Chapter
V, Part 2
41.
Understandably, the
concept of text type (compare German ‘Texttyp’, ‘Textsorte’, ‘Textklasse’)
attracted slight interest in a °mainstream linguistics pragmatically devoted to
describing language by itself° apart from its uses. This disinterest even
carried over into early text linguistics in its project to construct a ‘formal
grammar’ for the ‘text’ abstractly viewed as a well-formed sequence of
sentences (cf. II.85, 105). Only when such a general ‘grammar’ signally
failed to attain °coverage, convergence, and consensus° did research widely
lower its sights to describing text types and the discourse domains they serve
where we can hope to uncover °richer constraints°.
42.
The °functional
lexicogrammar° proposed in IV.B might help out by indicating some strategic
dominances of Processes and Aspects for specified text types. In the discourse
domain of political history, for example, the ‘political’ factor would
favor °control centers° being Participants with disparate degrees of power
plus their Actions, chiefly Enactive and Dispositive (how they acted and what or
whom they acted upon), while the ‘historical’ factor would favor rich
Circumstances of Temporality and Locality. Less central but still influential
would be Semiotic Actions, e.g., declarations, decrees, and other acts intended
to project a Message. Sample [564] would be one typical Discourse Episode; and
we might make tables for the Processes like [564a] and for the Aspects like
[564b].
[564]
In June 1906 the peasants of Dinshaway clashed with British soldiers who were
hunting pigeons, and a soldier who went for help died of exhaustion. The British
wanted to set an example and convened a special tribunal. They hanged four
peasants, flogged four, and imprisoned twelve. Egyptian nationalism took on a
more strident tone. (The Making of Modern
Egypt)
[564a]
Dispositives: clashed, hunting, hanged, flogged, imprisoned
Enactive: went for help
Developmental:
died, exhaustion, took on a more strident tone
Volitional:
wanted, nationalism [= wanting independence]
Semiotic:
set an example, convened
Circumstances:
In June 1906, Dinshaway, Egyptian
Participants:
peasants, British soldiers, pigeons, soldier, the British, tribunal, peasants
[564b]
Unmarked: Positive, Past, Declarative, Narrative
Tentatives:
hunting, went for
Frequentive
and Intensive: hanged, flogged, imprisoned
Textual
commentary can readily build upon and enrich such a table. The side of power, in
this case ‘the British’, may expressly intend its Dispositives to be
Semiotics (e.g., ‘hanging’ to ‘set an example’). In a historical and
political perspective, Actions of violence, though °regressive and ecologically
unsound°, are always meaningful, as when the soldier’s death was perversely
interpreted as a communal murder rather than a natural effect of the rough, hot
terrain on a lad from chilly old England. And at a deeper level, the Egyptians
may have read the foray of ‘soldiers’ to ‘hunt pigeons’ (one of their
own staple foods) as a provocation; certainly, colonial powers have often
provoked ‘incidents’ to get a pretext for intervening and seizing territory,
though in this case the British had already drummed up a pretext for seizing
Egypt and especially the Suez Canal in 1882. Still, the step from a violent
Dispositive over to a Semiotic is hard to control: this ‘example’ was read
as a Message not that ‘nationalist’ resistance was futile but that it was,
on the contrary, much more urgent.
43.
The discourse
domain of environmentalism also centers on Dispositives (disposing over
resources), Production (manufacturing that exploits resources and creates
dangerous wastes) and Circumstances (places representing the environment). But
the focus goes to ecological effects beyond just the human Participants, namely
the effects on the total ambience for all forms of life. And whereas political
history has had its own discourse domain for a very long time, environmentalism
did not develop one until many people had admitted that °modernization was
imposing a host of ecologically unsound practices°, especially the voracious
depletion of non-renewable resources (I.2, 9; III.104; VII.7). Before the °New
Right coalition° openly proclaimed its noble ideology of universal selfishness
and greed (cf. VII.32ff), the discourse was nearly all on one side, with
everyone, including the worst despoilers and polluters, claiming to favor the
environment. Hence, the dominant Processes were Perceptive and Cognitive —
what the inhabitants of the environment detect
or know about the Disposing, in
contrast to what is officially claimed. The contrast has been widening during
the conflict between ecological concern versus feverish campaigns for °economic
growth in the midst of a global recession° caused by just such campaigns.
Environmental depletion and damage are not halted, let alone reversed, but
merely mystified and concealed. A typical Discourse Episode is a discovery whose
cast of Participants includes the rich and empowered ‘depleters’, the poor
and disempowered ‘depleted’, and the discoverer(s) — here, the African
environmentalist and information disseminator Seun Ogunseitan (cf. V.88), plus
the Circumstances of Locality [565]. We could have a table of dominant Processes
like [565a] and of Aspects like [565b].
[565]
After six months’ investigation of the trade in toxic waste in Europe and
Nigeria, Ogunseitan […] discovered that at least twenty extremely poisonous
chemicals from a number of European firms had been dumped in Koko, a quiet town
in the swampy delta of the Niger river […] Thousands of drums, bags, and
containers, many of them broken, were found in an unguarded compound surrounded
only by a ten-foot high rickety fence. Less than fifty metres away people were
living quietly, cropping cassava. (An African Dream)
[565a]
Dispositive: trade in toxic waste, dumped, broken
Perceptive
+ Cognitive: investigation, discovered, were found
Productive:
from a number of European firms, cropping
Participants:
Ogunseitan, firms, chemicals, drums, bags, containers, people
Circumstances:
After six months, in Europe and Nigeria, in Koko, in the swampy delta of the
Niger river, in a compound, Less than fifty metres away
[565b]
Unmarked: Positive, Past, Declarative, Narrative => Descriptive
Progressive
+ Durative: were living quietly, cropping cassava
Besides
the explicit Dispositives, we can infer implicit ones: ‘extremely poisonous’
for what the waste could do to people, and ‘unguarded’ for what people
should have done with it but hadn’t (to save money and to avoid drawing
attention, combining profit with secrecy). The ironic contrast of lethal danger
and peaceful setting culminates in the ‘cassava’ plant, whose roots are
eaten — the part most vulnerable to ‘chemicals’. Environmentalist pressure
in the wealthy Center countries is evidently being met by secretly transferring
lethal wastes to poor countries at the Periphery, on the hateful colonialist
pretexts that ‘life is cheap’ there anyway (thanks to no birth control) and
medical diagnosis is too primitive to link such a dump with mysterious diseases
or deaths among the cassava farmers.
44.
The domain
of linguistic discourse, in contrast, is, like ‘scientific text types’
in general, less Narrative and more Expository and Descriptive, but with the
further constraint that Semiotic and Cognitive processes dominate, as in the
typical Discourse Episode [566] by Wallace Chafe, with the tables of Processes
[566a] and Aspects [566b].
