I.A. Science and society
1. The top goal of the °science of text and discourse° proposed here is to support the °freedom of access to knowledge and society through discourse °. This goal has become enormously urgent in our ‘modernizing’ world, where social progress demands that the increasingly diverse social classes and cultures develop more cooperative practices for sharing knowledge and negotiating social roles ; and discourse must surely be our central modality for doing so. To help people use discourse more effectively, we must first understand its normal uses. We therefore need theories and methods both for exploring prevailing discourse practices within relevant discourse domains, and for projecting alternative practices that favor genuine progress (cf. III.97, 109, 186, 216; V.70, 89). And there’s a monumental trade-off: making things easier for discourse participants means making them much harder for us.
2. To be sure, such an enterprise seems dauntingly ambitious from the standpoint of so-called °classical science°, which has been devoted to pursuing tidy theoretical issues in a disinterested objectivity disconnected from the messy practices and problems of society (I.4; III.1), and in a ‘monodisciplinary’ format of neatly parceled fields, each with its own concerns. Still, the last three decades have witnessed a widening consensus that science must reconnect theory with practice and re-engage with society, whose problems have reached such intensities that global crisis is imminent and is already in miniature dress-rehearsal on the daily news (II.104). Moreover, this development has been partly fostered by science itself, whose technological advances have vastly amplified the rate and scale of environmental depletion, social violence, and military destruction, and have enabled the countries at the ‘Center’ to invade and exploit those along the ‘Periphery’. Science must now take the leading role in deciding how its results will be used in human terms, and in launching projects that directly address the problems we now see all around us — especially the deepening crises in material, in knowledge, in communication, in literacy, and so on (II.104, 133; V.78).
3. Yet the current conditions are frankly unfavorable. Paradoxically (if not schizophrenically), modern society subscribes both to a devout scientism of believing that science is all-powerful and can create the technology to solve all our problems, and also to a smoldering anti-intellectualism of believing that intellectuals, including scientists, are effete snobs or jargon-happy technocrats far too wrapped up in their obscure work to care about society’s problems (III.148). In combination, these two beliefs, however unfounded, are doubly paralyzing: the first for lulling us into false security and keeping things as they are, and the second for fomenting a fierce irrational suspicion of scientific projects to change things. The worldwide awakening of science to its social and ecological responsibilities is a response to this harrowing double bind of being both expected to change the world and suspected of being unwilling or unable to try. Today, many more of us have decided to try than ever before; whether we are able remains to be seen.
4. This volume explores the ‘new foundations’ that might support such a decision. While °classical science° was busily devising grand engines and new substances to make the material world faster, harder, hotter, colder, cheaper, and more complicated, few scientists took an active interest in how human beings talk to each other and think about their ordinary lives. Instead, the official ‘monodisciplinary’ sciences such as linguistics and psychology have long preferred to back away from these issues and replace them with °sparse theoretical or technical constructions° austerely disconnected from the practices of everyday life. As a result, classical science is not well-prepared to help when it has become obvious that our customary practices of talking and thinking are °ecologically unsound° for co-existing in the modernized world where people and their actions are increasingly interconnected yet steadily fewer people understand how (cf. VI.41; VII.22f, 28, 69; VIII.2, 8, 55, 113f, 132). The °failure to connect° is surely the thematic flaw of modern times (VII.22).
5. Whence these deliberations about the foundations for a new °transdisciplinary science of text and discourse°. After nearly a decade of gestation and uncounted rewritings in dozens of countries, the ideas presented here have continued to evolve so far that I am reluctant to freeze them into print, seeing how the connections among the ideas keep multiplying from version to version (VII.218). I have had to recognize how many major obstacles to science, and especially the human sciences, have resulted from prematurely freezing our theories and models for the dynamic and evolving practices and phenomena of language, cognition, and society. But for the present, I must close the restlessly expansive discourse of this volume and hope it may contribute to a renewed and deepened ‘dialectic’ between theory and practice.
6. Perhaps I might start off with a brief, user-friendly demonstration, introducing main terms in bold type and using pairs of the unobtrusive symbol ‘°’ to keep track of the °main terms and themes° of the book. I shall highlight the symptomatic gap between theory versus practice that has pervaded so many aspects of human societies. In the official ideology of ‘modern Western’ societies in ‘Center’ countries, the most influential version of this gap is the °fundamental contradiction between inclusive theory versus exclusive practice°. In theory, all citizens have the same basic human rights to free speech, public education, jobs, and so on; in practice, the great majority have inferior rights. So numerous strategies have evolved to legitimize the practical exclusion by making it appear natural, necessary, and fair, or else to mystify it by insisting that practices are in fact inclusive and that exclusions are mere accidents caused by individuals who don’t do what they should and who deserve whatever they get. Also, the control over theory is mainly reserved for specialized institutions such as bureaucracies and is withheld from practitioners such as ordinary citizens in their workplace.
7. The same contradiction pervades the ways °discourse participants° assume social roles to seek either solidarity or power , i.e., equality or inequality of human rights. Discourses of solidarity promote negotiation and co-operation among participants and among their goals. Discourses of power promote authority and confrontation and pursue the goals of some participants at the expense of others. To accommodate inclusive theories, discourses of power can be either legitimized by appealing to personal differences in individual ‘merit’, ‘aptitude’, ‘intelligence’, and so on, or else mystified as discourses of solidarity about ‘society’, ‘tradition’, ‘civilization’, ‘democracy’, ‘individual freedom’, ‘free speech’, ‘free market’, and so on (VII.33, 79; VIII.54). Whenever the content (what you are talking about) is subordinated to the goals (what you want to achieve) (III.228), the interaction counts as political discourse in the broadest sense (VIII.42).
8. As we shall be seeing later on, the contradiction sketched in I.6 pervades many institutions and discourse domains in modern society. In this section, we shall explore the discourse of the ideology of consumerism enlisting people in the acquisition of commodities like goods and services as the main purpose and goal of life and the sole road to ‘happiness’ (I.12; VIII.61). This ideology has largely eclipsed the converse ideology of ecologism, wherein theory and practice are reconciled by cooperating to consciously sustain a life-style in harmony with our social and ecological environment. The central contradiction of consumerism consists of offering you both the solidarity of having what others do (‘millions of satisfied customers’) and the power of having what others don’t (‘designed exclusively for you’). The political factor stipulates that saying what or how the commodity is gets heavily outweighed by the goal of getting you to spend your money on it in a contradictory but mystified fantasy of solidarity and power.
9. Consumerism in turn reflects the larger agenda that has evolved from the social and material conditions in the production and distribution of commodities in modern ‘Center’ societies such as the U.S. Economic growth has become our dominant myth, a ‘myth’ being a devoutly accredited account of how the ‘world’ must be. This myth says that the volume and net value of the commodities produced and consumed will go on rising forever, unchecked by population pressure or environmental depletion . A lack or decline in ‘growth’ signals a ‘social crisis’ calling for forceful actions like convening advisors, changing governments, or dealing out harsh treatment to scapegoats, usually working women, minorities, or immigrants, who get blamed for blocking the growth. This devout adherence to °growthism° , as Michael Halliday has aptly called it, is extremely resistant to contrary evidence, because to admit that we have definitively reached if not surpassed the limits of the growth the earth can sustain is equally unpalatable both to the rich and greedy and to the poor and needy.
10. Consumerism mystifies the °contradiction between inclusive theory versus exclusive practice° by propagating the theory that the benefits of economic growth are going to the whole society. In actual material practice, the main benefits go to a small elit e whose life style is made into a °consumerist showcase of conspicuous consumption° by the mass media as an enticement for the rest of society to consume as hungrily as their limited means allow and to dream of future prosperity. Each individual is encouraged to compete with the others in consuming and is thereby distracted away from developing the counter-ideology of °ecologism°.
