S

Quotes: (2)

(Enkvist 1981: 109) 'Information dynamics and experiential iconicism ... conspire without being identical. In addition, we cannot discard iconicism as but another manifestation of salience in the usual sense of that term ... Salience is a result of a set of universal psychological principles which people use when translating their experiences into language' .

(Enkvist 1981: 110) 'Salience involves basic strategies of cognition which are reflected in language rather than such text-strategic alternatives whose task it is to illustrate in iconic terms the structure of the world' .

satire

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (1)

Frye 1957

Quotes: (1)

(Frye 1957: 192) 'The four mythoi that we are dealing with, comedy, romance, tragedy, and irony, may now be seen as four aspects of a central unifying myth....conflict is the basis or archetypal theme of romance ...catastrophe ... is the archetypal theme of tragedy....the sense that heroism and effective action are absent, disorganized or foredoomed to defeat, and that confusion and anarchy reign over the world, is the archetypal theme of irony and satire....recognition of a newborn society rising in triumph around a still somewhat mysterious hero and his bride, is the archetypal theme of comedy' .

scene

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (4)

Quotes: (19)

(Burke 1945: 187) 'By utilizing a function of our term agent , we can transform this problem into a solution. Namely: we can say that people interpret natural sequences in terms of cause and effect not because of something in the natural scene requiring this interpretation, but because they are the sort of agents that see things in terms of necessary relations . In this view we do not derive our ideas of cause and effect from experience; all that we can derive from experience is the observation that certain happenings seem likely to follow certain happenings. But our ideas of cause and effect are derived from the nature of the mind' .

(Burke 1945: 179) 'We here sum up briefly a position for which Berkeley argues with considerable thoroughness. One must consult the original if he would do justice to the various steps in the exposition. But whether or not one is convinced by Berkeley's arguments, one must agree that they are statements saying what can be said about "matter" (that is, scene ) when considered in terms of "ideas" (that is, agent )' .

(Burke 1945: 9) 'The logic of the scene-agent ratio has often served as an embarrassment to the naturalistic novelist. He may choose to "indict" some scene (such as bad working conditions under capitalism) by showing that it has a "brutalizing" effect upon the people who are indigenous to this scene. But the scene-agent ratio, if strictly observed here, would require that the "brutalizing" situation contain "brutalized" characters as its dialectical counterpart. And thereby, in his humanitarian zeal to save mankind, the novelist portrays characters which, in being as brutal as their scene, are not worth saving. We could phrase this dilemma in another way: our novelist points up his thesis by too narrow a conception of scene as the motive-force behind his characters; and this restricting of the scene calls in turn for a corresponding restriction upon personality, or role' .

(Burke 1945: 128-9) 'For the featuring of scene , the corresponding philosophic terminology is materialism .
For the featuring of agent , the corresponding terminology is idealism .
For the featuring of agency , the corresponding terminology is pragmatism .
For the featuring of purpose , the corresponding terminology is mysticism .
For the featuring of act , the corresponding terminology is realism .
Nominalism and rationalism increase the kinds of terminology to seven. But since we have used up all our terms, we must account for them indirectly' .

(Burke 1945: 77) 'When "defining by location", one may place the object of one's definition in contexts of varying scope. And our remarks on the scene-act ratio, for instance, suggest that the choice of circumference for the scene in terms of which a given act is to be located will have a corresponding effect upon the interpretation of the act itself. Similarly, the logic of the scene-agent ratio will figure in our definition of the individual, insofar as principles of dramatic consistency are maintained' .

(Burke 1945: 195) 'Since we began our enterprise with all respect for the requirements of empirical science, we have defined knowledge by empirical tests. Knowledge by definition, then, is the knowledge of conditions and relations. It is the knowledge of appearances , the knowledge of objects as they necessarily appear when seen in terms of our human categories (the categories of the mind in general). So, by definition, the transcendent realm of the unconditioned things-in-themselves (the scene that contains the possibilities of freedom) cannot be known . Hence, we must restrict the claims we can make about it. But whereas it can't be known , it can be thought about , for we are now thinking about it' .

(Burke 1945: 9) 'The principles of consistency binding scene, act, and agent also lead to reverse applications. That is, the scene-act ratio either calls for acts in keeping with scenes or scenes in keeping with acts- and similarly with the scene-agent ratio' .

(Burke 1945: xv) 'We shall use five terms as generating principle of our investigation. They are: Act, Scene, Agent, Agency, Purpose. In a rounded statement about motives, you must have some word that names the act (names what took place, in thought or deed), and another that names the scene (the background of the act, the situation in which it occurred); also, you must indicate what person or kind of person ( agent ) performed the act, what means or instruments he used ( agency ), and the purpose . Men may violently disagree about the purposes behind a given act, or about the character of the person who did it, or how he did it, or in what kind of situation he acted; or they may even insist upon totally different words to name the act itself. But be that as it may, any complete statement about motives will offer some kind of answers to these five questions: what was done (act), when or where it was done (scene), who did it (agent), how he did it (agency), and why (purpose)' .

(Burke 1945: 12) 'The maxim, "terrain determines tactics", is a strict localization of the scene-act ratio, with "terrain" as the casuistic equivalent for "scene" in a military calculus of motives, and "tactics" as the corresponding "act"' .

(Burke 1945: 190) 'But look where we now are. We have described intellectual synthesis as "active". Yet what kind of "act" is this? The empirical scene has derived its character from the nature of the agent; but though we have called this action of the mind "spontaneous" and "original", we might just as well have called it "inevitable". It is compulsory , lacking the elements of freedom necessary for action. The mind cannot see otherwise than in terms of the categories. To observe is an act, in that one can choose either to observe it or not to observe it. But to observe in terms of the categories is not an act in this sense, since we must consider it in such terms, whether we choose to observe it or not. Conversely, though the sensibility is "passive", we find space and time called the "forms" of sensibility. And in the tradition from which Western philosophy stems, "form" is the act word par excellence. So the "passive" begins to look as active as the avowedly active' .

(Burke 1945: 189) 'I believe the true mettle of a philosopher is shown in what he can say about nothing. Any tyro can talk about something. But it takes a really profound thinker to say profound things about nothing. And I hasten to admit that my own five terms are all about nothing, since they designate not this scene, or that agent, etc. but scene, agent, etc. in general)' .

(Burke 1945: 210) 'Let us, then, put the matter this way: So far as our dramatistic terminology is concerned, the Marxist philosophy began by grounding agent in scene , but by reason of its poignant concern with the ethical, it requires the systematic featuring of act . On the Symbolic level, it does feature act implicitly but intensely, in having so dramatic a pattern. On the Rhetorical level, its scientist and anti-scholastic vocabulary is needed for purposes of political dynamism (for the use of an ethical terminology would fail to differentiate the doctrine sufficiently from non-secular ways of salvation). But if, as an experiment, you try a systematic development of terms generated from act , the entire system falls quickly into place' .

(Burke 1945: 158) 'I am suggesting that "variability" allows for two quite different meanings, as with the two meanings for "fillability", one referring to a cause ab extra and the other to some internal principle of motion. It stands pliantly at the point where scene overlaps upon agent' .

(Burke 1945: 3) 'It is a principle of drama that the nature of acts and agents should be consistent with the nature of the scene' .

(Burke 1945: 6-7) 'From the motivational point of view, there is implicit in the quality of a scene the quality of the action that is to take place within it. This would be another way of saying that the act will be consistent with the scene. Thus, when the curtain rises to disclose a given stage-set, this stage-set contains, simultaneously, implicitly, all that the narrative is to draw out as a sequence, explicitly. Or, of you will, the stage-set contains the action ambiguously (as regards the norms of action)- and in the course of the play's development this ambiguity is converted into a corresponding articulacy . The proportion would be: scene is to act as implicit is to explicit' .

(Booth 1974: 22) 'The dogmas we turn to now tend to travel together, reinforcing each other to constitute the almost overwhelmingly persuasive worldview of modernism. But it will be useful to think of them as falling into five kinds. There are dogmas about (a) the methods or means for producing change; (b) the nature of the thing being changed- the mind or soul or self or person or organism (though I have talked only of "changing minds", I intend the word mind in the broadest possible sense); (c) the scene of change- the world in which that thing changed, the "mind", finds itself; (d) the principles or basic assumptions about truth and its testing- the ground and nature of change; and (e) the purpose of change. Every effort to change a mind will appear differently depending on our view of what does the changing, what is changed, how it relates to the whole nature of things, whether or in what sense the change is tested or justified in basic principles, and the purpose of the change' .

(Booth 1979: 107) 'He [Burke] in fact rejects more than conventional norms, His dialectic of similarities and differences is so deliberately flexible and so aggressively opposed to neatly fixed meanings that in a sense all literal proof is made suspect. In the opening pages of A Grammar of Motives we find a series of claims that any action or statement can be considered as evidence for or against almost any concept. In defining any substance, for example, we necessarily place it in its context, its scene , which is to define it in terms of what it is not , leading to the "paradox of substance": "every positive is negative". Before we know it, Burke has moved through statements like "any tendency to do something is ...a tendency not to do it" (32) to a series of paradoxes and oxymorons and "ambiguities of substance" that stagger the literal-minded' .

(Booth 1979: 112-3) 'We shall therefore always look, in every human situation, for the elements of drama, the five most obvious being the action itself, the agent doing the action, the agency or means by which he performs it, the scene in which it is performed, and the purpose it is intended to achieve. Sometimes we may want to add others, like time as a distinguishable part of the scene and attitude as a subdivision of agency, but usually the dramatistic pentad will do our job. We shall use these elements, however, not as some use Aristotle's four causes -- unvarying, frozen, literal categories -- but as fluid reagents, applicable in different "ratios" for different problems. What is one agent's action is another agent's scene. A given agent can be of someone else's agency -- a tool to other ends -- or he can be, again, a part of someone's scene' .

(Culler 1992: 216) 'The best way to describe the scene of contemporary theory may not be as a set of competing schools or methods but as discussions of problems or issues that people are striving to cope with or resolve. This has the disadvantage of making criticism seem less quarrelsome than it is, but we too easily assume that theorists disagree because one is a "Marxist" and the other a "psychoanalytic critic." Bypassing these labels forces us to look more closely at the extent to which critics are saying similar things in different vocabularies and the extent to which they genuinely disagree. I take up six issues that seem particularly important' .

schema

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (3)

Spellmeyer 1993

Winograd 1977

Quotes: (5)

(Spellmeyer 1993: 25) 'Implicit in Habermas' schema is the recognition that a disciplinary practice, on the part of either individuals or entire communities, does not make sense in itself and cannot be studies exclusively from an insider's point of view. The purpose of medicine, for example, is not the practice of medicine' .

(Haberlandt and Bingham 1982: 32) 'Anderson [1981] distinguishes between concepts, propositions, and schemata, with the latter including scripts. A concept is the "unanalyzable building block or primitive" of semantic memory.... Propositions are formed by relating concepts through predicates. They are the smallest units of meaning, assertions about the world which can be judged true or false. A schema is a set of related propositions and a script is a stereotyped sequence of propositions involving concepts, namely people or roles, objects or props, and settings. The script was conceived to be a very flexible mechanism' .

(Winograd 1977: 74) 'We can look at schemas as providing a guide for structuring the processes of production and comprehension. In the process of production, a schema ... lists the different parts and properties of a structure which must be decided upon in order to produce it.... In comprehension, the set of stored schemas is actively used in a process of "pattern recognition"' .

(Winograd 1977: 75) 'Psychological experiments ... have demonstrated the ways in which the application of a larger-scale or pragmatically based schema can have strong effects on the way people remember texts' .

(Winograd 1977: 72) 'A schema is a description of a complex object, situation, process, or structure. It is a collection of knowledge related to the concept, not a definition in the formal sense' .

science

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (7)

Quotes: (15)

(Burke 1945: 214-5) 'All told, throughout these pages we have been considering five major aspects of science:
'(1) high development of technological specialization
'(2) involvement with rationale of money (accountancy)
'(3) progressive departure from natural conditions, usually saluted in the name of "naturalism"
'(4) reduction of scenic circumference to empirical limits (the reason why the technological powers that take us farthest from natural conditions have been called "naturalistic")
'(5) stress upon the "problem of knowledge" as the point of departure for philosophic speculation' .

