ODOURLESS

QUIZ III: Topics

• "Speech Act Theory" (Allan)
• "Grice's Pragmatics" (Wharton)
• Yule's "Semantics", "Pragmatics", "Discourse analysis"
• De Beaugrande / Dressler: Class and Blog notes.

TEXTUALITY, STANDARDS, REGULATIVE PRINCIPLES

De Beaugrande and Dressler (1981) view their own procedural approach to text linguistics as evolved out of other views, and most text linguists make some reference to both micro- and macrostructural features of the text, and to speakers’ world knowledge. By a procedural approach, de Beaugrande and Dressler (1981: 31) mean an approach in which ‘all the levels of language are to be described in terms of their utilization’. They (1931: 3) define text as a communicative occurrence which meets seven standards of textuality – namely cohesion and coherence, which are both text-centred, and intentionality, acceptability, informativity, situationality and intertextuality, which are all user-centred. These seven standards function as the constitutive principles which define and create communication. In addition, at least three regulative principles control textual communication. These are efficiency, effectiveness and appropriateness.

Intentionality concerns the text producer’s intention to produce a cohesive and coherent text that will attain whatever goal s/he has planned that it should attain. Text producers and receivers both rely on Grice’s Co-operative Principle in managing discourse, but in text linguistics the notion of conversational implicature is supplemented with the notion that language users plan towards a goal (de Beaugrande and Dressler 1981: 132–3).

Acceptability concerns the receiver’s wish that the text should be cohesive and coherent and be of relevance to her/him (de Beaugrande and Dressler 1981: 7): ‘This attitude is responsive to such factors as text type, social or cultural setting, and the desirability of goals.’ The receiver will be tolerant of things, such as false starts, which interfere with coherence and cohesion and will use inferencing, based on her/his own general knowledge, to bring the textual world together.

Informativity ‘concerns the extent to which the occurrences of the presented text are expected vs unexpected or known vs unknown/certain’ (de Beaugrande and Dressler 1981: 8–9). When something very unexpected occurs the text receiver performs a motivation search (problem-solving) to find out what these occurrences signify, why they were selected, and how they can be integrated back into the continuity that is the basis of communication. If no solution is found, the text will appear as nonsensical.

A receiver’s expectations of what will appear in a text are powerfully affected by her/his perception of what text type s/he is currently encountering. What is unexpected in a technical report may be less unexpected in a poem, and it is interesting to observe how people faced with apparent nonsense will normally be able to give it a meaning if they are told that the text is a poem.

Most cognitive approaches to text analysis emphasize what readers bring to the text: the text is not a file full of meaning which the reader simply downloads. How sentences relate to one another and how the units of meaning combine to create a coherent extended text is the result of interaction between the reader’s world and the text, with the reader making plausible interpretations.

Situationality ‘concerns the factors which make a text relevant to a situation of occurrence’ (de Beaugrande and Dressler 1981: 9). Again, a text-receiver will typically try hard to solve any problem arising from the occurrence of apparently irrelevant items in text; that is, s/he will engage in problem–solution in order to make such items appear relevant.

Intertextuality concerns the way in which the use of a certain text depends on knowledge of other texts. For instance, a traffic sign saying ‘resume speed’ only makes sense on the basis of a previous sign telling a driver to slow down. The interdependence of texts covered by the notion of intertextuality is responsible for the evolution of text types, which are groups of texts displaying characteristic features and patterns. Parodies, critical reviews, reports and responses to the arguments of others are highly and obviously reliant on intertextuality. In other cases, we are less aware of intertextuality. For instance, a novel we are reading may appear as an independent text; however, it relies on the tradition of novel-writing, and we bring our knowledge of what a novel is to the reading of it.

Regulative principles of textual communication

Efficiency depends on the text being used in communicating with minimum effort by the participants.

Effectiveness depends on the text leaving a strong impression and creating favourable conditions for attaining a goal.

Appropriateness is the agreement between the setting of a text and the ways in which the standards of textuality are upheld. It mediates between efficiency and effectiveness which tend to work against each other. Plain language and trite content [efficiency] are very easy to produce and receive, but cause boredom and leave little impression behind. In contrast, creative language and bizarre content [effectiveness] can elicit a powerful effect, but may become unduly difficult to produce and receive.

Naturalness

In text linguistics, then, the links between clauses are observed across sentence boundaries, and these links can be seen to form larger patterns of text organization. In addition, however, reference to the text surrounding a given sentence may be seen to cast light on the naturalness of the sentence in question.

