D

Quotes: (1)

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

deconstruction

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (1)

Lanham 1993

Quotes: (1)

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

defense

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (2)

Booth 1974

Quotes: (2)

(Booth 1974: 20-1) 'There have been countless ... demonstrations that objective scholarship is not and cannot be objective in the sense of being free of value judgments.... Noam Chomsky's famous essay "Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship" partially undermines itself with this failure. Chomsky shows easily and conclusively that "liberal scholars", most notably Gabriel Jackson in his study on study on Spain in the 30s, discover what their value commitments allow them to discover, and they overlook what their values lead them to overlook. But Chomsky them writes as of he has earned, with this restoration of values into historical study, the right to impose his own values on history -- and without even as much effort to grapple with opposing views as was made by Jackson.... Chomsky often talks as if all attempts to write honest history are really and always mere disguises for value commitments and that therefore he has a right to push his value button- "down with the 'liberal' defense of capitalism"- and see what is churned out. His obligation, I would have thought, was to give his readers good reasons why his version of the war is in some historical sense better than Jackson's, and not just one more passionate voice to be measured in decibels' .

(Booth 1979: 105-6) 'We can at least begin with Burke's own kind of defense when under attack. Having seen man's world as a drama of symbolic actions, convinced that man's "symbolicity" is disastrous whenever any symbolic direction is followed to some kind of logical "perfection", he has consistently sought ways of mitigating, or undermining, the rage for perfection that each monistic mode of thought exhibits. We can see what this means in his fairly recent defense of his excremental talk about Keats. We must think of him as seeking always to modulate the excesses both of eulogistic languages, which would treat man as a creature or pure mind or spirit, and of "dislogistic" languages, which would reduce him to mere body, never acting but only reacting. In that light, what he calls his "joycing" of Keats can indeed be seen, in his words, as "but heuristic, suggestive, though it may put us in search of corroborative observations. And any such bathos, lurking behind the poem's pathos, is so alien to the formal pretenses of the work, if such indecorous transliterating of the poem's decorum had occurred to Keats, in all likelihood he would have phrased his formula differently, to avoid this turn"' .

deficit

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (1)

Quotes: (2)

(Coates and Cameron 1988: 21) 'We need a model of difference and not deficit' .

(Coates and Cameron 1988: 66) Power > difference, not deficit .

definition

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (8)

Quotes: (17)

(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: 26) 'Contextual definition might also be called "positional", or "geometric", or "definition by location"' .

(Burke 1945: 28) 'In sum, contextual definition stresses placement, ancestral definition stresses derivation' .

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

(Burke 1945: 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: 195) 'Since we began our enterprise with all respect for the requirements of empirical science, we have defined knowledge by empirical tests. Knowledge by definition, then, is the knowledge of conditions and relations. It is the knowledge of appearances , the knowledge of objects as they necessarily appear when seen in terms of our human categories (the categories of the mind in general). So, by definition, the transcendent realm of the unconditioned things-in-themselves (the scene that contains the possibilities of freedom) cannot be known . Hence, we must restrict the claims we can make about it. But whereas it can't be known , it can be thought about , for we are now thinking about it' .

(Gibbs 1987: 565) 'This original definition of mutual knowledge raises a serious paradox. The infinite series of beliefs statements is seen as necessary, although it is highly unlikely that listeners can compute an infinite series of these propositions in a finite period of time' .

(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: 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: 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' .

(Booth 1974: 21) 'If one recognizes, as we all must, that in the social sciences and humanities values are implicatied at every point, even in the assertion of the simplest fact, then of course we are in trouble, because by definition we are caught in whirlpools of Mere Assertion, knowledge being by definition unobtainable about values' .

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

(Schiffrin 1994: 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' .

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

(Winograd 1977: 66) After considering the polar distinctions of inter-sentential versus intra-sentential, context-dependent versus context-independent, dialog versus text, and spoken versus written and dismissing them as useful because of overlap of features and considerations, Winograd asserts that 'having eliminated these simple distinctions as candidates for defining "discourse", we are left without a clear criterion for our area of study. As the rest of this paper will illustrate, there is a good deal of diversity, and a clear definition will be possible only after a larger body of theory and techniques has been developed' .

(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' .