[566] Some Indian languages express subtleties which English glosses over. When I say ‘he is chopping wood’, I give no hint how I came to know this. In the Wintu language of northern California, I would say ‘pi k’upabe’ if I had seen the woodsman at work. If I had heard but not seen him, I would say ‘pi k’upanthe’. If someone had told me about it, the form would be ‘pi k’upake’ — ‘I understand that he is chopping wood’. Or if I guess the act is going on because he usually does it at this time, I would say ‘pi k’upanthe’ — ‘I assume he is chopping wood’ (A Richness of Words)
[566a]
Semiotics: express subtleties, say (4 times), told about it; with Negative:
glosses over, give no hint
Cognitive:
know, understand, guess, assume
Perceptive:
seen, heard
Dispositive:
is chopping wood (3 times), at work; as Developmental: going on; as Enactive:
does it
Participants:
languages, English, I, woodsman/he, someone; subtleties, hint, form, act
Circumstances:
at this time, northern California; Semiotic as Circumstance: In the Wintu
language
[566b]
Unmarked: Positive, Present, Declarative, Expository
Progressive:
is chopping wood (2 times)
Completive:
came to know
Conditional:
would say (3 times), had seen, had heard but not seen, had told, would be, if I
guess
Frequentive:
usually
Tentative:
guess, assume
The
°interaction of linguistic, cognitive, and social constraints° is prominently
topicalized here. Semiotics thematically interact with Perceptives and
Cognitives to connect what you ‘say’ with social moves for ‘coming to
know’ it, which in Wintu has precise effects on grammatical form. The
connection is foregrounded by the Conditional Status: ‘if’
you ‘know’ (or ‘see’, ‘assume’, etc.) in a given manner, then ‘say’. Typical too is having a ‘language’ or its
‘forms’ or content (e.g. ‘hint’) be Participants in place of the
speakers who ‘express’, ‘gloss over’, and so on (cf. IV.24;VII.260). By
adopting the role of a first-person speaker of Wintu, Chafe smartly streamlines
the translating into English and distinguishes himself from the third-person
‘chopping’ Agent or any ‘someone’ who might intervene. The obtrusive
Dispositive (‘chopping wood’) is a classical and objective Action free of
subjective problems about how you know it (versus, say ‘he is making plans’
or ‘he is being unfriendly’).
45.
Although these
functional descriptions can support lexicogrammatical portrayals of a text type
or discourse domain, they certainly don’t yield the strict definitions or
delimitations for the comprehensive, theoretically rigorous classification some
linguists have demanded. Those demands reflect the long-standing ambition among
linguists to classify things into a complete repertory with a limited number of
clear-cut criteria stated in terms of °language by itself°, which has
succeeded in the °sparser subdomains like phonology but not in the richer ones
like semantics and pragmatics° (cf. II.28-50; V.1).
For text types, the perplexities are still more recalcitrant because the types
are themselves intermediary control systems that guide the choices of options
but do not prescribe specific ‘rules’ or ‘bundles of features’. Each
type rides on its own °dialectic between specifying versus manifesting
constraints° that are richer than for the language as a whole (V.3). How can
the dynamic dialectic be °frozen for purposes of formal description°?
46. So we can readily appreciate why early research on text types loosened rather than enhanced control over the domain of study while fresh perplexities emerged: how many types to postulate, how to label them, which properties identify a given type, and so on. °Classicalizing approaches that tabulated Parts of Speech° and the like proved ineffectual. In retrospect, the central problem seems plain: trying to jump from very sparse data (say, choices of Verb Tenses) over to very rich concepts (say, literary novel) (cf. V.16.3). Instead, we need functional models indicating how the °sparser data act as the means for the ends of richer data across the layered hierarchy of language°. We can build upon the layer-model proposed in Fig. III.27 back in III.92 to get the model shown below in Fig. V.2. The text type is now described as coupling the material base (the means) for text
patterns with the data field (the end) for schematizing meanings to support the processing of topics,
e.g., to explain the capacities of human memory in psychological monographs.
Above that, a discourse domain couples the material base (the means) for interaction
patterns with the data field
(the end) of negotiating meanings to
support the processing of scripts that
organize roles and the co-ordination of the participants’
plans
and goals, e.g., for holding a lecture
on ‘human intelligence’ in support of a new school curriculum. Again, the
layering is spanned by the three functional levels on the left of the figure
going from harder to softer, namely, prosody,
lexicogrammar, and discourse,
whereby the couplings can interface the threefold °constraints of language,
world, and society° (cf. II.48, 62f; III.92). In this model, sparser data (say,
word choices) relate to a text type or discourse domain largely through the
mediation of richer layers (say, topics). So the language data in a discourse
sample offer evidence whose significance is to be established by mapping out the
mediation, e.g., by showing in detail how the avoidance of First Person Singular
or of Emotive Processes in psychological monographs (III.100) is part of the
general script for speaking in the name of a faceless, impersonal institution of
authority about mental processes that are hard to observe.
47. Recent
criticism of the term or concept of ‘text type’ for being pre-theoretical indicates that the mediation between the sparse data
usually presented in ‘theoretical linguistics’ and the rich data of
discourse domains is still poorly mapped out. It might be fairer to criticize
mainstream ‘linguistic theories’ for being pre-practical
— not yet adequately relatable to discoursal practices. The study of text
types illustrate how °scientific validity can get traded off against ecological
validity° (III.257). A classification in terms of the statistical frequency of
Word Classes could claim to be quite precise and objective but would contribute
very little to an °ecologist program for free access to knowledge and society
through discourse°. Instead, we might reset our priorities by starting from
ecological validity and developing it as the cognitive and social context for
scientific validity, as in as in Gell-Mann’s book The Quark and the Jaguar, which is a deliberate and integratively
complex mix of text types: scientific treatise, ecologist program, philosophical
disquisition, epistemological analysis, and personal history. In such a text, a
given feature is especially likely to be °multi-functional°, e.g., his use of
the First Person Singular to counteract the image of science as a faceless,
impersonal institution and at the same time to show how his personal convictions
about sustainable ecology and his personal hobby as an observer of wildlife have
helped to guide his famous search for a unified theory in physics.
48. Perhaps we could step back
from the standard question of which or how many text types there are, to pose
the question of which criteria could distinguish them for a given text in a
corpus, such as:
(a)
the graphic format of the text, e.g.,
the alphabetical columns in a ‘telephone directory’;
(b)
the style of the text, e.g., the
archaic lexicogrammar of English ‘psalms’ and ‘prayers’;
(c)
the topic to be expressed, e.g., the
deceased person’s accomplishments and virtues for the ‘eulogy’ at a
funeral;
(d)
the dominant Processes or Aspects,
e.g., Intensive Dispositives in a ‘war report’;
(e)
the participants who are likely or
entitled to produce the text, e.g., the drill instructor who barks out the
‘orders’ in the U.S. Marine Corps;
(f)
the plan and goal, e.g., seeking a buyer for your ‘used automobile’ through a ‘classified ad’;
(g)
the situation in which the type
occurs, e.g., a job interview calling for a ‘resumé’;
(h)
the informativity suitable to the
participants, e.g., a ‘training lecture’ for electronics technicians to
operate and service a new machine;
(i)
the institution that codifies the type
and defines the participants, e.g., a criminal court where you enter a
‘plea’;
(j)
the medium of presentation, e.g., a
telephone answering machine to present a recorded ‘greeting’ and to request
a ‘message’ after a ‘beep’.
