Chapter II, Part 3
II.F. Discursive studies of language
111.
Discursivism110 can designate an approach for practicing ‘discursive engagements’ with other texts or discourses to
explore their linguistic, cognitive, or social constitution (I.35). A
‘language’ is defined as a vast ‘virtual system of available options’ (a
‘theory of everything’, as it were) in a genuine dialectic
with a ‘text’ defined as an ‘actual system of selections and
combinations’; a ‘discourse’ is defined as an actual multi-system of
related texts (cf. I.35ff). Ideologically, discursivism resonates with ecologism,
which sees text and discourse as resources for free access to knowledge and
society (0.7; I.76). Historically, it is emerging as a post-modernist project
committed to inclusive multilingualism and multi-culturalism. Like
functionalism, with which it shares key interests, it has evolved on two
distinct sides, namely text linguistics and discourse analysis,
which I believe to be converging (cf. II.119).
112. Discursivism stands firm upon being frankly explicit about its own
social, ideological, and academic orientation and consciously positioning the
‘voice’ of the author who shares knowledge as a charter of ‘being
educated’ (I.78, 84; II.209). Moreover, the voice too is shared and
‘polyphonic’, seeking ‘intersubjectivity’ through contact with a wide
spectrum of alternative or contrasting voices and viewpoints in their own words
rather than just paraphrasing or summarising them all. Discursive diversity
benefits from post-modernism and multiculturalism at the present stage of
political and economic history, when they engage in counter-discourse against
the discourses of right-wing governmental or corporate power-brokers who fear
diversity will bring pressure to share.
113. Discursivism does not aspire to completeness of
description or analysis, which in the past has imposed drastic restrictions on
both the data and the description (0.8), e.g. ‘syntax independent of
meaning’ (II.69, 79). For ecologism, completeness is a ‘hopeful utopia’ to
work toward without attaining; we can always say more about a text, compare or
contrast it with more alternative versions or with other texts, or trace it
further back to its sources or forward to its effects, and so on. The realistic
aim is to pursue the exploration until we have captured some non-trivial and
non-obvious aspects of interest and relevance for our agenda of understanding
and enhancing human communication (0.8). If we view texts as ‘work in
progress’ (I.39), our own discourse can further the ‘progress’ by broaden-ing
inclusion and exploiting the inclusive essence of language (cf. I.38f, 47). In
theory, then, discourse remains an open process that can ‘progress’ through
multiple discursive engagements, as when explanation clarifies and renews its
own content (cf. I.76, 113); our success in this ‘progress’ is the real
foundation for whatever authority our work may attain.
114. In practice, we should expressly apply the
‘ecologist strategies of discourse’ we are seeking to describe. So I adopt
user-friendly, ordinary language as far as I can, and technical language only as
far as is genuinely required. I also build balanced or parallel patterns, as
when I introduce each approach to ‘studies of language’ in this chapter by
suggesting how it ‘defines language’ and where it might be situated
‘ideologically’ and ‘historically’ (II.4, 25, 75, 90, 111).
115. The texts and discourses we describe can be chosen for their relevance
to a discursive theme
concerning some significant issue or problem in current public discourse. One
such theme would be corporate cynicism, where ‘social benefit’ is a
‘doublespeak’ term for ‘private profit’:
[70] The Council for Nuclear Safety showed more than 1000 workers in Harmony
Gold Mines[…] have received an annual radiation dose five times higher than it
should be. ‘Essentially, these workers were being fried.’[…] ‘They are
not provided with protective clothing or even instruments that would allow them
to measure radiation levels.’ ‘Mining has a social benefit and
we can’t make it so costly that workers’ jobs are at risk’, said Anglogold
representative Johan Botha. ‘So perhaps you say radiation will kill you, but no jobs will also kill you.’ ([Johannisburg] Mail & Guardian, 01/03/99)
In the less cynical corporate
discourses of the past, the ‘representative’ would express ‘surprise’
and ‘regret’, however insincere, and promise some ‘investi-gation’ or
‘remediation’. But the ‘new cynicism’ offers a brutal choice between
being ‘killed’ by ‘radiation’ or by starvation (‘joblessness’). The
‘workers’ being black Africans and the spokesman being a white Afrikaner
encapsulates the sinister history of gold mining in South Africa.