(Burke 1945: 38) Such histories can be imagined in an endless variety of details. What we are suggesting here is that they all embody a grammatical form in accordance with which we should not expect a dualism of motives to be automatically dissolved, as with those apologists of science who believe that in a scientific world ethics become unnecessary. However, to consider these possibilities further, we should move into the areas of Symbolic, involving modes of transubstantiation, rituals of rebirth, whereby the individual identifies himself in terms of the collective motive (an identification by which he both is and is not one with that with which and by which he is identified). At present it is enough to note in a general way how the paradox of the absolute figures grammatically in the dialectic, making for a transcending of none term by its other, and for the reversed ambiguous derivation of the term from its other as ancestral principle' .

(Burke 1945: 195-6) 'To grant that these unknowns can be thought of, however, is further to allow for a very ingenious verbalism. If they can be thought of, of we can employ our intelligence on them, let us call them the "intelligible". Whereupon, lo! whereas empiricism took its start in equating the intelligible with the sensible, the intelligible is now so named precisely because it can't be sensed. Beginning in empiricism, making a line-up that will permit the pursuit of each empirical science in its own terms, we have nonetheless managed to so wangle things that we make allowance for terms beyond the scope of empirical science' .

(Burke 1945: xxiii) 'It is not our purpose to import dialectical and metaphysical concerns into a subject that might otherwise be free of them. On the contrary, we hope to make clear the ways in which dialectical and metaphysical issues necessarily figure in the subject of motivation. Our speculations, as we interpret them, should show that the subject of motivation is a philosophic one, not ultimately to be solved in terms of empirical science' .

(Burke 1945: 56) 'Contemporary scientific theory, in proposing to abandon the categories of substance and causality, has done speculation a good turn. For it has made clear wherein the difference between philosophic and scientific terminologies of motivation resides. Philosophy, like common sense, must think of human motivation dramatistically, in terms of action and its ends. But a science is freed of philosophic taints only insofar as it confines itself to terms of motion and arrested motion (figure, structure). This convention, almost Puritanical in its severity (surely we should not be far wrong in calling it a secularized variant of Puritanism) has brought about such magnification of human powers that any "objection" to it would have about as much force as an attempt to "refute" Niagara Falls. But such results, however spectacular, do not justify an attempt to abide by the same terminological conventions when treating of human motives. For one could confine the study of action within the terms of motion only by resigning oneself to gross misrepresentations of life as we normally experience it. Though we here lay great stress upon the puns and other word play in men's ideas of motivation, we do not thereby conclude that such linguistic tactics are "nothing but" puns and word play' .

(Burke 1945: 195) 'If this realm of the things-in-themselves can be thought though not known , this limitation upon our claims to knowledge about them applies in reverse to science. Science compels us to admit that things-in-themselves can't be known; but in putting them outside the area of scientific knowledge , by the same token we put them outside the area of scientific refutation or denial . The sources of morality thus lie beyond the reach of the terms proper to the physical sciences (which is but another way of saying that, in this terminology, action cannot be reduced to motion)' .

(Burke 1945: 76-7) 'We might sum up the matter thus: Theologically , nature has attributes derived from its origin in an act of God (the Creation), but God is more than nature. Dramatistically , motion involves action, but action is more than motion. Hence theologically and/or dramatistically, nature (in the sense of God's Creation) is to nature (in the sense of naturalistic science) as action is to motion, since God's Creation is an enactment , whereas nature as conceived in terms of naturalistic science is a sheer concatenation of motions. But inasmuch as the theological ration between God (Creator) and Nature (Creation) is the same as the dramatistic ration between action and motion, the pantheistic equating of God and Nature would be paralleled by the equating of action and motion. And since action is a personal principle while motion is an impersonal principle, the pantheistic equation leads into the naturalistic position which reduces personalistic concepts to depersonalized terms' .

(Booth 1974: 66) 'The notion that we have reason to believe only what has been proved, in the sense of withstanding all possible doubts, cannot be lived with by most of us for even a moment. There is nothing shameful in this, unless logic, mathematics, and physical science, which are also based on "unprovable" assumptions, are shameful. Life would be impossible if it were not so' .

(Bove 1990: 55) Canguilhem's 'work showed that the history of systems of thought, of disciplines, and of sciences was not merely the chronology of concepts, ideas, and individual discoveries.... He outlined the history of science as the workings of a number of material practices that make up a society. He traced how some of these practices and sciences extended-- like "vectors", as it were-- throughout a culture, and he showed how they opened new species for new forms of knowledge production' .

(Kinneavy 1971: 24) 'The justification for the autonomy of textual study is the same as the justification for any scientific abstraction: by focusing on one aspect of a reality, science can set up tools for isolated analysis which is possible only within this particular vacuum. Then the object of investigation can be reinserted into the stream of life, more intelligible for its academic isolation.' .

(Kinneavy 1971: 40) Kinneavy maintains that the 'aims overlap just as the modes of discourse. But abstracting them for individual consideration is the necessary limitation of any aspect of science' .

(Geertz 1973: 5) 'The concept of culture I espouse, and whose utility the essays below attempt to demonstrate, is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning' .

(Ijsseling 1976: 116) 'Many outhors adopt the position whereby a redical separation is made between a metaphorical, figurative and transferential use of language, and an exact, adequate, literal and non-metaphorical use. Science and philosophy essentially exclude any metaphorical use of language' .

(A. Pratt 1981: 36) 'In the women's novel of development (exclusive of the science fiction genre) ... the hero does not choose a life to one side of society after conscious deliberation on the subject; rather she is radically alienated by gender-role norms from the very outset' .

scope

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (4)

Quotes: (12)

(Johnson 1990: 39) 'A comprehensive treatment of the question of writing is obviously beyond the scope of the present essay. I will therefore concentrate on a particular recent moment of reflection about writing -- the theoretical "revolution" in France in 1967-- which has had a decisive impact upon the shape of literary studies today' .

(Burke 1945: 77-8) 'Now, it seems undeniable, by the very nature of the case, that in definition, or systematic placement, one must see things "in terms of..." And implicit in the terms chosen, there are "circumferences" of varying scope. Motivationally, they involve such relationships as are revealed in the analysis of the scene-act and scene-agent ratios whereby the quality of the context in which a subject is placed will affect the quality of the subject placed in that context' .

(Burke 1945: 64) 'In sum: we are discussing the Creation not as a temporal event, but as the logical prototype of an act. Indeed, even if one believed it literally, one would hardly be justified in treating it as a temporal event, since it was itself the positing of time; it was the act that set up the conditions of temporal development; hence a terminology that reduced it to terms of time would lack sufficient scope. Thus, even a literal believer would have to treat it in terms that placed it, rather, at an intersection of time and the timeless- a point at which we place ourselves when we discuss it in terms of those non-temporal firsts called "principles"' .

(Burke 1945: 85-6) 'Though we have stressed the contrast between theology and behaviorism because it so readily illustrates the "circumferential logic" (that is, the effect of scope in a given terminology of motives), we should note that a writer's vocabulary is usually set somewhere between these two extremes. His aims are usually less thoroughgoing, more "monographic", as with the selection of some "thesis"' .

(Burke 1945: 79) 'We cherish the behaviorist experiment precisely because it illustrates the relation between the circumference and the circumscribed in mechanistic terms; and because the sharpest instance of the way in which the altering of the scenic scope affects the interpretation of the act is to be found in the shift from teleological to mechanistic philosophies. Christian theology, in stressing the rational, personal, and purposive aspects of the Creation as the embodiment of the Creator's pervasive will, had treated such principles as scenic, That is, they were not merely traits of human beings, but extended to the outer circumference of the ultimate ground. Hence, by the logic of the scene-act ratio, they were taken as basic to the constitution of human motives, and could be "deduced" from the nature of God as an objective, extrinsic principle defining the nature of human acts. But when the circumference was narrowed to naturalistic limits, the "Creator" was left out or account, and only the "Creation" remained (remained not as an "act", however, but as a concatenation of motions)' .

(Burke 1945: 90) 'So far as we can see, this matter of circumference is imbedded in the very nature of terms, and men are continually performing "new acts", in that they are continually making judgments as to the scope of the context which they implicitly or explicitly impute in their interpretations of motives. To select a set of terms is, by the same token, to select a circumference' .

(Burke 1945: xxii-xxiii) 'The titular word for our own method is "dramatism", since it invites one to consider the matter of motives in a perspective that, being developed from the analysis of drama, treats language and thought primarily as modes of action. The method is synoptic, though not in the historical sense. A purely historical survey would require no less that a universal history of human culture; for every judgment, exhortation, or admonition, every view of natural or supernatural reality, every intention or expectation involves assumptions about motive, or cause. Our work must be synoptic in a different sense: in the sense that it offers a system of placement, and should enable us, by the systematic manipulations of the terms, to "generate" or "anticipate" the various classes of motivational theory. And a treatment in these terms, we hope to show, reduces the subject synoptically while still permitting us to appreciate its scope and complexity' .

(Burke 1945: 96) 'Integral to the concept of scope is the concept of reduction . In a sense, every circumference, no matter how far-reaching its reference, is a reduction. A cosmology, for instance, is a reduction of the world to the dimensions of words; it is the world in terms of words. The reductive factor becomes quite obvious when we pause to realize that any terminology of motives reduces the vast complexity of life by reduction to principles, laws, sequences, classifications, correlations, in brief, abstractions or generalizations of one sort or another. And any generalization is necessarily a reduction in that it selects a group of things and gives them a property which makes it possible to consider them as a single entity . Thus, the general concept of "man" neglects an infinite number of particular differences in order to stress certain properties which many distinct individual entities have in common. Indeed, any characterization of any sort is a reduction. To give a proper name to one person, or to name a thing, is to recognize some principle of identity or continuity running through the discontinuities that, of themselves, would make the world sheer chaos. To note any order whatever is to "reduce". To divide experience into hungry and sated moments, into the pleasant and unpleasant, into the before and after, into here and there - even distinctions as broad as these translate the world's infinite particulars into terms that are a reduction of the world; in fact, as per the equating of infinity and zero, terms of such broad scope are perhaps the most drastically reductive of all' .

(Winograd 1977: 84-6) 'The concepts presented in the sections above have been developed by researchers working at three different sorts of tasks: data exploration (primarily by linguists); model building (primarily in artificial intelligence); and model verification (primarily by psychologists).... Current research tends to lie in clusters along these separate lines. There is little work which combines the linguist's sophistication in recognizing the complexity of the data with the computer system builder's concern with the properties of the system as a whole, and the psychologist's demand that the resulting analysis be verifiable through experiments. If we are ever to really understand natural discourse, we have to develop methodologies which span these approaches, providing both scope and rigor in their theories' .

(Kristeva 1986: 472) 'The reader will find in the following pages, first, an attempt to situate the problematic of women in Europe within an inquiry on time: that time which the feminist movement both inherits and modifies. Second, I will attempt to distinguish two phases or two generations of women which, while immediately universalist and cosmopolitan in their demands, can nonetheless be differentiated by the fact that the first generation is more determined by the implications of a national problematic ..., while the second, more determined by its place within the "symbolic denominator", is European and trans-European. Finally, I will try, both through the problems approached and through the type of analysis I propose, to present what I consider a viable stance for a European-- or at least a European woman-- within a domain which is henceforth worldwide in scope' .

script

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (1)

Quotes: (8)

(Haberlandt and Bingham 1982: 36) 'Scripts are no longer viewed as "data structures that are available in one piece in some part of memory" (Schank 1980:264). Rather a script is a set of pointers to those memory structures tied to the particular script' .

(Haberlandt and Bingham 1982: 42) 'The question motivating the experiment described here was whether script instantiation could be demonstrated empirically' .

(Haberlandt and Bingham 1982: 38) 'The assumption of the present study was that facilitation in script related sentences is achieved through spreading activation' .

(Haberlandt and Bingham 1982: 30) 'Comprehension is a joint function of textual aspects and of the reader's knowledge where both textual features and reader knowledge exist at various levels of abstractness....In the present paper we examine "scriptal" relatedness, which is one of the many intersentence relationships described by linguists. The paper consists of three parts. The first part discusses the script construct in the context of other constructs and illustrates how scripts provide connectivity between sentences. The second treats the role of scripts in the retention of texts, and the third addresses the role of scripts in reading comprehension' .

(Haberlandt and Bingham 1982: ) 'A text is rarely based on a single script, rather it is based on several scripts' .

(Haberlandt and Bingham 1982: 44) 'We think that the critical contribution of script theory was to focus attention of the role of events and on reader knowledge of events in reading comprehension. The script concept will probably change as a result of future research, but the underlying theme of reader knowledge of events will remain an important part of theories of text comprehension' .

