A
New Introduction
To
The Study
Of Text And Discourse
Discursivism and Ecologism
0.A.
Preview: Inclusion for insiders, exclusion for outsiders
1
0.B.
A ‘New Introduction’?
0.C.
Laying out the text
I.A.
Theory and practice in society
I.B.
Language and discourse as theory and practice
I.C.
Theory and practice in ‘modern education’
I.D.
Theory and practice in ‘modern science’
Notes
II.
Theory and Practice in Studies of Language
II.A.
Prescriptive studies of language
II.B.
Descriptive studies of language: philology
II.C.
Descriptive studies of language: linguistics
II.D.
Generative studies of language
II.E.
Functional studies of language
II.F.
Discursive studies of language
II.F.1.
Discursive studies in text linguistics
II.F.2.
Discursive studies in discourse analysis
II.F.3.
Discursive studies in corpus linguistics
II.G.
Deconstructivist studies of language
II.H.
Theory and practice in the language department
Notes
III.
Lexicogrammar in the Study of Text and Discourse
III.A.
Grammar, Lexicon, Lexicogrammar
III.B.
A Lexicogrammar of Processes
III.B.1.
Outer Processes
III.B.2.
Inner Processes
III.C.
A Lexicogrammatical of Parameters
Notes
IV.
Prosody in the Study of Text and Discourse
IV.A. The spontaneity of real conversation
IV.B.
Stresses and Tone Groups
IV.C.
Prosody and Grammar in Clause Types
IV.C.1.
The Declarative Clause Type for Statements
IV.C.2.
The Interrogative Clause for Questions
IV.C.3.
The Exclamatory Clause Type for Exclamations
IV.C.4.
The Imperative Clause for Commands
IV.D.
Minor Clause Types
IV.D.1.
Dependent Clauses
IV.D.2.
Non-Finite Clauses
IV.E.
Non-Clauses
Notes
V.
Visuality in the Study of Text and Discourse
V.A.
Visuality in theory and practice
V.B.
Mental
imagery
V.C.
Personal images
V.D.
Facial expressions and gestures
V.E.
Emotional displays
V.F.
The Visuality of the Text as artefact
V.H.
Punctuation in Grammar, Prosody and Visuality
Notes
VI.
Style in the Study of Text and Discourse
VI.A.
Theory and practice again
VI.B.
Ancient studies of style
VI.C.
Modern studies of style
VI.D.
Stylistic Parameters
VI.E.
Manipulating styles
VI.F.
Analysing a text
Notes
VII.
Discursive Themes of Social Division
VII.A.
Tracking social discourse
VII.B.
Modes of speaking 1: Strategies for inclusion and exclusion
VII.C.
Modes of speaking 2: Strategies for displacement
VII.D.
Discourse and Counter-Discourse 1: The ‘New Racism’
VII.E.
Discourse and counter-discourse 2: Worker safety
VII.F.
Discourse and counter-discourse 3: Consumer health
VII.G.
Discourse and counter-discourse 4: Environmentalism
VII.H
Discourse and counter-discourse 5: Civil asset forfeiture
VII.I
Discourse
and counter-discourse 6: ‘American interests’
VII.J
Discourse and counter-discourse 7:
The ‘Patriot Acts’
Notes
VIII. The Standards of Textuality Revisited
VIII.A
The Standards in theory and practice
VIII.B
Discursive diversity: Seven standards in seven samples
VIII.C.
Close-Up: Shopping as an ‘Art Form’
Notes
IX. A Final Word
Notes
News Sources
0.A.
Preview: Inclusion for insiders, exclusion for outsiders
1.
When I first went to South Africa, I was startled by a hand-written sign-board
posted along the roadway near Soweto, whose name stands for ‘South West
Townships’, a sprawling conglomerate outside Johannesburg:
[1]
STOP NONSENSE FREE ESTIMATES
I was stumped. My jet-lagged mind imagined first a weird offer to give ‘free estimates’ for the costs of ‘stopping nonsense’ from being uttered in intolerable profusion, no doubt a welcome service in the upcoming election campaigns; and then, even weirder, an offer to ‘stop’ producing ‘estimates’ that are ‘nonsense-free’ by inserting the usual gobbledygook of legal discourse (VI.31; VII.8). In a lower corner, the signboard named a maker of cement and bricks, which flummoxed me all the more. I had sinister imaginings of nonsense-talkers getting encased in concrete or getting their mouths bricked shut, which seemed a trifle drastic.