116. In Tanzania, African workers in gold mines
didn’t need to wait around for radiation to kill them (first reported by
Amnesty International):
[71] Ten
of thousands of small-time prospectors[…] held legal claim stakes to their
tiny mine shafts.[…] In August 1996,[…] bulldozers, backed by military
police firing weapons, rolled across the goldfield, smashing down worker
housing, crushing their mining equipment and filling in their pits.[…] About
fifty miners were still in their mine shafts, buried alive. (Best Democracy)111
In the corporation’s cynical response, the incident was ‘a complete
fabrication of a bunch of greedy, lying Black Africans trying to shake them
down’ — a version ‘backed by the World Bank’, which had ‘granted the
biggest loan guarantee in its history’ to ‘develop the site’; an actual
videotape of ‘a worker going into
a pit to retrieve bodies’ was said to show ‘bodies of ne’er-do-wells
killed by local resi-dents, or victims of mine accidents distant in time or
place’.111 An ‘internationally respected expert on human rights
and the environment, Tanzanian lawyer Tundu Lissu’, who called for an
‘investigation’, was ‘charged by the Tanzanian government with sedition’
— this action too ‘supported by the World Bank’.111
117. And the ‘social benefits’ of gold mining
may be granted not just to workers, but to all residents in an ‘area’[72].
In fact, all forms of life in the region may embrace a golden
opportunity to be ‘killed’[73]. Corporate cynicism again re-sponded, this time from
the boss of the Australian company running the mine[74].
[72] Mining
Awareness produced a leaflet that drew attention to the problems of blasting,
dust, chemicals, silting, erosion, water supply, pollution of the area and waste
disposal associated with gold mining.112
[73] An
enormous ‘toxic bullet’ of deadly cyanide that accidentally overflowed a dam
at a Romanian gold mine has contaminated 250
miles of rivers in Hungary and Yugoslavia, killing
millions of fish, shutting down water supplies and leaving a trail of aquatic
devastation that will require years to repair. (NGO Coalition To Save Our
Rivers)www
[74] the only fish I’ve seen are
the four fish held up by two 14-year-old boys that were described as
‘Environmental Experts’. (Brett Montgomery)www
The
Romanian disaster was accidental, though foreseeable from a string of similar
incidents at the site (cf. VII.62). But unleashing toxic waste seems planned to
become policy in the globalisation sponsored by the same World Bank, witness an
internal memo from its Chief Economist, Lawrence H. Summers[75].
[75] Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging more
migration of dirty industries to the LDCs[less developed countries]?[…]
Under-populated countries in Africa are vastly under-polluted.[…]
The economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage
country is impeccable: a country with the lowest wages[loses the least in]
foregone earnings from morbidity and mortality.113
Such
data point up how the discursive theme of corporate cynicism can challenge not
just discursivism and ecologism, but the well-being of whole societies.
118. Discursivism aspires to be a ‘progressive’ enterprise for
producing discourse about discourse and staging a productive interplay of
discursive positions. The present Introduction is a programmatic attempt
to enlist discursivism in such a project, ranging across the Internet and large
corpora from discourses of literature, philosophy, history, politics, economics,
science, and technology.
II.F.1 Discursive studies in text linguistics
119. The immediate ambience for discursive studies has been partly mounted
by text linguistics and discourse analysis. Though I am inclined to see their
concerns converging today,114 their histories have been mostly
divergent. As befits its name, ‘text linguistics’ came more from inside
linguistics proper, and so was more allied with formalism. Discourse analysis,
at least in English research, came more from outside, especially from
ethnographic fieldwork studies of previously undescribed languages and cultures
(II.58), and has thus been more allied with functionalism. They gradually
converged as text linguistics recognised the text to be primarily a functional
unit and only secondarily a formal unit.
