' .

(Culler 1992: 213) 'One of the continuing contentions of the sorts of theory styled "poststructuralist" -- possibly the only claim by which poststructuralism can be identified and distinguished -- has been that theories are caught up in and affected by the phenomena they claim to theorize' .

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

(Coates and Cameron 1988: 29) 'Brown and Levinson ... define the notion of face as "the public self-image that every member wants to claim for himself". ... Negative face involves the desire for freedom of action and freedom from imposition, while positive face involves the desire for approval. Power ... means that in an interaction, the speaker can be characterised as relatively more or less powerful than the addressee' .

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

clarity

Definition

See also

References: (2)

Lanham 1976

Quotes: (3)

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

(Lanham 1976: 20-1) 'Of all the unexamined premises rhetoric took over from serious philosophy, clarity has perplexed the most. Since Aristotle it has figured as a central goal for verbal expression. Theorists, without giving the matter special thought, seem to have considered clarity a property of the text. Yet clarity describes many styles and audiences. Used to describe a particular verbal configuration, clarity cannot mean anything at all....The most intellectual, conceptual, scientific virtue of style turns out to be entirely emotional. If everyone is happy, clarity has arrived.... Clarity is at least partly, and often predominantly, a temporal phenomenon, a problem of period. One century's brightness becomes murk for the next. Clarity no more permits objective standards than custom itself' .

(Lanham 1976: 22) 'The real deceiver is the plain stylist who pretends to put all his cards on the table. Clarity, then, is a cheat, an illusion. To rhetorical man at least, the world is not clear, it is made clear. The clear stylist does it with a conjuring trick. For this trick we return thanks. We are reassured. The world is made like our minds' .

class (linguistics)

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (0)

Quotes: (0)

clause

Definition

See also

References: (3)

Schiffrin 1994

Quotes: (3)

(Hopper 1987: 153) 'What I have wanted to stress here is the need to understand not only the formal process but the way in which that formal process emerges from a discourse context, in other words, is anchored in particular, concrete utterances. It is this "prior textuality" of the construction which explains why it has retained properties of a separate, external clause. What we see emerging, then, is a new strategy for permitting a lexical agent to be incorporated into a nuclear clause under certain contextual conditions, presumable involving differences of topic continuity' .

(Schiffrin 1994: 41-2) 'I began this chapter with a brief description of two different paradigms underlying our conception of language.... After comparing two different definitions of discourse stemming from these two paradigms -- discourse as language above the sentence or clause, ... discourse as language use ... -- I proposed a third definition that sits at the intersection of structure and function -- discourse as utterances ...Actual analyses of discourse reveal an interdependence between structure and function ... The distinction between structure and function also bears on two other issues that I discuss later. One is the relationship between text and context: structural definitions focus upon text and functional definitions upon context ... Another is the way linguists view communication: structural definitions take a narrower view of communication than do functional definitions, and place a higher priority on the role of the code (cf. text) in communication' .

(van Dijk 1977: 13) 'Another interesting by-product of this rule is that we now have a formal means to determine that some sentence (or expression) is thematic or topical. A sentence or clause the thematic if it expresses a macro-proposition of the discourse' .

code

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (6)

Schiffrin 1994

Lanham 1993

Derrida 1986c

Leitch [n.d.]

Quotes: (9)

(Hopper 1987: 147) 'All discourse is in some sense specialist discourse, moulded to the speaker's personality (i.e. personal history), the situation, and the topic. It is precisely the point about Emergent Grammar that such "heteroglossic" aspects of language necessarily become integral parts of the linguistic description, and are not set aside as a separate agenda irrelevant to the linguistic code and its structure' .

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

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

(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 21) 'We see the mutual-knowledge hypothesis as untenable. We conclude, therefore, that the code theory must be wrong, and that we had better worry about possible alternatives' .

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

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

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

cognition

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (2)

Spellmeyer 1993

Enkvist 1981

Quotes: (3)

(Spellmeyer 1993: 22) According to Spellmeyer, constructionists would have us believe: 'Each community has its own distinctive mode of cognition, its own characteristic "flow chart" for problem solving. Psychologists do not think first and then practice psychology: strictly speaking, the discipline of psychology preordains the nature of thought for its practitioners. Whatever we perceive, then, is a construct, something constructed by communities, and whatever we have learned derives not from experience but from a process of initiation into those rituals of community life that create both selves and worlds' .

(Enkvist 1981: 104) 'If we wish to relate instances of experiential iconicism in text generation or in text interpretation and comprehension to our general knowledge of the world (as we must), a cognitive model becomes necessary. And we must cite principles of human interaction if we can to detect the motives for the preference of one text strategy to another. In brief, we shall need the whole gamut of models if we wish to explain why somebody opts for an iconic arrangement of his text and how he carries out his iconic strategy through text patterning and, ultimately, syntax. This is simply another way of saying that experiential iconicism can be discussed in terms of examples brought from various levels: syntax, text patterning, cognition, interaction' .

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

coherence

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (3)

Foucault 1986b

Quotes: (5)

(Foucault 1986b: 153) 'I believe there is another principle of rarefaction, complementary to the first: the author. Not, of course, the author in the sense of the individual who delivered the speech or wrote the text in question, but the author as the unifying principle in a particular group of writings or statements, lying at the origins of their significance, as the seat of their coherence' .