11. As history shows, governments of all political ideologies from left -wing to right-wing need not ensure the real economic growth of the average citizen. They need merely maintain an illusion of growth by °stimulating showcase sectors of the economy° — typically, heavy industry in left -wing socialism and high technology in right-wing capitalism — through contracts, incentives, and tax breaks, or by issuing selective or manipulated statistics about how great the whole economy is doing (VII.18, 28, 49; VIII.52, 78). The manifest extremes of wealth versus poverty in the practices of modern societies are mystified by official theories to be either temporary fluctuations of the free market or else natural outcomes of a meritocracy: a system wherein all individuals have equal chances and succeed or fail entirely though individual merit. This mystification explains the finding of fieldwork research in political science that citizens do take stands or cast votes by assessing the whole economy rather than their own economic situation, and do blindly support the same political systems and practices that °disempower them with alienating, low-skilled jobs°. And the same mystification explains the success of the ‘New Right coalition’ in wooing a block of voters (many of them not well off) for its own contradictory °conservative agenda° to ‘conserve’ an agonizingly lopsided social order and to squander the remaining resources of our planet on making it even more lopsided (III.2; VII.30f).
12. Modern consumerism evolved its current format when the basic consumption of food, clothing, and shelter began to approach saturation for many people in ‘Center’ societies. Further economic growth demanded surplus consumption of commodities for which a need must be artificially aroused and maintained. This task was duly consigned to the discourse of advertising, which systematically foments artificial surplus needs by portraying consumption as the road to true happiness and the universal solution to personal or social problems — insecurity, anxiety, frustration, failed ambition, boredom, ugliness, ignorance, whatever (VII.10). People who can’t see any real solution will keep on trying this false one. They are lured by the dual myth that consumption confers status upon the individual participant and solves the problem of how to define the self in a modern world (‘you are what you buy’). They °fail to make the connection° and recognize that consumerism is the real problem for two reasons: (1) it is °ecologically unsound° in destroying the basis for future well-being; and (2) defining your self in terms of the commodities you can buy and possess °reifies by treating people as things and alienates by stifling the development of human inner potential° (cf. VII.10). Thus, consumerism deploys advertising to mystify its own irresolvable contradictions: the ‘free market’ decides just how free you really are; your commodities define your self by alienating it; your individualism is acted out by conforming to imposed patterns of consumption; your need to become a valid human being leads you to ruthlessly exploit other humans; your ‘buying power ’ is sustained by debts and credits; and so on. The phony promises and smarmy exaggerations of advertising will be eagerly accredited by people who want to believe that consumerism can somehow rescue them from the °alienation and fragmentation of modern life° (cf. VII.5, 8ff). Consumption proffers an endless series of °reconciliation fantasies° for the very contradictions within consumerism itself and thereby deters people from turning to °ecologism°.
13. The discourse strategies of advertising enlist every resource of language, emotion , sensory perception , and visual imagery to seize attention and motivate you to acquire commodities. Advertising texts flood the mass media of newspapers, magazines, radio, and television, plus all manner of available surfaces, e.g., buildings, landscapes, clothing, and automobiles. Indeed, whole scenes of ‘modern life’, on film or in fact, are made into texts whose message is consumerism, writ large for all to read. And everything is relentlessly commodified, including culture, ideas, knowledge, discourse, and of course people, especially women (VIII.67). To stimulate demands for ever ‘newer’ versions and ‘fashions’ of the same commodities, consumerism erases the memory of the culture for its own customs such as clothing, diet, and housing (cf. II.27, III.113; VI.12, 34, 43, 54, 56; VIII.33).
14. Naturally, the individual commodity also becomes a ‘text’ combined with a name and label that not merely identify it but urge consumption upon consumers whose limited needs and funds enforce constant decisions about what to buy. The ‘text’ in the ordinary sense, consisting of language, is an integral part but far from complete or self-contained. As in many other domains, the producers of the discourse of advertising are far more skilled than the intended receivers, and exploit their advantage for economic and social power. The discourse activates the twin °myths of economic growth and consumerism° and projects consumption to be the grand opportunity for the disempowered to act in solidarity with the empowered, instead of reflecting on practices of power and trying to transform them toward genuine solidarity. Each text helps to sustain this vast socio-economic complex without the consumerate understanding or resisting.
15. This account can be supported by a demonstration text, printed on a jar labelled ‘Ruby red™ sweet & sour Harvard beets’ and marketed in the U.S. (numbering added):
[1.1] OUR OWN FAMOUS home-grown beets are treated ever so royally here. [1.2] First we slice them into wedges. [1.3] Then we coddle them in a rich, ruby sauce that’s just this side of sweet. [1.4] Ah! Isn’t that just the way you love your Harvard beets!
Some heuristic questions might be useful:
How is the discourse agenda set up?
How is the discourse economy organized?
Why might these particular items and patterns be chosen?
What might have been some plausible alternatives?
Which connections or contradictions obtain among elements?
What is treated as given or familiar, and what is asserted as new or special?
The agenda of the text subsumes the ongoing array of actions, plans, and goals of the discourse participants: for advertising, to manage the situations wherein consumers encounter commodities. Intense satisfaction from having bought this commodity and this brand is promised by activating the ‘mythical’ context of consumerism and fitting it to the current setting.
16. The economy of the text subsumes the degrees of strategic importance or of language-guided focus among discoursal choices: for advertising, the choices that stimulate a need for commodities. Our sample enlists the consumer both in inclusive solidarity among the plain folks down on the farm and in an exclusive power fantasy among the wealthy elite, while using language to slyly mystify the contradiction. Buying the commodity gets ‘rewritten’ into a symbolic act of empowerment — a °gratification fantasy° compensating ordinary consumers for their real disempowerment.
17. The term ‘economy’ reflects the status of the text as a ‘system’ — if language is a virtual system stipulating the potential choices, the text is an actual system manifesting the real choices (see I.34). More precisely, each of these is a multi-system composed of multiple interactive systems, such as sounds, words, and phrases. We can thus organize our analysis by exploring the several contributing economies . As is usual in advertising texts, the topic economy centers on the commodity, which is given straightaway by being both the material contents of the container and being referred to by the first Sentence Subject ‘beets’ in [1.1]. Ostensibly, the topic is developed by monitoring the production process, as if the goal were merely to provide helpful information similar to the text type ‘cookery book ’. Meanwhile, the less obtrusive sub-topic of ‘luxury ’ or ‘opulence’ is craftily sustained through devious associations.
18. The prosodic economy is sustained by intonation, i.e., the flow and ‘melody’ of the text as it would be uttered or read aloud (cf. IV.E). Fluctuations in pitch and emphasis would probably foreground items like ‘ever so royally’ [1.1], ‘just this side of sweet’ [1.3], and ‘just the way’ [1.4] (compare the relative height of the lines in Fig. I.1), each time suggesting a vivacious if not gushy insistence on getting the product exactly right for ‘you’. The ‘Ah!’ [1.4] would be loud and lengthened to invoke the satisfaction you would get from tasting the product (I.16, 23). Also, alliterations like
‘royally - rich - ruby’ and ‘sauce - side - sweet’ could be soothing and ingratiating. In the graphic economy, we can notice the first three words being printed in large upper case type; on the original label, the opening ‘O’ was in shadow font and placed next to the image of a beet with a similar size and shape. More importantly, the rest of the label pictures a cartoon-like lush green farm with the stereotyp ical tractor, red barn, and white house, invoking the vanishing American idyll of producing what you need in the circle of the home (cf. I.28f).
19. The lexicogrammatical economy interfaces two richly interacting economies. Some content or meanings are lexicalized, i.e., expressed in the lexical economy through the choice of words and expressions from the ‘lexicon ’ (the vocabulary ). Others are grammaticalized, i.e., expressed in the grammatical economy through the choice of forms and patterns from the ‘grammar’. Since the motives for a particular choice in a text are seldom displayed for direct observation, we can probe them through comparisons with plausible alternatives in terms of what seems °unmarked°, i.e., the usual choice under normal conditions, versus °marked°, i.e., unusual, unlikely, conspicuous, and so on. A valuable heuristic here is to change the text in certain ways and to contrast the results with the original choices, thus comparing text with text rather than text with some idealized abstraction or formal representation.
20. One strategic factor in the °grammatical economy° of [1] is the choice of Pro-Nouns as Subjects for all the Active Process Verbs . The initial ‘our’ [1.1] leads into the ‘we’ who do the preparing [1.2-3]. The marked shift to ‘you’ and ‘your’ [1.4] implies a symbolic gesture of putting the commodity in the customer’s hand, while the ‘Ah!’ seems to put it in ‘your’ mouth to taste. By having the shared ‘Target’ of the Action (the ‘Direct Object’) be ‘our/your beets’, the Verb simply solidarity between the ‘we’ Agents and ‘you’ Agents — ‘we’ do the ‘coddling’ and ‘you’ do the ‘loving’.