Such
criteria cannot be rigorous or complete because they apply selectively and in
various combinations during discoursal practices. For example, the message on a
telephone answering machine normally stems from a certain participant (an
occupant of the premises), has a typical style (e.g., matter-of-fact), topic
(the answering person not being available but willing to call back later),
dominant Processes (Identifying and Semiotic) and Aspects (Imperative ‘leave
number’ plus stated or implied Performative promise to ‘return your
call’), a plan (be available for contact when you’re away), a low ratio of
informativity (inform callers who they’ve reached), and perhaps a specific
situationality (e.g., you’re being harassed by abusive callers, I.50). Such
interactions accommodate the diverse functions and roles in discourse, but
vastly compound the difficulty of classifying text types in a rigorous scheme.
Here too, rich knowledge of world and society is easy to apply in practice but
hard to capture in theory (cf. I.34-37, 41, 55, 58f; II.67, 75; III.1, 86f; IV.157).
49. In
the meantime, we can concentrate on readily
identifiable types with demonstrable
social relevance to human goals. Such types sustain discourse domains that
can have a major personal or social impact on participants, depending on their
discoursal skills. Some domains provide extensively scripted roles for the
participants. You cannot simply fail or refuse to play the role, and the
tolerance for inappropriate
discourse
may be narrow and risky. In the domain of ‘legal proceedings’, for example,
the discourse role of ‘defendant’ is tightly scripted irrespective of the
‘facts’ of the case, e.g., whether you are ‘guilty’. Fieldwork by Ruth
Wodak found that Viennese defendants involved in traffic accidents with a fatal
outcome consistently received lighter sentences when they played the role with
efficien
t and appropriate
discourse.
A fluent Narrative of the accident in a ‘standard’ dialect was far more
likely to elicit belief and a mild sentence from the judge than was a hesitant,
disorganized one in a ‘non-standard’ dialect (of which Vienna has a copious
supply), even though all the victims were equally dead.
50.
Social relevance to
goals has the advantage of being a criterion open to reliable judgement by the
participants themselves and not just postulated by theoreticians. For the
commonplace text type ‘posted notices’,
the ‘posting’ person anticipates a group of otherwise unspecified receivers
for whom the message will be relevant. So the notice should be terse and plain
and posted in a location where this group is likely to read it. Someone without
the relevant cultural knowledge of goals might be puzzled by notices like
[567-69], which I observed in north Florida on a rural fencepost, at a
hairdresser’s, and at a petrol station, and like [570] in the bus station in
Baguio (Philippines).
[567]
CLEAN diRT — DOZER WORK
[568]
Walk-Ins Welcome
[569]
Drive-offs Will Be Prosecuted
[570]
This Platform is Off Limits to Pickpockets and Baggage Thieves
For
[567], the prospective paradoxes of ‘dirt’ having the Attribute ‘clean’
and of people doing the Enactives of both ‘dozing’ and ‘working’ are
irrelevant for the goals of local farmers, who need dirt free of garbage or
chemicals, and bulldozers to move it. For the Enactives in [568-69], the
prototypical pattern of ‘drive-ins’ giving prompt service to Americans who
stay in their cars has yielded ‘walk-ins’ for people coming in without a
prior appointment, and ‘drive-offs’ for people who fill up on petrol and
leave without paying. Since all customers must ‘walk in’ and ‘drive
off’, the goal of these texts must be to provide a more specific promise or
threat. The goal for the Impermissible Circumstance in [570] is more mediated,
since the Agents it names would ignore it even if they read it; the goal is
probably to reassure passengers while warning them to be watchful.
51.
Quite different goals
are relevant for the text-type ‘weather
report’. This type is tightly constrained in its format as well as in its
topic, situation, and medium, and is thus usually low in informativity. The
script foresees an economy centered on Evaluating the Ameriorative ‘good’ or
Pejorative ‘bad’ weather conditions relevant for people who want to plan
activities, e.g.:
[580]
Southern Europe will be warm Friday into the weekend. A few thunderstorms are
possible by Sunday. Heavy rain will fall in Northern Spain this weekend.
Northern Europe, including Paris and London, will be unsettled with clouds and
showers. […] A storm will pass from eastern China across South Korea and into
Japan over the weekend, bringing soaking rains to many areas.
The
‘bad’ Values are foregrounded by analogizing weather conditions into Agents
who can do Dispositives on people and places by ‘unsettling’ and
‘soaking’ them. These Values are more relevant for fisherman in small crafts
on the Sea of Japan or campers in the Pyrenees than for farmers hoping for rain,
or surfers who dig stormy waves. Extremely bad conditions such as a hurricane
are likely to spill over into other text types, such as a ‘disaster report’
plus photos on the front page, and analogizing with Agents may lead to giving
the hurricane a human’s name.
52.
The text-type (or
cluster of types) ‘printed
advertisement’ is directly relevant to the advertiser’s goal of getting
the readers to put purchase and consumption on their agenda. The challenge is
making your message seem relevant to the readers who are literally flooded by
such messages (I.13). It may well not be effective to simply command people to
run out and buy your commodity. Instead, you can command them to do something
enjoyable such as ‘learning how to open up exciting conversations with strange
girls’ or ‘becoming a skilled writer in just six weeks’ ([107] and [216]
in IV.52, 90), where your commodity is supposed to provide the means. Or, you
can count on people knowing what they’ll do, e.g., if you present your
‘escort service’ by saying ‘top class young ladies, nice dressed and speak
all languages, offer you first class company’, or ‘we guarantee that our
girls are all attractive, open-minded, personal, with a sense of humour’, or
‘superintelligent funny ladies’ where the Danish writer probably thought
that English ‘funny’ means ‘providing fun’ (Copenhagen
This Week, June 1993). Or again, you can invite imaginative inferences about
what will happen, e.g., during sociable activities [581-82]. Again, the
commodities are presented as the means toward an interactive goal, e.g., using
liquor to make friends get ‘close’ and into just the ‘right mood’
for…well, ‘anything’.
[581]
When the friends are close and the mood is right, the party starts in the
kitchen. And, of course, –––Vodka is there.