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

(Booth 1979: 104) 'I must emphasize how strongly the surface of Burke's writing seems to violate two of Crane's criteria for good criticism, even though to do so may initially seem like the experience of crawling backward into a world of exuberant dancers. He often seems blithely indifferent to Crane's insistence on coherence and common-sensical correspondence with what is "really there". His paths are seldom straight and clear; his allusions are often obscure; his arguments often seem to depend on puns or questionable etymologies or on conjectures so wild that he does not even try to defend them. Whatever the accepted canons are for organizing a proof seem as often violated as honored. His notorious translation of Keats's last line into "Body is turd, turd body", is only one of thousands of what have seemed debasements -- or, at best, irrelevant private translations -- of what "everyone knows" about the works he discusses' .

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

(van Dijk 1977: 6) 'Discourse coherence is not primarily a matter of meaning, but of reference' .

collective

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (4)

Quotes: (6)

(Burke 1945: 38) Such histories can be imagined in an endless variety of details. What we are suggesting here is that they all embody a grammatical form in accordance with which we should not expect a dualism of motives to be automatically dissolved, as with those apologists of science who believe that in a scientific world ethics become unnecessary. However, to consider these possibilities further, we should move into the areas of Symbolic, involving modes of transubstantiation, rituals of rebirth, whereby the individual identifies himself in terms of the collective motive (an identification by which he both is and is not one with that with which and by which he is identified). At present it is enough to note in a general way how the paradox of the absolute figures grammatically in the dialectic, making for a transcending of none term by its other, and for the reversed ambiguous derivation of the term from its other as ancestral principle' .

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

(Fish 1982: 109) 'All aesthetics, then, are local and conventional rather than universal, reflecting a collective decision as to what will count as literature, a decision that will be in force only so long as a community of readers or believers ... continues to abide by it' .

(Ricoeur 1982: 147) 'Writing preserves discourse and makes it an archive available for individual and collective memory' .

(Jameson 1981: 115) 'An ideologeme, that is, a historically determinate conceptual or semic complex which can project itself variously in the form of a "value system" or "philosophical concept," or in the form of a protonarrative, a private of collective narrative fantasy' .

(Jameson 1981: 76) 'Our object of study will prove to be the ideologeme, that is, the smallest intelligible unit of the essentially antagonistic collective discourses of social classes' .

comedy

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (2)

Frye 1957

Quotes: (5)

(Burke 1945: xvii) 'In our original plans for this project, we had no notion of writing a "Grammar" at all. We began with a theory of comedy, applies to a treatise on human relations. Feeling that competitive ambition is a drastically over-developed motive in the modern world, we thought this motive might be transcended if men devoted themselves not so much to "excoriating" it as to "appreciating" it. Accordingly, we began taking notes on the foibles and antics of what we tended to think of as "the Human Barnyard"' .

(Frye 1957: 207) 'It is a commonplace of criticism that comedy tends to deal with characters in a social group, whereas tragedy is more concentrated on a single individual' .

(Frye 1957: 207) 'Like comedy, tragedy is best and most easily studied in drama, but it is not confined to drama, nor to actions that end in disaster' .

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

(Frye 1957: 192) 'The four mythoi that we are dealing with, comedy, romance, tragedy, and irony, may now be seen as four aspects of a central unifying myth....conflict is the basis or archetypal theme of romance ...catastrophe ... is the archetypal theme of tragedy....the sense that heroism and effective action are absent, disorganized or foredoomed to defeat, and that confusion and anarchy reign over the world, is the archetypal theme of irony and satire....recognition of a newborn society rising in triumph around a still somewhat mysterious hero and his bride, is the archetypal theme of comedy' .

communication

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (11)

Quotes: (38)

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

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

(Fish 1982: 531) 'The point of my analysis has been to show that while "Is there a text in this class?" does not have a determinate meaning, a meaning that survives the sea change of situations, in any situation we might imagine the meaning of the utterance is either perfectly clear or capable, in the course of time, of being clarified. What is it that makes this possible, if it is not the "possibilities and norms" already encoded in the language? How does communication ever occur if not by reference to a public and stable norm? The answer, implicit in everything I have already said, is that communication occurs within situations and that to be in a situation is already to be in possession of (or to be possessed by) a structure of assumptions, of practices understood to be relevant in relation to purposes and goals that are already in place; and it is within the assumption of these purposes and goals that any utterance is immediately heard.... What I have been arguing is that meanings come already calculated, not because of norms embedded in the language but because language is always perceived, from the very first, within a structure of norms. That structure, however, is not abstract and independent but social; and there fore it is not a single structure with a privileged relationship to the process of communication as it occurs in any situation but a structure that changes when one situation, with its assumed background of practices, purposes, and goals, has given way to another' .

(Schiffrin 1994: 15) 'To enhance the comparative value of my descriptions of the approaches, I have decided to orient my sample analysis around two phenomena: (a) questions (and the sequences they initiated) to be analyzed in terms of speech act theory, interactional sociolinguistics, and ethnography of communication; (b) referring expressions (in referring sequences) to be analyzed in terms of pragmatics, conversation analysis, and variation analysis. We see not only that the different approaches provide different answers to some of the same questions, but that they highlight different facets of both questions and referring expressions' .

(Schiffrin 1994: 8) '"Communication" cannot be assumed to be constant across cultures. Cultural conceptions of communication are deeply intertwined with conceptions of person, cultural values, and world knowledge -- such that instances of communication behavior are never free of the cultural belief and action systems in which they occur' .

(Schiffrin 1994: 18) 'All approaches take a stand (albeit often implicitly) on the relationship between structure and function, text and context, and discourse and communication, simply because these conceptual distinctions are all variants of the dichotomy between what is considered part of language and what is not' .