120. Text linguistics115 seems to have a diffuse history because
much early work did not circulate widely, or bore diffuse designations, such as
‘linguostylistics’116 or ‘functional sentence perspective’.117
The field gained a modest identity during the 1960s and 1970s, concentrated at a
few institutions across Eastern and Western Europe. The ‘cold war’ hindered
the study of texts from consolidating research in the Soviet Union, East
Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Poland in the ‘East’, and Finland, Spain,
Italy, Holland, West Germany, and Austria in the ‘West’. A further hindrance
was the dominance of ‘Linguistics Departments’ so focused on the
‘sentence’ as to regard ‘sentence linguistics’ (as we then called it for
contrast) as a tautology or pleonasm, and ‘text linguistics’ as an oxymoron
or casuistry.
121. Ironically, the text was admitted chiefly to relieve
some pressures arising when formalist linguistics expanded from syntax toward
semantics and, more guardedly, pragmatics. In theory, the text was at first just
a sequence of sentences; and in practice, it was reached roundaboutly by going
‘beyond the sentence’. Proposals were duly advanced for ‘text syntax’,
‘text semantics’, and ‘text pragmatics’ like the theoretical and
abstract ‘components’ postulated for the sentence, with the syntactic one
‘generating’, and the other two only ‘interpreting’ (II.81), as if a
text could be an empty syntactic shell waiting to be filled with meaning and
purpose.
122. Viewed in retrospect, the contact with authentic texts eventually had
to drive a shift of emphasis in text linguistics from theory-driven toward
practice-driven concepts of the ‘text’, and from top-down to bottom-up
concepts of ‘language’. In theory, working up from the bottom might
eventually arrive back at the top, perhaps at the degrees of generality and
abstraction that formal linguistics deemed so essential for ‘scientific
research’. In practice, this movement did not occur. Instead, we gradually
acknowledged that the richer and more interesting aspects of texts, both for
theory and practice, are situated in more specific and concrete issues of
textuality and intertextuality.
123. By this route, text linguistics arrived at the conception of the text
as a communicative event intended and accepted as a contribution to a discourse,
defined in turn as a set or series of relevant texts in any communicative medium
(I.40). Here, both text and discourse are practical units, which obviates the
need for an expressly theoretical unit like the texteme118 to
be a theoretical unit ‘above’ the other ‘‑emes’ described in II.3
and corresponding to the text as the practical unit. In our dialectical
account where language is the theory and discourse is the practice (I.40ff), the
units in the ‘virtual system’ of the language remain theoretical until they
get put into practice within an actual system;119 and the context of
the practice can act through a dialectic back upon the theory, notably when the
usage is creative or novel. The major bridge between language and text is the intertext,
a large set of texts which manifest shared strategies of selection and
combination, but which were not intended as contributions to the same discourse
(II.158f).
124. A favoured topic in early work was ‘pronominalisation’120 (also called ‘anaphora’121 or ‘reference’122),
which mainly organises various relations among Nouns and Pronouns within a Text.
Pronominalisation is surely a ‘grammatical’ and ‘linguistic’ issue, but
is not limited to the single sentence. In sample[76], ‘Good’ Mrs Brown is
introduced with the Noun Phrase ‘the old woman’ and functions as the Topic
Agent for the Paragraph; the Pronoun ‘she’ makes the Subject of a series of
Sentences detailing her repugnant exterior in a Thematic Sequence: ‘ugly – red
rims – eyes – mouth – miserably dressed – face –
uglier’.
The consistent Cohesion easily identifies the Female Pronouns with the correct
person.