2. I was later enlightened
by residents of Soweto. A ‘township’ is an ‘informal settlement’ (the
official term in the ‘New South Africa’) jerry-built by migrant labourers
who were compelled by the byzantine ‘Area Acts’ (in the old South Africa) to
live far from their workplaces. Many neighbourhoods are horrendously
noisy and crowded, and in desperation a family builds a wall to shut out the
commotion. This construction bears the wryly whimsical name of ‘stop nonsense
wall’ — to a cultural outsider
a meaningless term, but to an insider a poignant icon in the grinding struggle
amid racism and poverty — two violent reductions of human potential
entrapped in a vicious cycle (cf. I.38).
3.
On the campus of the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica, I beheld
this sign by the road:
[2]
SLEEPING POLICEMAN
Stumped
again! I imagined a constable who dozed on the job so unremittingly the
authorities posted a sign to shame him, but that too seemed a trifle drastic. I
was swiftly ‘enlightened’, in the manner of Zen, when my head struck the top
of my tiny rental car. The sign was announcing what I had known in the US as a
‘speed bump’ laid across the roadway to slow down drivers who just ignore
signs announcing a ‘speed limit’. (In Brazil, we call them honestly
‘spring breakers’.)
4.
On a waterfront shop in Alexandria, Egypt, I espied this signboard:
[3]
EGYPTIAN ANTICS
Now
I imagined Egyptians performing those wondrously limber postures pictured on the
walls of the pharaohs’ temples, where the legs and head are moving off to one
side and the shoulders out toward the front, while the face (in profile)
exhibits a wide-eyed smirk strongly at odds with the bodily cramps such eternal
contortions should occasion. But this time I knew a better explanation: a simple
misprint for ‘antiques’, which serve as icons of Egyptian culture for many
outsiders.
5.
Three signs showing three brief texts. Taken in total isolation, perhaps absurd.
But texts are rarely isolated. They are produced and received in context by
cultural insiders so easily as to suggest a circular paradox: you use the text
to process the context while using the context to process the text, as if you
could know in advance what is being said. But in fact, the two processes run in
a dialectical cycle, each side informing and guiding the other (I.1).
This cycle is fundamental to human action and interaction, especially for
language and discourse (section I.B).
6.
Even viewing the three signs from outside these cultures, I knew enough to
reject the meanings fabricated by my barmy imagination. Having been a wandering
outsider nearly all my adult life has instilled a deep respect for the skills of
insiders in their brisk ordinary understanding. Yet those years have also
instilled a deep perplexity at the disturbing failure of insiders to understand
outsiders. And, in the public sphere, those same years have witnessed a striking
increase in world-wide contacts and conflicts between insiders and outsiders.
7.
Undoubtedly, our future well-being vitally demands a mode of understanding that
supports humane and democratic co-existence among insiders and outsiders in a
‘post-modern’ world of cultural and linguistic diversity. Such is the agenda
we might call ecologism, promoting active co-operation in a spirit of
genuine respect for each other and for our widest social and ecological
environment (I.10). Above all, ecologism enlists text and discourse for
promoting the freedom of access to knowledge and society (I.76; II.111,
134, 179). To this end, we can examine the prevailing strategies of discourse
and the problems they entail; and pursue alternative ‘ecologist’ strategies
such as ‘critical rewriting’.
8.
Ecologism can be productively
supported by the approach I propose to call discursivism, practicing engagements
between our own texts or discourses and others selected for their social
relevance (II.114). Our goal is not to achieve completeness, but to work
out some non-trivial and non-obvious aspects that advance our ecologist
agenda of understanding and enhancing human communication. Discursivism is thus
an explicit enterprise for producing discourse about discourse and staging an
interplay of discursive positions. In this Introduction, the role of the
author is accordingly reshaped as an integrator of diverse discourses which
interact both as theory, e.g., expounding motives for or against
ecologism, and as practice, e.g., adducing discursive positions for or
against ecologism.
9.
Ecologism is a challenging
agenda, but surely not unattainable, for some have mastered it, though perhaps
not consciously — philosophers, scientists, artists, mystics, saints, mostly
striving against the grain of the times. And the agenda is too urgent to leave
untried. This new century, if not already the generation reaching maturity
today, may well face the final decision between inclusion and exclusion — and
between democracy and tyranny, between people power and money power. Unless we
can renew our sense of a common humanity in the twenty-first century, we are
doomed to relive and intensify the spiralling confrontations of the twentieth.
0.B
A‘New Introduction’?
10.