(Haberlandt and Bingham 1982: 31) Haberlandt and Bingham say that Schank developed the notion of script as a '"predetermined, stereotyped sequence of actions that defines a well-known situation" (Schank and Abelson 1977)' .

semiotic

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (3)

Geertz 1973

Quotes: (3)

(Schiffrin 1994: 19) 'As I will make clear in chapter 12, the order of chapters, and thus the type of inquiry for each area of empirical focus, is not random: they reflect a transition ... from a focus upon the individual (whether the actions, knowledge, or intentions of a self) to a focus upon interaction (how self and other together construct what is said, meant, and done) to a focus upon the semiotic systems shared and used by self and other during their interaction (language, society, and culture). An ability to build such transitions ... into one's theory, and to allow and account for them in one's practice, is a crucial part of a discourse analysis that seeks to integrate what speech act theory, interactional sociolinguistics, ethnography of communication, pragmatics, conversation analysis, and variation analysis can offer, both individually and together, to the analysis of utterances' .

(Enkvist 1981: 110) 'So far I have concentrated on empirically verifiable patterns of order in the worlds of nature and of society. But iconicism can be used to evoke orders of a less readily verifiable kind -- processes of association in an individual's mind..., and imaginary patterns in imaginary universes and fantasies. Thus the very ordering of a text can turn into a semiotic subsystem, or perhaps rather into a potential hierarchy of such subsystems because there can be simultaneous iconicism at various macro- and microlevels of text structure. Indeed iconicism is potentially conceivable at every level where the structure of the text and of language allows a choice between different patterns of linearization' .

sentence

Definition

See also

References: (9)

Minsky 1980

van Dijk 1977

Quotes: (18)

(Hopper 1987: 140) 'Critics of "radical pragmatics", and "functional grammar", assume that they and those they oppose share a common view of language, that there is a pairing of autonomous (i.e., decontextualized) grammatical forms with "functions" (whatever they might be in the abstract), and that the only point of disagreement is whether these forms might be eventually derivable from "functions" or whether the forms must be described independently of "functions". I find a certain irony in such a use of the terms "function" and "functionalism", since the very restriction of the investigation to an artificially defined level of "sentences" seems to me to be quintessentially anti-functionalist. Be that as it may, I am concerned in this paper with the more fundamental problem of the assumptions underlying the critique, especially the assumption of an abstract, mentally represented rule system which is somehow implemented when we speak' .

(Hopper 1987: 145) 'Looking at language this way involves a serious adjustment for the linguist, since we have developed the habit of seeing utterances in terms of a fixed framework of rules, and especially because we have been raised on the doctrine of the free generability of sentences, and the privileging of novelty over prior texts. Indeed, novelty is a prized virtue in our society altogether, ... and we have many ways, some more subtle than others, of censuring perceived repetitions of others' behavior and an enormous vocabulary dealing with repetition (copying, imitation). Yet when one examines actual specimens of speech from the formulaic point of view the effect is a striking one, perhaps even a memorable one, in that it is then extremely difficult to revert to the old rule-governed syntactic view of discourse' .

(Gibbs 1987: 569-70) 'The first task facing a listener in understanding an utterance, according to Sperber and Wilson's relevance hypothesis is to identify its propositional form.... They assume that the initial parse of a sentence begins in some sort of input module ... which results in its literal, context-free, representation' .

(Fish 1982: 527) Speaking of the need to declare the more common interpretation of the reference of an utterance as its normal meaning, Fish says 'To admit as much is not to weaken my argument by reinstating the category of the normal, because the category as it appears in that argument is not transcendental but institutional; and while no institution is so universally in force and so perdurable that the meanings it enables will be normal for ever, some institutions or forms of life are so widely lived in that for a great many people the meanings the enable seem "naturally" available and it takes a special effort to see that they are the products of circumstances....The obviousness of the utterance's meaning is not a function of the values its words have in a linguistic system that is independent of context; rather, it is because the words are heard as already embedded in a context that they have a meaning that Hirsch can then cite as obvious.... it is impossible even to think of a sentence independently of a context, and when we are asked to consider a sentence for which no context has been specified, we will automatically hear it in the context in which it has been most often encountered' .

(Fish 1982: 32) The sentence 'is an experience; it occurs, it does something; it makes us do something.... what it does is what is means....there is no direct relationship between the meaning of a sentence (paragraph, novel, poem) and what its words mean....It is the experience of an utterance... that is its meaning. It follows, then, that it is impossible to mean the same thing in two (or more) different ways, although we tend to think that it happens all the time' .

(Fish 1982: 25) The sentence 'is no longer an object, a thing-in-itself, but an event, something that happens to, and with the participation of, the reader. And it is this event, this happening -- all of it and not anything that could be said about it or any information one might take away from it -- that is, I would argue, the meaning of the sentence' .

(Schiffrin 1994: 9) 'Grice proposed distinctions between different types of meaning and argued that general maxims of cooperation provide inferential routes to a speaker's communicative intention. Pragmatics is most concerned with analyzing speaker meaning at the level of utterances and this often amounts to a sentence, rather than text, sized unit of language use. But since an utterance is, by definition, situated in a context (including a linguistic context, i.e. a text), pragmatics often ends up including discourse analyses and providing means of analyzing discourse along the way' .

(Schiffrin 1994: 41-2) 'I began this chapter with a brief description of two different paradigms underlying our conception of language.... After comparing two different definitions of discourse stemming from these two paradigms -- discourse as language above the sentence or clause, ... discourse as language use ... -- I proposed a third definition that sits at the intersection of structure and function -- discourse as utterances ...Actual analyses of discourse reveal an interdependence between structure and function ... The distinction between structure and function also bears on two other issues that I discuss later. One is the relationship between text and context: structural definitions focus upon text and functional definitions upon context ... Another is the way linguists view communication: structural definitions take a narrower view of communication than do functional definitions, and place a higher priority on the role of the code (cf. text) in communication' .

(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 9-10) 'It is not legitimate to ignore the differences between the semantic representations of sentences and the thoughts that utterances are used to convey.... The semantic representation of a sentence deals with a sort of common core of meaning shared by every utterance of it.... The grammar can say nothing about how the hearer, using non-linguistic information, determines on a particular occasion what the time of utterance actually is, who the speaker is, which Bill or Betsy the speaker has in mind, etc., and hence which thought is actually being expressed. These aspects of interpretation involve an interaction between linguistic structure and non-linguistic information, only the former being dealt with by the grammar' .

(Minsky 1980: 11) Since a sentence can be assessed as grammatical but nonsensical while another may be both ungrammatical and nonsensical, 'what is involved in the recognition of sentences must be quite different from what is involved in the appreciation of meanings ... The word-order relations ... exploit the (grammatical) convention and rules people usually use to induce others to make assignments to terminals of structures' .

(Minsky 1980: 12) This would lead to 'a qualitative theory of "grammatical": if the top levels are satisfied but some lower terminals are not we have a meaningless sentence; if the top is weak but the bottom solid, we can have an ungrammatical but meaningful utterance' .

(Haberlandt and Bingham 1982: 37) 'Later in the passage a target sentence followed which was highly compatible with one version and less so with the other' .

(Haberlandt and Bingham 1982: 39) 'The purpose of the present experiment was to evaluate the hypothesis that judgments of target sentences would be faster and more accurate in Same pairs that in Different pairs. Using this technique we made the following two assumptions: that judgment latencies were an estimate of ease of comprehension, and that, in this task, sentences were processed against the background of the preceding sentence, although the sentence judgment task was a single-sentence task as far as our subjects were concerned' .

(van Dijk 1977: 27-30) 'We will briefly state a number of hypotheses regarding ... processing implications....It will be assumed that in discourse comprehension fragments of the morpho-phonological and syntactic surface structure of the sentence sequence are stored only in short-term memory to construct a proposition sequence.... It is assumed that beyond a limited number of propositions, the proposition sequence of the text base is not fully accessible for recall.... Given a sequence of assigned propositions, the reader will make hypotheses about the relevant macro-structure proposition covering the sequence by applying the macro-rules to the sequence.... Macro-structure formation takes place in the course of reading the text, not a posteriori. The same holds true for the assignment of conventional categories to the macro-propositions. Both the assignment of macro-structures and of conventional super-structures is recursive. As soon as a first level becomes too complex. a second level is formed, and so forth. The macro-structure is available when it is necessary to explicitly summarize a text.... The macro-structure is also the basis for recall of the discourse immediately after presentation. The macro-structure is directly available in episodic memory. It then yields, by inverse macro-rule application and recognition, access to lower-level macro-structures and possibly to some text base propositions if the discourse was not too long.... Macro-structures may also constitute "plans for speaking".... Macro-structure formation is a highly complex process, so it can hardly be expected that effective comprehension exactly follows the rules formulated above: expedient strategies are used in the global interpretation of discourse.... Finally, there are strategies based on contextual cues and knowledge of the general communication situation. We may know the speaker so well that we may easily predict the main themes of his discourse, even with very scanty information.... Familiarity with the relevant macro-structures will certainly facilitate the task of global comprehension' .

(van Dijk 1977: 13) 'Another interesting by-product of this rule is that we now have a formal means to determine that some sentence (or expression) is thematic or topical. A sentence or clause the thematic if it expresses a macro-proposition of the discourse' .

(van Dijk 1977: 16) 'Thus the connectedness conditions for a sentence like "John bought a ticket" depends on whether the topic of discourse is "John took the train" or "John was going to the movies". So, under this constraint we judge (15) to be acceptable, but not (16):
'(15) John went to the station and bought a ticket.
'(16) John went to the station and fell asleep' .

(Enkvist 1981: 102) 'I have spoken about text strategies and must therefore digress to explain the background of this concept....It is practical as well as theoretically defensible to classify text models into four major categories. The first category of models is sentence-based. A sentence-based model uses ready-made sentences as its input and cannot therefore manipulate sentence boundaries. It can only explain how features within and between sentences, such as anaphoric and cataphoric references and theme-rheme-focus structures, link sentences to one another.... The second type of model is predication-based. Here the input consists of a set of predications of some kind together with their temporal, causal or spatial, and perhaps social, relations, and a strategy which controls their textualization and linearization into sentences through grouping, conjunction, and embedding' .

(Enkvist 1981: 107-8) 'How, then, does experiential iconicism relate to some other major text-strategic principles, at sentence level most notably information dynamics and saliency? ... Information dynamics is concerned with the distribution of old and new information, or more precisely, of information which the speaker/writer assumes or knows is familiar to the receptor and information he assumes or knows will be new. Should we wish to regard such assumptions, and hence the distribution of old and new information in the text, as part of the universe of discourse, information dynamics might merge with experiential iconicism'. But if we maintain a distinction between the text and the world it describes, such a merger will not take place' .

sex differences

Definition

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References: (0)

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sign

Definition

Under construction

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References: (6)

Quotes: (9)

(Derrida 1986a: 93) 'There are two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign, of play. The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin which escapes play and the order of the sign, and which lives the necessity of interpretation as an exile. The other, which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms play and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name of man being the name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or of ontotheology -- in other words, throughout his entire history -- has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of play' .

(Derrida 1986b: 108) 'From the moment that there is meaning there are nothing but signs. We think only in signs. Which amounts to ruining the notion of the sign at the very moment when, as in Nietzsche, its exigency is recognized in the absoluteness of its right' .

(Derrida 1986b: 106-7) Since Derrida understands Peirce to have affirmed that signs originate from other signs, he says that 'the genetic root-system refers from sign to sign. No ground of nonsignification-- understood as insignificance or an intuition of a present truth -- stretches out to give it foundation under the play and the coming into being of signs' .

(Derrida 1986b: 104) 'The thesis of the arbitrariness of the sign ... must forbid a radical distinction between the linguistic and the graphic sign' .

(Derrida 1986b: 103) 'Writing is not a sign of a sign, except if one says it of all signs, which would be more profoundly true' .

(Greenblatt 1995: 230-1) 'Great works of art are not neutral relay stations in the circulation of cultural materials. Something happens to objects, beliefs and practices when they are represented, reimagined, and performed in literary texts, something often unpredictable and disturbing. That "something" is the sign both of the power of art and of the embeddedness of culture in the contingencies of history' .

(Harris 1990: 49) 'For purposes of an integrational analysis, however, the concept of meaning may be dispensed with and replaced by that of communicational function. The crucial difference is that the communicational function of a sign is always contextually determined and derives from the network of integrational relations which obtain in a particular situation' .

(Derrida 1986c: 125) 'Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system. The idea or phonic substance that a sign contains is of less importance than the other signs that surround it' .