(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'? .

demonstration

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (2)

Foucault 1986a

Quotes: (2)

(Booth 1979: 106) Burke 'repudiates many of the canons of demonstration that most traditional scholars would take for granted. Now, when we find a critic not just deliberately flouting but making an overt attack on Occam's razor, when we find him not only "guilty of circular reasoning" but hailing circular reasoning as what every thinker inevitably commits, we can either rule him out of court or we can try to understand what critical purposes are thwarted when we insist that all discourse fit models imported from the sciences' .

(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' .

denotation

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (0)

Quotes: (0)

derivation

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (1)

Quotes: (4)

(Burke 1945: 35) 'Hence , Pure Personality would be the same as No Personality: and the derivation of the personal principle from God as pure person would amount to its derivation from an impersonal principle. Similarly, a point that Hegel made much of, Pure Being would be the same as Not-Being; and in Aristotle, God can be defined either as "Pure Act" or as complete repose, a rest that is "eternal, unchangeable, immovable". And Leibniz was able to propose something pretty much like unconscious ideas in his doctrine of the "virtual innateness of ideas". (We might point up the oxymoron here by translating "unconscious ideas" as "unaware awarenesses")' .

(Burke 1945: 28) 'In sum, contextual definition stresses placement, ancestral definition stresses derivation' .

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

(Burke 1945: 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' .

description

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (11)

Sperber and Wilson 1988

Quotes: (15)

(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' .

(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' .

(Fish 1982: 42) 'The method, then, is applicable to larger units and its chief characteristics remain the same: (1) it refuses to answer or even ask the question, what is this work about; (2) it yields an analysis not of formal features but of the developing responses of the reader in relation to the words as they succeed one another in time; (3) the result will be a description of the structure of response which hay have an oblique or even ... a contrasting relationship to the structure of the work as a thing in itself' .

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

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

(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: 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' .

(Minsky 1980: 19) 'What does it mean to expect a chair? Typically, four legs, some assortment of rungs, a level seat, an upper back. One expects also certain relations between these "parts". The legs must be below the seat, the back above. The legs must be supported by the floor. The seat must be horizontal, the back vertical, and so forth. Now suppose that this description does not match; the vision system finds four legs, a level plane, but no back. The "difference" between what we expect and what we see is "too few backs". This suggests not a chair, but a table or a bench' .

(Bove 1990: 62) 'The contemporary use of "discourse" turns literary critics away from questions of meaning; it also turns us from questions of "method" to the description of function. It suggests that a new set of questions should replace the interpretive ones that have come to constitute criticism and the normal practice of teachers and scholars. We might ask such things as, How does language work to produce knowledge? How is language organized in disciplines? Which institutions perform and which regulative principles direct this organization?' .

(Bove 1990: 60) 'Genealogy separates itself within the "will to truth" by trying to unmask discourses' associations with power and materialities; also, it is not reductive, that is, it alone allows for a full description of the completely determined discursive practices it studies' and, finally, it describes and criticizes these practices with an eye to revealing their "subjugating" effects in the present-- it means always to resist discipling and speaking for others in their own struggles' .

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

(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' .

(Kinneavy 1971: 36) Kinneavy postulates 'categories like: a narrative, a series of classifications, a criticism or evaluation, and a description. Actually, these four classes of kinds of referents are the modes of discourse considered here' .

(Geertz 1973: 5-6) 'In understanding what ethnography is, or more exactly what doing ethnography is, that a start can be made toward grasping what anthropological analysis amounts to as a form of knowledge. This, it must immediately be said, is not a matter of methods. From one point of view, that of the textbook, doing ethnography is establishing rapport, selecting informants, transcribing texts, taking genealogies, mapping fields, keeping a diary, and so on. But it is not these things, techniques and received procedures, that define the enterprise. What defines it is the kind of intellectual effort it is: an elaborate venture in, to borrow a notion from Gilbert Ryle, "thick description"' .

designation

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (1)

Bathrick 1992

Quotes: (1)

(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' .

determination

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (2)

Gibbs 1987

Quotes: (2)

(Burke 1945: 15) 'Though we have inspected two ratios, the five terms would allow for ten (scene-act, scene-agent, scene-agency, scene-purpose, act-purpose, act-agent, act-agency, agent-purpose, agent-agency, agency-purpose). The ratios are principles of determination' .

deviation

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (2)

Fish 1982

Quotes: (3)

(Burke 1945: 104) 'It is always a matter of casuistry to decide whether you will treat the modification of a principle as an "extension of" the principle or a "deviation from" it' .