Naturalness is Sinclair’s term for ‘the concept of well-formedness of sentences in text’ (1984: 203), and it is contrasted with what is normally thought of as sentence well-formedness, which is a property sentences may or may not have when seen in isolation.

The Linguistics Encyclopedia, Second Edition, Kirsten Malmkjaer, New York, Routledge, 2002.

COHERENCE

Coherence concerns the way in which the things that the text is about, called the textual world, are mutually accessible and relevant. The textual world is considered to consist of concepts and relations. A concept is defined as ‘a configuration of knowledge (cognitive content) which can be recovered or activated with more or less unity and consistency in the mind’, and relations as the links between the concepts ‘which appear together in a textual world’ (de Beaugrande and Dressler 1981: 4). Some of the most common relations can be classified in terms of two major notions, namely causality relations and time relations.

·  Causality relations ‘concern the ways in which one situation or event affects the conditions for some other one’ (de Beaugrande and Dressler 1987: 4), and are of four major types:

a Cause: David hit the ball so hard that it flew over the hedge; here the event of ‘hitting the ball hard’ has created the necessary conditions for the event of ‘the ball flying over the hedge’.

b Enablement: Tabitha lay quietly in the sun and Tomas crept over and pulled her tail; here a weaker relation obtains between the event consisting of Tabitha lying quietly in the sun, and the event consisting of Tomas creeping over and pulling her tail; the former event is a sufficient, but not a necessary, condition for the latter.

c Reason: Because I’ve been writing about text linguistics all day I deserve a rest this evening; in this case, the second event follows as a rational response to the first, but is not actually caused or enabled by it.

d Purpose: You are reading this to find out about text linguistics; in this case, although the first event enables the second, there is an added dimension, in so far as the second event is the planned outcome of the first.

·  Time relations concern the arrangement of events in time. In the case of cause, enablement and reason, an earlier event causes, enables or provides the reason for a later one, so that we might say that forward directionality is involved. Purpose, however, has backward directionality, since a later event is the purpose for an earlier event.

The Linguistics Encyclopedia, Second Edition, Kirsten Malmkjaer, New York, Routledge, 2002.

QUIZ II: Topics

• Jakobson's "Linguistics and Poetics" (pp. 3 to 8 - pdf file)
• Jakobson's "Two aspects of language and two types of aphasic disturbances" (only "The twofold character of language" and "The metaphoric and metonymic poles")
• Benveniste's "Subjectivity in language", "The nature of pronouns", "The nature of the linguistic sign". It is also suggested to read "El lenguaje y la experiencia humana" and "El aparato formal de la enunciación" from the Spanish version of Problèmes
• Bakthin's "The Problem of Speech Genres" (Selections)
• Class notes

ABOUT ARTICLE BY VAN DIJK

Please note that we won't be discussing section 2 (Macro-rules) in Van Dijk's "Semantic Macrostructures" but only sections 1, 3 and 4.

BAKTHIN: The Problem of Speech Genres (Selections)

Here's a 7-page file with selections from Bakthin's essay.

DISCOURSE AND GENDER

Discourse and Gender: Two chapters by Deborah Tannen

DISCOURSE AND IDEOLOGY: TWO ARTICLES

Fairclough

van Dijk

SPEECH ACT THEORIES - PRAGMATICS

Speech Act Theories

Grice's Pragmatics

SEMANTIC MACROSTRUCTURES

Van Dijk's Conference 2

BAKHTIN

The Problem of Speech Genres

BENVENISTE

Subjectivity in Language

The Nature of Pronouns

Problemas de lingüística general

Missing page from the Spanish version

JAKOBSON

"Linguistics and Poetics"

"Two aspects of language and two types of aphasic disturbances" (Only 'The Twofold Character of Language' and 'The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles')

VOLOSHINOV

Marxism and the Philosophy of Language - Chapter 1

Further readings:

Voloshinov

In perspective: Valentin Voloshinov

STRUCTURALISM AND SAUSSURE

"Structuralism and Saussure"

"Immutability and Mutability of the Sign"

Course in General Linguistics (incomplete)

Further readings:

• Ferdinand de Saussure
• Signs
• Structuralism
  

PRINCIPLES AND LEVELS + THE LINGUISTIC CONTEXT

Linguistics by H. G. Widdowson


The linguistic context by G. Finch

STRUCTURALISM: FURTHER READING

Here's an interesting article on Structuralism to expand horizons! Particularly, pay a look at the section "Developments in Structuralism". Have a nice reading experience!

POSITIVISM: Link

If you happen to be interested in reading more about Positivism and empiricism, you may consult this entry. In particular note how Positivism entails empiricism.