[582]
Anything can happen. [picture of a huge tequila bottle behind a group of two [!]
males and three {!] females on a beach, all gorgeous]
As
usual, the °scenario of consumerist discourse invokes a reconciliation fantasy
(I.12) for social alienation°, wherein the °commodity offers easy
gratifications° that are otherwise denied. The degree of explicitness can range
from direct appeal [583] to reassurance [584] to mere hint [585]. In these
scenarios, the reader is the Participant who gets something for nothing: a
prize, a chance to gorge without getting fat, and a payment of damages from a
negligence lawsuit. The enticement helps to mystify the specious premises so
symptomatic of consumerism, e.g., that ‘a million prizes’ could be
‘instantly’ disbursed (apparently all to you), that frozen yoghurt has zero
calories (it has half as many as ice cream), and that every ‘accident’ is
somebody else’s fault. Demystified versions would be ineffectiv
e in openly appealing to greed and
gluttony and debunking the ease and innocence of the gratification fantasy
[583a-85a] (cf. IV.250).
[583]
WIN INSTANTLY OVER 1,000,000 PRIZES! [magazine sweepstakes]
[584]
ALL THE PLEASURE — NONE OF THE GUILT [frozen yoghurt outlet]
[585]
Accidents don’t just happen. They are caused by people. Sometimes saying
you’re sorry isn’t enough. [attorneys’ firm]
[583a]
Enter our sweepstakes immediately and qualify to win one of over 1,000,000
prizes in the near future.
[584a]
With frozen yoghurt you can have the same pleasure as gorging on ice cream but
you need feel only half as guilty afterwards.
[585a]
Let us find some rich guy to blame for your accident and sue for a pile of cash.
Evidently,
text receivers can be more easily persuaded by content they infer, especially if
their Participant role in the scenario is one they would not want to have
spelled out (cf. I.32; IV.240).
53.
An ordinary citizen
formulating a classified ad has more direct goals and follows tighter
constraints upon format, topic, goal, and medium. For an item in the
‘automobiles for sale’ section, where space is expensive and readers are
skimming for specific criteria like age and price, you will probably produce a
list of short Phrases (or mere abbreviations, e.g., ‘fsh’ for ‘finish’)
rather than the complete sentences schoolteachers exalt, as in this British
example:
[586]
Audi 100CD 2.2i auto, big boot, the fashionable safe reliable car, immac-ulate,
like new, champagne fsh, long MOT taxed, sunroof, Blaupunkt radio cassette,
garaged and carefully looked after, most reluctant sale, bargain £4,850.
081-904-4050 (Motoring Exchange and Mart
17-23/6/1993)
After
specifying the generic features of make (‘Audi’), model (‘100CD’),
engine size (‘2.2’), fuel
injection (‘i’), automatic transmission (‘auto’), finish (‘fsh’),
and inspection (‘MOT’) in technical terms, you can praise user-friendly
features in ordinary language, e.g., ‘big boot’ for tons of luggage or
‘sunroof’ for rare sunny days. Auto sales are proverbially risky and buyers
can be reassured by stressing the virtues of the make (e.g., ‘fashionable safe
reliable’) and the wonderful shape of yours (e.g., ‘immaculate’ like the
Holy Virgin, ‘garaged and carefully looked after’) and by vowing that you
are ‘most reluctant’ to sell it, as opposed to saying ‘can’t wait to be
rid of it’.
54.
The richest and most
diversified discourse domain (or cluster of domains) is also the most common and
universally relevant, namely ordinary
conversation. Its has been investigated mainly by the branch of sociology
usually known as conversational analysis,
which has developed its own °data-driven fieldwork methods° for observing and
recording authentic data in multi-party
discourse (II.93).
Understandably, this work has not followed °theory-driven formalist linguistics
and its technical constructions like competence and grammaticality°. Nor has it
followed ‘ordinary-language philosophy’ proposing to sort out well-defined
‘speech acts’ like ‘promise’ or ‘threaten’ and to formulate
‘conversational maxims’, such as ‘be relevant’, ‘be informative’, or
‘be truthful’. Either alliance would be heavily intuitive and non-empirical,
based on °isolated invented sentences attributed to anonymous ideal speakers°
(cf. II.27, 40, 53; V.59).
55.
Instead, conversational
analysis has focused on social practices like taking
turns, repairing errors or false starts, and opening
or closing a conversation. The terms
and categories are thus heavily practice-driven, having been worked out from
extensive corpuses of recorded conversations, especially in the approach known
as ethnomethodology
, a term signalling an alliance
with ethnography
, the anthropological
study
of culture. The term was coined by Harold Garfinkel after such terms as
‘ethnoscience’ or ‘ethnomedicine’, which designate people’s
commonsense working knowledge of what ‘science’ or ‘medicine’ do (cf.
VIII.45). He reasoned that people also have a commonsense ‘methodology’ for
ordinary social activities like conversation, like a theory built very close to
practice, and use it to jointly construct social reality. This line of reasoning
was one of the most productive early forays into a °post-classical approach for
bracketing reality as a negotiable discoursal construct and for integrating the
constraints of language, world, and society°. Other disciplines, including text
linguistics, were held back by allegiance to °classical science° from making
°common sense into an accredited explanatory framework°. Ethnomethodology
simply started out with the empirical observation that participants usually
manage conversation quite well and apply common sense to handle and exploit
complexity (IV.7).
56.
Ethnomethodologists
scrupulously record and transcribe data and seek to provide ‘thick’ rich
accounts. The transcripts attempt to register pronunciation and intonation by
means of creative respellings along with annotations for tone of voice, audible
breathing, silences, and so on, all of which may be relevant to the interaction
(III.195). Intriguingly, the heightened ‘realism’ of such a transcript can
give an impression of °defamiliarization° from the prevailing conventions of
framing conversations in written texts, e.g., in literary novels.
Ethnomethodologists attempt to minimize their own framing by not imposing
standards of punctuation and orthography that might bias their own use of the
data, e.g., by marking off distinct constituents and sentence boundaries.
57.
We can examine some
conversational data supplied by Manny Schegloff and replayed at a NATO
conference I also attended in April 1993:
[587.1]
1 + rings
[587.2]
Marcia: hello?
[587.3] Donny: ‘lo Marcia
[587.4]
Marcia: yea:h
[587.5]
Donny: = it’s Donny
[587.6]
Marcia: hi Donny
[587.7]
Donny: guess what / hh
[587.8]
Marcia: what
[587.9]
Donny: my ca:r is sta::lled
[587.10]
(2 seconds of silence)
[587.11]
Donny: ‘n’ I’m up here in the Glen?