(Schiffrin 1994: 8) In the ethnography of communication approach, Dell Hymes proposed 'that scholarship focus on communicative competence: the tacit social, psychological, cultural, and linguistic knowledge governing appropriate use of language (including, but not limited to, grammar). Communicative competence includes knowledge of how to engage in everyday conversation as well as other culturally constructed speech events' .

(Schiffrin 1994: 5) 'The goals of this book are to describe and compare several different approaches to the linguistic analysis of discourse: speech act theory, interactional sociolinguistics, ethnography of communication, pragmatics, conversation analysis, and variation analysis. My aim is not to reduce the vastness of discourse analysis: I believe that at relatively early stages of an endeavor, reduction just for the sake of simplification can too drastically limit the range of interesting questions that can and should be asked' .

(Schiffrin 1994: 19) 'As I will make clear in chapter 12, the order of chapters, and thus the type of inquiry for each area of empirical focus, is not random: they reflect a transition ... from a focus upon the individual (whether the actions, knowledge, or intentions of a self) to a focus upon interaction (how self and other together construct what is said, meant, and done) to a focus upon the semiotic systems shared and used by self and other during their interaction (language, society, and culture). An ability to build such transitions ... into one's theory, and to allow and account for them in one's practice, is a crucial part of a discourse analysis that seeks to integrate what speech act theory, interactional sociolinguistics, ethnography of communication, pragmatics, conversation analysis, and variation analysis can offer, both individually and together, to the analysis of utterances' .

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

(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 55) 'Treating linguistic communication as the model of communication in general has led to theoretical distortions and misperceptions of the data' .

(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 21) Sperber and Wilson summarize a basic inference model of communication to be that a speaker means something by an utterance when she intends (1) that her utterance will produce a certain response in the audience, (2) that the audience will recognize her intention, and (3) that the audience's recognition of her intention will function as at least part of the reason for the response .

(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 26) 'Purely inferential communication exists' .

(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 38) 'The communication process gives rise to shared information' .

(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 45) 'We assume, then, that communication is governed by a less-than-perfect heuristic. On this approach, failures in communication are to be expected: what is mysterious and requires explanation is not failure but success' .

(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 57) 'No one has any clear idea how inference might operate over non-propositional objects: say, over images, impressions or emotions.... We see it as a major challenge for any account of human communication to give a precise description and explanation of its vaguer effects. Distinguishing meaning from communication, accepting that something can be communicated without being strictly speaking meant by the communicator or the communicator's behaviour, is a first essential step' .

(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 60) 'One of the advantages of verbal communication is that it gives rise to the strongest possible form of communication; it enables the hearer to pin down to speaker's intentions about the explicit content of her utterance to a single strongly manifest candidate, with no alternative worth considering at all' .

(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 61) 'Mere informing alters the cognitive environment of the audience. Communication alters the mutual cognitive environment of the audience and communicator. Mutual manifestness may be of little cognitive importance, but it is of crucial social importance' .

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

(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 27) 'We maintain, then, that there are at least two different modes of communication: the coding-decoding mode and the inferential mode' .

(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 63) 'We began this chapter by asking how human beings communicate with one another, Our answer is that they use two quite different modes of communication: coded communication and ostensive-inferential communication. This is how language is used in verbal communication' .

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

(Ricoeur 1982: 146) 'The book divides the act of writing and the act of reading into two sides, between which there is no communication' .

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

(Winograd 1977: 63) 'While the field is not yet at a stage where it is possible to lay out a precise unifying theory, this paper attempts to provide a beginning framework for studying discourse.... Its four sections attempt to:
1. Delimit the range of problems covered by the term "discourse".
2. Characterize the basic structure of natural language based on a notion of communication.
3. Propose a general approach to formalisms for describing the phenomena and building theories about them.
4. Lay out an outline of the different schemas involved in generating and comprehending language' .

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

(Winograd 1977: 66) It is obvious that Winograd assumes the basic conduit model of communication when he says that there is a 'need to transmit meaning through a sequential medium'. Apparently the arrangement is not a particularly happy one for 'the message is forced into a linearized channel in order to be conveyed by speaking' .

(Winograd 1977: 75) Winograd speaks of 'the schemas that form part of the cognitive structure of speaker and hearer' saying that 'the schemas can be grouped into three major areas:
1. the objects, events, and abstractions being discussed
2. the communication situation
3. the standard patterns of discourse in the language' .

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

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

community

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (6)

Jameson 1981

Quotes: (12)

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

(Spellmeyer 1993: 23) However, Spellmeyer posits: 'Were it not for differences between individuals, and for miscarriages in practical application, knowledge might indeed be communal and self-referential just as the constructionists believe. But regardless of how carefully we draw the boundaries of a community, regardless of how like-minded its members may seem, these members will sometimes find themselves at odds over fundamental issues.... The history of any discipline is a history of just such discordant moments because knowledge can never entirely escape its historical and institutional blindnesses, and our own everyday practice takes those blindnesses into account' .

(M. Pratt 1987: 56) 'What the "subcommunity" approach does not do, however, is see the dominated and dominant in their relations with each other -- this is the limitation imposed by the imaginings of community' .

(M. Pratt 1987: 55) Referring to the dedication of the Statue of Liberty with dignitaries on the island surrounded by suffragists in boats protesting, Pratt says, 'To include both the island full of dignitaries and the boatload of suffragists in the same picture is to introduce a deep cleavage indeed into the imagined community' .

(Coates and Cameron 1988: 59) Thomas studied speakers of a Welsh community where [E:] in certain words is beginning to be lost in favor of a shift to [A:]. She observed that women who use the feature more tend to attend a chapel on the end of town where the dialect is more prevalent. Though most of those who retain this feature in their language also live at that end of the community, there are some who do not live in the east end of the town, but attend church there. 'To summarize, use of the [E:] variant is confined to older women, whose social networks are more community-based that those of their male contemporaries and younger villagers of both sexes' .