IDEOLOGY CATEGORIES

ADDRESSER ("Us"): actor description; categorization/polarization; comparison; consensus/populism; distancing; interaction/context; legality/norm expression; national self-glorification; positive self-presentation.

MESSAGE: authority/number game; burden (standard argument); counterfactuals; dramatization/hyperbole; victimization; euphemism; evidentiality; illustration; explanation; fallacies; generalization; history as lesson; implication/pressuposition; irony/repetition; lexicalization; metaphor; pseudo-ignorance; openness/honesty; reasonableness; situation description; vagueness.

ADDRESSEE ("Them"): actor description; categorization/polarization; comparison; distancing; empathy/humanitarianism; illegality; negative other-presentation.

CONVERSATION ANALYSIS: TEXT

- Are you still there?
- Yes.
- Forgive me. I didn’t want it to begin like this.
- Just remember, I’m only here because you asked me to come.
- I know that. And I’m grateful to you for it.
- It might help if you explained why you invited me.
- Later, I don’t want to talk about that yet.
- Then what?
- Other things. The things that have happened.
- I’m listening.
- Because I don’t want you to hate me. Can you understand that?
- I don’t hate you. There was a time when I did, but I’m over that now.
- Today is my last day, you see. And I had to make sure.
- Is this where you’ve been all along?
- I came here about two years ago, I think.
- And before that?
- Here and there. That man was after me, and I had to keep moving. It gave me a feeling for travel, a real taste for it. Not all what I had expected. My plan had always been to sit still and let the time run out.
- You’re talking about Quinn?
- Yes. The private detective.
- Did he find you?
- Twice. Once in New York. The next time down South.
- Why did he lie about it?
- Because I scared him to death. He knew what would happen to him if anyone found out.
- He disappeared, you know. I couldn’t find a trace of him.
- He’s somewhere. It’s not important.

SMOKING (OLD?) HABITS

To add to your intertextual skills!

ADDRESSIVITY (SPANISH)

In the Spanish version of Bakhtin's essay, the paragraph dealing with addressivity reads as follows:

Un signo importante (constitutivo) del enunciado es su orientación hacia alguien, su propiedad de estar destinado. (p. 285)

[in English: An essential (constitutive) marker of the utterance is its quality of being directed to someone, its addressivity]

and later:

El carácter dirigido del enunciado es su rasgo constitutivo sin el cual no existe ni puede existir el enunciado. Las diferentes formas típicas de este carácter, y las diversas concepciones típicas del destinatario, son las particularidades constitutivas que determinan la especificidad de los géneros discursivos. (p. 289)

[in English: Thus, addressivity, the quality of turning to someone, is a constitutive feature of the utterance; without it the utterance does not and cannot exist. The various typical forms this addressivity assumes and the various concepts of the addressee are constitutive, definitive features of various speech genres.]

This confirms the assumption that in the Spanish version they would not select a noun to mean addressivity. While checking the Spanish version, I noticed that the original title of this book was "èstetika slovesnogo tvorchestva". Now, it'd be too much to wonder how Mikhail wrote "addressivity" in Russian, wouldn't it?

Source:
Bajtín, M. M. Estética de la creación verbal, Siglo XXI, México, 1982.

VOLOSHINOV: Main points

For the purposes of our discussion, and as to Voloshinov's chapter, you should focus your attention on:

1. The ideological sign.
2. The semiotic value of signs.
3. Signs and reality.
4. The act of reference.
5. Signs and consciousness.
6. Signs, consciousness, society, ideology.
7. The word and its properties.

If you have any questions, please do post them below as comments.

UNITS, LEVELS, BRANCHES

Some definitions: unit, level, branch of linguistics.

A unit of a particular linguistic level is a component that represents the whole set (i.e. the unit in itself displays qualities shared by the whole set of units). In this sense, then, a unit may be a syntagm, a lexeme, a morpheme, a phoneme, etc. Units pertaining to certain levels do not regularly have a speficic term that names them, though attempts are constantly made by specialists to mirror the more traditional ones (e.g. 'narreme', a unit of narrative text).

Whenever undertaking a language study, the point of view defines and narrows down the scope of multiple possibilities a language offers. To some degree, a level may be defined as the result of such scope delimitation and then studies may be carried out at the syntactic / lexical / semantic / morphological / phonological levels.

As language is broad and multiple-faceted so is linguistics, and the latter is approached by considering a particular branch or area of study. Some of these branches are traditional (i.e. outlined during the first decades of the 2oth century), others result from the advances made in areas that directly or indirectly correlate with linguistics, such as technology (i.e. Computational Linguistics).