[587.12]
Marcia: Oh::
[587.13]
(4 seconds of silence)
[587.14]
Donny: hhh / a:nd / hh
[587.15]
(2 seconds of silence)
[587.16]
Donny: I don’ know if it’s po:ssible but (hhh)
[587.17]
(2 seconds of silence)
[587.18]
Donny: see I haveta open up the ba:nk / hh
[587.19]
(3 seconds of silence)
[587.20]
Donny: a:t uh: in Brentwood? / hh
[587.21]
Marcia: =yeah:- an’ I know you want- an’ I wou- an’ I would, but-
except I’ve gotta leave in aybout five minutes (hheh)
[587.22]
Donny: I gotta call somebody else / right away / okay?
[587.23]
Marcia: okay
[587.24]
Donny: thanks a lot / bye
[587.25]
Marcia: bye:
Telephone
conversations offer the simplifying advantage that visual data like gestures,
facial expressions, and so on, are not being interchanged, and the analysis can
zoom in on the auditory data. Yet as Schegloff pointed out, these data do not
manifest the central move, namely the request on Donny’s agenda to be driven
to Brentwood by Marcia; the request is only inferrable as the co-referent of
‘it’ in [587.16] and the implicit Target Proposition of ‘I know you
want’ in [587.21]. Explicitly, Donny pursues his plan by stating his Locality
[587.11], which happens to be an area in Los Angeles where buses, taxis, or auto
mechanics are less available, plus the reasons why he is stuck there [587.9] and
why he must urgently get away [587.18, 20]. He repeatedly pauses at strategic
points where Marcia is supposed to infer his request and offer her help, but she
remains silent [587.10, 13, 15, 17, 19], as if the conversation were stalling
like his car. When she does decide to respond, she acknowledges ‘knowing’
the unstated Volition (‘want’) and goes from Conditional (‘I would’) to
Incapable (I can’t). She gives only a vague and weak reason, since merely
‘leaving in aybout five minutes’ [587.21] doesn’t rule out driving Donny,
as compared to saying she has to get to work herself. He doesn’t negotiate but
declares his intention to repeat his plan with ‘somebody else’ [587.22],
though his second ‘okay?’ in [587.22] might be a final plea, since he has no
reason to ask Marcia’s permission to ‘call’. When she ‘okays’ his plan
[587.23], Donny goes right into the closing, whose briefness (‘bye’
[587.24]) contrasts starkly both with the opening spread out over five turns
[587.2-6] and with Donny’s hesitant statement of his plight spread out over
thirteen [587.8-20] if we count Marcia’s silences as meaningful turns.
58.
Like other
ethnomethodologists, Schegloff views such a discourse as an interactional
achievement, even though Donny’s plan failed. The two participants did
manage the conversation and got across what they meant. Their turns interlocked
closely and efficien
tly without breakdowns or random
gaps and interruptions. Apparently absent data, such as Donny’s implied
request and Marcia’s silences, are a significant part of this achievement, and
we can say the data are ‘there’ because the participants themselves assume
they are. Moreover, the absences do support Donny’s evident sub-plan to save
face by not asking a direct question at once and getting a flat ‘no’. His
use of Interrogative intonation in two Tone Groups where he is actually
Declaring [587.11, 20] was probably intended to animate Marcia, who first just
says ‘oh’ (showing she has understood but isn’t in a co-operative mood),
and then gives an answer just as if he had asked [587.12, 21]. Donny again saves
face when he does not ask if she is going in his direction when she
‘leaves’: either she isn’t or else she is but doesn’t want to bother
with him, so he has nothing to gain and something to lose by asking. His
‘thanks a lot’ [587.24] saves face one last time by suggesting he feels
helped rather than rebuffed — not cognitively true but socially functional.
59.
Common sense subserves
the analysis of such conversations by providing the grounds to reconstruct what
is ‘going on’, e.g., in knowing that ‘the Glen’ is a Locality quite a
ways from ‘Brentwood’ and that ‘opening a bank’ is an important and
responsible Action brooking no delay. We might also assume that Donny can’t
fix the car himself and doesn’t want to spend the time and money to wait for a
taxi and pay a high fare, and that Marcia has a car of her own and knows Donny
well enough to be enlisted. Still, the analysis leads to non-trivial empirical
insights, such as that multi-functional events are occurring even in a fairly
short and simple conversation, and that people have highly efficien
t, fine-tuned ways of achieving
them well beyond the faceless ‘speech acts’ and ‘maxims’ of
‘ordinary-language philosophy’ (cf. II.53; V.54).
60.
For our own science of
text and discourse, we might subdivide conversation into domains with specified
goals. One relevant domain would be the discourse
of ‘job interviews
’,
which gains importance as the ratio of available jobs to people needing
employment gets more skewed and as newer jobs demand more elaborate
communicative skills. To hire manual laborers for a factory or farm, you hardly
needed to probe the ideology, personality, beliefs, and attitudes of applicants,
or their capacities for creatively constructing and redefining their jobs to
meet new conditions (cf. V.79; VII.125). But you might well want to do so when
hiring financial consultants, public relations managers, or sales personnel who
market expensive surplus commodities or who trade on the stock exchange, where
innovation is crucial and where the margins of risk versus profit (and legality)
are complex and fluctuating.
61.
The ‘interview’
conversation has thus acquired the agenda of not merely presenting and
discussing qualifications and conditions of work, but of signalling or detecting
broader attitudes and aptitudes for interacting flexibly with distinct groups of
people and moving money around quickly and shrewdly. The latent conflicts of
interest get slipperier too: not just that the prospective employer wants to
give lower benefits and the employee wants to get higher ones, but that the
employer may seek data which the employee is neither disposed nor well-trained
to provide. With rising ‘job mobility’ come the problems of diversifying and
retraining: you must seem flexible enough to adapt to the job and succeed but
not so flexible that you can be expected to swap jobs or fields again soon when
your success attracts attention.
62.
The interview
conversation normally frames the written text type ‘resumé’,
constrained mainly in format (lists rather than a running narrative) and topic
(past experience and qualifications, e.g., certificates and school degrees). The
script for writing resumés is fairly standardized, and is expounded by
commercial handbooks; many prospective employers also give out written
‘application forms’ to elicit easily comparable data. According to Kelly
Cheripko, an undergraduate at the University of Florida whose job search was
also her discourse analysis project, ‘it is important to list’: ‘at least
a 3.0 [B] grade average in high school and/or college’; ‘extracurricular
activities, e.g., officer of a service organization, to stress your leadership
ability’; and ‘previous job experience to make the employer feel you are
“one of the guys”’. Special care can be taken to tailor the data by
adding, omitting, or reformulating certain items to make yourself seem qualified
but not overqualified. Kelly
suggested ‘altering or inventing experience to fit the prospective job (a
clothing store you worked at suddenly carried a complete shoe line) — be
creative while attempting to make it sound realistic’. Her survey indicated
that ‘the veracity will almost never be checked’ unless problems arise; your
fluent Narrative is easily believed (IV.49).
63.