21. Another key factor in the grammatical economy is the choice of Clause patterns to °foreground or focus° on some items and groups of items. Three general strategies predominate in many types of English discourse: focus favors (1) shorter, simpler patterns over longer, more complex ones; (2) later positions in an utterance over earlier ones; and (3) items in unexpected positions over items in expected ones. Access can be strategically supported by making Clauses shorter and simpler and thereby increasing the quantity of focusable late positions for ‘end weight’ when the content seems unfamiliar, difficult, or important, and by doing the opposite when the content seems familiar, easy, or unimportant. Suppose we repackaged the opening of the text to this:
[1.1a] This jar contains beets. These beets are our own. They are famous. They are home-grown. They are treated here. The treatment is ever so royal.
It would seem °efficient° (easy to understand) but not °effective° (helpful for the goal), because we bloat the economy by paying out the message in tiny installments (cf. IV.63, 175). The result might be °appropriate° for young children but hardly for adult shoppers. Packaging the message into slightly longer, more complex Clauses might improve it, e.g.:
[1.1b] These beets are our own. They are famous and home-grown. They are treated ever so royally here.
Here, the key Modifiers ‘our own’, ‘famous’, and ‘home-grown’ are expressly asserted as new information in the Clause Predicates, which provide the more focused later positions for °end weight°. Yet putting the attributes into focus also makes them easier to examine and challenge, e.g., by wondering why exclusive ownership of the ‘beets’ is claimed, and how they can be both ‘famous’ and ‘home-grown’. In contrast, the original version strategically invoked the attributes as content you would already know, and reserved a single high-focus position to inform you about the ‘royalty’ of the ‘treatment’ as an interesting fact you would want to learn (not just ‘royally’ but ‘ever so royally’!).
22. Focusing by means of Clause patterns illustrates how discourse strategies usually have °thresholds whereby advantages are traded off° against disadvantages. We just saw that patterns get worse when they get too short and simple. The same thing happens at the opposite extreme when patterns get too long and complicated, e.g.:
[1.1-2c] Our famous, home-grown, ever so royally treated beets are first sliced into wedges.
This version impairs both efficiency by making the Sentence Subject too complex and top-heavy, and effectiveness by invoking the ‘royal treatment’ of the ‘beets’ as a well-known fact and neglecting the chance to assert it prominently now. Moreover, this packaging intensifies the contradiction between ‘royal treatment’ versus ‘slicing into wedges’. Since ‘royalty’ usually belongs to humans, it might be reconciled with ‘slicing’ on a fantasy level by imagining a cannibalistic ritual performed on captive kings. But whether such a fantasy could occur to or motivate ordinary shoppers seems dubious.
23. The word choices of the opening Sentence are also strategic for the °lexical economy°. More than ‘these’ or plain ‘our’, ‘our own’ hints at a proprietary claim other companies cannot make for their beets. ‘Famous’ suggests, better than ‘familiar’ or ‘well-known’, an outstanding achievement or public distinction. ‘Home-grown’, in contrast, invokes an intimate familial sphere, fitting the adjacent image of an idyllic farm on the label (I.11, 14, 24f). Thus, the first four lexical choices plus the image enact the hidden contradiction between the elite and the ordinary, which is to be mystified as a °fantasy reconciliation° between aristocratic exaltation and down-home simplicity.
24. The second and third Sentences of the text [1.2-3] sustain the grammatical economy in the unmarked order by having a known topical Subject ‘we’ referring to the producer and connecting back to ‘our’, and by presenting ostensibly new content in the higher-focus Predicate. In the lexical economy, however, [1.2] is paradoxically marked by its ordinariness against the smarmy exaggeration elsewhere, as if this °stretch of text° is a distinct and intrusive °discourse episode°. A more consistent lexical style might have been:
[1.2a] First we cleave them valiantly with burnished swords into rubicund shards.
Perhaps the agenda called for a modicum of useful information to tell these beets apart from the whole beets marketed by the same company, since the main label does not call them ‘sliced’ (too prosaic, perhaps, next to ‘ruby red’?). If so, a shift from mystifying to clarifying triggered a shift in lexical style.
25. The third Sentence [1.3], which has a more complex pattern with a second Predicate slot in a Subordinate Clause, reverts to the lexical and grammatical economies inaugurated in [1.1] while intensifying the appeal to sensory perceptions. The leading discourse strategy here for blending ordinary and elite is to choose words with multiple meanings. In Webster’s Dictionary, ‘rich’ designates ‘highly seasoned, fatty, oily, or sweet’ as well as ‘possessing or controlling great wealth’; ‘ruby’ is both a ‘dark red color’ as well as a ‘precious stone’ like royalty might wear in a crown; and ‘coddle’ is ‘cook in liquid slowly and gently just below the boiling point’ as well as ‘treat with extreme care, pamper’. These dual associations might have a parallel in ‘treat’: ‘to act upon’ as well as ‘to provide with food, drink or entertainment’ or with an ‘unexpected source of delight’. The intended effect is to reconcile and mystify the contradiction between the ordinariness of the commodity and the magnificence claimed for it, without blatantly lying; if challenged, the advertisers can claim to be merely describing the cooking process.
26. The finicky limitation ‘just this side of sweet’ [1.3] implies that the chef drew a fine distinction in taste and skilfully kept the delicacy from becoming really sweet (which, for U.S. cuisine in contrast, say, to Filipino cuisine, vegetables should not be). Unlike ‘slightly sour’, this wording ties into the emotive lexical economy through the alternate senses of ‘sweet’ as ‘much loved’, and of ‘just’ as ‘righteous’ (e.g. a ‘just king’).
27. The final Sentence [1.4] injects a bit of novelty into both the lexical and the grammatical economies. Lexically, it returns to the ordinary, but this time as if a skilled orator, after a grand pronouncement, were turning to you in solidarity with a casual aside. All the lexical items are unmarked in being commonplace and monosyllabic — (‘is not that’ instead of ‘isn’t that’ would have been too marked for the colloquial style), except ‘Harvard’, which (again in an alternate sense) stands out as a marked symbol for elite culture. Grammatically, however, [1.4] is marked by contrasting with the preceding Sentences, which were all simple Declaratives with Subject + Verb, [1.1] being Passive and [1.2-3] being Actives. [1.4] is an Exclamation by its punctuation, though its format resembles a Question; it begins with an Interjection ‘Ah!’, presumably calculated to mimic the consumer’s response (I.13, 16); and it shifts from First Person to Second Person. This Exclamatory format implies that the ‘love’ is established and need not be asserted in a Declarative [1.4a], let alone posed in a Question [1.4b]; it is taken as given that you do ‘love Harvard beets’ and the only uncertainty is ‘the way’. A Positive question still leaves some leeway [1.4b], whereas a Negative question with ‘isn’t’ anticipates a Positive answer [1.4c] (potential answers in square brackets):
[1.4a] That is just the way you love your Harvard beets. [how do you know?]
[1.4b] Is that just the way you love your Harvard beets? [well, let’s see now…]
[1.4c] Isn’t that just the way you love your Harvard beets? [why, of course!]
We shall re-examine these various formats in IV.59.
28. By now we can see how the choices made in the various ‘economies’ of this text strategically pursued the agenda of motivating buyers and arousing their appetite for the commodity. A text ostensibly describing beets offers consumers the power fantasy that buying this brand will equate them with ‘royalty’ who are ‘rich’ and ‘famous’, ‘coddled’, and bedecked with ‘rubies’. A contradictory solidarity-fantasy evokes the wistful intimacy of sharing ‘home‑grown’ food, a term which, like ‘home-made’ and ‘home-cooked’, is widely deployed by U.S. advertising to °mystify deskilled mass-production in the modernized market economy° (cf. I.18; IV.85). Picturing the farm on the label makes the contradiction less virulent than portraying it in words. Indeed, visual images in current advertising are often used to convey contradictory or false non-verbal messages, e.g., photos of ruggedly healthy people smoking cigarettes out in the purest air.
29. Compare now a similar agenda with slightly different economies in another label-text from the same company (numbering added):
[2.1] Ah, what ruby perfection this is! [2.2] We start with our delectable red cabbage, raised on our own Wisconsin farm and hand-inspected to pass the most rigid of quality standards. [2.3] Then we serve it up oh so sweet and sassy. [2.4] Hot or cold, it’s quite a savory treat — [2.5] it does Aunt Nellie’s proud!