TASK 1

Do some research on your own and see if you can come up with at least 10 (ten) different branches of linguistics. For each, think of the level and the units that are addressed.

GRICE

Paul Grice (1913 – 1988)

The act of communication has two meanings:
SENTENCE MEANING: context independent
relation between L. sign and meaning is arbitrary
process of decoding

SPEAKER’S MEANING: what the S. tries to communicate explicitly or implicitly
the relation is not arbitrary, it’s purpose-built
process of inferring

The hearer bridges the gap between the sentence meaning and the speaker’s meaning by answering three questions:

1- What did the speaker intend to say explicitly?
2- What did the speaker intend to say implicitly?
3- What was the intended context?

Inference to the best explanation

- hypotheses formation / evaluation

The best hypothesis is the one that satisfies certain expectations about what the speakers are aiming at:

THE COOPERATIVE PRINCIPLE (CP)

Conversational maxims:

1- QUANTITY (informativeness)
2- QUALITY (truthfulness)
3- RELATION (relevance)
4- MANNER (clarity)

Sometimes, in order to interpret the speaker’s meaning, the hearer will assume that the speaker tries to communicate more than what is actually said: IMPLICATURES

The implicatures of an utterance are those propositions that should be built so as to preserve the assumption that the CP has been obeyed

E.g.: A: Let’s go to see a movie together!

B: I have to study (the speaker is implicating that he will not go)

(Contrib. V. Raynald)

MIKHAIL BAKHTIN

Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975)

By James P. Zappen

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin was born in Orel, south of Moscow, in 1895 and grew up in Vilnius and Odessa, cosmopolitan border towns that offered an unusually heterogeneous mix of disparate languages and cultures. He studied classics and philology at St. Petersburg (later Petrograd) University, then moved to the country, first to Nevel and then to Vitebsk, in the wake of the revolutions of 1917. There he maintained an association with other intellectuals, the so-called "Bakhtin circle," among them Valentin Voloshinov and Pavel Medvedev. Bakhtin shared with members of this circle a variety of interests, most especially Kant and contemporary German philosophy and the new physics of Planck, Einstein, and Bohr. During this period, he completed several works on ethics and aesthetics, among them Toward a Philosophy of the Act, published long after his death. From 1924 to 1929, Bakhtin lived in Leningrad (formerly Petrograd), supported by his wife, Elena Alexandrovna, while unemployed due to suspicions arising from his religious activities and to a bone disease, which necessitated the amputation of his right leg in 1938. During the late 1920’s, he wrote Problems of Dostoevsky’s Art, published in 1929 (and partially translated in "Three Fragments from the 1929 Edition"). He may or may not have written several books published in others’ names but sometimes attributed to him, including Voloshinov’s Freudianism: A Critical Sketch and Marxism and the Philosophy of Language and Medvedev and Bakhtin’s The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship. Bakhtin was arrested in 1929, probably as a result of his religious activities, and exhiled in Kazakhstan, where he stayed until 1936, when he accepted a professorship at the Mordovian Pedagogical Institute in Saransk. During the 1930’s and early 1940’s, he completed some of his most important studies of the novel, including "Discourse in the Novel," "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel," and "Epic and Novel." He also completed his major work on Rabelais, submitted as his doctoral dissertation to the Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moscow in 1941 (he was later awarded the lower degree of Candidate). Forced to move from Saransk to Savelovo to escape the great purge of 1937, Bakhtin returned after the Second World War, his relative obscurity during the Stalinist years perhaps saving his life. A successful teacher in Saransk during the 1950’s, Bakhtin was discovered in the early 1960’s by a group of Moscow graduate students who had read his Dostoevsky book. He wrote notes titled "Toward a Reworking of the Dostoevsky Book" in 1961; published a second edition of the book, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, in 1963; published the Rabelais book, Rabelais and his World, in 1965; and published a collection of his most important essays on the novel, The Dialogic Imagination, in the year of his death, 1975. During the last twenty-five years of his life, he also wrote several essays later published under the title Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. His work spread throughout the West in the 1980’s and is the subject of vigorous debate and reassessment in Russia in the mid 1990’s (Emerson, First Hundred Years).
Bakhtin’s interests in his early years apparently shaped his thinking throughout his career. His experience in Vilnius and Odessa exposed him to a rich and complex mix of different language groups, cultures, and classes, illustrative of the mix of languages that he would later call heteroglossia (Clark and Holquist 21 ff.). His reading in contemporary German philosophy and recent developments in physics introduced him to the problem of unity amid differences that would persist throughout his work and its reception in Russia and the West. Bakhtin resisted the Neo-Kantian emphasis upon an all-embracing unity: "The original Kantian concept of the heterogeneity of ends is much closer to Bakhtin’s work than the later Neo-Kantian lust for unity" (Holquist 6). But he was receptive to Einstein’s revelation of a complex unity of differences—his demonstration that "one body’s motion has meaning only in relation to another body"—from which Bakhtin seems to have inferred that all meaning is relational, the result of a "dialogue" between and among bodies—physical, political, conceptual (Holquist 20-21). Finally, Bakhtin’s religious activities as an intellectual from the Orthodox tradition introduced him to the communal ideal of the early church, transformed into a new social order characterized by "the concept of sobornost’, ‘togetherness’ or ‘true sense of community’" (Clark and Holquist 129 ff.).