(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' .

diachronic

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (1)

Jameson 1981

Quotes: (1)

(Jameson 1981: 105) 'The strategic value of generic concepts for Marxism clearly lies in the mediatory function of the notion of a genre, which allows the coordination of immanent formal analysis of the individual text with the twin diachronic perspective of the history of forms and the evolution of social life' .

diacritic

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (0)

Quotes: (0)

dialect

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (1)

Quotes: (1)

(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' .

dialectic

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (6)

Quotes: (7)

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

(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' .

(Frye 1957: 195) 'The characterization of romance follows its general dialectic structure, which means that subtlety and complexity are not much favored. Characters tend to be either for or against the quest' .

(Ijsseling 1976: 14) 'Plato is aware of the fundamental ambiguity of the word, which may guide a man, but also can lead him astray and deceive him'. Therefore, Plato is suspicious of speech and prefers dialectic .

(Said 1986: 611) 'The dialectic of self-fortification and self-confirmation by which culture achieves its hegemony over society and the State is based on a constantly practiced differentiation of self from what it believes to be not itself' .

dialogue

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (2)

Longacre 1983

Lanham 1976

Quotes: (2)

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

(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' .

dichotomy

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (2)

Schiffrin 1994

Derrida 1986b

Quotes: (2)

(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' .

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

differance

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (1)

Derrida 1986c

Quotes: (1)

(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' .

difference

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (12)

Said 1986

Quotes: (17)

(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' .

(Burke 1945: xix) 'Since no two things or acts or situations are exactly alike, you cannot apply the same term to both of them without thereby introducing a certain margin of ambiguity, an ambiguity as great as the difference between the two subjects that are given the identical title' .

(Gibbs 1987: 568) 'The issue of what kinds of experience constitute "knowing" or "assuming" as opposed to merely being "manifest" is a delicate one. Yet making a distinction between something being "known" and other things being "manifest" to someone might artificially create a difference where none exists' .

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

(Booth 1974: xiv) 'One thing that we all believe, though many of us believe we have no good grounds for the belief, is that there really is a difference between good reasons and bad- which in my terms means a genuine difference between good rhetoric and bad....I shall be pursuing here the art of discovering good reasons, finding what really warrants assent because any reasonable person ought to be persuaded by what has been said' .

(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' .

(Longacre 1983: 3) 'Our classification needs ... to include both broad classifications and also more narrow specification of surface types. The classification needs, however, to allow for the difference between notional structures ... and surface structures.... In brief, notional structures of discourse relate more clearly to the overall purpose of the discourse, while surface structures have to do more with a discourse's formal characteristics' .

(Booth 1979: 115-6) 'We must not ... support simple skepticism or relativism; these always in practice feed the fanaticisms that destroy. Confidence must be maintained in the difference between good criticism and bad, and we must develop criteria for distinguishing the discourse that curses from the kind that cures' .

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

(Bove 1990: 64) 'When the tools of opposition, useful to a point and in a specific local struggle against a particular form of power, lose their negative edge-- when their critical effect makes no difference and they simply permit the creation of new texts, new documents recording the successful placement of the previously "oppositional" within the considerable unchanged institutional structures of the discipline -- at that point criticism must turn skeptical again and genealogically recall how the heretical became orthodox' .

(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' .

(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: 21) 'We need a model of difference and not deficit' .

(Coates and Cameron 1988: 66) Power > difference, not deficit .

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

(Said 1986: 621) 'Were I to use one word consistently along with criticism ... it would be oppositional....its identity is its difference from other cultural activities and from systems of thought or of method' .

differentiation

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (2)

M. Pratt 1987

Said 1986

Quotes: (3)

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

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

disambiguation

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (1)

Sperber and Wilson 1988

Quotes: (1)

(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' .

discipline

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (5)

Quotes: (8)

(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' .

(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' .

(Bove 1990: 63-4) 'Since ours is a society which increasingly tries to ensure its political order through discursive systems that discipline our language and culture, any successful resistance to that order would seem to require strong weapons aimed to weaken that discipline.... Literary criticism, presumably always specially sensitive to the functions of language, and newly sensitive to its relationship to power on the site of institutionalized disciplines, can turn its tools to the critical examination of how, in relation to the state and its largest institutions, power operates in discourse and how discourse disciplines a population.... Discourse can turn literary studies into a full criticism, one which is skeptical, critical, oppositional, and-- when appropriate-- sustentative. It can help us to avoid reduction, either of the historical context of an event or of the rhetorically complex display of power within a textualized discourse or institutionalized discipline' .