Again, a strong sensory appeal is made: ‘delectable’ [2.2], ‘savory’ [2.4], and ‘sweet and sassy’ [2.3] (a pair of terms avoiding ‘sour’ and suggesting high spirits). The consumer’s delighted exclamation is again anticipated (‘ah’, echoed by ‘oh’) [2.1, 3]. But the elitism of the opener ‘ruby perfection’ [2.1] is backgrounded to the homey touch of food ‘raised on our own Wisconsin farm’ [2.2] (again with the same picture on the label); ‘our own’ would have the same function as in [1.1] (cf. I.19). The lexical economy follows suit with colloquial choices imitating the speech style of farmers to invite solidarity: ‘serve it up’, ‘it’s quite a treat’, and ‘it does Aunt Nellie’s proud’ [2.3-5]. Even the name ‘Aunt Nellie’ was doubtless chosen to suggest a rural setting; my U.S. informants visualized her being ‘elderly’, having ‘gray hair in a bun’, wearing ‘a house-dress and checkered apron’, and ‘standing in the kitchen’. The industrial ambience implied by ‘rigid quality standards’ is mystified here by ‘hand-inspected’, which, with its family of associates (e.g. ‘hand-dipped’ ice cream, ‘hand-picked’ vegetables), masks the increasing mechanization that promotes °economic growth° by intensifying production. In a suitable °reconciliation fantasy° that feigns to overcome the alienation in consumerism, the motherly Nellie — a traditional housekeeping female whose main function is her cooking — would pick up each head of cabbage in her ‘hands’ to examine it with expert but loving care and would imagine how she will ‘serve up’ a ‘savory treat’ that will ‘do her proud’. So buy the product and help make this surrogate mother proud — even if, or especially if, your own mother is ashamed of you for not making it into the rich and powerful elite
30. This brief demonstration may indicate how a °science of text and discourse° might pursue critical discourse analysis through such heuristic questions as those suggested in I.15 by assessing strategic uses of discourse resources in everyday life and by demystifying implicit moves of power. The items and patterns we find in print (or on tape) can be related to the agenda and to the various economies and weighed against other choices (I.19). And the text can be related to plausible social contexts and roles wherein people communicate and interact. The ‘validity ’ of our results rests not so much on replicating the specific mental and behavioral processes of the participants at that one time and place, as on describing the characteristic discourse practices of those or similar participants in that type of situation. Our analysis or description cannot be complete or exhaustive, but it should attain insights that are not merely trivial or obvious and that suggest why the text might have been formulated this way and how it might be relevant to social practices such as seeking power and solidarity or producing and consuming commodities..
31. A further step is to check our own intuitive assessments against those of informants who are not discourse analysts but are comparable to the presumed participants in the discourse under study. We can present the original as well as our alternative versions and gather reports about how each version evokes meanings, beliefs, attitudes, emotions, sensory perceptions, mental images, and so forth. In one informal survey, for example, a group of undergraduate students at the University of Florida generally agreed with the associations suggested above, except for conflating ‘coddle’ [1.3] with ‘cuddle’, which fits the lexical economy equally well. Such open-ended discoursal probes can be correlated with the more closed-ended and controlled ones developed for fieldwork and experiments, such as filling out questionnaires or rating items on scales between ‘happy and sad’ (II.96).
32. Determining the discourse strategies that can make texts °appropriate , efficient, and effective° would have direct relevance for social practice, e.g., for how discourse encourages people to embrace consumerism and eschew ecologism. Whereas much past research has based its model of communication on the transaction wherein a speaker makes a ‘literal’ and ‘true’ statement about ‘reality ’ and the hearer responds accordingly, a °critical science of text and discourse° seeks to model communication as an ongoing interaction whereby the significance of a real or hypothetical situation is continually being negotiated to fit complex and often competing agendas . A ‘literal’ version might be quite not at all effective or appropriate, e.g.:
[1d] The beets you see in this jar confer fame and royalty, and if you buy and eat them, you will join the company of the powerful, rich, pampered, jewel-studded elite who enjoy privileges like attending Harvard University.
This °demystified° version would surely defeat the agenda. People are less critical and more prone to believe and be persuaded by their own tacit inferences (cf. IV.240; V.52).
33. In sum, the °science of text and discourse° expounded in this book would be firmly committed to supporting not just °ecologism° as a progressive ideology and global strategy for sustainable life but also ecological validity: not whether our specific findings are ‘true’ in the timeless absolute sense of capturing reality for once and for all, but whether our science contributes to a general and productive understanding of the human situation. In the modernized world, the most salient factor for us is that many people participate in discourse without having adequate control over the resources and strategies for accomplishing their goals and for accessing the knowledge they need to organize their lives and roles in society (cf. I.59; II.5; III.97, 239; V.89). A critical science of text and discourse must expound the discourse strategies for self-reliant participation and thereby pursue its own goal of °promoting equality and solidarity through discourse and through the knowledge and the social practices that discourse serves to access and negotiate° (cf. I.1, 60; II.128; III.3; VII.37; VIII.29).
34. It is essential to view the text as a °communicative event wherein linguistic, cognitive, and social actions converge°, and not just as the sequence of words that were uttered or written. Such a view is easy to assert but hard to maintain because of the enormous °richness° it entails, and we shall need to proceed gradually. For the present, we can regard the text as a °system of connections ° among various elements: sounds, words, meanings, discourse participants, actions in a plan, and so on. Since these elements clearly belong to different types, the text must be a °multi-system comprising multiple interactive systems° (I.16). And it must have units that are °multifunctional°, e.g., a word being a patterns of sounds, a piece of a phrase, an instruction to ‘activate’ a meaning, and so on. So the sequence you actually hear or see is like the tip of an iceberg — a tiny amount of matter and energy into which an enormous amount of information has been ‘condensed’ by a speaker or writer and is ready to be ‘amplified’ by a hearer or reader (III.58, 92, 107). If this transaction weren’t so commonplace, it would be amazing; and we are still laboring to explain just how it can be done.
35. One step toward an explanation was already proposed back in I.17: the text is an actual system of interconnected real choices drawn from the language as virtual system of potential choices. Much of the organizing of the text-system has already been done by acquiring the language-system, but by no means all. So the text requires a rich interaction between the standing constraints of the language (e.g., that English puts the Article before the Noun, not after it) versus the emergent constraints from the context as it evolves (e.g., that you are using an intimate speaking style with a close friend). This interaction too is quite easy to achieve and quite hard to explain, especially in implying that the language system is continually evolving while people use it (III.D).
36. Particularly hard to explain is how people can communicate so well when everybody knows the language in a uniquely personal way gained from childhood, family, school, job, and so forth. How can people in fact maintain a °consensus° about what they mean? The explanation developed in this book is: people use and share language so well precisely because it is a °system continually interacting with their shared knowledge about their world and their society°. Such a system cannot consist only of rules to be applied by all speakers at all times. Alone, the rules would either be too general to provide criteria for quick selection and application, or else too specific to be usable on a wide range of occasions. A language must also consist of strategies for choosing rules and specifying or adapting them to fit the context, e.g., that difficult content should be stated in shorter, simpler utterances than easy content (I.21).
37. This account suggests that the evolution of people’s knowledge about their language while they are using it favors rather than disturbs consensus. Since you usually use language in discourse with others, your knowledge evolves in parallel and is always being tuned. In this way, the relation between the virtual system of language and actual system of text (as proposed in I.34) is a °dialectic° wherein each side mutually controls the other as they jointly evolve. So the language of any one person is never the whole language nor even that one person’s whole knowledge of the language, but always the °currently active version° of it, evolving to support the discourse (cf. III.134-40). By participating in the same discourse, the participants’ respective versions get tuned to correspond at varying degrees of detail depending on how exact you want to be, how precise or specialized the content is, and so on. Though far from established, the principle seems reasonable that these versions are not very much larger or more complicated than they need to be (cf. III.134-37). The next question is how such versions can be organized so efficiently and rapidly without conscious effort or control — or in plain terms, how humans speak and understand so well and so fast that we feel we are doing almost nothing at all (I.58f), and certainly nothing nearly so complicated as theories of language suggest with big tables or arrays of ‘rules’, ‘features’, ‘structures’, and so forth.