Reading tips for Jakobson's Two Aspects of Language...

Regarding Jakobson's Chapter 8 in Language in Literature, and for the purposes of the subject, you should only consider:

Section II: The Twofold Character of Language
Section V: The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles

SAUSSURE: SYMBOL V. SIGN

The word symbol has been used to designate the linguistic sign, or more specifically, what is here called the signifier. Principle I in particular weighs against the use of this term. One characteristic of the symbol is that it is never wholly arbitrary; it is not empty, for there is the rudiment of a natural bond between the signifier and the signified. The symbol of justice, a pair of scales, could not be replaced by just any other symbol, such as a chariot.

de Saussure, Ferdinand; W. Baskin (transl.) "Nature of the Linguistic Sign" in Course in General Linguistics. (pages 68-69)

VALENTIN VOLOSHINOV

Valentin Nikolaevich Voloshinov

(1895-1936)

Russian linguist, whose work has been influential in the field of literary theory and the Marxist theory of ideology.

Voloshinov’s Marxism and the Philosophy of Language draws its main ideas from Wilhelm von Humboldt’s concept of language and Saussure’s structuralism plus Voloshinov’s contemporary, Nikolai Marr as well as his participation in the Bakhtin Circle. There is dispute over the authorship of Voloshinov’s work, some of which is attributed to Bakhtin.

The Bakhtin Circle addressed the social and cultural issues posed by the Russian Revolution and its degeneration under Stalin in philosophical terms. Members included Matvei Isaevich Kagan (1889-1937); Pavel Nikolaevich Medvedev (1891-1938); Lev Vasilievich Pumpianskii (1891-1940); Ivan Ivanovich Sollertinskii (1902-1944), Voloshinov and others.

The circle began meeting in the Belorussian towns of Nevel and Vitebsk in 1918 before moving to Leningrad in 1924. Their group meetings were terminated due to the arrest of many of the group in 1929. Voloshinov worked at the Herzen Pedagogical Institute in Leningrad until 1934 when he contracted tuberculosis. He died in a sanitorium two years later.

FERDINAND DE SAUSSURE

FERDINAND DE SAUSSURE

(1857-1913)

Swiss linguist whose ideas on structure in language laid the foundation for the structuralist school in linguistics and social theory. The whole line from Jakobson to Lévi-Strauss to Althusser to Foucault and Derrida trace their ideas back to Saussure’s simple idea that the meaning of a word is to be understood through its relation to other words, as opposed to the positivist line of research dominant in his day, which sought to understand language through analysis of sounds and their impact on the nervous system.

While still a student, Saussure established his reputation with a brilliant contribution to comparative linguistics, Memoir on the Original System of Vowels in the Indo-European Languages. In it, he explained how vowel alternations in Indo-European languages take place. Though he wrote no other book, he was enormously influential as a teacher, lecturing at the École des Hautes Études in Paris from 1881 to 1891 and as professor of Indo-European linguistics and Sanskrit (1901-13) and of general linguistics (1907-13) at the University of Geneva. His name is best known, however, for the Cour de Linguistique Générale, a reconstruction of his lecture notes and other materials by two of his students.

While viewing language as a social rather than a biological phenomenon, he saw language as a structured system that can be viewed synchronically and diachronically (i.e., historically) but he insisted that the methodology of each approach is distinct and mutually exclusive. His own work focused on the synchronic relations, i.e., the structure created by like and differing signs, or signifiers, taken as a distinct structure, formally unrelated to any structure inherent in that which is signified. He also introduced two terms that have become common currency in linguistics – “parole,” the speech of the individual person, and “langue,” the systematic, structured language (such as English) existing at a given time within a given society. These are ideas are usually regarded as starting point of Structuralism in Linguistics.