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

(Kinneavy 1971: 16-7) 'A discipline must be fertilized from without; otherwise it can become stale and sterile' .

(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' .

(White 1974: 395) 'It is difficult to get an objective history of a scholarly discipline, because if the historian is himself a practitioner of it, he is likely to be a devotee of one or another of its sects and hence biased; and if he is not a practitioner, he is unlikely to have the expertise necessary to distinguish between the significant and the insignificant events of the field's development' .

discourse

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (25)

Quotes: (101)

(Hopper 1987: 142) 'The notion of Emergent Grammar is meant to suggest that structure, or regularity, comes out of discourse and is shaped by discourse as much as it shapes discourse in an on-going process. Grammar is hence not to be understood as a pre-requisite for discourse, a prior possession attributable in identical form to both speaker and hearer. Its forms are not fixed templates, but are negotiable in face-to-face interaction in ways that reflect the individual speakers' past experience of these forms, and their assessment of the present context, including especially their interlocutors, whose experiences and assessments may be quite different. Moreover, the term Emergent Grammar points to a grammar which is not abstractly formulated and abstractly represented, but always anchored in the specific concrete form of an utterance' .

(Hopper 1987: 144) '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' .

(Hopper 1987: 144-5) 'It has been noted before that to a very considerable extent everyday language is built up out of combinations of such prefabricated parts. Language is, in other words, to be viewed as a kind of pastiche, pasted together in an improvised way out of ready-made elements. Language is thus to be treated, in Wittgenstein's words, "from outside" (cf. Wittgenstein 1958: para. 120) -- not as governed by internalized mentally represented rules, but by pre-existent material with which discourses can be devised ... Evidently an entirely parallel way of viewing language is to be attributed to Jacques Derrida with his metaphor of language as "graft": new speech acts are "grafted onto" old ones and of course serve in turn as the stock onto which further new speech acts are grafted ... Becker's idea of "prior texts" ... is also crucial here: previous actual utterances form the basis of new utterances. Similar observations have been made by Bolinger, by Andrew Pawley, and others. It is this pre-patterned, pre-fabricated aspect of speech which accounts best for the characteristic of language for which no dualistic, double-tiered theory can provide an intuitively satisfying explanation: in natural discourse we compose and speak simultaneously (Smith 1980:60). There is no room -- no need -- for mediation by mental structures. It is in this sense that, as Bolinger has pointed out (Bolinger 1976), speaking is more similar to remembering procedures and things than it is to following rules. It is a question of possessing a repertoire of strategies for building discourses and reaching into memory in order to improvise and assemble them. Grammar is now not to be seen as the only, or even the major, source of regularity, but instead grammar is what results when formulas are re-arranged, or dismantled and re-assembled, in different ways' .

(Hopper 1987: 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' .

(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' .

(Hopper 1987: 147) 'What I've been saying up to now has had the purpose of re-contextualizing the notion of grammar -- not to abolish it, but rather to suspend it with a view to isolating those regularities in discourse which we will agree to call emergent grammatical regularities. But as we have seen, the doctrine of Emergent Grammar assignes an entirely different status to grammar from what might be called A Priori Grammar' .

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

(Booth 1974: xiii) 'If philosophy is defined as inquiry into certain truth, then what I pursue here is not philosophy but rhetoric: the art of discovering warrantable beliefs and improving those beliefs in shared discourse. But the differences are not sharply definable, and I of course think of the inquiry as in a larger sense philosophical. To talk of improving beliefs implies that we are seeking truth, since some beliefs are "truer" than others. Besides, many philosophers from Cicero to the present have defined what they do precisely as I would define rhetoric' .

(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: 152) 'I suspect one could find a kind of gradation between different types of discourse within most societies: discourse "uttered" in the course of the day and in casual meetings, and which disappears with the very act which gave rise to it; and those forms of discourse that lie at the origins of a certain number of new verbal acts, which are reiterated, transformed or discussed; in short, discourse which is spoken and remains spoken, indefinitely, beyond its formulation, and which remains to be spoken' .

(Foucault 1986b: 149) 'I am supposing that is every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organised and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures, whose role is to avert its powers and its dangers, to cope with chance events, to evade its ponderous, awesome materiality. In a society such as our own we all know the rules of exclusion. The most obvious and familiar of these concerns what is prohibited' .

(Foucault 1986b: 155) 'Disciplines constitute a system of control in the production of discourse, fixing its limits through the action of an identity taking the form of a permanent reactivation of the rules' .