(Coates and Cameron 1988: 23) Coates and Cameron report that Nichols has found a correlation between occupations of speakers and whether they use Gullah or 'standard English'. After describing that older black women and men of all ages work in jobs which allow them to speak Gullah, while job opportunities for younger women have opened up which require them to speak standard English, 'Nichols claims that in the South Carolina Black community, labour market forces are the single most important factor influencing linguistic choices' .

(Coates and Cameron 1988: 24) Coates and Cameron pose the question to us: 'Given differing vernacular norms for the two sexes, what happens to the definition of the speech community as a group with shared linguistic norms'? .

(Jameson 1981: 74) 'A social hermeneutic will ... wish to keep faith with its medieval precursor in just this respect, and must necessarily restore a perspective in which the imagery of libidinal revolution and of bodily transfiguration once again becomes a figure for the perfected community' .

competence

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (3)

Schiffrin 1994

Quotes: (3)

(Hopper 1987: 154) 'It will be seen that "grammar" begins life on page 2 [of Radford 1981] in its theoretically correct style, as a "model" of the native speaker's "linguistic competence". But notice that by page 3, "grammar" is suddenly no longer a linguists construct, a formal characterization of the abilities presumed to underlie the speaker's behavior, but the knowledge itself. It has gone from a linguist's theory to something the speaker possesses. One would not blame Radford, were it not that formal grammarians are quick to castigate discourse linguists for alleged "confusion" over the notion of "grammar", and often accuse them of not understanding this supposedly elementary concept' .

(Fish 1982: 100) 'Linguistics is positively harmful when its procedures are applied to such utterances, and it had best limit itself to the sphere of its competence, which is, of course, ordinary language' .

composition

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (4)

Quotes: (5)

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

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

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

(Foucault 1986a: 144-5) 'In a novel narrated in the first person, neither the first person pronoun, the present indicative tense, nor, for that matter, its signs of localization refer directly to the writer, either to the time when he wrote, or to the specific act of writing; rather, they stand for a "second self" whose similarity to the author is never fixed and undergoes considerable alteration within the course of a single book. It would be as false to seek the author in relation to the actual writer as to the fictional narrator; the "author-function" arises out of their scission-- in the division and distance of the two. One might object that this phenomenon only applies to novels or poetry, to a context of "quasi-discourse," but, in fact, all discourse that supports this "author-function" is characterized by this plurality of egos. In a mathematical treatise, the ego who indicates the circumstances of composition in the preface is not identical, either in terms of his position or his function, to the "I" who concludes a demonstration within the body of the text. The former implies a unique individual who, at a given time and place, succeeded in completing a project, whereas the latter indicates an instance and plan of demonstration that anyone could perform provided the same set of axioms, preliminary operations, and an identical set of symbols were used. It is also possible to locate a third ego: one who speaks of the goals of his investigation, the obstacles encountered, its results, and the problems yet to be solved and this "I" would function in a field of existing or future mathematical discourses. We are not dealing with a system of dependencies where a first and essential use of the "I" is reduplicated, as a kind of fiction, by the other two. On the contrary, the "author-function" in such discourses operates so as to effect the simultaneous dispersion of the three egos' .

comprehension

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (8)

Gibbs 1987

Foucault 1986b

Quotes: (15)

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

(Gibbs 1987: 574-5) 'Even if one assumes that mutual knowledge is not necessary for comprehension, there is much psychological evidence which is not in accord with many of the basic assumptions underlying the relevance hypothesis. The weight of this evidence suggests that it may be premature to accept the relevance hypothesis as a reasonable model of the psychological processes used in working out conversational inferences' .

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

(Foucault 1986b: 162) 'And now, let those who are weak on vocabulary, let those with little comprehension of theory call all this-- if its appeal is stronger than its meaning for them-- structuralism' .

(Haberlandt and Bingham 1982: 36) 'Scripts are assumed to provide privileged access to information in memory wherever it is located and to facilitate comprehension if subsequent sentences (Schank 1978). The mechanism for privileged access in reading comprehension is "spreading activation"' .

(Haberlandt and Bingham 1982: 39) 'The purpose of the present experiment was to evaluate the hypothesis that judgments of target sentences would be faster and more accurate in Same pairs that in Different pairs. Using this technique we made the following two assumptions: that judgment latencies were an estimate of ease of comprehension, and that, in this task, sentences were processed against the background of the preceding sentence, although the sentence judgment task was a single-sentence task as far as our subjects were concerned' .

(Haberlandt and Bingham 1982: 30) 'Comprehension is a joint function of textual aspects and of the reader's knowledge where both textual features and reader knowledge exist at various levels of abstractness....In the present paper we examine "scriptal" relatedness, which is one of the many intersentence relationships described by linguists. The paper consists of three parts. The first part discusses the script construct in the context of other constructs and illustrates how scripts provide connectivity between sentences. The second treats the role of scripts in the retention of texts, and the third addresses the role of scripts in reading comprehension' .

(Haberlandt and Bingham 1982: 44) 'We think that the critical contribution of script theory was to focus attention of the role of events and on reader knowledge of events in reading comprehension. The script concept will probably change as a result of future research, but the underlying theme of reader knowledge of events will remain an important part of theories of text comprehension' .