(Jameson 1981: 76) 'Both the individual text and its ideologemes know a final transformation, and must be read in terms of what I will call the ideology of form, that is, the symbolic messages transmitted to us by the coexistence of various sign systems which are themselves traces or anticipations of modes of production' .

significance

Definition

Under construction

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References: (5)

Quotes: (5)

(Fish 1982: 107) 'Philosophical, psychological, and moral concepts ... are built into the language we use... The significance of this is that the language system is not characterized apart for the realm of value and intention but begins and ends with that realm' .

(Foucault 1986b: 153) 'I believe there is another principle of rarefaction, complementary to the first: the author. Not, of course, the author in the sense of the individual who delivered the speech or wrote the text in question, but the author as the unifying principle in a particular group of writings or statements, lying at the origins of their significance, as the seat of their coherence' .

(Bakhtin 1986: 666) 'Once rhetorical discourse is brought into the study with all its living diversity, it cannot fail to have a deeply revolutionizing influence on linguistics and on the philosophy of language. It is precisely those aspects of any discourse (the internally dialogic quality of discourse, and the phenomena related to it), not yet sufficiently taken into account and fathomed in all the enormous weight they carry in the life of language, that are revealed with great external precision in rhetorical forms, provided a correct and unprejudiced approach to those forms is used. Such is the general methodological and heuristic significance of rhetorical forms for linguistics and for the philosophy of language' .

(White 1974: 399) When characterizing psychological therapy, White says that, 'the problem is to get the parent to "reemplot" his whole life history in such a way as to change the meaning of those events for him and their significance for the economy of the whole set of events that make up his life' .

signified

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (1)

Derrida 1986c

Quotes: (1)

signifier

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (3)

Foucault 1986b

Derrida 1986c

Foucault 1986a

Quotes: (5)

(Foucault 1986b: 157-8) 'Western thought has seen to it that discourse be permitted as little room as possible between thought and words. It would appear to have ensured that to discourse should appear merely as a certain interjection between speaking and thinking; that it should constitute thought, clad in its signs and rendered visible by words or, conversely, that the structures of language themselves should be brought into play, producing a certain effect of meaning.
'Whether it is the philosophy of a founding subject, a philosophy of originating experience or a philosophy of universal mediation, discourse is really only an activity, of writing in the first case, of reading in the second and exchange in the third. This exchange, this writing, this reading never involve anything but signs. Discourse thus nullifies itself, in reality, in placing itself at the disposal of the signifier' .

(Foucault 1986b: 162) 'At all events, one thing at least must be emphasised here: that the analysis of discourse thus understood, does not reveal the universality of a meaning, but brings to light the action of imposed rarity, with a fundamental power of affirmation. Rarity and affirmation; rarity, in the last resort of affirmation -- certainly not any continuous outpouring of meaning, and certainly not any monarchy of the signifier' .

(Foucault 1986b: 158) 'I believe we must resolve ourselves to accept three decisions which our current thinking rather tends to resist, and which belong to the three groups of function I have just mentioned: to question our will to truth; to restore to discourse its character as an event; to abolish the sovereignty of the signifier.... One can straight away distinguish some of the methodological demands they imply. A principle of reversal, first of all.... Next, then, the principle of discontinuity .... Discourse must be treated as a discontinuous activity, its different manifestations sometimes coming together, but just as easily unaware of, or excluding each other. The principle of specificity declares that a particular discourse cannot be resolved by a prior system of significations...We must conceive discourse as a violence that we do to things, or, at all events, as a practice we impose upon them; it is in this practice that the events of discourse find the principle of their regularity. The fourth principle, that of exteriority, holds that we are not to burrow to the hidden core of discourse, to the heart of the thought or meaning manifested in it; instead, taking the discourse itself, its appearance and its regularity, that we should look for its external conditions of existence, for that which gives rise to the chance series of these events and fixes its limits' .

(Foucault 1986a: 139) He posits writing as an 'interplay of signs' regulated more by the signifier than the content .

situation

Definition

Under construction

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References: (14)

Quotes: (20)

(Burke 1945: 16) 'Ordinarily, the scene-act and scene-agent ratios can be extended to cover such cases. Thus, the office of the Presidency may be treated as a "situation" affecting the agent who occupies it' .

(Fish 1982: 532) 'On one level this counterargument is unassailable, but on another level it is finally beside the point. It is unassailable as a general and theoretical conclusion: the positing of context- or institution-specific norms surely rules out the possibility of a norm whose validity would be recognized by everyone, no matter what his situation. But it is beside the point for any particular individual, for since everyone is situated somewhere, there is no one for whom the absence of an asituational norm would be of any practical consequence, in the sense that his performance or his confidence in his ability to perform would be impaired. So that while it is generally true that to have many standards is to have none at all, it is not true for anyone in particular ... In other words, while relativism is a position one can entertain, it is not a position one can occupy.... The point is that there is never a moment when one believes nothing, when consciousness is innocent of any and all categories of thought, and whatever categories of thought are operative at a given moment will serve as an undoubted ground' .

(Fish 1982: 526) 'The meaning of the utterance would be severely constrained, not after it was heard but in the ways in which it could, in the first place, be heard. An infinite plurality of meanings would be a fear only if sentences existed in a state in which they were not already embedded in and had come into view as a function of, some situation or other' .

(Fish 1982: 525-6) 'My colleague was not hesitating between two (or more) possible meanings of the utterance; rather, he immediately apprehended what seemed to be an inescapable meaning, given his prestructured understanding of the situation, and then he immediately apprehended another inescapable meaning when that understanding was altered' .

(Fish 1982: 531) 'The point of my analysis has been to show that while "Is there a text in this class?" does not have a determinate meaning, a meaning that survives the sea change of situations, in any situation we might imagine the meaning of the utterance is either perfectly clear or capable, in the course of time, of being clarified. What is it that makes this possible, if it is not the "possibilities and norms" already encoded in the language? How does communication ever occur if not by reference to a public and stable norm? The answer, implicit in everything I have already said, is that communication occurs within situations and that to be in a situation is already to be in possession of (or to be possessed by) a structure of assumptions, of practices understood to be relevant in relation to purposes and goals that are already in place; and it is within the assumption of these purposes and goals that any utterance is immediately heard.... What I have been arguing is that meanings come already calculated, not because of norms embedded in the language but because language is always perceived, from the very first, within a structure of norms. That structure, however, is not abstract and independent but social; and there fore it is not a single structure with a privileged relationship to the process of communication as it occurs in any situation but a structure that changes when one situation, with its assumed background of practices, purposes, and goals, has given way to another' .

(Booth 1974: 5) 'You may even have been taught, as I was, that to be reasonable in such a situation means taking an absolutely neutral ground until solid proof is available- which in fact amounts to making the negative decision, to deny credence. Since nothing has been proved, an educated man will wait for real evidence. It is part of my point in these lectures that we were taught wrong' .

(Spellmeyer 1993: 20) '[The] attempt to get behind culture and language presupposed the existence of an invariant "real world" writing situation -- rather than writing for business, or for history class, or for one's mother -- as well as a standard definition of success' .

(Minsky 1980: 1) 'A frame is a data-structure for representing a stereotyped situation ... Collections of related frames are linked together into frame systems' .

(Lanham 1976: 48-9) 'Begin with illusion. Reality will dependably follow. Contrive external circumstance. Begin by allegorizing your own behavior. It is the situation which convinces. Arrange the external coordinates carefully and to your liking. The reality you desire will be established by them. They are not superficial embellishments. They are everything' .

(Winograd 1977: 72) 'A schema is a description of a complex object, situation, process, or structure. It is a collection of knowledge related to the concept, not a definition in the formal sense' .

(Winograd 1977: 75) Winograd speaks of 'the schemas that form part of the cognitive structure of speaker and hearer' saying that 'the schemas can be grouped into three major areas:
1. the objects, events, and abstractions being discussed
2. the communication situation
3. the standard patterns of discourse in the language' .

(Frye 1957: 208-9) 'In its most elementary form, the vision of law (dike) operates as lex talionis or revenge. The hero provokes enmity, or inherits a situation of enmity, and the return of the avenger constitutes the catastrophe' .

(Enkvist 1981: 103) 'If we want to derive predications out of the model too, instead of accepting them as part of the input, we must adopt a device of the third, cognitive, type. In such cognitive models the predications are usually derived out of a cognitive network, again under the control of a text strategy.... But in addition to all this we may also wish to look into the motives and reasons why a certain speaker/writer has opted for one particular text strategy in his particular context of situation. If so, we must once again enlarge our perspective and adopt a model of a fourth type which is sensitive not only to strategies of text composition but also to principles of human interaction. Such models try to explain how human beings communicate as part of their attempts at social cooperation' .

(Jameson 1981: 106) 'Still, as texts free themselves more and more from an immediate performance situation, it becomes ever more difficult to enforce a given generic rule on their readers' .

social class

Definition

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References: (0)

Quotes: (0)

sociolinguistics

Definition

See also

References: (2)

Quotes: (6)

(Schiffrin 1994: 15) 'To enhance the comparative value of my descriptions of the approaches, I have decided to orient my sample analysis around two phenomena: (a) questions (and the sequences they initiated) to be analyzed in terms of speech act theory, interactional sociolinguistics, and ethnography of communication; (b) referring expressions (in referring sequences) to be analyzed in terms of pragmatics, conversation analysis, and variation analysis. We see not only that the different approaches provide different answers to some of the same questions, but that they highlight different facets of both questions and referring expressions' .

(Schiffrin 1994: 5) 'The goals of this book are to describe and compare several different approaches to the linguistic analysis of discourse: speech act theory, interactional sociolinguistics, ethnography of communication, pragmatics, conversation analysis, and variation analysis. My aim is not to reduce the vastness of discourse analysis: I believe that at relatively early stages of an endeavor, reduction just for the sake of simplification can too drastically limit the range of interesting questions that can and should be asked' .

(Schiffrin 1994: 134) 'Interactional sociolinguistics views discourse as a social interaction in which the emergent construction and negotiation of meaning is facilitated by the use of language. Although the interactional approach is basically a functional approach to language, its focus on function is balanced in important ways. The work of Goffman forces structural attention to the contexts in which language is used: situations, occasions, encounters, participation frameworks, and so on, have forms and meanings that are partially created and/or sustained by language. Similarly, language is patterned in ways that reflect those contexts of use. Put another way, language and context co-constitute one another: language contextualizes and is contextualized, such that language does not just function "in" context, language also forms and provides context. One particular context is social interaction. Language, culture, and society are grounded in interaction: they stand in a reflexive relationship with the self, the other, and the self-other relationship, and it is out of these mutually constitutive relationships that discourse is created' .

(Coates and Cameron 1988: 19) 'Whatever the solution, it can hardly be denied that there is a problem for sociolinguistics in using the traditional model which takes the family as the primary unit of social stratification at a time when our traditional concept of the family ... is breaking down' .

(Coates and Cameron 1988: 13) 'Sociolinguistics has dealt, therefore, with the what of sex differences, but has it dealt so well with the why? Do the conventional explanations given in sociolinguistic analysis stand up to scrutiny? That is the question we want to address' .

sociology

Definition

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References: (2)

Culler 1992

Quotes: (2)

(Schiffrin 1994: 10) 'Conversational analysis ... differs from other branches of sociology because rather than analyzing social order per se, it seeks to discover the methods by which members of a society produce an sense of social order' .

(Culler 1992: 203) 'The genre of theory includes works of anthropology, art history, gender studies, linguistics, philosophy political theory, psychoanalysis, social and intellectual history, and sociology. Its works are tied to argument in these fields, but they become theory because their visions or arguments have been suggestive or productive for people not working primarily or professionally in those disciplines' .

sophist

Definition

Under construction

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References: (0)

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soul

Definition

Under construction

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References: (4)

Quotes: (4)

(Burke 1945: 118) 'According to Aristotle, Thales believed that "all things are full of Gods". For our purposes this could be interpreted as a recognition of the fact that in everything there is a power, or motive, of some sort. That is, we would interpret it in a broader sense than the notion that "soul is intermingled in the whole universe", though Aristotle in his De Anima says this is what Thales "probably" meant' .

(Lanham 1976: 4-5) 'The rhetorical view of life ... begins with the centrality of language. It conceives reality as fundamentally dramatic, man as fundamentally a role player. It synthesizes an essentially bifurcated, self-serving theory of motive. We play for advantage, but we play for pleasure, too.... Homo rhetoricus cannot, to sum up, be serious.... And if he relinquishes the luxury of a central self, a soul, he gains the tolerance, and usually the sense of humor, that comes from knowing he -- and others -- not only may think differently, but may be differently' .