(Foucault 1986b: 161) 'Criticism analyses the processes of rarefaction, consolidation and unification in discourse; genealogy studies their formation, at once scattered, discontinuous and regular' .

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

(Foucault 1986b: 162) 'The critical side of the analysis deals with the systems enveloping discourse; attempting to mark out and distinguish the principles of ordering, exclusion and rarity in discourse. We might, to play with our words, say it practises a kind of studied casualness. The genealogical side of discourse, by way of contrast, deals with series of effective formation of discourse: it attempts to grasp it in its power of affirmation, by which I do not mean a power opposed to that of negation, but the power of constituting domains of objects, in relation to which one can affirm or deny true or false propositions. Let us call these domains of objects positivist and , to play on words yet again, let us say that, if the critical style is one of studied casualness, then the genealogical mood is one of felicitous positivism' .

(Foucault 1986b: 151) 'True discourse, liberated by the nature of its form from desire and power, is incapable of recognising the will to truth which pervades it; and the will to truth, having imposed itself upon us for so long, is such that the truth it seeks to reveal cannot fail to mask it' .

(Foucault 1986b: 155) 'There is, I believe, a third group of rules serving to control discourse....This amounts to a rarefaction among speaking subjects: none may enter into a discourse on a specific subject unless he has satisfied certain conditions or if he is not, from the outset, qualified to do so. More exactly, not all areas of discourse are equally open and penetrable; some are forbidden territory ... while others are virtually open to the winds and stand, without any prior restrictions, open to all' .

(Foucault 1986b: 162) 'At all events, one thing at least must be emphasised here: that the analysis of discourse thus understood, does not reveal the universality of a meaning, but brings to light the action of imposed rarity, with a fundamental power of affirmation. Rarity and affirmation; rarity, in the last resort of affirmation -- certainly not any continuous outpouring of meaning, and certainly not any monarchy of the signifier' .

(Foucault 1986b: 158) 'I believe we must resolve ourselves to accept three decisions which our current thinking rather tends to resist, and which belong to the three groups of function I have just mentioned: to question our will to truth; to restore to discourse its character as an event; to abolish the sovereignty of the signifier.... One can straight away distinguish some of the methodological demands they imply. A principle of reversal, first of all.... Next, then, the principle of discontinuity .... Discourse must be treated as a discontinuous activity, its different manifestations sometimes coming together, but just as easily unaware of, or excluding each other. The principle of specificity declares that a particular discourse cannot be resolved by a prior system of significations...We must conceive discourse as a violence that we do to things, or, at all events, as a practice we impose upon them; it is in this practice that the events of discourse find the principle of their regularity. The fourth principle, that of exteriority, holds that we are not to burrow to the hidden core of discourse, to the heart of the thought or meaning manifested in it; instead, taking the discourse itself, its appearance and its regularity, that we should look for its external conditions of existence, for that which gives rise to the chance series of these events and fixes its limits' .

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

(Foucault 1986b: 156) 'Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and the powers it carries with it' .

(Foucault 1986b: 151) 'Of the three great systems of exclusion governing discourse -- prohibited words, the division of madness and the will to truth -- I have spoken at greatest length concerning the third. With good reason: for centuries, the former have continually tended toward the latter; because this last has, gradually, been attempting to assimilate the others in order both to modify them and to provide them with a firm foundation. Because, if the two former are continually growing more fragile and less certain to the extent that they are now invaded by the will to truth, the latter, in contrast, daily grows in strength, in depth and implacability' .

(Foucault 1986b: 152) 'I believe we can isolate another group: internal rules, where discourse exercises its own control; rules concerned with the principles of classification, ordering and distribution. It is as though we were now involved in the mastery of another dimension of discourse: that of events and chance' .

(Schiffrin 1994: 90-1) 'The essential insight of speech act theory is that language performs communicative acts. ... Speech act theory, then, is basically concerned with what people "do" with language -- with the functions of language. ... The conditions underlying and defining speech acts are central to speech act theory: they are the basis for the way we recognize and classify speech acts ... and for the way a single utterance can have more than one function ... In sum, by focusing upon the meaning of utterances as acts, speech act theory offers an approach to discourse analysis in which what is said is chunked (or segmented) into units that have communicative functions that can be identifies and labelled. Although we can describe such acts in different ways ... the import of such acts for discourse is that they both initiate and respond to other acts' .