(van Dijk 1977: 4) 'In this paper, we will show that some fundamental problems of cognitive psychology can be accounted for in terms of macro-processing of complex semantic information.... Comprehension (as well as production) probably takes place at several levels, such that lower-level information is organized, reduced, and represented at higher levels. These processes involve the use of macro-rules; the input to the macro-rules is the micro-structure, and the output is the macro-structure. Macro-structures help to explain the ability to summarize discourse, and in general to use information from discourse for other cognitive tasks' .

(Winograd 1977: 64) 'This paper approaches the problem of studying discourse as one of understanding the cognitive structures and processes of language users. There are alternative approaches, such as text-based studies ... This paper ... proposes instead to focus on the cognitive processes of language production and comprehension. From this point of view, the text is a concrete trace of the processes, and its structure needs to be understood in terms of the processing structure ... There are clear advantages to having a framework which emphasizes the psychological processes, rather than the traces they leave, since any psycholinguistic model must deal first and foremost with the cognitive processing' .

(Winograd 1977: 74) 'We can look at schemas as providing a guide for structuring the processes of production and comprehension. In the process of production, a schema ... lists the different parts and properties of a structure which must be decided upon in order to produce it.... In comprehension, the set of stored schemas is actively used in a process of "pattern recognition"' .

(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' .

concatenation

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (1)

Quotes: (2)

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

(Burke 1945: 76-7) 'We might sum up the matter thus: Theologically , nature has attributes derived from its origin in an act of God (the Creation), but God is more than nature. Dramatistically , motion involves action, but action is more than motion. Hence theologically and/or dramatistically, nature (in the sense of God's Creation) is to nature (in the sense of naturalistic science) as action is to motion, since God's Creation is an enactment , whereas nature as conceived in terms of naturalistic science is a sheer concatenation of motions. But inasmuch as the theological ration between God (Creator) and Nature (Creation) is the same as the dramatistic ration between action and motion, the pantheistic equating of God and Nature would be paralleled by the equating of action and motion. And since action is a personal principle while motion is an impersonal principle, the pantheistic equation leads into the naturalistic position which reduces personalistic concepts to depersonalized terms' .

concept

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (16)

Geertz 1973

Jameson 1981

A. Pratt 1981

Quotes: (25)

(Burke 1945: 96) 'Next, within the verbal, there is the reduction of one terminology to another. Any word or concept is a reduction in this sense. One reduces this to that by discussing this in terms of that' .

(Burke 1945: 26) 'There is another strategy of definition, usually interwoven with the contextual sort, yet susceptible of separate observation. This is the "tribal" or "familial" sort, the definition of a substance in terms of ancestral cause....The Aristotelian genus is originally not a logical, but a biological, concept' .

(Burke 1945: 21) 'There is a set of words comprising what we might call the Stance family, for they all derive from a concept of place, or placement. In the Indo-Germanic languages the root for this family is sta , to stand (Sanscrit, stha ). And out of it there has developed this essential family, comprising such members as: consist, constancy, constitution, contrast. destiny, ecstasy, existence, hypostasize, obstacle, stage, state, status, statute, stead, subsist, and system. In German, an important member of the Stance family is stellen , to place, a root that figures in Vorstellung , a philosopher's and psychologist's word for representation, conception, idea, image' .

(Burke 1945: 66) 'We are reasoning as follows: we are saying that, to study the nature of the term, act , one must select a prototype, or paradigm of action. This prototype we find in the conception of a perfect or total act, such as the act of "the Creation". Examining this concept, we find that it is "magic", for it produces something out of nothing. This enables us to equate magic with novelty - and leads us to look for a modicum of magic in every act to the extent that the act possesses a modicum of novelty. This consideration also admonishes us, however, to make a distinction between "true" and "false" magic. "False" magic is a quasi-scientific ideal that would suspend the laws of motion , as in the attempt to coerce natural forces by purely ritualistic means. "True" magic is an aspect not of motion but of action' .

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

(Burke 1945: 40) 'But to consider an act in terms of its grounds is to consider it in terms of what it is not, namely, in terms of motives that, in acting upon the active, would make it a passive, We could state the paradox another way by saying that the concept of activation implies a kind of passive-behind-the-passive; for an agent who is "motivated by his passions" would be "moved by his being-movedness", or "acted upon by his state of being acted upon"' .

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

(Booth 1979: 108) 'Obviously such talk is nonsense to anyone who insists on a literal meaning for phrases like "the same as" and "amounts to". Burke seldom uses such words in a sense that would satisfy someone like Crane as strictly literal; even the word "literal" is not quite literal; thinking about the concept as Burke might, we would no doubt extend my questioning of Crane's usage in chapter 2 [of this work]. Indeed, a major part of his persistent program is to remind literalists that behind their claims to precision lurk confusions that can be acknowledged and lived with only by qualifying every copulative verb with some sense of ambiguity. It is not just that the words need semantic scouring. What something is is always too rich and complex for any one statement. Thus Burke can, without violating his own canons, say at one point that literary form as the gratification of needs is the appeal in poetry and, in other contexts, say that literary form is a disguise for the true appeal; and he can really mean both statements' .

(Ricoeur 1982: 147) 'I propose to show that the concept of the text, such as we have formulated it in the first part of this essay, demands a renewal of the two notions of explanation and interpretation and, in virtue of this renewal, a less contradictory conception of their interrelation' .

(Bove 1990: 55) 'There is a broad political purpose to this project that develops out of a radical skepticism about "truth" and the correspondence of fact and concept' .