(Ordonez [n.d.]: 62) 'Many roads thus lead to the same conclusion: that the traditional split between body and soul is no longer viable and that its pernicious legacy for women is being erased by today's woman, writing affirmatively and with a common purpose across the boundaries of nationality and ethnicity' .

source

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (2)

Quotes: (5)

(Burke 1945: xxi) 'Pragmatists would probably have referred the motivation back to a source in agency . They would have noted that our hero escaped by using an instrument , the file by which he severed his bonds; then in this same line of thought, they would have observed that the hand holding the file was also an instrument; and by the same token the brain that guided the hand would be an instrument, and so likewise the educational system that taught the methods and shaped the values involved in the incident. True, if you reduce the terms to any one of them, you will find them branching out again; for no one of them is enough' .

(Burke 1945: 192) 'The great departures in human thought can be eventually reduced to a moment where the thinker treats as o pposite, key terms formerly considered a pposite, or v.v. So we are admonished to be on the look-out for those moments when strategic synonymizings or desynonymizings occur. And, in accordance with the logic of our ratios, when they do occur, we are further admonished to be on the look-out for a shift in the source of derivation, as terms formally derived from different sources are now derived from a common source, or v.v.' .

(Burke 1945: 34-5) 'The process of transcendence may, of course, be reversed. Then the ultimate abstract Oneness is taken as a source, a "first"; and the steps leading up to it are interpreted as stages emanating from it. Or terms that are contextual to each other (such as Being and Not-Being, Action and Rest, Mechanism and Purpose, The One and the Many) can be treated as familially related (as were Being to be derived from Not-Being, Action from Rest, Mechanism from Purpose, the Many from the One)' .

(Burke 1945: 74-5) 'There are two primary generalizations that characterize the quality of motives: freedom and necessity. And whenever they appear, we may know that we are in the presence of "God-terms", or names for the ultimates of motivation. Doctrines wherein Creator and Creation are not ontologically collapsed into a unity give us a kind of double genesis for motives. Consideration in terms of the Creation leads to "necessity" when, in accordance with the logic of geometric substance, all the parts of nature are treated as necessarily related to one another in their necessary relationship to the whole. For "necessity" names the extrinsic conditions that determine a motion and must be taken into account when one is planning an action. And consideration in terms of the Creator leads to "freedom" when, in accordance with the logic of tribal substance, men "substantially" derive freedom (or self-movement) from God as its ancestral source. This double genesis allows for free will and determinism simultaneously, rather than requiring a flat choice between them' .

(Fish 1982: 346-7) A given interpretation will be unacceptable, Fish says, if 'there is at present no interpretive strategy for producing it.... [Thus,] while there are always mechanisms for ruling out readings, their source is not the text but the presently recognized interpretive strategies for producing the text' .

speaker

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (8)

Gibbs 1987

Spellmeyer 1993

van Dijk 1977

Winograd 1977

Ijsseling 1976

Quotes: (11)

(Gibbs 1987: 582) 'When listeners are addressed by someone, they usually assume the speaker has done his/her best to enable them to understand him/her' .

(Schiffrin 1994: 13) 'The origin of an approach provides different theoretical and metatheoretical premises that continue to influence assumptions, concepts, and methods. For example, different origins may be responsible for different assumptions and beliefs about language -- assumptions about the stability of linguistic meaning, the role of speaker intentionality, the degree to which language is designed for communicative purposes, and the contribution of linguistic meaning to interactive meaning' .

(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 21) Sperber and Wilson summarize a basic inference model of communication to be that a speaker means something by an utterance when she intends (1) that her utterance will produce a certain response in the audience, (2) that the audience will recognize her intention, and (3) that the audience's recognition of her intention will function as at least part of the reason for the response .

(Spellmeyer 1993: 28) 'Whatever else the everything-is-language argument might do, it gives the teacher a new ... alibi for ignoring social differences. Who needs to listen to students when language is always the speaker?' .

(Winograd 1977: 76) 'Each speaker of a language possesses a large and rather diverse set of schemas dealing with the process of natural language communication' .

(Coates and Cameron 1988: 29) 'Brown and Levinson ... define the notion of face as "the public self-image that every member wants to claim for himself". ... Negative face involves the desire for freedom of action and freedom from imposition, while positive face involves the desire for approval. Power ... means that in an interaction, the speaker can be characterised as relatively more or less powerful than the addressee' .

(Ijsseling 1976: 133) 'Intertextuality ... conceives all that one says as a fabric woven into a much wider network of interrelated texts with references to each other. The speaker or writer is also woven into this fabric. He is not the origin or centre, but is entirely carried along by the network of words in circulation' .

speech community

Definition

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References: (0)

Quotes: (0)

standard

Definition

See also

References: (3)

Spellmeyer 1993

Winograd 1977

Quotes: (7)

(Coates and Cameron 1988: 31) Duechar claims that the use of standard speech connotes prestige .

(Coates and Cameron 1988: 11) Cameron uses the phrase 'closer to the standard' .

(Coates and Cameron 1988: 27) Deuchar seems to assume a single strategy for women everywhere. 'Women tend to produce speech closer to the standard in pronunciation than that of men. The main explanations advanced for this phenomenon are in terms of sociological factors external to language such as status consciousness or solidarity. I shall show that neither of these explanations is entirely satisfactory, but that the phenomenon can be explained in terms of pragmatic, interactional notions internal to language use. The notions I shall make use of are those of face and power as used by Brown and Levinson (1978) in their model of politeness' .

(Coates and Cameron 1988: 23) Coates and Cameron report that Nichols has found a correlation between occupations of speakers and whether they use Gullah or 'standard English'. After describing that older black women and men of all ages work in jobs which allow them to speak Gullah, while job opportunities for younger women have opened up which require them to speak standard English, 'Nichols claims that in the South Carolina Black community, labour market forces are the single most important factor influencing linguistic choices' .

(Coates and Cameron 1988: 30) 'In order to use the notions of face and power to explain women's greater use of standard speech we need four assumptions: 1. participants in an interaction wish to protect their own face; 2. attention to other's face is affected by relative power in relation to other; 3. attention to other's face may involve damage to one's own; 4. women have less relative power than men' .

state

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (8)

Quotes: (12)

(Burke 1945: 45-6) 'The socialist revolution is designed first to reverse the state (during the "dictatorship of the proletariat") and next to abolish it, or let it "wither away". But our grammar would lead us to doubt whether a "state" can ever really "wither away", and least of all in a complex industrial society. Though it may take strategically new forms, we expect the logic of the actus-status pair to continue manifesting itself. The selection of the proletariat as the vessel of the new act that transcends the bourgeois state may or may not be correct as a casuistry, but it violates no law of "grammar". The belief in the withering away of the state, however, does seem to violate a law of grammar. For no continuity of social act is possible without a corresponding social status; and the many different kinds of act required in an industrial state, with its high degree of specialization, make for corresponding classifications of status' .

(Burke 1945: 21) 'There is a set of words comprising what we might call the Stance family, for they all derive from a concept of place, or placement. In the Indo-Germanic languages the root for this family is sta , to stand (Sanscrit, stha ). And out of it there has developed this essential family, comprising such members as: consist, constancy, constitution, contrast. destiny, ecstasy, existence, hypostasize, obstacle, stage, state, status, statute, stead, subsist, and system. In German, an important member of the Stance family is stellen , to place, a root that figures in Vorstellung , a philosopher's and psychologist's word for representation, conception, idea, image' .

(Burke 1945: 52) 'We may even go a step further and note that one may say "it is substantially true" precisely at a time when on the basis of the evidence, it would be much more accurate to say, "it is not true"....What handier linguistic resource could a rhetorician want than an ambiguity whereby he can say "The state of affairs is substantially such-and-such," instead of having to say "The state of affairs is and/or is not such-and-such"?' .

(Burke 1945: 40) 'But to consider an act in terms of its grounds is to consider it in terms of what it is not, namely, in terms of motives that, in acting upon the active, would make it a passive, We could state the paradox another way by saying that the concept of activation implies a kind of passive-behind-the-passive; for an agent who is "motivated by his passions" would be "moved by his being-movedness", or "acted upon by his state of being acted upon"' .

(Bove 1990: 63-4) 'Since ours is a society which increasingly tries to ensure its political order through discursive systems that discipline our language and culture, any successful resistance to that order would seem to require strong weapons aimed to weaken that discipline.... Literary criticism, presumably always specially sensitive to the functions of language, and newly sensitive to its relationship to power on the site of institutionalized disciplines, can turn its tools to the critical examination of how, in relation to the state and its largest institutions, power operates in discourse and how discourse disciplines a population.... Discourse can turn literary studies into a full criticism, one which is skeptical, critical, oppositional, and-- when appropriate-- sustentative. It can help us to avoid reduction, either of the historical context of an event or of the rhetorically complex display of power within a textualized discourse or institutionalized discipline' .

(Bove 1990: 61) 'Foucault grew increasingly interested in what the rise of the modern disciplines had to do with modern state power-- with what he called "governability"-- and how it displaced sovereignty as the hegemonic figure of power and authority.... In disciplinary societies, self-determination is nearly impossible, and political opposition must take the form of resistance to the systems of knowledge and their institutions that regulate the population into "individualities" ... In this understanding of governability, truth produced by these knowledge systems blocks the possibility of sapping power; it speaks for-- or... "represents"-- others' .

(Marshall 1992: 175) 'The idea that a text must have a single clear meaning and that interpretation should aim to state it is highly questionable, but it has deep roots in our culture' .

(A. Pratt 1981: 22) 'In most women's novels the green world is present in retrospect, something left behind or about to be left behind as one backs into the enclosure-- a state of innocence that becomes most poignant as one is initiated into experience.... In such cases the young woman turns away from "appropriate" males toward fantasies of a figure, projected from within her own personality, more suitable to her needs' .

(Said 1986: 611) 'The dialectic of self-fortification and self-confirmation by which culture achieves its hegemony over society and the State is based on a constantly practiced differentiation of self from what it believes to be not itself' .

(Schor 1992: 263) 'Two chief axioms of feminist criticism state that all acts of language area grounded in the dense network of partial positions (e.g., sexual, class, racial) occupied by speaking subjects and that to claim to speak for all (women, feminists, literary critics) is to speak from a position of assumed mastery and false universality. This position is precisely the one we as feminists seek to interrogate and dismantle, even though, as many of us have discovered, assumed mastery and false universality constantly reassert themselves' .

statement

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (2)

Booth 1979

Quotes: (4)

(Burke 1945: 58) 'The design on a piece of primitive pottery may be wholly symbolic or allegorical. But a drawing that accurately reproduces this design in a scientific treatise would be not symbolic or allegorical, but realistic. And similarly, even when statements about the nature of the world are abstractly metaphysical, statements about the nature of these statements can be as empirical as the statement, "This is Mr. Smith", made when introducing Mr. Smith in the accepted manner' .

(Booth 1979: 108) 'Obviously such talk is nonsense to anyone who insists on a literal meaning for phrases like "the same as" and "amounts to". Burke seldom uses such words in a sense that would satisfy someone like Crane as strictly literal; even the word "literal" is not quite literal; thinking about the concept as Burke might, we would no doubt extend my questioning of Crane's usage in chapter 2 [of this work]. Indeed, a major part of his persistent program is to remind literalists that behind their claims to precision lurk confusions that can be acknowledged and lived with only by qualifying every copulative verb with some sense of ambiguity. It is not just that the words need semantic scouring. What something is is always too rich and complex for any one statement. Thus Burke can, without violating his own canons, say at one point that literary form as the gratification of needs is the appeal in poetry and, in other contexts, say that literary form is a disguise for the true appeal; and he can really mean both statements' .

status

Definition

See also

References: (10)

Hopper 1987

Lanham 1993

Virtanen 1992

Bathrick 1992

Foucault 1986a

White 1974

Quotes: (15)

(Hopper 1987: 147) 'What I've been saying up to now has had the purpose of re-contextualizing the notion of grammar -- not to abolish it, but rather to suspend it with a view to isolating those regularities in discourse which we will agree to call emergent grammatical regularities. But as we have seen, the doctrine of Emergent Grammar assignes an entirely different status to grammar from what might be called A Priori Grammar' .

(Fish 1982: 108) 'If deviation theories trivialize the norm and therefore trivialize everything else, a theory which restores human content to language also restores legitimate status to literature by reuniting it with a norm that is no longer trivialized' .