[76] The old woman took her[Florence]
by the wrist.[…] She was a very ugly old woman, with red rims round her
eyes, and a mouth that mumbled and chattered of itself when she was not
speaking. She was miserably dressed.[…] She seemed to have
followed Florence, for she had lost her breath (Dombey)
More delicate textual functions of pronominalisation apply to these data
about the same ‘old woman’ in a later scene of the novel:
[77] ‘It’s my handsome
daughter, living and come back!’ screamed the old
woman,[…] dropping
on the floor before her, and still rocking herself to and fro with
every frantic demonstration[…] ‘Yes,
mother,’ returned Alice.[…] ‘Get up, and sit in your
chair. What good does this do?’ ‘She’s
come back harder than she went!’ cried the mother. ‘She
don’t care for me!’[…] ‘Of course I have come back harder. What else did
you expect? I don’t know who
began to harden me, if my own dear mother
didn’t’, she returned, sitting with her folded arms, and knitted brows, and
compressed lips as if she were bent on excluding, by force, every softer feeling
from her breast.
The
‘daughter’ refers to her ‘mother’ with Second Person Pronouns, but the
mother dramatises Alice’s rebuke of ‘frantic’ emotional displays by using
the Third Person Pronoun, as if calling on an unseen compassionate audience to
witness the ‘hardness’ we also witness from Alice’s bodily posture
‘excluding every softer feeling’. In response, the daughter sarcastically
assigns the credit for the ‘hard-ening’ to the Third Person Noun Phrase
‘my own dear mother’.
125. Centring on the text means downgrading the sentence from the
obligatory theoretical unit of language to the preferred practical unit of
written discourse, normally defined in English either by punctuation (starting
with a capital Letter and ending with a Period) or by grammar (at least one
Independent Clause). We can now address any relevant Stretch of Text, whether or
not it counts as a sentence in some ‘grammar’. We might finally explore the
cognitive and social functions that can favour ‘complete sentences’, e.g.,
compensating for ‘hearing loss’[78], or meeting an ‘attainment target’
in education[79]; or else disfavour them, e.g., taking lecture notes[80], or
calling for an urgently needed ‘scalpel’[81].
[78] Never use only one word; always use the complete sentence; always talk at normal pace, without exaggeration (Hearing
Loss) 123
[79]
Pupils should be able to[…] produce, independently, pieces of writing using complete
sentences, some of them demarcated with capital letters and full stops or
question marks (National Curriculum English) www
[80] To
summarise a lecture you need to[…] record the main points as they are made. Do
not worry about writing in complete sentences.
(People in Organisations) 124
[81] In this surgical context, the
words are sufficient as pointers to required meaning.[…] By the time the
surgeon had produced his complete sentence,
the patient might well have bled to death: a victim of syntax. (Aspects
of Language Teaching) 125
Having
to point out where ‘complete sentences’ are obviously inappropriate
indi-cates how far they are routinely overrated. Oddly, sample[79] implies only
‘some complete sentences’ need the orthographic signals of a written
sentence.
126. By downgrading the sentence, we also downgrade
the status of ‘grammati-cality’, obviating the formalist projects for a
sentence-based ‘text grammar’,126 which foundered on the problems
of defining the ‘grammatical text’ as opposed to the ‘ungrammatical
text’ or ‘non-text’. In retrospect, we can recognise the notion that the
text is a grammatical unit as a gross category error. Once we define the text as
an event (I.40; II.123), the ‘non-text’ must be a ‘non-event’ that does
not or cannot occur; we could not describe the properties non-texts have, but
only ones properties they lack and real texts have. So we would launch a
quixotic quest for impossible properties by excluding every property any text is
found to possess. How baffling that might prove can be gleaned from the myriad
texts whose proper-ties are hardly ‘grammatical’ in any theoretical or
formal sense but do make them appropriate to their communicative functions, as
in a newspaper header[82], a telegram[83], or a notice in an ‘agony column’
(charged by the word!)[84].
[82] LOVE-TUG
KIDS SNATCHED BY ‘DANGER MAN’ DAD Terrified tots dragged away in gun drama (Daily
Mirror)
[83]
HELLO DARLING. BACK IN BLIGHTY. 14 DAYS LEAVE. TRY JOIN. REPLY MY HOME. LOVE
LESLIE. (Enigma Variations)
[84] My
lady sleeps. She of raven tresses. Corner seat from Victoria, Wednesday night.