(Haberlandt and Bingham 1982: 32) 'Anderson [1981] distinguishes between concepts, propositions, and schemata, with the latter including scripts. A concept is the "unanalyzable building block or primitive" of semantic memory.... Propositions are formed by relating concepts through predicates. They are the smallest units of meaning, assertions about the world which can be judged true or false. A schema is a set of related propositions and a script is a stereotyped sequence of propositions involving concepts, namely people or roles, objects or props, and settings. The script was conceived to be a very flexible mechanism' .

(van Dijk 1977: 5) 'The phrase the book has an intensional meaning, namely the individual concept of a book, which may take various extensions, i.e. actual books referred to, in particular situations. Both intensional and extensional interpretations are necessary in an account of the semantic structures of discourse' .

(Winograd 1977: 72) 'A schema is a description of a complex object, situation, process, or structure. It is a collection of knowledge related to the concept, not a definition in the formal sense' .

(Bakhtin 1986: 666) 'The novel is an artistic genre. Novelistic discourse is poetic discourse, but one that does not fit within the frame provided by the concept of poetic discourse as it now exists. The concept has certain underlying presuppositions that limit it' .

(Harris 1990: 49) 'For purposes of an integrational analysis, however, the concept of meaning may be dispensed with and replaced by that of communicational function. The crucial difference is that the communicational function of a sign is always contextually determined and derives from the network of integrational relations which obtain in a particular situation' .

(Coates and Cameron 1988: 19) 'Whatever the solution, it can hardly be denied that there is a problem for sociolinguistics in using the traditional model which takes the family as the primary unit of social stratification at a time when our traditional concept of the family ... is breaking down' .

(Geertz 1973: 5) 'The concept of culture I espouse, and whose utility the essays below attempt to demonstrate, is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning' .

(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' .

conception

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (5)

Quotes: (8)

(Burke 1945: 118-9) 'And we should infer that the original conception of the powers of motives in things is not exactly animistic. The evidences of animism which nineteenth-century anthropologists found so profusely among primitive tribes are, to our way of thinking, mainly indications of how thoroughly most of such anthropologists were imbued with the terms typical of nineteenth-century idealist philosophy, so that they saw things in these terms. We should expect, rather, that the basic perception of motives is a perception of things not as possessing the souls and personalities of agents , but as being essentially active. That is, they were not felt to be people ; they were felt to be actions' .

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

(Lanham 1976: 60) 'It was not that Ovid was a bad plotter. The rhetorical view denies that plot is possible. It was not that Ovid "had no taste for heroes and certainly, no capacity for creating them", as Brooks Otis charges. He did not believe in heroes, or the self they were based on. He was not bad at transitions; he wanted to lose the reader. He was not incapable of tracing a coherent genealogy for Rome; he did not believe in the Virgilian conception of history upon which such descent was based. He was not too dense to master a suitable repertoire of Augustan philosophical clich�s; he denied the theory of knowledge from which they grew. Too skeptical to think the whole truth contained in a single myth, he thought the epic genre a fraud, an obvious pretense that the world makes more sense than it does' .

(Bakhtin 1986: 665) 'Stylistics and the philosophy of discourse indeed confront a dilemma: either to acknowledge tha novel (and consequently all artistic prose tending in that direction) an unartistic or quasi-artistic genre, or to radically reconsider that conception of poetic discourse in which traditional stylistics is grounded and which determines all its categories' .

conclusion

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (3)

Ordonez [n.d.]

Quotes: (3)

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

(Coates and Cameron 1988: 69) Could Wood's study lead to the conclusion that 'floor time' and other language behavior that is often considered 'power' language is not a significant factor in promotions? The woman in higher status does not need to dominate her male subordinate. We could conclude that language dominance is irrelevant to status in the women's behavior .

(Ordonez [n.d.]: 62) 'Many roads thus lead to the same conclusion: that the traditional split between body and soul is no longer viable and that its pernicious legacy for women is being erased by today's woman, writing affirmatively and with a common purpose across the boundaries of nationality and ethnicity' .

concrete

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (5)

Quotes: (7)

(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' .

(Booth 1974: 40) 'But I ask you to think a bit, as I turn now from motivism to the remaining four dogmas, about what would happen to your intellectual and moral life if you reversed that formula, cultivating a benign acceptance- perhaps temporary and tentative, but real- of every belief that can pass two tests: you have no particular, concrete grounds to doubt it (as distinct from the abstract principle to doubt what cannot be proved); and you have good reason to think all men who understand the problem share your belief' .

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

(Bakhtin 1986: 668) 'Every concrete utterance of a speaking subject serves as a point where centrifugal as well as centripetal forces are brought to bear' .

condition

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (3)

Culler 1992

Quotes: (3)

(Culler 1992: 213) Responding to Knapp and Michaels, who maintain that 'Beliefs cannot be grounded in some deeper condition of knowledge' (1982.Against theory. Critical inquiry 8: 738), Culler posits, 'this might be true for such things as religious beliefs, but the various beliefs that function as principles, criteria, and premises in people's work on literature most probably belong to a structure of knowledge and argumentation' .

(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' .

(Coates and Cameron 1988: 92) A female strategy is not just to display condition of subordination to males, but to cope .

conjunction

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (1)

Enkvist 1981

Quotes: (1)

connotation

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (0)

Quotes: (0)

consequence

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (2)

Gibbs 1987

Quotes: (2)

consistency

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (2)

Quotes: (3)

(Hopper 1987: 150) 'A major pustulate, or working hypothesis, of Emergent Grammar is that the more useful a construction is, the more it will tend to become structuralized, in the sense of achieving cross-textual consistency, and serving as a basis for variation and extension' .