(Schiffrin 1994: 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: 134) 'Interactional sociolinguistics views discourse as a social interaction in which the emergent construction and negotiation of meaning is facilitated by the use of language. Although the interactional approach is basically a functional approach to language, its focus on function is balanced in important ways. The work of Goffman forces structural attention to the contexts in which language is used: situations, occasions, encounters, participation frameworks, and so on, have forms and meanings that are partially created and/or sustained by language. Similarly, language is patterned in ways that reflect those contexts of use. Put another way, language and context co-constitute one another: language contextualizes and is contextualized, such that language does not just function "in" context, language also forms and provides context. One particular context is social interaction. Language, culture, and society are grounded in interaction: they stand in a reflexive relationship with the self, the other, and the self-other relationship, and it is out of these mutually constitutive relationships that discourse is created' .

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

(Schiffrin 1994: 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' .

(Schiffrin 1994: 7) 'Although speech act theory was not first developed as a means of analyzing discourse, particular issues in speech act theory ... lead to discourse analysis. Speech act theory also provides a means by which to segment texts, and thus a framework for defining units that could then be combined into larger structures' .

(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 .

(Longacre 1983: 17) Longacre calls 'the man [sic] who is making up the discourse and beaming it towards us' a composer .

(Longacre 1983: 8) 'Every discourse finds a further principle of unity in terms of participants and/or themes' .

(Longacre 1983: 3) 'To begin with, we can classify all possible discourses according to two basic parameters: contingent temporal succession and agent orientation.... Narrative discourse ... is plus in respect to both parameters. Procedural discourse ... is plus in respect to contingent succession ... but minus in respect to the agent orientation ... Behavioral discourse is minus in regard to contingent succession but plus in regard to agent orientation ... Expository discourse is minus in respect to both parameters' .

(Longacre 1983: 19) He thinks of the 'composer as framer of the discourse' .

(Longacre 1983: 11) 'An example of this occurred in a news story in the Dallas Morning News ... Its notional intent was to give a first person account of an apartment fire in Dallas, but it is cast in the form of procedural discourse' .

(Longacre 1983: 15) 'The previous section has skirted the edge of a further feature of monologue discourse that requires discussion in its own right: the distinction between the main line of development in a discourse and all other material -- which I here lump together under the rubric supportive' .

(Longacre 1983: 20) 'I here get to the main point of this chapter...Something like plot characterizes forms of discourse other than narrative....Plot is the notional structure of narrative discourse' .

(Lanham 1993: x) 'We failed to notice that the personal computer had presented itself as an alternative to the printed book, and the electronic screen as an alternative to the printed page. Furthermore, in the last three of four years, that alternative page has been enhanced so that it can present and manipulate images and sounds almost as easily as words. And it can do all this in 16.7 million colors. The long reign of black-and-white textual truth has ended. The nature and status of textual discourse have been altered. This movement from book to screen promises a metamorphosis comparable in magnitude, if not in hype, to broadcast TV' .

(Lanham 1993: xiii) 'Unlike most humanists discussion technology, I argue an optimistic thesis. I think electronic expression has come not to destroy the Western arts and letters, but to fulfill them. And I think too that the instructional practices built upon the electronic word will not repudiate the deepest and most fundamental currents of Western education in discourse but redeem them' .

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

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

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

(Ricoeur 1982: 158) 'To read is, on any hypothesis, to conjoin a new discourse to the discourse of the text' .

(Ricoeur 1982: 159) 'Initially the text had only a sense, that is, internal relations or a structure; now it has a meaning, that is, a realisation in the discourse of the reading subject' .

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

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

(Bove 1990: 62) 'The genealogical analysis of discourse, then, sets out with an eye on the present to criticize and trace the systems of power which have come to constitute human being in our world. It does this to stand in opposition to them and to provide the results of its work to whomever would like to use them in their struggles against the forms of power they are trying to resist' .

(Bove 1990: 57-8) '"Discourse" makes possible disciplines and institutions which, in turn, sustain and distribute those discourses.... In other words, these discourses are linked to social institutions which "have power" in the very ordinary sense we mean when we use that phrase: such institutions can control bodies and actions. But there is more to them than "having power" in the sense of being able to dominate others.... Power must not be thought of as negative, as repression, domination, or inhibition. On the contrary, it must always be seen as "a making possible", as an opening up of fields in which cerain kinds of action and production are brought about.... What Foucault means when he says that power acts upon actions is precisely that it regulates our forming of ourselves' .

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

(van Dijk 1977: 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' .

(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' .