38. The dialectic between virtual and actual points to a different type of theories centering on the principle that a language possesses the format and characteristics it does precisely in order to be used in the ways it is (II.56, 112). So language must be an °adaptive evolving system° tuning its possible uses to fit its current uses. The striking differences between languages or language ‘families’ indicate that such a system can evolve in a great many directions, accumulating in its sounds, forms, and patterns a host of °frozen accidents° that help determine the conditions of further evolution, as in the long tug-of-war in the English language pitting the ‘Germanic family’ which engendered it against the ‘Romance family’ of Latin, French and so on which periodically attracted it. Since most of these evolutions occurred without any centralized planning yet did not disrupt the organization, the system must be capable of °self-organizing°, i.e., of constituting and reconstituting itself without explicit controls. Indeed, this capability can evidently overrule the projects for centralized planning by language academies, government ministries, educators, grammarians, and language guardians to steer the evolution along a predetermined path and make the language conform more closely to rhetorical or logical ideals. Such plans are doomed if they are based on misguided notions about language (e.g., that it is free-standing system) and if they conflict with the principles of the ongoing self-organization (e.g., by trying to freeze it). We can’t hope to help people use discourse more effectively until we understand much better how it normally functions (I.4), and now we’re back to our opening trade-off (I.1): making things easier for them means making things much harder for us.
39. Certainly, much effort will be demanded to profoundly revise the familiar ways of looking at language both in common sense and in science in order to (1) reintegrate language with cognition and society; (2) acknowledge its continual evolution; (3) account for varying versions of the language between different situations or between different speakers; and (4) reconsider the balance between the freedom of the language user versus the conventions of the language community. These revisions deprive us of the comfortable authority to take language for granted as a complete, permanent, and well-ordered system without asking how it is actually sustained, and to regard the real practices of human discourse as fragmentary, fleeting, and disorderly when they must be just the opposite! But let’s face it: language is sustained by discourse practices, and taking this fact very seriously can lead us to important new insights for a whole series of similar pairs of concepts whose relation is inadequately accounted for: theory versus practice, system versus data, general versus specific, social versus individual, knowing versus doing, storage versus operation, and even order versus chaos. In everyday reasoning, each pair easily freezes into a dichotomy where we believe we can understand just one side without the other, e.g., by constructing a theory that does not address practice, or defining the individual apart from the social (II.4; III.107). Re-envisioning these pairs as genuine dialectics requires a more agile and evolutionary point of view, e.g., to recognize that the individual is a product of society (VII.3, 85) and that order is not merely the absence or opposite of chaos but can emerge from chaos (III.44).
40. And some such dialectic must be the basis for the clear and comprehensible text converging out of people’s rich and messy knowledge about language, world, and society. This convergence cannot be achieved by some marvelous logical machine that gets rid of all the richness and messiness by applying all the correct rules, recovering all the underlying structures, and resolving every ambiguity, as some philosophers and linguists have imagined (II.39f, 49f). Empirical evidence indicates no such machine (rather the contrary, as we shall see), and computational evidence shows it couldn’t conceivably operate this way at the speed of ordinary discourse. Instead, the clear and comprehensible order of the text is the other side of the richness and messiness and exploits them to astonishing advantage (IV.7).
41. Perhaps another user-friendly demonstration may clarify my point. One of the major early conceptions in the emergence of ‘text linguistics’ in the 1970s was textuality, comprising seven modes of °connectedness° within the total text-event. Textuality is both the essential quality of all texts and a human achievement whenever a text is °textualized°, i.e., whenever an ‘artifact’ of sounds or written marks is produced or received as a text. Yet textualizing usually runs so quickly and skillfully that you may believe you aren’t achieving anything much (I.37) and may assume the artifact itself to be the whole ‘text’. This belief ‘reifies ’ the text into a free-standing entity that ‘says just what it means’ and ‘contains’ its own truth or authority, witness such commonsensical sayings as ‘that’s what it says here’, ‘it’s right here on the page’, or ‘those are the exact words’ (cf. II.4. This premature and restrictive reification is what °critical discourse analysis° seeks to strip away by insistently grasping the ‘text’ as a communicative event (I.34; II.1). Our programmatic motto might be: a text does not exist, as text, unless someone is processing it (III.203). This motto may sound odd or empty because at the very moment you recognize something as a text, you are already processing it, so why worry about what it is when you aren’t? The answer is: to see the text as an event, we must direct our attention at what happens during that quick transition between mere uttered sound or inscribed print over to text.
42. Consider the U.S. telephone directory . At first glance, it certainly looks more like an artifact than a text. Actually, it is a very sparse text intended to be richly processed. The handful of words and numbers in each entry instruct acculturated users to process a statement that the named person resides or works at the cited address and has that telephone number. The textuality is highly °local° (small-scale), since the statements are not taken to constitute more °global° (large-scale) messages. People get listed together on a page because their last names are related in alphabetic sequence and not because they live in the same building or neighborhood, share the same diet, and so on, though they may do so for other motives, e.g., when a surname indicates a specific ethnic group. Nor does the order of entries imply a ranking of people, say, from oldest to youngest, or from tallest to shortest, or from wealthiest to poorest, or from prettiest to ugliest. Such criteria would be hard to manage and might give offense.
43. We can readily recognize in the telephone directory two distinct modes of °connectedness° — two °principles of textuality°. We apply the principle of cohesion by connecting the forms and patterns of each entry, such as words and numbers. In this case, the cohesion is quite local and sparse in relying more on juxtaposition than on full or extended phrasing. Sequences resembling sentences appears only occasionally, as in ‘if no answer, dial 392-0777’. Yet in our culture, each listed telephone number equals the message that you could dial it and expect an answer, and not, say, recite it as a magic incantation to make the named person appear out of thin air.
44. By making sense in this way, we move beyond the cohesion of forms and patterns and apply the principle of coherence by connecting the meanings. This principle treats words and numbers as the means for the end of constituting meanings (II.60f) and not an end in themselves for, say, producing an aesthetically pleasing visual design on a sheet of paper. The close interaction between cohesion and coherence counsels a science of texts as processing events to highlight the distinction between the two. For the pioneer linguist Edward Sapir, ‘it is psychologically impossible to see or hear two words juxtaposed without straining to give them some measure of coherent significance’; but the ‘juxtaposing’ and the ‘giving’ are not the same act and may not yield the same results.
45. Thanks to our knowledge of world and society, entries in the telephone directory may have much the same cohesive format and yet a varying richness of coherence. If you read, in the 1990-91 listings in St. Augustine, Florida, an entry for ‘Lawless James & Trudi’, you may assume that two married people have the last name ‘Lawless’ listed first here, and share the address and telephone number. These first names signal the gender sequence of male before female — the unmarked order in °patriarchal societies° — though we also see some reverse listings like ‘Whittaker Eileen & Gary’ and some separate listing like ‘Wilcox Ward & Nell Carter’, where the issue of marriage is left open.
46. Still, the richness of coherence is restricted by taking personal names to be less meaningful than ordinary words, e.g., by not assuming that James and Trudi are ‘lawless’ and should be curbed or prosecuted. The ordinary words in a directory mainly signify professions, services, or brand names. ‘Minorcan Moving & Storage’ invokes a business run by ‘Minorcans’ (an ethnic clue linked to the Spanish heritage of St. Augustine) who ‘move and store’ other people’s belongings and not groups of immobilized or homeless Minorcans. ‘Fountain of Youth’ suggests a health club or beauty parlor but is actually the historical site of a spring which the Spanish explorer Ponce de León, who landed nearby in 1513, is alleged to have mistaken for that fabled elixir.
47. Your strategies for making a telephone directory cohesive and coherent take into account what the telephone company intends and how you should accept the results. Here, you apply two further °principles of textuality°: intentionality subsumes what text producers intend to mean, achieve, and so on, while acceptability subsumes what text receivers engage to do by accepting something as text, e.g., understand, consider, react, and so on. A text may not realize an intention like winning an argument, or a message may be disbelieved or denied, but the event was nonetheless intended and accepted as text and not, say, as an exercise for vocal cords and eardrums. In a directory, a wrong listing or a misspelled entry such as ‘massage service’ for ‘message service’ may have annoying effects, but does not abolish the purpose of the text.