Before proceeding, I would point out that this book is by no means a ‘new
edition’ with cosmetic updates and expanded ‘References’; instead, this Introduc-tion
differs from the old Introduction to Text
Linguistics of 1981 more than resembles it, though the two books share the
programmatic concern for authentic and interesting examples and an openness for
new issues. Moreover, this book is a more programmatic project for re-inventing
the voice of the author, furthering the shift away from the static, faceless,
and power-based authority of ‘monological’ academic writing over to a
dynamic, personal, and solidarity-based participant in dialogical engagements
with a multiplicity of alternative voices.
11.
Such a New Introduction must be largely exploratory. I am not
‘introducing’ a long-established field in academic language and linguistics
programmes, such as ‘syntax’ or ‘semantics’, though I shall briefly
assess each of these. Nor am I ‘intro-ducing’ the more recently established
fields of ‘text linguistics’ and ‘discourse analysis’, which by now are
amply ‘introduced’, though I shall earnestly engage with their concerns.
What I do propose to ‘introduce’ is an ‘ecologist’ agenda for a
‘discursivist’ approach to the ‘study of text and discourse’, a field
that accords sustained critical attention to a wide range of real data, guided
by systematic strategies of exploration and explanation. Perhaps the broader
label Study in the new title may lighten the self-conscious perplexities
inhering in the status of ‘science’ or in the boundaries of
‘linguistics’.
12. The shift in emphasis reacts to dramatic trends in official and international discourse of the last two decades, when operative mantras like ‘globalisation’, ‘privatisation’, ‘rationalisation’, or ‘structural adjustment’ promise ‘a better life for all’ but deliver it only to a powerful few. In the new millennium, the world is so sharply polarised between insiders and outsiders that we simply must declare where we stand. A leading mandate for the ‘study’ advocated here would be to engage with discourses of power and to produce ‘counter-discourses’ of solidarity.
13.
Such an Introduction would be unproductive, indeed self-contradictory,
unless its own presentation pursues ‘ecologist’ strategies of discourse for
freedom of access. This latter concept is so vital to my whole project expounded
here that I decided to withdraw the finished book (already in final proofs) from
a highly reputable contracted publisher who wanted to make a pricey hardcover
(the contract had expressly said paperback!) and am literally giving it
away for ‘free’! I hope to see a similar altruism among other colleagues
whose published books would cost too much for most of the people whose social
and economic disempowerment the ‘critical analysis’ is intended to
deconstruct.
14.
On the ‘stylistic’ side’, by the same reasoning, my own discourse must
remain clear and accessible even when the issues grow complex or controversial.
My central terms and ideas should be conscientiously explained, easily
understood, and consistently applied (like ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ in
I.11), and should suggest how the diverse issues and problems might be
approached with unifying strategies. Meanwhile, the agenda of ecologism remains
‘work in progress’, where ‘progress’ is now straightforwardly re-defined
as a movement toward inclusion and equality (I.10). In parallel, discourse
itself is ‘work in progress’ in the dual senses that its essence is to seek
inclusion and that it can always be rendered more inclusive (clearer, more
accessible, more user-friendly, etc.) (I.39). Any doubts I may have had about
this parallel have melted away during the protracted reworking of the present
volume.
15.
My terms have been carefully and systematically chosen and defined to establish
their essential cores and clear away discursive vagaries and historical baggage,
notably for social and political terms like ‘power’ and ‘solidarity’, or
‘left-wing’ and ‘right-wing’. Handled this way, such terms can do more
to refine our awareness of essential issues than any ponderous jargon or brittle
neologisms.
16.
For easy recognition and reference, my primary terms
appear in bold type when they are introduced and defined. Terms for
language units like ‘Text’ or ‘Utterance’, and linguistic categories
like ‘Subject’ are Capitalised throughout, e.g., to distinguish the
‘Subject’ of a Verb from a ‘subject’ taught in school.
17. The paragraphs are numbered consecutively to make cross-referencing
more exact than page-numbers can; a reference like ‘(cf. I.1)’ means
‘compare what is said in paragraph I.1’; just plain ‘(I.11)’ means ‘as
is also said in paragraph I.11’.
18. Sample texts as data carry consecutive numbers in square brackets;
alterna-tive versions of the same text add lower-case letters, e.g., if [1] is
compared to [1a], [1b], and so on. Footnotes may provide a complete reference;
or, if the full title appears with the sample, merely author and publishing
data. Where just an abbreviated title goes with a sample, the rest can be found
in a key for Sources, e.g. Decline for Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire, or Souls for W.E.B. Du Bois’ Souls of Black Folk, The.
19.