(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' .

(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: 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' .

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

(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' .

(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' .

(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' .

(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' .

(van Dijk 1977: 12) The detail deletion rule: 'all detailed information may be deleted which somehow has been integrated into another proposition of the discourse' .

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

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

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

(Virtanen 1992: 302-3) 'The two-level typology outlined in Section 3 suggests that text types can be ranged on a scale according to the ease with which they may serve different types of discourse' .

(Virtanen 1992: 306) 'Narratives, for example, can be used for argumentation, or descriptions for instruction. Such an apparent mismatch of discourse type and text type may be accounted for in terms of the suggested two levels. Any discourse type may surface in the form of a narrative: Narratives may be used to instruct ... explain things ... describe activities or circumstances ... The ease of the indirect or secondary usage manifested by this type of text, and its potential to realize the widest array of discourse types may, indeed, be regarded as arguments for the "basic" status of narrative among the different types of text' .

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

(Bakhtin 1986: 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' .

(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' .

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

(Kinneavy 1971: 40) Kinneavy maintains that the 'aims overlap just as the modes of discourse. But abstracting them for individual consideration is the necessary limitation of any aspect of science' .

(Kinneavy 1971: 30) 'the subdivisions of discourse are the major concern. In other words, what are the basic signals of discourse, the basic kinds of references made by discourse, and the basic uses of discourse?' .

(Kinneavy 1971: 16) 'Only recently, however, with the work of Christensen, Harris, and Pike have structural and generative grammars moved into areas relevant to discourse education' .

(Bathrick 1992: 323) 'Cultural studies has pushed generally toward a multiperspectivism that would challenge the notion of one dominant theoretical model as a "master discourse" at the center of the profession ... that there is one, "scientific" interpretive model valid for all texts and contexts' .

(Bathrick 1992: 328) 'The critique of essentialism and universalism has been vital in opening up the study of literature and history to a heterogeneity of theme, perspective, constituency, medium; and of political, national, and sexual identities. At the same time, the emergence of once silenced and still oppressed voices within the critical domain of cultural discourse has politicized and helped position and certify those identities as part of a striving for empowerment.... In the area of ethnic studies, African American, Third World, and Latin American programs have proffered an internal critique of the ethnocentric Occidentalism of much of humanist scholarly and curricular organization in academic institutions or, more modestly, have sought to resituate prevailing discourses and canons in relation to what and who have been excluded by dominant voices' .

(Enkvist 1981: 97-8) 'Rhetoricians used to be the people who worried most about the complex of problems which I shall discuss under a somewhat ponderous term, Experiential Iconicism....The traditional labels under which these problems used to enter into rhetoric and grammar were ordo naturalis and ordo artificialis....In natural order ... text and discourse have the same arrangement as things in the universe of discourse' .

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

(Cixous 1986: 309) 'I shall speak about women's writing: about what it will do....as there are no grounds for establishing a discourse, but rather an arid millennial ground to break, what I say has at least two sides and two aims: to break up, to destroy; and to foresee the unforeseeable, to project' .

(Coates and Cameron 1988: 95) How is 'typical' known apart from contrast with other kinds of discourse? .

(Foucault 1986a: 142) 'An author's name is not simply an element of speech... Its presence is functional in that it serves as a means of classification. A name can group together a number of texts and thus differentiate them from others.... The author's name characterizes a particular manner of existence of discourse'. The culture in which a discourse circulates regulates its status and manner of reception .

(Jardine 1986: 564) 'To designate that process, I have suggested a new name, what I hope to be a believable neologism: gynesis-- the putting into discourse of "woman" as that process beyond the Cartesian Subject, the Dialectics of Representation, or Man's Truth. The object produced by this process is neither a person nor a thing, but a horizon, that towards which the process is tending: a gynema. This gynema is a reading effect, a woman-in-effect, never stable, without identity' .

(Leitch [n.d.]: 154) 'Foucault demonstrates that archival discourse expands, divides, and deploys knowledge and power in the interest of social control' .

(Ordonez 1989: 89) 'Whatever we say or whatever we write ... will always be a part and parcel of an ongoing discourse into which we insert ourselves at particular and varying points. Our individual utterances can never be entirely encompassing, nor should they be; neither can they be separate or detached' .

discovery

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (1)

Fish 1982

Quotes: (1)

(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' .

dislogistic

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (1)

Quotes: (1)

distinction

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (10)

Quotes: (14)

(Burke 1945: 47) 'Indeed, we can take it as a reliable rule of thumb that, whenever, we find a distinction between the internal and the external, the intrinsic and the extrinsic, the within and the without, (as with Korzybski's distinction between happenings "inside the skin" and happenings "outside the skin") we can expect to encounter the paradoxes of substance' .