Carried programme. Gentleman answering inquiry desires acquaintance. (Agony
Column)
In
a practical and functional sense, these texts are grammatical, plainly
telling who ‘snatched’ and ‘dragged’ whom[82], who got ‘back to
Blighty’ (nickname for England among soldiers overseas) for ‘14 days’ of
‘leave’ and ‘love’ with whom[83], and who has ‘raven tresses’ and
‘carried a programme’[84]. Such texts display the grammatical option of ‘Non-Clause’ Patterns which lack Subject and Predicate but which
can well be appropriate, efficient, and effective (section IV.E)
126. Here, ‘grammar’ is not a mainly theoretical
construct, as in formalism and generativism, but a dialectic of theory and
practice, as in systemic functional linguistics. So the grammar should be
described dialectically by continually relating theory to practice and adducing
not sparse invented data like the pedestrian and predictable[85], much cited in
formalist linguistics but not found in any large corpus I
have queried, but rich authentic data like the sprightly and unpredictable[86] about Uncle Josh Weatherby trying golf for the first and last time in his
life.
[85] The man hit the ball.
[86]
So I whaled away at that little ball, and by chowder I hit it. I knocked it
clear over into Deacon Witherspoon’s pasture, and hit his old muley cow, and
she got skeered and run away,[and] never stopped a-runnin’ till she went slap
dab into Ezra Hoskins’ grocery store, upsot four gallons of apple
butter into a keg of soft soap, and
sot one foot into a tub of mackral, and t’other foot into a box of winder glass. (Punkin Centre)
Ironically, data expressly designed to be
‘grammatical’ fail to reveal the real power of the grammar. The failure
worsens if we invent ‘ungrammatical’ non-data, e.g.:
[85a]*Hit man ball the the.
[86a] *I whaled
that I’d muley slap Deacon glass into butter foot skeered.
We have our hands more than full enough with real data.
127. So text linguistics logically shifted the conceptual centre from
‘grammaticality’ over to textuality.127 Three perspectives
crystallised in the ‘seven standards’ of textuality:128
(a) the text itself as process and product in Cohesion and Coherence; (b)
the participants, usually the producer(s) in Intentionality, and the
receiver(s) in Acceptability; and (c) the broader context in
Informativity, Situationality, and Intertextuality. For a brief
review, here’s Uncle Josh again, whose sally into riding a ‘bisickle’
fared no
better than playing golf:
[87] I got on that durned masheen and it jumped up in the front and kicked
up behind, and bucked up in the middle, and shied and balked and jumped
sideways.[…]. Wall, I lost the lamp, I lost the clamp, I lost my patience, I
lost my temper, I lost my self-respect, my last suspender button and my standin’
in the community. I broke the handle bars, I broke the sprockets, I broke the
Ten Commandments, I broke my New Year’s pledge and the law agin loud and
abusive language. (Punkin Centre)
Cohesion
can subsume the all the practices of connecting units and patterns for which the
Lexicogrammar provides the theory,129 and we can retire the cumbrous
notion of ‘text syntax’. The Agent first is the ‘masheen’ and ‘it’
as the naughty two-wheeled perpetrator, and then Uncle Josh as ‘Í’, the
hapless victim; each is the Subject of a series of Verbs. Coherence can
subsume the means for connecting meanings and concepts,130 and we can
retire ‘text semantics’ too, e.g., relating ‘lamp’, ‘clamp’, ‘handle bars’, and ‘sprockets’ as parts of the ‘masheen’ (hence
the Definite Article); and recognising a Thematic Sequence like ‘jumped up –
kicked up – bucked up – shied – jumped’, all making the ‘bisickle’ a metaphorical horse; or ‘in the front – behind – in the middle –
sideways’. Intentionality subsumes
the conditions that the text producer intends to perform an event as a text, and
Acceptability subsumes the conditions
that the text receiver accepts the event as a text, which this author
whimsically commented on:
[88] The one particular object in writing
this book is to furnish you with an occasional laugh, and the writer with an
occasional dollar.[…] In Uncle Josh Weathersby you have a purely imaginary
character, yet one true to life.[…] Take him as you find him, and in his
experiences you will observe there is a bright side to everything.