To keep the main text tidy and readable, adjunct material like references and
names of cited authors appears mainly in the Notes
at the end of each chapter, with just a few abbreviations, e.g., ‘NY’ for
‘New York’ (the city) and ‘UP’ for ‘Univer-sity Press’. The quantity
of references has been kept modest, focusing on two types: the fundamental ones
for setting the agenda in some field or subfield, such as Trubetzkoy’s Grundzüge
der Phonologie or Nida’s Morphology;
and the recent and user-friendly ones that could well support the agenda
proposed here, such as Joseph Stiglitz’s Globalization
and its Discontents or Greg Palast’s The Best Democracy Money
Can Buy. Extensive references (1,614, if yer wants to know) can be found in
my New Foundations for a Science of Text and Discourse.
20.
Most data samples were gathered from public sources like news media or popular
novels. I made extensive use of the Internet (marked with the superscript www)
and of large corpora like the British National Corpus (superscript bnc) or
my own British and American Writers Corpus (superscript bawc),
so that data cannot be referenced by page numbers. Since Internet postings like
the Los Angeles Times or the American Civil Liberties Union can be easily
re-accessed with key words in a search engine like AltaVista, I conserved
precious space by listing website addresses (URLs) in the footnotes only in
important instances.
21.
My own spelling and punctuation follow British English. But where relevant for
text samples, I reproduce my original sources, e.g., ‘Sandwitch LeRelax’
(name of a snack stall on the beach in Qinitra, Morocco), or ‘SISTHAM REPERING’
(item on an auto mechanic’s bill in Sinai’a, UAE) (cf. V.36).
22.
I have tried to maintain an easy-going, user-friendly style without fretting
over the prescriptions and proscriptions of purist language guardians about the
split infinitive, ‘hopefully’, ‘and’ or ‘but’ starting a sentence,
etc. etc. (cf. II.15, 19). They would heartily disapprove of ecologism, as I do
of their spurious elitism. I shall indeed argue at various points that much of
the advice handed out by those claiming to defend the English language (or
‘King’s English, ‘standard English’,
‘good usage’, etc.) represents either an callous ignorance or a stubborn
mistrust of authentic usage, and possibly also a patronising disdain for the
everyday conversation of ordinary citizens. The real dangers lie in pompous,
evasive, or deceitful language which is designed to disempower those citizens,
and which may be quite unobjectionable from the standpoint of purism. I shall
present plentiful examples, awarding ‘special attention’ to discourses of
power and exclusion either circulating in mass media or being carefully
repressed (Chs. VII-IX).
23. Converting from a book in final proofs (in WORD) to a internet web folder (in FrontPage) is an incredibly tedious and sometimes infuriating process fraught with unaccountable if not indeed insidious transmutations of fonts, sizes, margins and so on, during which you will exhaust your vocabulary of foul epithets many times over. This book had been craftily formatted because the publisher who contracted it had strong ideas about length, which led to wee type (the same, however, in all of their books), text squeezed in next to graphics, surreptitious font compressions, and so on. Now that I have the leeway, I enlarged the fonts; I switched from Times to Ariel, and from singe space lines to 150; I tried to hunt down all the line-end hyphenations that were now unnecessary. I converted all WORD graphics -- an incredibly primitive and spiteful sub-program which has not been updated for yonks, and which crashes your program if versions differ -- to freely-spaced jpgs, which I tested after uploading to be sure they show up! So the whole thing would be a lot bulkier to print out, but a lot more readable in a purely visual sense on a computer or CD. (The yellow underlining of certain items like 'rental car' in 0.3 with pointers to commercial websites is somehow insidiously triggered by FrontPage; yet I can find nothing in the HTML code to explain or expunge it. Please don't blame me!)
24.
Also, I made a few updatings
in content when I uncovered
major data while the publisher's 'reviewers' were 'looking at' the book, such as those suggesting that 9/11 might conceivably
have been intended by the participating Saudis as a ‘pre-emptive strike’.
Proposals have been advanced for the US to invade Saudi Arabia (e.g. by
Irwin Stelzer of the Hudson
Institute in the Sunday
Times). Editor
and TV talking head Rich Lowry, in the National Review's new Web log,
‘The Corner’, remarked that his mail was showing ‘lots of sentiment’ for
dropping a nuclear bomb on the holy city of Mecca. After all, Lowry pontificated,
'religions have suffered such catastrophic setbacks before’; ‘nuking Mecca
seems extreme, of course, but then again few people would die and it would
send a signal.’* That it would, Ritchie-Boy — the start of World War III, to
be exact — and with Dr Strangeloves like you 'editing' and 'reviewing the nation’, books like
this one almost write themselves, especially those listed in IX.7..
Note
* http://www.nationalreview.com/thecorner/10503547