(Burke 1945: 67-8) 'However, it is not the purpose of our Dramatism to abide strictly by any one system of philosophic terms that happens to exemplify the dramatist pattern. Rather, it is our purpose to show that the explicit and systematic use of the dramatist pentad is best designed to bring out the strategic moments of motivational theory. Accordingly, at this point, we are more concerned to illustrate the Grammatical scruples than to select one particular casuistry as our choice among them. Philosophies again and again have got their point of departure precisely by treating as a distinction in kind what other philosophies have treated as a distinction in degree, or v.v.' .

(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: 173) 'Dialectically, any conflict between two concepts of justice can be removed by the adoption of a remoter term broad enough to encompass both, as a distinction between farmhouse and palace can be resolved in classing them both as "dwellings"' .

(Booth 1974: 13) 'What is most interesting here is the automatic reliance on the distinction between facts and values, and the quality of the reply one often receives if he questions that distinction. If the word dogma is applicable to any general notion that cannot, for the believer, be brought into question, the belief that you cannot and indeed should not allow your values to intrude upon your cognitive life- that thought and knowledge and fact are on one side and affirmations of value on the other- has been until recently a dogma for all right-thinking moderns' .

(Lanham 1993: 13) 'In the digital light of these technologies, the disciplinary boundaries that currently govern academic study of the arts dissolve before our eyes, as do the administrative structures that enshrine them. It is not only the distinction between the creator and the critic that dissolves, but the walls between painting and music and sculpture, music, architecture, and literature' .

(Derrida 1986b: 104) 'The thesis of the arbitrariness of the sign ... must forbid a radical distinction between the linguistic and the graphic sign' .

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

(White 1974: 406) 'The older distinction between fiction and history, in which fiction is conceived as the representation of the imaginable and history as the representation of the actual, must five place to the recognition that we can only know the actual by contrasting it with or likening it to the imaginable' .

distribution

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (3)

Foucault 1986b

Enkvist 1981

Quotes: (3)

(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' .

doctrine

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (1)

Quotes: (4)

(Burke 1945: 210-1) 'So we offer such a tentative restatement of the Marxist doctrine, as formed about the act of class struggle. We are following no particular text, but are trying to restate the Marxist position in general, as it appears when translated into the terms of characterization employed in this book. We freely grant, however, that such a mode of summarization, characterization, and placement is almost ludicrously inapposite, when considered from the Rhetorical point of view. For though we manipulate our terms in keeping with all the important Marxist emphasis upon class antagonism as the locus of motives, our vocabulary necessarily lacks the partisan vigor that infuses the Marxist rhetoric, and makes the Communist Manifesto a masterpiece of challenge' .

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

(Burke 1945: 52) 'Positivists who would discard the category of substance assert that the only meaningful propositions are those which are capable of scientific proof; and having thus outlawed the conveniences of a substantive rhetoric they next blandly concede that the scientific proof is not always possible actually, but must be possible "in principle" -which would leave them pretty much where they began, except that their doctrine won't allow them to admit it' .

domain

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (3)

Spellmeyer 1993

Bathrick 1992

Kristeva 1986

Quotes: (3)

(Spellmeyer 1993: 19) 'Not a skill, not an art, persuasion is the struggle, perpetually on shifting terms, to establish a domain of intersubjectivity' .

(Kristeva 1986: 472) 'The reader will find in the following pages, first, an attempt to situate the problematic of women in Europe within an inquiry on time: that time which the feminist movement both inherits and modifies. Second, I will attempt to distinguish two phases or two generations of women which, while immediately universalist and cosmopolitan in their demands, can nonetheless be differentiated by the fact that the first generation is more determined by the implications of a national problematic ..., while the second, more determined by its place within the "symbolic denominator", is European and trans-European. Finally, I will try, both through the problems approached and through the type of analysis I propose, to present what I consider a viable stance for a European-- or at least a European woman-- within a domain which is henceforth worldwide in scope' .

drama

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (3)

Frye 1957

Quotes: (6)

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

(Burke 1945: 3) 'It is a principle of drama that the nature of acts and agents should be consistent with the nature of the scene' .

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

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

(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' .

dualism

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (1)