The conversational part
of the interview is less scripted than is the resumé, but you must still
monitor carefully what you say and how you behave. The art seems to lie in
navigating a minefield of delicate trade-offs, where too little and too much are
equally damaging. You should seem confident but not conceited, respectful but
not obsequious, polite but not unctious, complimentary but not fulsome,
attentive but not fastidious, committed but not dogmatic, and above all
interested in the job but not desperate to get it. Employers also take their
risks; applicants may exude ‘poise’ or ‘confidence’ not because their
qualifications or expertise are genuinely superior but because their social
status is secure — a head start that may have left them poorly equipped to
provide new ideas or to handle unforeseen pressures. Hence, interviews can
easily discriminate in favor of higher-class applicants along parameters that
are irrelevant to job performance — quite similar to the situation in
conventional schooling (VII.81, 107).
64.
Transcripts of the eight
interviews covertly taped by Kelly illustrate some discourse strategies a
skilled interviewee can deploy to control the conversation. To ‘sell
yourself’, she noted, you should ‘make the interviewer believe you are
special, a hard worker, a superior salesperson and leader’ whose ‘thinking
correlates with his/her own’. This can be done when describing either your
past jobs or your intentions for the job at stake now [588]. Decisive on both
counts is the type of job: here, manager in a pricey clothing store for women
who buy more for motives of prestige and fashion than practical need, so the
methods of ‘selling’ require special persuasion [589].
[588]
I learned a lot at Show-Off [another pricey clothing store whose name tells why
women buy there] / I helped Mr Chafin [boss and owner] choose clothes for each
season […] I was soon promoted to second
assistant manager and / then to assistant […] I could’ve been manager
but / I hadn’t finished my
education / and I felt that obtaining my degree
/ was my first priority at the time […] I did the / night bookwork
/ I was the manager on duty // I
had control over the/ sales crew
and / I helped to select clothes to be bought / I took care of shipments
// oh / and I also ran a teen board
for the store / it took a lot of time
but it was fun […] it was a great
experience // I must say that // I liked
the responsibility / I liked my staff
then / so/ I guess it / was just / a combination
[589]
I feel like selling would be my
main job / not just / my own
selling but being a leader and
motivating the girls on duty to
sell / any time you’re in retail
/ selling is most important / the
book work and cleaning is also important but selling
comes first / some one has to lead
and motivate everyone else and that’s
/ what I’d do
Soon
after she submitted her report, Kelly had another interview and
‘capitalized’ on her insights: she was ‘awarded a job which pays much
better than most jobs in the Mall’.
65.
Another socially
relevant domain of conversation is the discourse
of waitpersons
in
restaurants with customers.
My data here come from an under-graduate discourse analysis project by Shavonne
Mussatt, who had held such a job herself for five years. Since the fixed
salaries are low (Shavonne reported the ‘general hourly wage of $2.01’, just
at the allowed minimum), ‘you must rely on tips for the majority of your
income’, i.e., on purely voluntary gratuities of fluctuating size. The U.S.
guideline rate at the time was 15% of the price of the meal plus drinks, but
this may not be widely known or accepted outside major cities. Americans seem
uncomfortable about giving money away if they can avoid it, but also about
looking stingy or poor in public. The waitperson’s agenda is to carry on
conversations that motivate tipping by showing courtesy and personal concern and
that minimize the chance of getting ‘stiffed’ (no
tip). Mussatt invoked the ‘fine art in manipulating total strangers into
giving you money’.
66.
She distributed
anonymous questionnaires
to
waitpersons who described how they act and talk in typical situations: whether
their service varies by a customer’s presumed wealth or race [590-92], how
they greet customers [593] and converse with them [594-95], whether they enhance
tips by recommending higher-priced dishes [596-598], and whether they react
openly if a customer is rude [599-600] or leaves an absurdly small tip [601].
[590]
poor people have the right to go out too. I don’t expect a big tip from
families with young children or elderly people
[591]
if you can’t afford the 15% tip then you can’t afford to go out
[592]
No. The only color I care about is green
[593]
I always attempt to phrase my speech so that the customers think I am doing them
a favor out of friendship
[594]
I might inquire where they are from or if they are on vacation ask them where
they are going. I might try to placate unruly children by giving them something
to occupy them
[595]
I once told some customers whose son had just graduated that I was an
engineering student. They supported the image of a hard-working under-graduate
and left me a big tip for my little lie
[596]
I usually suggest dishes which experience tells me are broadly popular. These
fall in about the mid range of prices
[597]
I never suggest the more expensive menu items first […] I don’t wish the
customer to suspect my motives
[598]
I earn my living this way, so naturally I go where the money is and build the
largest check possible while providing the commensurate degree of service
[599]
If the person’s deportment is rude, I withdraw my cordiality and treat them
with cold efficiency
[600]
I treat rude customers like anyone else. However, I may pretend I didn’t hear
them when they ask for something
[601]
I once returned a tip and said ‘you obviously need this more than I do’
Because
the waitperson is the most likely to suffer for mistakes, discourse strategies
can shift the responsibility:
[602]
passing the buck is part of restaurant life. Once a customer asked for something
to not be spicy but I didn’t tell the cook. The customer said it was too hot,
so I said that was as mild as the dish came.
[603]
Once it took an inordinately long time for a guy to get his dish because I’d
forgotten to turn in the order. When he complained I explained that his dish was
prepared once but the head chef deemed it to be substandard and insisted on
preparing another personally.
Still,
conversation cannot control all the factors. The survey showed a consensus that
men get higher tips than women, even if the men are gay (which the survey
indicated is not uncommon). Various motives were suggested:
[604]
Men tip other men more because they think they have a family to support, and
assume that women work for ‘fun’. Women tip men more because they enjoy the
role reversal of being served by a male
[605]
Women tip me better because I make them feel good about themselves by doting on
them and complimenting their hairdress and makeup
[605]
indicates how a resourceful gay
male
can derive a conversational advantage even in rabidly homophobic
societies like the U.S.
67.
Another domain of
conversation, namely the discourse of
customer service in clothing stores, was studied in an undergraduate
discourse analysis project by Jason Tunnick, who posed as a buyer with ‘bad
taste’ in seven Gainesville stores. In each store, Jason would don some
monstrous mix like ‘a pinkish polka dot shirt tucked into a long plaid green
pair of pants’ or an ‘oversized multicolored shirt over brownish jeans
ripped in fifty places’, certified to be terrible by his girlfriend. He then
asked an unsuspecting salesperson if he ‘looked all right’ to see if they
would risk losing a sale (and the cash commission) and offending a customer by
honestly telling him he looked dreadful or laughing in his face. The girlfriend
(who was secretly taping the conversation) would keep saying he looked
‘nice’ or ‘good’, thus raising the stakes for the salesperson to risk
fomenting a quarrel between the pair.
68.