(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: 9) 'The principles of consistency binding scene, act, and agent also lead to reverse applications. That is, the scene-act ratio either calls for acts in keeping with scenes or scenes in keeping with acts- and similarly with the scene-agent ratio' .

constituent

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (1)

Quotes: (1)

constraint

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (2)

Greenblatt 1995

Quotes: (2)

(van Dijk 1977: 16) 'Thus the connectedness conditions for a sentence like "John bought a ticket" depends on whether the topic of discourse is "John took the train" or "John was going to the movies". So, under this constraint we judge (15) to be acceptable, but not (16):
'(15) John went to the station and bought a ticket.
'(16) John went to the station and fell asleep' .

(Greenblatt 1995: 228-9) 'If culture functions as a structure of limits, it also functions as the regulator and guarantor of movement. Indeed the limits are virtually meaningless without movement; it is only through improvisation, experiment, and exchange that cultural boundaries can be established. Obviously, among different cultures there will be a great diversity in the ratio between mobility and constraint. Some cultures dream of imposing an absolute order, a perfect stasis, but even these, if they are to reproduce themselves from one generation to the next, will have to commit themselves, however tentatively or unwillingly, to some minimal measure of movement; conversely, some cultures dream of an absolute mobility, a perfect freedom, but these too have always been compelled, in the interest of survival, to accept some limits' .

construct

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (8)

Quotes: (9)

(Booth 1974: 16-7) 'One can easily construct a long column of opposed terms that roughly match the original and entirely misleading split between fact and value: objective versus subjective, matter versus mind, mechanism versus vitalism, scientific reason versus faith or "the heart" or "the wisdom of the body"- and so on. The giveaway in such matters is that the column can be turned into two double columns, all of the terms made useful to either scientismist or irrationalist, just by adding proper adjectives to the opponent's terms. Often one needs no better adjective than a mere mere : my side obtains knowledge of facts, yours asserts mere value. Or: my side respects values, yours deals with mere facts. My side works with reason, yours with mere, or blind, faith' .

(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' .

(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' .

(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 .

(Booth 1979: 109) Burke 'found himself trying to construct a rhetoric, symbolic, and grammar of human motives, a three-in-one inquiry that would potentially accommodate all particular doctrines and provide for their meeting without mutual destruction. In short, he set out, like certain others, to build a pluralism that would save himself and the world by reducing meaningless and destructive symbolic encounter. The further one goes in Burke, the clearer it becomes that every consideration is subordinated to this master program' .

construction

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (6)

Quotes: (8)

(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' .

(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' .

(van Dijk 1977: 15) 'The macro-rule of construction is perhaps most characteristic of all macro-rules. It organizes micro-information by combining sequences of propositions that function as one unit at some macro-level; it reduces information without simply deleting it; and it introduces information at the macro-level that is "new" in the sense of not being part of the text base or entailed by individual propositions of the text base' .

(van Dijk 1977: 14) The construction rule: 'closely linked to integration, and they might be considered variants of each other. The interesting difference is that construction has no input proposition that organizes other propositions. Instead, a sequence of propositions is directly replaced by a macro-proposition, under the same conditions as in integration' .

(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?' .

(Foucault 1986a: 146) 'Chomsky in his book on Cartesian grammar "rediscovered" a form of knowledge that had been in use from Cordemoy to Humboldt. It could only be understood from the perspective of generative grammar because this later manifestation held the key to its construction: in effect, a retrospective codification of an historical position' .

content

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (7)

Virtanen 1992

Foucault 1986a

Quotes: (11)

(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: 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: 43-4) 'All gods are "substances", and as such are names for motives or combinations of motives. Polytheistic divinities, besides their personalistic aspects, often represent decidedly geometric, or scenic, kinds of motivation. Indeed, we may even think of local divinities as theological prototypes of contemporary environmentalist, or geographic motives. For to say that a river is a different "god" than a mountain is to say, within the rules of a polytheistic nomenclature, that a river calls for a different set of human actions than a mountain. Whereas the "enlightened" have too often been content to dismiss the pagan gods merely as instances of animistic superstition, the fact is that the complex of social behavior centering about a given "god" was often quite correct, in the most realistically biological sense. Thus, insofar as adequate modes of planting and harvesting and distribution are connected with the rites of a given divinity, its name would be the title for a correct summation of motives. However, such concepts of motivation are usually developed to the point where their original reference is obscured, being replaced by motivational concepts peculiar to a specialized priesthood and to the needs of class domination' .

(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' .

(Haberlandt and Bingham 1982: 39) 'The Same pairs were constructed in accordance with the constraints that priming and target sentences occur in a forward order, that both sentences of a pair begin with the same pronoun, and that there was no repetition of content words' .

(van Dijk 1977: 22) 'Frames and macro-structures are closely related but entirely different notions. Both organize complex semantic information. Frames, however, are conventional and general. Most members of a society or culture have approximately the same set of frames. Macro-structures do not have this character. Instead, they are ad hoc information, i.e., the particular global content of a particular discourse' .

(van Dijk 1977: 18) 'Super-structures are organizing principles of discourse. The have a hierarchical character, roughly defining the "global syntax" of the text. By contrast, the macro-structures define the "content" of the text. In certain kinds of narrative, such as folktales, this content may be conventional ... What has been said about the conventional "genre" of narratives also holds ... for other discourse types, e.g., arguments, advertisements, newspaper reports, propaganda, and psychological papers. In all cases the constraints operate globally, both on the global syntax of the macro-structures and on their specific content' .

(Virtanen 1992: 294-5) 'The present article is concerned with text types that are characterizable with the help of text-internal criteria. Such criteria are connected with the form or content of texts' .