Situationality
subsumes the connections between the text and the context of situation, e.g.,
Josh being impelled by mishaps to utter ‘loud and
abusive language’ and ‘break the Ten Commandments’, the easiest one to
‘break’ on a bicycle out of control doubtless being to ‘take the name of
the Lord in vain’ (Exodus 20:7).
Informativity subsumes the degrees to which the text or some of its
aspects are unexpected, interesting, or stimulating, e.g., the pointedly motley
rosters of things that got ‘lost’ or ‘broken’, some literal and some
figurative (cf. VI.20). And finally, Intertextuality subsumes the
connections between the current text and previously experienced texts, e.g.,
other tales about the misadventures of Uncle Josh, and, more generally, the
‘tall tales’ of rural America (VI.46). Integrate the five standards except
Cohesion and Coherence, and we can retire ‘text pragmatics’.
128. My proposal for using the standards of textuality to retire from the
linguistics of the text the fields of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics follows
from their predominantly theoretical and non-dialectical status in general
linguistics, which has applied them largely to invented data (II.78). An
authentic text shows genuine theory progressing into genuine practice; an
invented text shows pseudo-theory regressing into pseudo-practice. And this
contrast is vital for grasping the complex relation between language and
discourse.
129. In return, a vibrant challenge for text linguistics might be to
determine how many of the issues addressed by those three fields can be
productively absorbed into a general study of texts and textuality. At least
some issues were plausibly artefacts of self-imposed limitations in trying to do
syntax without semantics, and semantic without pragmatics; and of the blinkered
dichotomies like ‘competence’ and ‘performance’, or ‘grammar’ and
‘lexicon’, and so forth. Emblematic moves toward abstraction and
idealisation have drained away the practical precision and determinacy of
language in use and fomented the compensatory elaboration of theoretical schemes
of ‘underlying rules’, ‘structures’, ‘features’, and so on, whose
relevance for exploring text and discourse is doubtful. We need a practical
theory to validly represent the theories of practice sustained by
discourse participants themselves — the theory that makes people
‘competent’ in their language.
130. Since the seven standards are for describing texts, design
criteria were proposed for evaluating texts: how far the text is efficient
in getting readily produced and received[89], effective in promoting
intentions and goals[90], and appropriate to the context, the
participants, and the situation[91] (II.24, 129; VIII.31-42). We find these
criteria being expressly favoured and recommended, especially in educational
settings[92-94].
[89] What
were habitually his final meditations? Of one sole unique advertisement to cause passers to stop in wonder, with
all extraneous accretions excluded, reduced to its simplest and most efficient
terms (Ulysses)
[90]
Wedgie[Tony Benn] then made what I found a very effective speech (Cabinet)131
[91] Sir
Pitt congratulated his brother warmly upon the peaceful issue of the affair,
making appropriate moral remarks upon the evils of duelling (Vanity
Fair)
[92] Croce[…] attacks the idea of
applying rhetorical or critical terms to the unique act of aesthetic
expression.[Yet for] the student,[…] the ineffable is to be transformed into ef-ficient
communication[…] an essay, or an examination answer. (Exploding English)132
[93][We]
use a unique management process model designed to improve the effectiveness
of your writing projects[…] that is consistent with your objectives. (Night
Owl)www
[94] Pupils
should consider the notion of appropriateness to situation, topic,
purpose and language mode and the fact that inappropriate language
use[may suggest being] pompous or inept or impertinent or rude. (National
Curriculum English)www
131. Unlike the standards of textuality, which apply
by definition to all authentic texts, these criteria may not be met or only
weakly, partly because they are rarely cultivated in education or the
professions, and partly because they don’t serve the intention of insiders who
disempower outsiders (cf. VII.5ff). In academic discourse, a strenuous style can
bid for power, as in this ‘definition’ of a
‘dune’[95] in the discourse of geography (unidentified Internet website).