48. The principle of informativity subsumes the degree to which the knowledge that the text makes accessible does not fit your prior knowledge . So °information° is not just the content or message itself but the °goodness of fit° between the content or message versus what you knew already. When you use a directory, you know the alphabet and the name to look up, and you want to access the phone number or, less often, the address; or, if several people share the name, you need to know the address to get the number. Our culture believes that people’s names are more important, distinctive, and memorable than their telephone numbers, and that their addresses rank in between. Numbers are highly informative only in the sparse technical sense that you can’t predict them from common sense or guess the rest of a number by knowing some of the digits, as you can often do with a word by knowing some of the letters, e.g., when you read exam papers by students with vile handwriting.
49. You apply the principle of situationality by connecting the text-event to the situation wherein it occurs. You consult directories when your plans and goals require data for establishing interpersonal contacts. If no directory is at hand or a number has changed, ‘Directory Assistance’ can give you the number but may refuse to give other data such as the address, which might be abused for making unwelcome visits to sell commodities; this restriction applies in the U.S. and the U.K., but not, say, in Denmark and Finland.
50. Of course, the wider situation for using directories includes the conversation when the call is actually made. Here, situationality governs the discourse strategies for choosing openings, closings, topics, and so on, as compared to face-to-face communication (cf. IV.57ff). A listed number enables public contact, whereas an unlisted one enables only private contact, e.g., to thwart sellers who make unsolicited sales calls to strangers, or, more ominously, abusive male callers to women . Many listings for women now replace first names indicating gender with initials — a cosmetic, mechanical solution that does nothing to solve the problem the pervasive ‘genderist’ stereotyping of women as objects of abuse, both in action and in discourse (cf. VIII.73ff).
51. Finally, you apply the principle of intertextuality by connecting the current occasion of producing or receiving the text up to your prior experience with other texts, especially ones of the same °text type and discourse domain° (cf. V.B). Using a directory is simple enough if you know the cultural conventions, which are similar in most countries with telephone services, though alphabets may vary (e.g. Ukrainian, Arabic) or a non-alphabetic script may be used (e.g. Chinese hànzì or kanji). You will not interchange text types by trying to read a directory as a genealogy of an enormous family, or as a dramatis personae of a play with a disconcertingly large cast of nondescript characters.
52. These seven °principles of textuality° — cohesion, coherence, intentionality, acceptability, informativity, situationality, and intertextuality — demonstrate how richly every text is °connected to your knowledge of world and society°, even a telephone directory. Since the appearance of the Introduction to Text Linguistics in 1981, which used these principles as its framework, we need to emphasize that they designate the major modes of connectedness and not (as some studies assumed) the linguistic features of text-artifacts nor the borderline between ‘texts’ versus ‘non-texts’ (cf. II.106ff, 110). The principles apply wherever an artifact is °textualized°, even if someone judges the results ‘incoherent’, ‘unintentional’, ‘unacceptable’, and so on. Such judgements indicate that the text is not appropriate (suitable to the occasion), or efficient (easy to handle), or effective (helpful for the goal) (I.21); but it is still a text. Usually, disturbances or irregularities are discounted or at worst construed as signals of spontaneity, stress, overload, ignorance, and so on, and not as a loss or a denial of textuality.
53. Like any other set of principles in a science, textuality must be justified by the insights it provides. It must be broad enough to cover all types of texts, e.g., a beets label and a telephone directory, which would extend well beyond staid models of communication being a disinterested interchange of literal and true statements about reality (I.32). Yet it should also not be so broad as to flatten out relevant differences, as does the model of a ‘sender encoding a message’ and a ‘receiver decoding’ it, which doesn’t tell where, how, or why the message originated, how the ‘coding’ gets done, or how certain options got selected over others; it just suggests a simple mechanical transaction of interchanging symbols the way you’d put a finished English text into Morse code (III.108; V.96; VII.209). And finally, it must be capable of °enrichment to accommodate our own cognitive and social goals°, e.g., to assemble knowledge about texts in order to support progressive discourse strategies. We enrich by stating more specific and diversified °constraints°, e.g., by relating a set of lexical choices to people’s beliefs about what is true or their attitudes about what is good or bad. In contrast, the ‘true statement’ model and the ‘encoding’ model °rarefy and make sparse° by stating only general and uniform constraints, e.g., that truth is always decidable or that all the various linguistic, cognitive and social activities of the speaker are so many instances of ‘encoding’. Our principles of textuality should help us °make multiple connections° both within a text and between the text and the human contexts in which it occurs; and to determine which connections are relevant.
54. Let’s try another easy-going demonstration, this time with the ‘Yellow Pages’ of a telephone directory. This text type is intended to be a listing of professionals or businesses offering the goods or services that your culture believes to be marketable and evaluates as desirable, but within the constraints of public discourse. In the U.S., sexual services won’t be listed under ‘Sex for Sale’, but you can try ‘Massage Parlors’ or ‘Escort Services’; and (even if you are a speaker of British English) you won’t be misled when a listing for a gardening shop (in the 1985 Daytona Beach Yellow Pages) offers
[3] High Quality Sods for Every Need!
Also, you expect a listing for ‘Garbage Removal’ but not ‘Fat Removal’ (try ‘Health Clubs’) nor ‘Blemish Removal’ (try ‘Cosmetic Surgery’). In our culture, people will admit having garbage much more readily than having an unsightly appearance.
55. Cultural beliefs and attitudes richly constrain even our two most ‘linguistic’ principles of textuality, cohesion and coherence. When you read the page headers in the Yellow Pages, which juxtapose the opening word of the first and last entries — e.g., on the page going from ‘Social Service Organizations’ to ‘Sods & Sodding Services’ the header runs ‘Social - Sods’ — you suspend your inclination to ‘give coherent significance to juxtaposed words’ (Sapir) (cf. I.44). You won’t take such headings as these to be offering weird goods and services (Gainesville and Daytona Beach Yellow Pages, and Jerusalem Golden Pages):
[4] Landscape - Laundries
[5] Kitchen - Lawyers
[6] Shock - Shoes
[7] Tire - Toilets
Our beliefs and attitudes constrain what is plausible from among what is merely possible. ‘Landscape laundries’ might wash away industrial pollution. ‘Kitchen lawyers’ in Jerusalem might give advice on the food laws observed by the Orthodox. ‘Shock shoes’ might insulate the wearer’s feet against static electricity. ‘Toilets’ with old ‘tires’ for seats might be the latest trend in recycling. It’s easy to say you do not believe any of this, but hard to say exactly why not: world knowledge is simple to apply in practice but complicated to capture in a precise model or theory (cf. I.34-37, 41; II.67, 75; III.1, 86f; IV.157; V.48).
56. We’re back again to the difficult question of how and how far people process a discourse in similar ways (I.36f). The °consensus° about what ordinary texts ‘mean ’, what the producer ‘intended’, and so on, is a commonplace social practice with few empirical theories to account for it so far. Cultural systems of beliefs and attitudes constrain what you think or say but scarcely enter your conscious awareness until you encounter a contrasting culture (VIII.4). In the U.S., you take it for granted that your name signifies your public and legal identity, your ‘last name’ being inherited from your family and your ‘first name’ chosen for you from a large, open list and replaceable in many social contexts by a ‘nickname’ of your own choice. In contrast, in the villages on the island of Bali studied in the late 1950s by Clifford and Hildred Geertz, personal names were ‘ritually bestowed 105 days after birth’, were made from ‘arbitrarily coined nonsense syllables’, ‘did not indicate familial connections’, and were unique ‘within a single community’; most surprising of all, their use was ‘religiously avoided’. Children were addressed with ‘birth-order names’ of ‘Wayan for the first child, Njoman for the second, Made (or Nengah) for the third, and Ktut for the fourth, restarting the cycle with Wayan for the fifth’. When people grew up and had their first child, they were given ‘teknonyms’ like Mother-of-Pula’ or ‘Father-of-Regreg’, the only prominent use of personal names; this continued (no matter whether ‘the child died, even in infancy’ or how many other children came later) until the first grandchild arrived, whereupon names were changed to ‘Grandmother-of’ or ‘Grandfather-of’; ‘and a similar transition occurred if they lived to see their first great-grandchild’. For the Geertzes, this ‘teknonymy underscores both the importance of the marital pair in local society and the enormous value which is placed on procreation’. ‘An individual is not perceived in the context of who his ancestors were (that, given the cultural veil that slips over the dead, is not even known)’ but ‘of whom he is ancestor to’. The total system ‘depicts the spiritual’ and ‘structural relations and co-existing generations, not the location of successive generations in an unrepeating historical process’.