(Foucault 1986a: 139) He posits writing as an 'interplay of signs' regulated more by the signifier than the content .

contention

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (3)

Gibbs 1987

Harris 1990

Quotes: (3)

(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' .

context

Definition

See also

References: (15)

Lanham 1976

Bove 1990

Bathrick 1992

Enkvist 1981

Foucault 1986a

Leitch [n.d.]

Quotes: (31)

(Hopper 1987: 144) 'The point about the retention of archaisms in proverbial language has of course often been made. But it has less often been noted that proverbial language is only an extreme case of repetition in discourse, at the other end of which are the morphological and syntactic repetitions some of which are called grammar; this point is made cogently by Lambrecht 1984. In other words, real live discourse abounds in all sorts of repetitions which have nothing to do with grammar as this is usually understood: for instance, idioms, proverbs, clich�s, formulas, specialist phrases, transitions, openings, closures, favored clause types, and so on. There is no consistent level at which these regularities are statable. They are not necessarily "sentences", or "clauses", with recurrent internal structure, but they are often used holistically. Their boundaries may or may not coincide with the constituent boundaries of our grammatical descriptions: subject and predicate, noun phrase, prepositional phrase. Moreover, what is a formulaic expression in one context may not be in another' .

(Burke 1945: 98) 'A scientist might happen to believe in a personal God, and might even pray to God for the success of his experiments. In such an act of prayer, of course, he would be treating God as a variable . Yet, when his prayer was finished, and he began his experiments, he would now, qua scientist, treat "God" as an invariant term, as being at most but the over-all name for the ultimate ground of all experience and all experiments, and not a name for the particularities of local context with which the scientific study of conditions, or correlations, is concerned' .

(Burke 1945: 90) 'So far as we can see, this matter of circumference is imbedded in the very nature of terms, and men are continually performing "new acts", in that they are continually making judgments as to the scope of the context which they implicitly or explicitly impute in their interpretations of motives. To select a set of terms is, by the same token, to select a circumference' .

(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' .

(Burke 1945: 23) 'But returning to the pun as it figures in the citation from Locke, we might point up the pattern as sharply as possible by observing that the word "substance", used to designate what a thing is , derives from a word designating something that a thing is not . That is, though used to designate something within the thing, intrinsic to it, the word etymologically refers to something outside the thing, extrinsic to it. Or otherwise put: the word in its etymological origins would refer to an attribute of the thing's context , since that which supports or underlies a thing would be a part of the thing's context. And a thing's context, being outside or beyond the thing, would be something that the thing is not' .

(Fish 1982: 110) 'The search for style, like the search for an essentialist definition of literature, proceeds in the context of an assumption that predetermines its shape' .

(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' .

(Lanham 1976: 62) 'The moral is clear. Nothing has only one meaning, context, justification. When all the world is made to converge on and yield up a single entity-- people, place, or city -- watch out' .

(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' .

(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' .

(Bathrick 1992: 320) 'The designation cultural studies has tended to stake out an area of conflict concerning the very meaning and relation of text and context, representation and the represented, cultural production and the world in which such production takes place....Cultural studies has sought to problematize the borders of textuality itself and, in so doing, to interrogate the ways in which fields of knowledge are constituted and organized' .

(Coates and Cameron 1988: 67) Rules and understanding may be context specific, but they should not be ad hoc .

(Leitch [n.d.]: 157) 'To the extent that the ordinary term "context" suggests a position outside textuality, it is misleading' .

convention

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (2)

Minsky 1980

Quotes: (2)

(Burke 1945: 56) 'Contemporary scientific theory, in proposing to abandon the categories of substance and causality, has done speculation a good turn. For it has made clear wherein the difference between philosophic and scientific terminologies of motivation resides. Philosophy, like common sense, must think of human motivation dramatistically, in terms of action and its ends. But a science is freed of philosophic taints only insofar as it confines itself to terms of motion and arrested motion (figure, structure). This convention, almost Puritanical in its severity (surely we should not be far wrong in calling it a secularized variant of Puritanism) has brought about such magnification of human powers that any "objection" to it would have about as much force as an attempt to "refute" Niagara Falls. But such results, however spectacular, do not justify an attempt to abide by the same terminological conventions when treating of human motives. For one could confine the study of action within the terms of motion only by resigning oneself to gross misrepresentations of life as we normally experience it. Though we here lay great stress upon the puns and other word play in men's ideas of motivation, we do not thereby conclude that such linguistic tactics are "nothing but" puns and word play' .

(Minsky 1980: 11) Since a sentence can be assessed as grammatical but nonsensical while another may be both ungrammatical and nonsensical, 'what is involved in the recognition of sentences must be quite different from what is involved in the appreciation of meanings ... The word-order relations ... exploit the (grammatical) convention and rules people usually use to induce others to make assignments to terminals of structures' .

conversation

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (4)

Quotes: (8)

(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' .

(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' .

conviction

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (1)

Spellmeyer 1993

Quotes: (1)

(Spellmeyer 1993: 27) 'Hermeneutic and "philosophical", our reformed metaempiricists would start from the conviction that no one simply "behaves", manipulated and ventriloquized by psychological imperatives, but that we all consciously act in response to experience and reflection, even if the historical sources of this action, no less than its subconscious motives and ultimate consequences, fall outside our immediate circle of awareness' .

copulative

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (1)

Quotes: (1)

correct

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (5)

Quotes: (6)

(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' .

(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' .

(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' .

(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."' .

counterargument

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (1)

Quotes: (1)

criteria

Definition

See also

References: (4)

Culler 1992

Virtanen 1992