In only one store did he
elicit the emphatic ‘no!’ and the merited burst of laughter. Elsewhere, the
salespersons either politely suggested alternatives [606] or else cast about for
reasons why a customer could wear such things after all, e.g., that personal
‘feeling’ and ‘comfort’ should decide [607-08] or that fashions are
growing bolder [609-10]:
[606]
you can wear that together but this
T-shirt over here / comes with it
also
[607]
you can put together anything
[…] like /wearing your stripes and polka dots together […] as long as you / feel
good
[608]
I don’t mind it // I mean / but then again like / I said I sometimes // oh god//
how would you say / open minded to
how things are now / before I really didn’t
like the stuff but I think it looks fine
/ it is just a matter of you / feeling comfortable
wearing it / well / women are a lot
more used to seeing a lot more brighter and bolder colors / it wasn’t so
common for men to see these kind of
colors until recently
[609]
I definitely like the two plaids
together // they are showing a lot
of that lately / this season bright colors / are very in // you wouldn’t believe
/ some of the stuff
they’re showing
[610]
a lot of people will say it is just wild
and everything but it looks good /
and they are just jealous that they
wouldn’t wear something like it
In
an informal opinion poll, other students told Jason they would not risk a frank
answer as a salesperson working on commission, but if asked to judge a close
friend’s outfit, their answers would vary. The males would all give an honest
answer to a male friend, but only 20% of them would to a female friend; half of
the females said they would be honest with either gender. If only a casual
acquaintance were asking, the uniformly preferred response (60% in all gender
combinations) was to find something good to say about the outfit and ignore the
bad. At the end of his project, Jason felt discouraged that he had ‘gone to
extremes’ and ‘still didn’t get an honest view’.
69.
Socially relevant
discourse domains like the conversation of job interviews and of customer
service in restaurants and stores indicate how ‘insider’ data can shed light
on the concrete discoursal strategies and practices of the participants and on
their social consequences, e.g., monetary rewards. The analysis deploys a
commonsensical model of the domain, like most people do have, as a heuristic for
empirical explorations of the ratio between what people are doing and hope to
achieve versus what they say (or should say). Such work could in turn suggest
ways to design explicit discourse training in school or on the job, e.g.,
training how to participate in job interviews.
70.
Once again, we see the
vital importance of dialectically balancing theoretical with practical
priorities (cf. V.13, 15, 47).
Sweeping changes in the global economy have undeniably intensified the impact of
discourse skills upon social well-being and now challenge the relevance of our
own theorizing about ‘language’ for social practices. Even °ordinary
communicative competence° is quite difficult to capture in a detailed model,
and by no means ensures social well-being when economic opportunities are
constricting. Our science needs to provide models not just of how such domains
do function but of how they might function more reliably, so that the social
consequences can be better controlled by the participants who are most affected
(I.1, 33, 59f; III.3, 22, 97, 109, 186, 216, 218; IV.163;
V.15). Heuristic projects with text
types and discourse domains can do more to improve control than putting all our
efforts into the search for some definitive theoretical classification.
V.C. Discourse for special
purposes: ‘LSP’ and terminology
71.
A further major type of
°intermediary control system between virtual and actual° is provided by language
for special purposes (‘LSP’), and especially by terminology. Here too, practice had until recently run well ahead of
theory, aside from some useful work on register
and genre, notions which overlap
somewhat with ‘style’ but have been oriented more toward social and
professional settings than toward literature. Today, research is rapidly
expanding, now that the key function of language has been widely recognized in
the processes of modern specialization
in knowledge domains, Institutional support has been provided for international
conferences and for new journals devoted to LSP and terminology.
72.
In hindsight, we can
readily appreciate the problems that made LSP seem intractable for so long. A
primarily linguistic problem is in what sense LSP might count as a
‘language’. It could surely not do so in the same sense as a ‘language
for general purposes’ (‘LGP’), since it could never have a complete °lexico-grammar°
all its own; it has to share with the lexicogrammar of at least one LPG. Even
specialists who had expressly tabulated and precisely defined all their
specialized terms must deploy the LGP in order to communicate their knowledge or
discoveries to non-specialist trainees or specialists in other fields. LSP is
therefore a ‘fuzzy’ system with a doubtful status in °mainstream linguistic
theory°.
73.
Another linguistic
problem is that a model of language for special purposes (‘LSP’) needs to be
correlated with a model of discourse for
special purposes (‘DSP’). This problem points once again to the
unsettled correlation between °virtual language versus actual discourse°.
Research on LSP is strongly pressured to study °authentic discourse data°
rather than to theorize about °language by itself as an uniform, stable, and
abstract system°. The British linguist J.R. Firth suggested that LSP (he called
it ‘restricted language’) would be easier to describe than LGP, but he did
not specify how far such a description could be done with available linguistic
terms and methods.
74.
Yet another linguistic
problem is the increasingly international context of communication among
specialists. One LSP can easily be influenced by other languages besides the LGP
upon which it is based and may develop into an ‘interlanguage’ or a mode of
‘code-switching’ (VI.26, 33ff; VII.336). In innovative fields, specific
locations and institutes, usually in Center countries, can gain conspicuous
leads in new methods and discoveries, the more so when expensive technology like
supercomputers, radiotelescopes, or particle accelerators is required. Such
locations and their participants also lead in coining new terms (including ones
named after themselves, such as the artificial element ‘Berkelium’ produced
in Berkeley) and reshaping discourse, e.g., by founding journals and hosting
conferences. This factor helps to instate the worldwide influence of English,
French, and German terms on LSPs drawn from other LGPs (cf. VI.54). Today,
English has won out at least as the language for specialized publications.
75.
A final linguistic
problem is that, as with styles and text types, we are unsure about which or how
many LSPs we should recognize and classify, e.g., general varieties like
‘technical’ or ‘scientific English’, or more specific ones like
‘English for engineering’ or ‘for chemistry’, or still more specific
ones like the ‘English for psychological abstracts’ or for ‘computer
repair manuals’. New developments may lead not just to new LSPs but to a new
sharing of LSPs, as seen now between mathematics and physics in superstring
theory, or between chemistry and biology in molecular genetics (cf. III.46, 51,
63-67, 159, 165). It is correspondingly difficult to draw up a linguistic
taxonomy of LSPs with satisfactory delicacy and detail. We might get further by
adopting a social and cognitive perspective and focusing more on the ‘purpose’
of developing and sharing special knowledge and not just on the ‘language’.
76.