[95] A dune is
defined as a body of coarse sand shaped by ambient wind conditions and the
grain-by-grain deflation of sand.
The text is inefficient and inappropriate
for learners, having (a) obscure specialised terms like ‘ambient’ meaning
‘in the environment’, and ‘deflation’ meaning ‘erosion’; (b)
gratuitous specifications like ‘ambient conditions’ (where else could
‘winds shape dunes’, in a tea cosy?) and ‘grain-by-grain’ (how else
would sand move, in clumps?); and (c) no relevance to ordinary knowledge, which
would interpret ‘deflate’ as ‘remove the air from inside’ — nonsense
here. Besides, ‘body’ is an oddly organic term for an object that easily
changes or disintegrates; and ‘coarse sand’ is plain wrong — the sand in
dunes by my home in Arabia was fine enough to enter around closed windows. In
the same strenuous style, rainfall was a ‘precipitation event’; extreme dryness in a small area was ‘localized
hyperaridity’; and sand grains that blow away again from their dune ‘became
wind re-entrained’.
132. The ecologist alternative
might be called critical rewriting, which converts discourse into
a user-friendly counter-discourse, as shown in[95a]. Other stretches of the same
text could be rewritten as shown for[96-98] into[96a-98a].
[95a] A dune is defined as a mound of sand shaped by the erosion of wind
and the motion of sand grains.
[96] Mesoscale dune wavelength is strongly correlated with
sand grain size.
[96a] On medium-sized dunes, the waves get longer when the
sand grains are bigger.
[97]
Transverse dunes are characterized by low length:width ratios and marked asymmet-
ry, where windward slopes are much gentler than the slip faces associated with lee slopes.
[97a] Dunes formed at a right angle to the wind are very
long but very narrow. They rise gently on the side facing the wind and drop
sharply on the other side.
[98] Barchans are crescentic dunes confined to
directionally-constant annual wind regimes;[…] where sand is sparse, barchans
become the expressed dune morphology.
[98a] Barchans
are crescent-shaped dunes appearing only where the wind blows in one direction
all year and especially if sand is sparse.
The motive for this inefficient wind
regime of academic hot air might be to compensate for the author’s confessed
inability to explain the formation of dunes:
[99] How dunes first form and then replicate are issues that remain
unclear.
[100] the
formation mechanism of dune characteristics remains hypothetical
133. Evidently, this design of academic discourse trades off empowering the
writer who expends less effort (high efficiency) with disempowering the readers
who expend more (low efficiency). The text may be effective to get insider
status, and may be judged appropriate even among audiences dazed by it. After
all, the most trivial statements can be dressed up to sound like specialised
knowledge:
[101] Life goes
on.
[101a]
Animate vivification perseverates in durational protractedness.
[102] As
time goes by, people get older.
[102a]
The serial accumulation of elapsing temporality is significantly correlated with
a linear increment in the human aging process.
[103] The
sky is blue.
[103a] The atmospheric
encirculation of our planetary ambience imparts an ocular wave-length
chromaticity between 450 and 500 nanometres.
Academic discourse is rarely so extreme, nor do academics expressly harbour
such disempowering goals. Rather, we work in a system in which strenuous prose
gets rewarded and published by academic journals who expect it too.
134. In this ‘introduction’, textual design will be a
recurring theme, relating to ecologist strategies of discourse that promote free
access to knowledge and society (0.7; I.76; II.111). These strategies can
suggest guidance that is not prescriptive or proscriptive (‘you
must say it this way and not that way’, or else!) but rather consultative
(‘if you want that effect or emphasis, try saying it this way’) (II.24). If
I have surmised that the design of any text can always be improved in the
‘hopeful utopia’ of unlimited space for ‘progress’ (0.13; I.39), then
because writing away on this Introduction
for more than five years has compelled me acknowledge it.