(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 3) 'The code model and the inferential model are not incompatible; they can be combined in various ways.... Both the code model and the inferential model can contribute to the study of verbal communication. However, it is usually assumed that one of the two models must provide the right overall framework for the study of communication in general.... Against these reductionist views, we maintain that communication can be achieved in ways which are as different from one another as walking is from plane flight. In particular, communication can be achieved by coding and decoding messages, and it can be achieved by providing evidence for an intended inference. The code model and the inferential model are each adequate to a different mode of communication; hence upgrading either to the status of a general theory of communication is a mistake....We will propose what we hope is an improved inferential model. However, we do not regard this model as the basis for a general theory of communication' .

(Lanham 1993: x) 'We failed to notice that the personal computer had presented itself as an alternative to the printed book, and the electronic screen as an alternative to the printed page. Furthermore, in the last three of four years, that alternative page has been enhanced so that it can present and manipulate images and sounds almost as easily as words. And it can do all this in 16.7 million colors. The long reign of black-and-white textual truth has ended. The nature and status of textual discourse have been altered. This movement from book to screen promises a metamorphosis comparable in magnitude, if not in hype, to broadcast TV' .

(Virtanen 1992: 306) 'Narratives, for example, can be used for argumentation, or descriptions for instruction. Such an apparent mismatch of discourse type and text type may be accounted for in terms of the suggested two levels. Any discourse type may surface in the form of a narrative: Narratives may be used to instruct ... explain things ... describe activities or circumstances ... The ease of the indirect or secondary usage manifested by this type of text, and its potential to realize the widest array of discourse types may, indeed, be regarded as arguments for the "basic" status of narrative among the different types of text' .

(Virtanen 1992: 293-4) 'I shall deal with some of the criteria that have been used in the study of language to group texts for various purposes. I shall then briefly touch upon the notion of prototype, before proceeding to a discussion of a two-level typology of texts. To round off, I shall consider the status of narrative among the different types of text' .

(Bathrick 1992: 322) 'Rather than deny its antinomic status, cultural studies often defines itself heuristically as a challenge to all existing systems and structures' .

(Coates and Cameron 1988: 69) Could Wood's study lead to the conclusion that 'floor time' and other language behavior that is often considered 'power' language is not a significant factor in promotions? The woman in higher status does not need to dominate her male subordinate. We could conclude that language dominance is irrelevant to status in the women's behavior .

(Coates and Cameron 1988: 28) 'We need to ask why they should use markers of status which neither reflect nor determine their real status' .

(Foucault 1986a: 142) 'An author's name is not simply an element of speech... Its presence is functional in that it serves as a means of classification. A name can group together a number of texts and thus differentiate them from others.... The author's name characterizes a particular manner of existence of discourse'. The culture in which a discourse circulates regulates its status and manner of reception .

(White 1974: 407) 'To say that we make sense of the real world by imposing upon it the formal coherency that we customarily associate with the products of writers of fiction in no way detracts from the status as knowledge which we ascribe to historiography' .

(White 1974: 40x) 'It may be observed that if historians were to recognize the fictive element in their narratives, this would not mean the degradation of historiography to the status of ideology or propaganda. In fact, this recognition would serve as a potent antidote to the tendency of historians to become captive of ideological preconceptions which they do not recognize as such but honor as the "correct" perception of "the way things really are."' .

strategy

Definition

See also

References: (8)

Quotes: (12)

(Hopper 1987: 144-5) 'It has been noted before that to a very considerable extent everyday language is built up out of combinations of such prefabricated parts. Language is, in other words, to be viewed as a kind of pastiche, pasted together in an improvised way out of ready-made elements. Language is thus to be treated, in Wittgenstein's words, "from outside" (cf. Wittgenstein 1958: para. 120) -- not as governed by internalized mentally represented rules, but by pre-existent material with which discourses can be devised ... Evidently an entirely parallel way of viewing language is to be attributed to Jacques Derrida with his metaphor of language as "graft": new speech acts are "grafted onto" old ones and of course serve in turn as the stock onto which further new speech acts are grafted ... Becker's idea of "prior texts" ... is also crucial here: previous actual utterances form the basis of new utterances. Similar observations have been made by Bolinger, by Andrew Pawley, and others. It is this pre-patterned, pre-fabricated aspect of speech which accounts best for the characteristic of language for which no dualistic, double-tiered theory can provide an intuitively satisfying explanation: in natural discourse we compose and speak simultaneously (Smith 1980:60). There is no room -- no need -- for mediation by mental structures. It is in this sense that, as Bolinger has pointed out (Bolinger 1976), speaking is more similar to remembering procedures and things than it is to following rules. It is a question of possessing a repertoire of strategies for building discourses and reaching into memory in order to improvise and assemble them. Grammar is now not to be seen as the only, or even the major, source of regularity, but instead grammar is what results when formulas are re-arranged, or dismantled and re-assembled, in different ways' .

(Hopper 1987: 153) 'What I have wanted to stress here is the need to understand not only the formal process but the way in which that formal process emerges from a discourse context, in other words, is anchored in particular, concrete utterances. It is this "prior textuality" of the construction which explains why it has retained properties of a separate, external clause. What we see emerging, then, is a new strategy for permitting a lexical agent to be incorporated into a nuclear clause under certain contextual conditions, presumable involving differences of topic continuity' .

(Burke 1945: 26) 'There is another strategy of definition, usually interwoven with the contextual sort, yet susceptible of separate observation. This is the "tribal" or "familial" sort, the definition of a substance in terms of ancestral cause....The Aristotelian genus is originally not a logical, but a biological, concept' .

(Lanham 1976: 61) 'Ovid saw the fraud implicit in any act of writing and wanted to declare it. What strikes us is the force of Ovid's sincerity. Formal pleasure represents a fundamental ingredient in any reconstruction of the past. It is not declared, the poet is not truly engaged. He has become a propagandist. Ovid's strategy in the Metamorphoses seems plain. He builds a mythic reality and then plays sophisticated games with it' .

(Derrida 1986a: 88) 'Levi-Strauss will always remain faithful to this double intention: to preserve as an instrument something whose truth value he criticizes'. Derrida says that Levi-Strauss advocates the use of bricolage, a strategy of using whatever is at hand, to analyze .

(Bathrick 1992: 335) 'The challenge of cultural studies to traditional organizations of knowledge within existing university structures represents more than just the addition of yet another innovative critical strategy for humanistic study. The questions raised touch on fundamental issues concerning how we perceive our educational mission, what we consider worthy of study and debate, who we are as cultural and social human beings' .

(Enkvist 1981: 104) 'If we wish to relate instances of experiential iconicism in text generation or in text interpretation and comprehension to our general knowledge of the world (as we must), a cognitive model becomes necessary. And we must cite principles of human interaction if we can to detect the motives for the preference of one text strategy to another. In brief, we shall need the whole gamut of models if we wish to explain why somebody opts for an iconic arrangement of his text and how he carries out his iconic strategy through text patterning and, ultimately, syntax. This is simply another way of saying that experiential iconicism can be discussed in terms of examples brought from various levels: syntax, text patterning, cognition, interaction' .

(Coates and Cameron 1988: 92) A female strategy is not just to display condition of subordination to males, but to cope .

stratification

Definition

See also

References: (2)

Bakhtin 1986

Quotes: (2)

(Bakhtin 1986: 668) 'The centripetal forces of the life of language, embodied in a "unitary language", operate in the midst of heteroglossia. At any give moment of its evolution, language is stratified not only into linguistic dialects in the strict sense of the word ... but also-- and for us this is the essential point-- into languages that are socio-ideological: languages of social groups, "professional" and "generic" languages, languages of generations and so forth. From this point of view, literary language itself is only one of these heteroglot languages-- and in its turn is also stratified into languages... And this stratification and heteroglossia, once realized, is not only a static invariant of linguistic life, but also what insures its dynamics: stratification and heteroglossia widen and deepen as long as language is alive and developing. Alongside the centripetal forces, the centrifugal forces of language carry on their uninterupted work; alongside verbal-ideological centralization and unification, the uninterrupted processes of decentralization and disunification go forward' .

structure

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (18)

Quotes: (42)

(Hopper 1987: 141) 'The assumption, in other words, is that "grammar" (in the sense of the rules, constraints, and categories of the language attributed to the speaker) must be an object apart from the speaker and separated from the uses which the speaker may make of it. That kind of grammar is conventionally understood to consist of sets of rules which operate on fixed categories like nouns and verbs, specify the forms of additive categories like those of case, tense, transitivity, etc., and restrict the possible orders in which words can occur in a sentence. Discourse, the actual use of language, is held to be in some sense an "implementation" of these structures, or the way in which the abstract mental system possessed in its entirety by the speaker is realized in particular utterances' .

(Hopper 1987: 141-2) 'This is, then, roughly the context in which the term Emergent Grammar is being proposed. The term "emergent" itself I take from an essay by the cultural anthropologist James Clifford, but I have transferred it from its original context of "culture" to that of "grammar". Clifford remarks that "Culture is temporal, emergent, and disputed" (Clifford 1986:19). I believe the same is true of grammar, which like speech itself must be viewed as a real-time, social phenomenon, and therefore is temporal; its structure is always deferred, always in a process but never arriving, and therefore emergent; and since I can only choose a tiny fraction of data to describe, any decision I make about limiting my field of inquiry (for example in regard to the selection of texts, or the privileging of the usage of a particular ethnic, class, age, or gender group) is very likely to be a political decision, to be against someone else's interests, and therefore disputed' .

(Hopper 1987: 142) 'The notion of Emergent Grammar is meant to suggest that structure, or regularity, comes out of discourse and is shaped by discourse as much as it shapes discourse in an on-going process. Grammar is hence not to be understood as a pre-requisite for discourse, a prior possession attributable in identical form to both speaker and hearer. Its forms are not fixed templates, but are negotiable in face-to-face interaction in ways that reflect the individual speakers' past experience of these forms, and their assessment of the present context, including especially their interlocutors, whose experiences and assessments may be quite different. Moreover, the term Emergent Grammar points to a grammar which is not abstractly formulated and abstractly represented, but always anchored in the specific concrete form of an utterance' .

(Hopper 1987: 142) 'The notion of emergence is a pregnant one. It is not intended to be a standard sense of origins or genealogy, not a historical question of "how" the grammar came to be the way it "is", but instead it takes the adjective emergent seriously as a continual movement towards structure, a postponement or "deferral" of structure, a view of structure as always provisional, always negotiable, and in fact as epiphenomenal, that is, as least as much an effect as a cause' .

(Hopper 1987: 147) 'All discourse is in some sense specialist discourse, moulded to the speaker's personality (i.e. personal history), the situation, and the topic. It is precisely the point about Emergent Grammar that such "heteroglossic" aspects of language necessarily become integral parts of the linguistic description, and are not set aside as a separate agenda irrelevant to the linguistic code and its structure' .

(Hopper 1987: 147) 'The systematicity which linguists have come to expect in language still exists, of course, but in a more complex way. The linguistic system is now not to be seen as something complete and homogeneous, in which, "exceptional" phenomena must be set aside as inconvenient irregularities, but as a growing together of disparate forms. This convergence takes place through lateral associations of real utterances. Similarities spread outwards from individual formulas, in ways that are motivated by a variety of factors ... They do not, however, merge into the kind of uniform grammar which would lead one to posit a uniform mental representation to subtend them' .

(Enkvist 1981: 103) 'Causal explanations must be sought at a level more comprehensive than that of the structure with which one is preoccupied' .

(Johnson 1990: 48) 'What enslaves is not writing per se but control of writing, and writing as control. What is needed is not less writing but more consciousness of how it works. If, as Derrida claims, the importance of writing has been "repressed" by the dominant culture of the Western tradition, it is because writing can always pass into the hands of the "other"... What is at stake in writing is the very structure of authority itself' .

(Burke 1945: 23) 'The same structure is present in the corresponding Greek word, hypostasis , literally, a standing under: hence anything set under, such as stand, base bottom, prop, support, stay; hence metaphorically, that which lies at the bottom of a thing, as the groundwork, subject-matter, argument of a narrative, speech, poem; a starting point, a beginning. And then come the metaphysical meanings (we are consulting Liddell and Scott): subsistence, reality, real being (as applied to mere appearance), nature, essence. In ecclesiastical Greek, the word corresponds to the Latin Persona , a Person of the Trinity (which leads us back into the old argument between the homoousians and the homoiousians, as to whether the three persons were of the same or similar substance). Medically, the word can designate a suppression, as of humours that ought to come to the surface; also matter deposited in the urine; and of liquids generally, the sediment, lees, dregs, grounds. When we are examining, from the standpoint of Symbolic, metaphysical tracts that would deal with "fundamentals" and get to the "bottom" of things, this last set of meanings can admonish us to be on the look-out for what Freud might call "cloacal" motives, furtively interwoven with speculations that may on the surface seem wholly abstract. An "acceptance" of the universe on this plane may also be a roundabout way of "making peace with the faeces"' .