57. Such striking intercultural contrasts abruptly highlight the saturation of ‘obvious’ texts with cultural beliefs and attitudes, even when, as for personal names, you imagine that they don’t ‘mean’ anything special. In the U.S., the naming system is °patriarchal° in asserting the prerogatives of the father to ‘carry on his name’ which, until recently, the wife had to assume; and when the father was not known or acknowledged, the mother got disgraced and the child got declared ‘illegitimate’ (as if unauthorized to exist). In the Balinese naming system, disgrace came rather from being childless, which made you ‘socially marginal in general’.
58. Evidently, even minimal texts like people’s names and sparse text types like telephone directories represent communicative events with rich cultural significances (tips of icebergs, I.34). Belonging to the culture enables you to process texts efficiently without conscious awareness of your activities and choices (I.37, 41). But you pay the price for this efficiency by adopting and reproducing a network of °discourse practices° including °ecologically unsound° ones you ought to transform (III.97), e.g., when women internalize the patriarchal discourse of ‘housewife’ and ‘motherhood’ along with expressions like ‘head of household’ and ‘legitimacy’ when they ought to develop an °ecologist discourse° of equality in human rights (VIII.64, 74, 98).
59. °Communicative competence°, a notion established by ethnographers like Dell Hymes, is best viewed not as knowledge of a static system of ‘rules’ but as an open and dynamic potential that can always be enhanced. On the plane of daily routines, people are trivially ‘competent’ in the sense that they can and do interact and participate in discourse, and can handle some complicated issues they certainly couldn’t explain, such as multi-functional prepositions or the mutual ordering of adjectives before a noun (IV.7, 142). But above that plane, people are ‘competent ’ in widely differing degrees and may encounter severe limits on their °freedom to access knowledge and pursue social goals° — not just because they don’t understand talk but also because they understand talk too easily in the ways their culture prescribes (cf. I.37; II.5; III.97f). They readily construct meanings that are °adaptive for the people in power, but maladaptive for themselves°, e.g., when they use the term ‘culture’ in a narrow exclusive meaning that obtusely suggests they themselves have no culture (cf. VIII.4).
60. So a °critical science of text and discourse ° can explore ‘communicative competence’ not merely as an abstract, stable source of consensus and efficiency, but as a concrete, fluctuating network of °discourse strategies° for unifying or dividing, for fostering solidarity or power, for constructing adaptive or maladaptive meanings, for sharing or monopolizing control. A map of these strategies is indispensable for an °ecologist program° to develop measuresfor realizing significantly more of the potential of discourse to °enhance human equality° and to support °free access to knowledge and society° (I.1, 33).
Commentary to I.A (I.1-5)
(To conserve space, the symbol ¶ serves to separate the Commentaries by number paragraphs. Material cited from the main text is placed in »pointy double quotes«.)
¶ I.1 »social progress«: see also II.2, 130, 132f; III.3; VII.12, 18, 28, 344; VIII.65, 118 »discourse is the central modality«: see also III.108, 216, 218; IV.163; VII.97, 115, 195, 288, 291; VIII.118, 131, 167. On the various »trade-offs« in cognitive and communicative processes or in models of these, see also I.22, 38; II.12, 58, 65, 75; III.36-41, 46, 149, 153, 164, 172, 179, 195, 198, 213.10, 239; IV.203; V.47, 63, 94; VI.26; VII.22, 84, 96, 219; VIII.113, 121f, 127, and Note to III.213ff. ¶ I.2 The concept of »classical science« will be explored in Ch. III; see Note to III.11 for passage citations. »crises«: see Notes to II.133 and VII.162. The terms »Center« and »Periphery« are used by sources like Galtung (1971) and Phillipson (1991) to avoid the overtones of terms like ‘first world’ and ‘third world’ and to suggest the inward flow of wealth and resources; but contrast Amin’s (1990) vision of a ‘polycentric world’. ¶ I.3 »Paradoxes« often arise in respect to cognition and communication in society, chiefly when people adapt to conflicting goals or changing situations; compare I.24; II.4, 27, 41, 88, 113, 117f, 122; III.3, 7, 14, 19, 22, 31, 44, 97, 155f, 172, 195; IV.1, 177; V.16.5, 50, 85; VI.77; VII.22, 39, 63, 66, 82, 147, 150; VIII.45, and Note to III.14. »scientism«: see also III.1, 11, 30, 68, 148; VII.35, 49, 52, 63, 115; VIII.45, 74, 137. »anti-intellectualism«: see III.148, 185; VII.32, 42-45, 51ff; VIII.137. ¶ I.4 »technical constructions«: see Note to II.27. On diverse »failures to make connections«, see also I.12; II.59, 61, 86; III.2, 97; V.94; VII.9, 22, 37, 216, 289; VIII.16, 20, 29, 72, 114(e), 129, 140, 154f. ¶ I.5 »transdisciplinary«: see II.2, 55, 89, 102ff, 112f, 132f; III.2f, 68, 145, 154, 181, 187, 199, 248, 257; IV.9; V.85, 89; VII.36, 55, 71, 118f, 129, 189, 221, 335; VIII.3, 81, 97. »dialectic between theory and practice«: cf. II.55, 80, 112; III.146, 148, 182; V.70; and compare Note to I.37 on »dialectics«.
Commentary to I.B (I.6-33)
¶ I.6 Perhaps »using pairs of the symbol ‘°’« will be less obtrusive, especially for longer passages, than the UPPER CASE which bothered some reviewers of my previous volumes (1980, 1984a). On problems of getting »theory« and »practice« to correspond, already cited by Immanuel Kant (1793), see I.10, 39, 55; II.5, 17, 24, 27, 41, 47, 54, 58, 66f, 92, 99; III.3, 72, 128, 166; IV.167, 233; V.13ff, 40, 48, 71f, 80, 96f; VI.1, 3, 62; VII.4f, 13, 17ff, 30, 40, 55f, 62, 77ff, 81, 85, 87, 93, 99, 118, 125, 129, 131f, 134, 165, 167, 169, 176f, 180, 182, 211, 234, 291, 299, 321, 323f, 330, 333f, 336; VIII.15, 60, 66, 72, 74 107(f); on the ‘poverty of theory’, see E.P. Thompson (1995). »inclusive theory vs. exclusive practice«: see also I.7f, 10, 15; II.27, 41; III.3, 10, 215; IV.167; V.90, 97; VII.4f, 13, 18ff, 40, 56, 62, 79, 81, 85, 159, 165, 167, 169, 211, 234, 291; VIII.60, 66, 72, 74. ¶ I.8 On »consumerism«, see also I.9-16, 29, 32; II.104, 133; III.2, 100; IV.50, 234f, 238, 244, 252; V.3, 52; VII.10, 22, 24, 29, 46, 80; VIII.34, 37, 56, 65. »ecologism«: see also I.12, 32f, 58, 60; II.2, 104, 128, 130, 132; III.2f, 15, 97, 145, 186, 257; V.47, 95; VI.41; VII.7, 16, 22, 36, 38, 46, 54, 118, 343f; VIII.43, 45, 74, 124. This »ideology« presumably had its forerunners in some ‘pre-modern’ societies insofar as they did not practice unsustainable methods, but it would not have been a programmatic counter-ideology as it is today. »exclusively for you«: see Marcuse (1964). ¶ I.9 »Economic growth«: see also I.9-12, 14, 29; V.43; VI.13, 75; VII.10, 18, 29f, 34, 49f, 53, 101, 294; VIII.27, 38, 49, 52f, 55, 57, 73. »growthism«: M.A.K. Halliday (1994b: 34). ¶ I.11 »showcase sectors«: see also I.10; VI.75; VII.18, 28, 49, 101; VIII.52, 78. »free market«: see also I.7, 12; III.3; VII.4, 18, 30, 35, 43, 80, 107, 167, 209; VIII.44, 48f, 54f, 63, 77. ¶ I.12 »discourse of advertising«: see also I.13-17, 25, 