135. For discourse analysis,133 presenting a fluent
history is even more difficult than for text linguistics, not just because (as
with text linguistics) much early work did not circulate widely or figured under
diverse designations, such as ‘tagmemics’ and ‘ethnomethodology’; but
also because discourse analysis is resolutely ‘multi-disciplinary’, and its
diversity grows with its popularity.134 In early stages (up into the
1960s), work was focussed outside Europe on non-European languages and cultures.
Linguistics was exploited more as a practical and functional enterprise than a
theoretical and formal one, which distinguished discourse analysis from text
linguistics until the trends I have summarised favoured convergence.135
136. To suggest the diversity of discourse analysis, I briefly compare four influential approaches, all more practice-driven and data-driven than theory-driven, though in differing respects. Fieldwork on lesser-known languages is allied with anthropology and ethnography, but also with linguistics through practical applications of Phonology and Morphology (II.58). Tagmemics136 extends the repertory of ‘structural units’ to the Tagmeme, a unit described by the relations between a position (or ‘slot’) and the items that can occupy it in a discourse, whether these be linguistic, cultural, or behavioural (cf. II.65). This approach led to such cogent discoveries as paragraph markers in spoken discourse and story-line markers in folktales. In a stretch of text in a Waorani folktale from Eastern Ecuador told by Dayuma about discovering cassava as a food[104], a hunter finds many tapir tracks near a cassava patch and wonders why out loud. The cassava answers him and says how to remove, cultivate, and prepare it, which he does, undaunted by a talking plant, and to the grief of the tapirs. The marker ‘ay’ appears seven times introducing the respective instructions in the process (p = person, par = participle, fut = future, inf = inference, ast = assertive, idt = identifier).137
‘Then the cassava spoke: “Take me. […] When you carry me to the house, peel off my skin, then cook the inside (stomach) of the cassava. Then eat it.’
Waorani uses Morpheme markers for ‘assertive’ to indicate an Independent Clause in the Declarative, and for ‘inference’ to indicate what is known only by hearsay, e.g., from a story told by the ancestors. Its Morphemes build words efficiently, e.g., ‘ay‘ [see‑much => then] and ‘kēwē’ [live‑always => cassava]. Such folktales fill the cognitive function of explaining or personifying familiar animals and plants, and the social function of binding the community, especially ones like the Waorani under pressure from multinational oil companies and Christian missionaries.
137. Ethnomethodology is an approach to the study of social
activity, including discourse, mainly in well-known languages, and allied to
sociology and philosophy (as phenomenology).138 Though again more
practical than theoretical, it explores the ‘theories of practice’ people
apply to everyday life as common-sense reasoning, which highlights the
‘theoreticalness’ of human practices (cf. I.8); in return, less work has
been done in elaborating abstract academic theories. A special tool is ‘breach
studies’,139 where ordinary practices are disrupted to see how
people react and possibly do ‘repairs’. In one study,140 the
order of sentences was scrambled, turning[105] into[105a]. The test persons
tried to restore the original order and were interviewed about their reasoning,
giving responses like[106] and[107].
[105] The second man was unlike the others. He was broader and shorter. There was much hair on his body and his head-hair was sleek as if fat had been rubbed in it. The hair lay in a ball at the back of his neck. He had no hair on the front of his head at all so that the sweep of bone skin came right over his ears. Now for the first time, Lok saw the ears of the new men. They
were
tiny and screwed tightly into
the
sides
of
their heads. (Inheritors)
[105a] A. He had no hair on the front of his head at all so that the sweep of bone skin came right over his ears. B. There was much hair on his body and his head-hair was sleek as if fat had been rubbed in it. C. They were tiny and screwed tightly into the sides of their heads. D The man was unlike the others. E. Now for the first time, Lok saw the ears of the second new men. F. He was broader and shorter. G. The hair lay in a