This focus leads us to
consider institutional problems as well. °Classical views of specialized
knowledge and science° naturally relegate language to a subservient role as a
mere conveyor of °facts built into reality° (III.146). Anybody who ‘knows
the field’ is naively assumed to be skilled in communicating about it, witness
the widespread acceptance of a college degree as a higher-division teaching
credential without any specific pedagogical training (VII.93, 200). Yet a
specialized knowledge base need not support communicative skills; instead, it
may only lead specialists to propagate pretentious or impenetrable jargon as a
display of power (V.78f; VII.219). For Benjamin Lee Whorf, ‘scientific thought
is a specialization of the western Indo-European type of language, which has
developed not only a set of different dialectics but actually a set of different
dialects; these dialects are now becoming mutually unintelligible’.
77.
Classical views also
encourage idealized notions of specialized discourse, as we can see in
statements like [611-12] (taken from a textbook). Aside from being wholly
impractical, the provision in [611] offers no ‘certainty’: every
word (except a recent coinage) has a ‘dictionary’ definition, and many have several
that are irrelevant to any one ‘scientific discussion’; besides, the
‘defining’ would normally occur when
the word is ‘used’, not ‘before’. Similarly, ‘an agreed use of
words’ by no means requires a ‘single unvaried meaning’ [612], since uses
adapt to context.
[611]
We need to make certain that every word in a scientific discussion is used
according to a dictionary meaning or is defined in the text before it is put to
use.
[612]
A definition is an agreed use of words or symbols, each expression having a
single limited meaning which remains unvaried.
Real
discourse often reveals a margin of instability where terms shift between
specialized versus ordinary. The term ‘black hole’ of astronomy is often
used for any central point of destruction: the term ‘accommodation’
ordinarily applied to living quarters becomes a mechanism for ‘adaptation’
to maintain ‘equilibrium’ in Piagetian psychology (V.111).
78.
No doubt classical views
have discouraged institutions from including specific training courses in LSP or
terminology within the curriculum of specialized fields. Most such fields and
their academic departments neither employ nor train discourse specialists who
could teach the courses. As in the familiar ‘seller’s market’, the clients
just have to take the product as is (cf. V.94; VII.219). So trainees and pupils
get exposed to profuse specialized discourse during intensive content-based
instruction and must struggle to spontaneously absorb a specialized
‘vocabulary’ along with some standard rhetorical gestures. Whether and how
you do so is largely left to your own improvised tactics, e.g., by memorizing
standard definitions from textbooks or by taping lectures and trying to infer
the meaning of terms from contexts well enough to imitate the discourse of
textbooks or lectures. Openly asking for simple explanations might embarrass
both the asker who publicly admits confusion and the specialist who feels
accused (justly, no doubt) of not having been clear. But relying on improvised
tactics means that the accelerating specialization must eventually engender a °communication
crisis° both between teachers and pupils in schools or colleges and between
experts and trainees in the workplace (VII.69, 93, 125, 154).
79.
Perhaps these
institutional problems are secretly welcomed as a means to reinforce power
structures, however indecorous it might be to admit it. The supply of
specialists is kept small enough to command high salaries. ‘Outsiders’ such
as the general public are excluded from discussing the issues or objecting to
the allotment of priorities, funding
, and so forth, on social or
ecological grounds, e.g., the use of public money to develop high technologies
for private showcase industries (VII.29). Science teaching in the public schools
conditions ordinary people to a lifetime of deferring to the opinions of
‘experts’ (cf. III.3; VII.49, 63, 219). In all these ways, specialized
discourse is not just a ‘seller’s market’, but one expressly designed for
small groups of buyers; for everybody else, the main function of the discourse
is inverted from accessing knowledge over to withholding
it, and from empowering people to
develop their potential over to disempowering
them to believe that specialized knowledge is just ‘too hard’ or that they
are ‘not intelligent enough’. Ironically, these same beliefs get exploited
by corporations as pretexts to save money by giving their own trainees
simplistic mechanical training:
many organizations are willing to assume that complex tasks can be successfully mapped onto a set of simple, Tayloristic, canonical steps that can be followed without need of significant understanding and insight and thus without need of significant investment in training or skilled technicians; [so] the corporation assumes the reps are untrainable, uncooperative, and unskilled; whereas the reps view the overly simplistic training programs as a reflection of the corporation’s low estimation of their worth and skills (John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid)
Brown
and Duguid intriguingly argue that technicians offset this formalistic training
by constructing communal narratives to develop and share knowledge in the
workplace, as shown by Julian Orr’s field study of service representatives
(‘reps’) in a large U.S. corporation (cf. VII.125). Narratives can restore
and preserve the cultural memories that formalism and consumerism seek to erase
in the name of modern science and technology (I.13; II.27, 121; III.121; VI.12).
80.
An egregiously
inaccessible specialized discourse domain is bureaucratic
discourse
, whose arsenal of elaborated
phrasings, nominalizations, passives, and circumlocutions allows the bureaucrat
to dictate the agenda and sharply restricts the access to knowledge
for
ordinary citizens (cf. III. 239). And the bureaucratic discourse with the
severest human consequences is surely legal
discourse. This domain strives in its own odd way to navigate the deep-lying
°contradictions between theory versus practice, and between objective versus
subjective in modern societies°. In theory, human actions in general must be so
clearly defined that judges can objectively decide, by the ‘letter of the
law’, what rights, obligations, penalties, and so on, are at stake; in
practice, judges must use discourse to subjectively construct a specific action
in terms of what the agent may have meant or intended. This contradiction puts
multiple pressures upon legal discourse to define the ‘meaning’ of other
discourse domains that have legal consequences, such as contracts. Section 2-202
of the Uniform Commercial Code of the United States [613] tries to protect the
‘terms’ of ‘written memoranda’ or ‘agreements’ against being
‘contradicted’ by some ‘prior’ or ‘oral agreement’, yet allows for
them being ‘explained or supplemented’ unless ‘the court finds the writing
to have been intended also as complete and exclusive statement’. The court can
thus freely decide whether the ‘terms’ should ‘stand’ by making
conjectures about what ‘the writing’ was ‘intended’ to be, viz.:
[613]
Terms with respect to which the confirmatory memoranda of the parties agree or
which are otherwise set forth in writing intended by the parties as a final
expression of their agreement with respect to such terms as are included therein
may not be contradicted by evidence of any prior agreement or of a
contemporaneous oral agreement but may be explained or supplemented […] by
evidence of consistent additional terms unless the court finds the writing to
have been intended also as a complete and exclusive statement of the terms of
the agreement.
We
encounter here another °imposition of formalism°:
the explicit claim that ‘terms’ have a single, determinate meaning or
interpretation, plus the implicit right to construct the meaning (cf. II.4). So
judges and courts can make their own interpretations without sacrificing the
official principle that they merely are enforcing the exact wordings.
81. How far their freedom can reach is a favorite topic of Stanley Fish, a professor of both English and Law (and erstwhile champion of ‘affective stylistics’, V.12). He argues that the law can never resolve its basic contradictions because legal discourse can never attain a ‘formal existence’ by ‘writing sentences of such precision and simplicity that their meanings leap off the pa