28; III.230; IV.52, 90, 96, 234-52; V.3, 52, 75; VII.10, 338; VIII.37, 58, 73, and Note to I.17. For Berger & Luckman (1967:106), »reification« is ‘the apprehension of human phenomena as if they were things’. »fantasy«: see also I.23, 28; III.235, 244; V.52; VII.10, 296; VIII.62; and compare Vestergaard & Schrøder (1985:120): ‘advertising thus becomes a magic mirror in which’ we can ‘discern a widespread popular discontent with everyday life and with the opportunities provided by the society in which we live’. ¶ I.13 »commodified«: see also I.14f; IV.50, 242, 244f; VII.27, 29, 88; VIII.31, 67. ¶ I.16 Aside from standing noun collocations like ‘discourse episode’, ‘discourse practices’, ‘discourse processing’, and ‘discourse strategies’, I shall use the modifier »discoursal« rather than ‘discursive’, whose other uses may be distracting. ¶ I.16 »gratification fantasy«: see also III.248; VII.10; VIII.135, 154. ¶ I.17 I encountered the »dialectic« between »virtual« and »actual systems« for language in the work of Peter Hartmann (1963a; cf. Beaugrande 1980); compare also I.35, 37f; II.102, 106f, 112; III.63, 71, 114, 136, 182, 255; IV.9, 21, 29; V.1ff, 16.5, 46, 71, 73, 90; VI.1; VII.102, 140, 291f; VIII.6. multi-system«: see also I.34; II.44, 81; III.72, 220. These »contributing economies« correspond only roughly to the ‘levels’ in conventional linguistics (cf. II.30, 59-63, 73, 75, 79f, 102), interpreted more dynamically as systems in actual use rather than standing repertories of possible choices. »usual in advertising texts«: but mystification can also be assisted by not making the commodity the text topic but merely displaying it; compare the tequila ad [582] in IV.52. »Sentence Subject«: the grammatical terms used in this book (rather than merely cited from other sources) are placed in upper case to identify them and to distinguish them from ones that may look the same, e.g., the »Subject« and Object of a Sentence versus the perceiving ‘subject’ and perceived ‘object’ in cognition. A functional lexicogrammar with a linguistic, cognitive, and social orientation is expounded in IV.B. ¶ I.19 »lexicogrammar« has been an established term in systemic functional approaches (e.g. M.A.K. Halliday 1985, 1994a; Matthiessen 1995), and will be elaborated mainly in Ch. IV. »Markedness« has been most influentially treated by M.A.K. Halliday (e.g. 1985, 1994a); see also Merlini Barbaresi (1988). »change«, »contrast«, »comparing text with text«: cf. I.31f; II.25(2); III.240; IV.17, 39, 62, 82, 101, 135f, 175f; V.14ff, 20-37, 52, 82; VI.15, 36, 73, 78, 84-101. ¶ I.20 »Active Process Verbs« express a ‘Process’, like ‘doing to’, initiated by an Agent and directed to a ‘Target’ (see IV.B on these terms). »Pro-Nouns«: the spelling is parallel to the ‘Pro-Verb’ in Ch. IV, since ‘proverb’ could be misleading. ¶ I.21 »foreground«: these »strategies« relate to the ‘functional sentence perspective’ described in IV.214-18. ¶ I.25f »Webster’s« Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary (1963:739, 751, 160, 943, 889, 461). ¶ I.28 On »deskilling« people, see Note to VII.22. ¶ I.30 On a »critical science of text and discourse«, see also I.32f, 41, 60; II.130; IV.230; V.97, 101, 119, 121; VII.36, 54, 82, 168f, 299; VIII.23, 29, 41, 46f. On the project known as ‘critical linguistics’, or, more recently, ‘critical discourse analysis’, sources include Bürger (1973); Mey (1979[1974]), who first used the term; Fowler, Hodge, Kress, & Trew (1979); T. Pateman (1981); Chilton (1985); K. Richardson (1987); Pfeiffer, Strouhal, & Wodak (1987); Thibault (1989); Wodak, Menz, & Lalouschek (1989); Kress (1991); Threadgold (1991); van Dijk (ed.) (1992). Ruth Wodak’s active group in Vienna illustrates the full breadth of research, including medical interviews (Hein & Wodak 1987; Menz 1991), therapy group sessions (Wodak 1986), gender equality (Wodak, Moosmüller, Feistritzer, & Doleschal 1987), information access (Lutz & Wodak 1987), and social power structures (Wodak [ed.] 1989; Wodak, De Cillia, Blüml, & Andraschko 1989; Wodak, Menz, Lutz, & Gruber 1985). On »demystifying«: see also I.32; II.5, 128f, 131; III.250; IV.52; VII.36; VIII.16, 19, 29, 66, 98, 134. ¶ I.32 »literal and true statement about reality«: see also I.46; II.10, 53, 94, 119; III.7, 12, 24, 142, 257; V.40, 58, 76, 120; VI.80; VII.115; VIII.3, 23, 45, 97, 131, and Note to II.50. ¶ I.33 »ecological validity« was made current by Ulrich Neisser, whose work (1967, 1976) gave a major impetus to cognitive psychology; see also Bronfenbrenner’s (1977:517) ‘experi-mental ecology’, which ‘investigates the progressive accommodation between the growing human organism and its environment through a systematic contrast between two or more environmental systems’; and compare II.133; III.192(c), 257; V.47
Commentary to I.C (I.34-60)
¶ I.34 On °connectionism°, see Note to I.102. »multifunctional«: compare II.48; III.91, 111, 196, 203; IV.5, 13, 154, 221; VI.20; VII.5; VIII.23. »frozen«: see Notes to III.53 on ‘frozen accidents’, and to II.47 on ‘frozen islands’ and on ‘freezing the whole system’. ¶ I.37 »tuned«: on tuning, see also II.78; III.102, 106f, 140, 185, 234, 238, 256; V.11; VII.116. On various »dialectics«, see also I.38-44; II.79, 106, 112, 117, 128; III.8, 18, 20f, 63, 69, 71, 84ff, 90, 114, 136, 146, 148, 156, 158, 165, 182, 187, 199, 254f; IV.41; V.3, 16.5, 16.7, 45, 90, 108; VI.13; VII.3, 102, 112, 190, 221, 290f; VIII.6, 41, and Note to I.16. »currently active version«: see also II.47; III.114, 220, 238, 251, 252, 255; V.3, 5f, 12, 46, 90; VI.67; VII.140. ¶ I.38 »frozen accidents« and »self-organizing«: see Notes to III.53. ¶ I.39 On various »dichotomies« and the problems they can cause, see also II.24, 32, 40, 80, 84, 107, 112, 114; III.17f, 84, 107, 146, 182, 196, 244, 253; IV.42, 72, 96, 129, 174; V.1, 11; VI.35, 66; VII.22; VIII.43, 114; On »order from chaos«, see Note to III.44. ¶ I.41 On the »connectedness« of texts, see Petöfi & Sözer (eds.) (1983); Conte (ed.) (1989); Conte et al. (eds.) (1989a). On »reifying the text«, see also II.4, 128; III.23. »text does not exist«: compare C.S. Peirce (1965:II, 307): ‘nothing is a sign unless it is interpreted as a sign’. ¶ I.42 In a »sparse« domain, constraints are few and general; in a »rich« domain, constraints are many and specific (III.31). ts are few and general; in a »rich« domain, constraints are many and specific (III.31). ¶ I.44 Sapir (1921:62). ¶ I.48 »information«: compare the routine definition ‘knowledge communicated concerning some particular fact, subject or event; that of which one is apprised or told’ (Bartoli 1988:115). I shall use instead the term data as the top category for all knowledge, meaning, significance, content, and so on. ¶ I.53 On »enriching« a model, see Note to III.54. ¶ I.56 C. Geertz & H. Geertz (1964), reprinted in C. Geertz (1973:369ff, 375ff, 379). ¶ I.58 »you pay for this efficiency«: cf. III.15, 33, 97. ¶ I.59 Hymes (1964, 1972) was expressly opposing the abstract »competence« of ‘generative’ linguistics (cf. Note to II.40); see also Habermas, (1971b, 1981); Gumperz (1981). On »adaptive« vs. »maladaptive meanings«, see Notes to III.81, 83.
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