(Fish 1982: 101-2) 'The trivialization of ordinary language is accomplished as soon as one excludes from its precincts matters of purpose, value, intention, obligation, and so on -- everything that can be characterized as human. What, then, is left to it? The answers to this question are various. For some, the defining constituent of ordinary language, or language, is its capacity to carry messages; for others, the structure of language is more or less equated with the structure of logic ... Still others hold instrumental views: language is used to refer either to objects in the real world or to ideas in the mind ... But whatever the definition, two things remain constant: (1) the content of language is an entity that can be specified independently of human values... and (2) a need is therefore created for another entity or system in the context of which human values can claim pride of place.... Once you've taken the human values out of the language, and yet designated what remains as the norm, the separated values become valueless, because they have been removed from the normative center' .

(Fish 1982: 526) 'Norms are not imbedded in the language ... but inhere in an institutional structure within which one hears utterances as already organized with reference to certain assumed purposes and goals' .

(Fish 1982: 42) 'The method, then, is applicable to larger units and its chief characteristics remain the same: (1) it refuses to answer or even ask the question, what is this work about; (2) it yields an analysis not of formal features but of the developing responses of the reader in relation to the words as they succeed one another in time; (3) the result will be a description of the structure of response which hay have an oblique or even ... a contrasting relationship to the structure of the work as a thing in itself' .

(Schiffrin 1994: 18) 'All approaches take a stand (albeit often implicitly) on the relationship between structure and function, text and context, and discourse and communication, simply because these conceptual distinctions are all variants of the dichotomy between what is considered part of language and what is not' .

(Schiffrin 1994: 7) 'Some interactional approaches ... focus on how people from different cultures may share grammatical knowledge of a language, but differently contextualize what is said such that very different messages are produces. Other interactional approaches ... focus on how language is situated in particular circumstances of social life, and on how it adds (or reflects) different types of meaning ... and structure ... to those circumstances' .

(Minsky 1980: 18) 'It should be emphasized again that we must not expect magic. For difficult, novel problems a new representation structure will have to be constructed, and this will require application of both general and special knowledge' .

(Minsky 1980: 16) 'In any event, the individual statements of a discourse lead to temporary representations -- which seem to correspond to what contemporary linguists call "deep structures" -- which are then quickly rearranged or consumed in elaboration the growing scenario representation. In order of "scale", among the ingredients of such a structure there might be these kinds of levels':
surface syntactic frames -- mainly verb and noun structures;
prepositional and word-order indicator conventions;
surface semantic frames -- action-centered meanings of words;
qualifiers and relations concerning participants, instruments, trajectories and strategies, goals, consequences and side-effects;
thematic frames -- scenarios concerned with topics, activities, portraits, setting; outstanding problems and strategies commonly connected with topics;
narrative frames -- skeleton forms for typical stories, explanations, and arguments; conventions about foci, protagonists, plot forms, development, etc., designed to help a listener construct a new, instantiated thematic frame in his own mind .

(Longacre 1983: 7) 'Each surface structure type has characteristic tense/aspect/voice features in the verbs that occur on its main line' .

(Longacre 1983: 10) 'It is a fact of language that whenever surface structure becomes well crystalized and marked, i.e., whenever it is opaque rather than transparent, it may be thrown out of phase with the notional structure. We must, therefore, face the fact that a given notional structure type may encode in the form of a differing surface structure type' .

(Longacre 1983: 9) 'We must remind ourselves that the classification into broad categories of surface structure types subsumes many specific genres within various languages' .

(Longacre 1983: 20) 'I here get to the main point of this chapter...Something like plot characterizes forms of discourse other than narrative....Plot is the notional structure of narrative discourse' .

(Lanham 1993: 129-30) 'The late, and now much disputed, literary theorist Paul de Man spent a lot of time glossing the great American rhetorician Kenneth Burke's apothegm that "every way of seeing is a way of not seeing". Electronic text allows us to see that this version of "blindness" and "insight" is often a matter of scaling-choice. That choice we can now manipulate ourselves; we can dial in a different scale of difficulty, of "readability". That will often defuse, if not solve, the difficulty. If scaling won't work, and we come to an irreducible aporia, we can include both alternatives in a toggle switch and move on. Problem solved. Electronic text is intrinsically a bi-stable medium, one made to accommodate exactly this difficulty. Texts, Derrida argued, are not "a store of ready-made 'concepts' but an activity resistant to any such reductive ploy". No need to argue that for electronic text- it is manifestly true. The same popular commentary on deconstruction defines it this way: "Deconstruction is therefore an activity performed by texts which in the end have to acknowledge their own partial complicity with what they denounce" Kenneth Burke said the same thing in 1935, but without the political spin of "denunciation" and "complicity": "Even when one attempts to criticize the structure, one must leave some parts of it intact in order to have a point of reference for his criticism. However, for all the self-perpetuating qualities of an orientation, it contains the germs of its dissolution". Electronic text, by its very manipulability, builds in a maximum of the textual self-consciousness such declarations point to. Add all this reflection together (and a lot more one could do), and it is hard not to think that, at the end of the day, electronic text will seem the natural fulfillment of much current literary theory, and resolve many of its questions' .

(Ricoeur 1982: 147-54) 'We explain the text in terms of its internal relations, its structure. On the other hand, we can lift the suspense and fulfil the text in speech, restoring it to living communication; in this case, we interpret the text.... Reading is the dialectic of these two attitudes' .

(Ricoeur 1982: 159) 'Initially the text had only a sense, that is, internal relations or a structure; now it has a meaning, that is, a realisation in the discourse of the reading subject' .

(Ricoeur 1982: 161-2) 'To explain is to bring out the structure, that is, the internal relations of dependence which constitute the statics of the text, to interpret is to follow the path of thought opened up by the text, to place oneself en route towards the orient of the text' .

(Culler 1992: 213) Responding to Knapp and Michaels, who maintain that 'Beliefs cannot be grounded in some deeper condition of knowledge' (1982.Against theory. Critical inquiry 8: 738), Culler posits, 'this might be true for such things as religious beliefs, but the various beliefs that function as principles, criteria, and premises in people's work on literature most probably belong to a structure of knowledge and argumentation' .

(Winograd 1977: 64) 'This paper approaches the problem of studying discourse as one of understanding the cognitive structures and processes of language users. There are alternative approaches, such as text-based studies ... This paper ... proposes instead to focus on the cognitive processes of language production and comprehension. From this point of view, the text is a concrete trace of the processes, and its structure needs to be understood in terms of the processing structure ... There are clear advantages to having a framework which emphasizes the psychological processes, rather than the traces they leave, since any psycholinguistic model must deal first and foremost with the cognitive processing' .

(Winograd 1977: 63) 'While the field is not yet at a stage where it is possible to lay out a precise unifying theory, this paper attempts to provide a beginning framework for studying discourse.... Its four sections attempt to:
1. Delimit the range of problems covered by the term "discourse".
2. Characterize the basic structure of natural language based on a notion of communication.
3. Propose a general approach to formalisms for describing the phenomena and building theories about them.
4. Lay out an outline of the different schemas involved in generating and comprehending language' .

(Winograd 1977: 72) 'A schema is a description of a complex object, situation, process, or structure. It is a collection of knowledge related to the concept, not a definition in the formal sense' .

(Frye 1957: 195) 'The characterization of romance follows its general dialectic structure, which means that subtlety and complexity are not much favored. Characters tend to be either for or against the quest' .

(Frye 1957: 218) 'Tragedy usually makes love and the social structure irreconcilable and contending forces' .

(Greenblatt 1995: 228-9) 'If culture functions as a structure of limits, it also functions as the regulator and guarantor of movement. Indeed the limits are virtually meaningless without movement; it is only through improvisation, experiment, and exchange that cultural boundaries can be established. Obviously, among different cultures there will be a great diversity in the ratio between mobility and constraint. Some cultures dream of imposing an absolute order, a perfect stasis, but even these, if they are to reproduce themselves from one generation to the next, will have to commit themselves, however tentatively or unwillingly, to some minimal measure of movement; conversely, some cultures dream of an absolute mobility, a perfect freedom, but these too have always been compelled, in the interest of survival, to accept some limits' .

(A. Pratt 1981: 25) 'The pursuit narrative in mythology often involved a green-world locale, an island, "well," or grotto, invaded by men who rape the beneficent women residents-- followed by an account of the destruction and theft of the area's natural value.... Such traumas characterize the plot structure of gothic novels where women heroes experience adventures in quest of true chivalry in combination with the horror of pursuit and victimization by male villains' .

study

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (18)

Booth 1974

Lanham 1993

Quotes: (28)

(Burke 1945: 319) 'This work (which would have as its motto Ad Bellum Purificandum , or Towards the Purification of War) is constructed on the belief that, whereas an attitude of humanistic contemplation is in itself more important by far than any method , only by method could it be given the body necessary for its existence even as an attitude. We would thus hold at least that an elaborate analysis of linguistic foibles is justified "in principle". Indeed, the study of linguistic action is but beginning. And we must be on our guard lest the great need for an attitude of linguistic skepticism allow us to be content with too hasty a "policy" as regards the nature of language itself. This is too serious a matter for such "dissipatory" approaches to the subject as we find among the contemporary "debunkers". And even serious approaches are invalidated when formed in keeping with the ideals of an uncriticized scientism, which is too evasive of the dramatistic to make even an adequate preparatory description of linguistic forms' .

(Burke 1945: 98) 'A scientist might happen to believe in a personal God, and might even pray to God for the success of his experiments. In such an act of prayer, of course, he would be treating God as a variable . Yet, when his prayer was finished, and he began his experiments, he would now, qua scientist, treat "God" as an invariant term, as being at most but the over-all name for the ultimate ground of all experience and all experiments, and not a name for the particularities of local context with which the scientific study of conditions, or correlations, is concerned' .

(Burke 1945: 66) 'We are reasoning as follows: we are saying that, to study the nature of the term, act , one must select a prototype, or paradigm of action. This prototype we find in the conception of a perfect or total act, such as the act of "the Creation". Examining this concept, we find that it is "magic", for it produces something out of nothing. This enables us to equate magic with novelty - and leads us to look for a modicum of magic in every act to the extent that the act possesses a modicum of novelty. This consideration also admonishes us, however, to make a distinction between "true" and "false" magic. "False" magic is a quasi-scientific ideal that would suspend the laws of motion , as in the attempt to coerce natural forces by purely ritualistic means. "True" magic is an aspect not of motion but of action' .

(Fish 1982: 354-5) 'Strictly speaking, getting "back-to-the-text" is not a move one can perform, because the text one gets back to will be the text demanded by some other interpretation and that interpretation will be presiding over its production. This is not to say, however, that the "back-to-the-text" move is ineffectual, The fact that it is not something one can do in no way diminishes the effectiveness of claiming to do it. As a rhetorical ploy, the announcement that one is returning to the text will be powerful so long as the assumption that criticism is secondary to the text and must not be allowed to overwhelm it remains unchallenged.... A wholesale challenge would be impossible because there would be no terms in which it could be made; that is, in order to be wholesale, it would have to be made in terms wholly outside the institution; but if that were the case, it would be unintelligible because it is only within the institution that the facts of literary study -- texts, authors, periods, genres -- become available' .

(Booth 1974: 20-1) 'There have been countless ... demonstrations that objective scholarship is not and cannot be objective in the sense of being free of value judgments.... Noam Chomsky's famous essay "Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship" partially undermines itself with this failure. Chomsky shows easily and conclusively that "liberal scholars", most notably Gabriel Jackson in his study on study on Spain in the 30s, discover what their value commitments allow them to discover, and they overlook what their values lead them to overlook. But Chomsky them writes as of he has earned, with this restoration of values into historical study, the right to impose his own values on history -- and without even as much effort to grapple with opposing views as was made by Jackson.... Chomsky often talks as if all attempts to write honest history are really and always mere disguises for value commitments and that therefore he has a right to push his value button- "down with the 'liberal' defense of capitalism"- and see what is churned out. His obligation, I would have thought, was to give his readers good reasons why his version of the war is in some historical sense better than Jackson's, and not just one more passionate voice to be measured in decibels' .

(Booth 1974: 26) 'Note the automatic assumption that the real reasons are not the public reasons, that the real reasons have something to do with the subconscious, or with class or racial affiliations that run far beneath the surface. If we were to ask Mailer whether his choosing to study the astronauts was itself defensible with good reasons, he might say- since he tries harder than most authors to apply the same standards to himself that he applies to other men- that his real reasons were also quite other than his conscious reasonings. We have all learned to assume that what determines minds and purposes must be not reasoning but deeper and blinder causes' .

(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 56) 'The distortions and misperceptions introduced by the explicit communication model are also found in the study of verbal communication itself. Some essential aspects of implicit verbal communication are overlooked. ... What is implicitly conveyed by an utterance is generally much vaguer than what is explicitly expressed, and that when the implicit import of an utterance is explicitly spelled out, it tends to be distorted by the elimination of this often intentional vagueness. The distortion is even greater in the case of metaphor and other figures of speech, whose poetic effects are generally destroyed by being explicitly spelled out' .

(Lanham 1993: 8) 'But if you are going to read books any more, or are going to read them in different ways, you must decide what it is that happens when you do read them. You must know this if you are to recreate that ineffable something in another medium. You must decide what business you are really in. You can conclude, of course, that that ineffable something cannot be transplanted, that the business you are really in is Reading Books. Many areas of endeavor in America pressured by technological change have already had to decide what business they were really in, and those making the narrow choice have usually not fared well. The railroads had to decide whether they were in the transportation business or the railroad business; they chose the latter and gradual extinction. Newspapers had to decide whether they were in the information business or only the newspaper business; most who chose the newspaper business are no longer in it. A fascinating instance of the choice is now taking place in the piano industry. Steinway used to own the market, and it has decided to stay in the piano business. Yamaha decided it was in the keyboard business- acoustic and electronic- and has, with Roland, Korg, and other manufacturers, redefined the instrument. Time has yet to tell who will win, financially or musically. For all its fastidious self-distancing from the world of affairs, literary study faces the same kind of decision. If we are not in the codex book business, what business are we really in?' .

(Lanham 1993: 13) 'In the digital light of these technologies, the disciplinary boundaries that currently govern academic study of the arts dissolve before our eyes, as do the administrative structures that enshrine them. It is not only the distinction between the creator and the critic that dissolves, but the walls between painting and music and sculpture, music, architecture, and literature' .

(Haberlandt and Bingham 1982: 38) 'The assumption of the present study was that facilitation in script related sentences is achieved through spreading activation' .

(Winograd 1977: 66) After considering the polar distinctions of inter-sentential versus intra-sentential, context-dependent versus context-independent, dialog versus text, and spoken versus written and dismissing them as useful because of overlap of features and considerations, Winograd asserts that 'having eliminated these simple distinctions as candidates for defining "discourse", we are left without a clear criterion for our area of study. As the rest of this paper will illustrate, there is a good deal of diversity, and a clear definition will be possible only after a larger body of theory and techniques has been developed' .

(Greenblatt 1995: ?227) 'Here we can make our first tentative move toward the use of culture for the study of literature... to recover a sense of the stakes that once gave readers pleasure and pain. An awareness of culture as a complex whole can help us to recover that sense by leading us to reconstruct the boundaries upon whose existence the works were predicated.... What kinds of behavior, what models of practice, does this work seem to enforce? Why might readers at a particular time and place find this work compelling? Are there differences between my values and the values implicit in the work I am reading? Upon what social understandings does the work depend? Whose freedom of thought or movement might be constrained implicitly or explicitly by this work? What are the larger social structures with which these particular acts of praise or blame might be connected?' .

(Bathrick 1992: 328) 'The critique of essentialism and universalism has been vital in opening up the study of literature and history to a heterogeneity of theme, perspective, constituency, medium; and of political, national, and sexual identities. At the same time, the emergence of once silenced and still oppressed voices within the critical domain of cultural discourse has politicized and helped position and certify those identities as part of a striving for empowerment.... In the area of ethnic studies, African American, Third World, and Latin American programs have proffered an internal critique of the ethnocentric Occidentalism of much of humanist scholarly and curricular organization in academic institutions or, more modestly, have sought to resituate prevailing discourses and canons in relation to what and who have been excluded by dominant voices' .

(Bathrick 1992: 323) 'Given, then, the protean, anti-institutional, and, finally, heuristic suggestiveness of the term cultural studies, I should like to proceed by focusing precisely on its nodal points of contradiction, on the programmatic debates and innovations that have emerged under its banner to challenge existing theory and institutional formations in the name of a more relevant and broadened humanistic study' .

(Coates and Cameron 1988: 18) Coates and Cameron report a study 'which finds social ambition a better predictor than occupation, or even education, of linguistic behaviour' .

(Coates and Cameron 1988: 33-8) Edwards claims that her paper will discuss 'the speech of the female participants in the study'. However, because 'it was arranged that the fieldworker should be the same sex as the friendship group' being studied, there is limitation of the observations to same-sex conversations. Nevertheless, Edwards asserts that 'the validity of these findings ... would have been considerably more limited if the variable of sex had not been carefully controlled' .

(Foucault 1986a: 139) Foucault asserts the validity of viewing the author as an individual but sets that aside to study the way a text points to its author .

(Ijsseling 1976: 19) 'Isocrates states that the logos directs ... all thought and action.... An orator is one who, on the basis of long study and constant practice gains complete control over the logos and has a perfect command of his language' .

(Jameson 1981: 76) 'Our object of study will prove to be the ideologeme, that is, the smallest intelligible unit of the essentially antagonistic collective discourses of social classes' .

(Said 1986: 617-8) 'What I am criticizing is two particular assumptions. There is first the almost unconsciously held ideological assumption that the Eurocentric model for the humanities actually represents a natural and proper subject matter for the humanistic scholar.... Second is the assumption that the principal relationships in the study of literature-- those I have identified as based on representation-- ought to obliterate the traces of other relationships within literary structures that are based principally upon acquisition and appropriation.... Two alternatives propose themselves for the contemporary critic. One is organic complicity with the pattern I have described.... The second alternative is for the critic to recognize the difference between instinctual filiation and social affiliation, and to show how affiliation sometimes reproduces filiation, sometimes makes its own forms' .

(White 1974: 404) 'In any field of study which, like history, has not yet become disciplinized to the point of constructing a formal terminological system for describing its objects, in the way that physics and chemistry have, it is the types of figurative discourse that dictate the fundamental forms of the data to be studied' .

stygmatized form

Definition

A segment of speech that is considered improper or inappropriate.

Examples

See also

References: (0)

Quotes: (0)

style

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (5)

Quotes: (8)

(Fish 1982: 111) 'The attempt to specify once and for all the properties of literature and locate the boundaries of style should be either abandoned ... or recognized for what it is: not a disinterested investigation but the reflection of an ideology; not a progress toward a theory but the product of one; not a question but an answer' .

(Fish 1982: 110) 'The search for style, like the search for an essentialist definition of literature, proceeds in the context of an assumption that predetermines its shape' .

(Booth 1974: xiii) 'My business is largely with what they left out- with what might be called the origin, likelihoods, and extent of human convictions, together with the grounds and degrees of belief, opinion, and assent- an argument for the intellectual validity of a subject which, abandoned by philosophers, has too often fallen into the hands of quacks: preachers of "plain style", of "winning friends and influencing [other?] people", of "writing that sells", to say nothing of various "scientific" modes of changing men's minds' .

(Foucault 1986b: 162) 'The critical side of the analysis deals with the systems enveloping discourse; attempting to mark out and distinguish the principles of ordering, exclusion and rarity in discourse. We might, to play with our words, say it practises a kind of studied casualness. The genealogical side of discourse, by way of contrast, deals with series of effective formation of discourse: it attempts to grasp it in its power of affirmation, by which I do not mean a power opposed to that of negation, but the power of constituting domains of objects, in relation to which one can affirm or deny true or false propositions. Let us call these domains of objects positivist and , to play on words yet again, let us say that, if the critical style is one of studied casualness, then the genealogical mood is one of felicitous positivism' .

(Lanham 1993: 9) 'We have become, I might parenthetically remark, more self-conscious about prose itself. So used are we to thinking black-and-white, continuous printed prose the norm of conceptual utterance, that it has taken a series of theoretical attacks and technological metamorphoses to make us see it for what it is: an act of extraordinary stylization, of remarkable, expressive self-denial. The lesson has been taught from Marinetti to Burke and Derrida, and by personal computers which restore to the reader ranges of expressivity- graphics, fonts, typography, layout, color- that the prose stylist has abjured. Obviously these pressures will not destroy prose, but they may change its underlying decorum. And perhaps engender, at long last, a theory of prose style as radical artifice rather than native transparency' .

(Lanham 1976: 20-1) 'Of all the unexamined premises rhetoric took over from serious philosophy, clarity has perplexed the most. Since Aristotle it has figured as a central goal for verbal expression. Theorists, without giving the matter special thought, seem to have considered clarity a property of the text. Yet clarity describes many styles and audiences. Used to describe a particular verbal configuration, clarity cannot mean anything at all....The most intellectual, conceptual, scientific virtue of style turns out to be entirely emotional. If everyone is happy, clarity has arrived.... Clarity is at least partly, and often predominantly, a temporal phenomenon, a problem of period. One century's brightness becomes murk for the next. Clarity no more permits objective standards than custom itself' .

(Lanham 1976: 34-5) 'The task of the critic, as of the cultural or literary historian, is not to choose sides and then ignore the other half. Nor is it to try, however tempted, to adjudicate the dispute, decide who is right and then simplify....We must ... rehearse again the quarrel between philosophy and rhetoric. And this time around, we must do more than use philosophy to debunk rhetoric, as the scientific world view has done.... Seeing Western literature correctly depends on controlling these two contradictory theories of knowledge, of self, of style.... Upon seeing Western literature aright depends our ability to hold together the two different ways of knowing which together make us human' .

(Lanham 1976: 56) 'The only element common to both is Ovid's deplorable, superficial, excessive, glib show-off style. It is true that without his style Ovid would be nothing. The Ars's two parts are held together by poetic virtuosity. The same couplet can compass the high style and the low. For the Ars was intended, we must remember, to be a showcase of Ovid's talents. He makes a point of playing every note on the organ, mimicking every effect. The couplet was indeed ... Ovid's criticism of life. It represented an allegory of control. The two worlds could be held together by a virtuoso act of style. Such a style had to be opaque, hold us at a distance, prevent entrance into either orchestration unreservedly' .

subcommunity

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (1)

M. Pratt 1987

Quotes: (2)

(M. Pratt 1987: 56) 'What the "subcommunity" approach does not do, however, is see the dominated and dominant in their relations with each other -- this is the limitation imposed by the imaginings of community' .

(M. Pratt 1987: 57) 'In both the linguistic and literary conceptions of subcommunity, then, one readily discerns nostalgia for the lost totality of the larger community. In the literary case, diversity of interpretation is often spontaneously, though by no means necessarily, perceived as a lack of consensus, a loss' .

subculture

Definition

See also

References: (1)

Quotes: (1)

(Coates and Cameron 1988: 65) The perception of women and men as different subcultures is marked. Usually subculture perception involves the use of features that are 'odd' across cultural boundaries. Yet in the case of differences in language use because of sex, men and women often seem to behave in ways that both see as 'quite natural' .

subjectivity

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (2)

Bove 1990

Quotes: (2)

(Fish 1982: 49) 'I would rather have an acknowledged and controlled subjectivity than an objectivity which is finally an illusion' .

(Bove 1990: 63) 'When viewed as an element in a historical system of institutionalized discourse, the traditional idea of the "author," and the privileged value accorded to it in literary scholarship and criticism, is one of the two or three key concepts by means of which the critical disciplines organize their knowledge around questions of subjectivity and discipline both their practitioners and those they "teach"' .

substance

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (4)

Quotes: (14)

(Burke 1945: 47) 'Indeed, we can take it as a reliable rule of thumb that, whenever, we find a distinction between the internal and the external, the intrinsic and the extrinsic, the within and the without, (as with Korzybski's distinction between happenings "inside the skin" and happenings "outside the skin") we can expect to encounter the paradoxes of substance' .

(Burke 1945: 37) 'In theological and metaphysical works, we can recognize the paradox of the absolute readily enough. Often, in fact, it is explicitly discussed. But in historicist writings it more easily goes unnoticed. Yet the paradox may be implicit in any term for a collective motivation, such as a concept of class, nation, the "general will," and the like. Technically, it becomes a "pure" motive when matched against some individual locus of motivation. And it may thus be the negation of an individual motive.... What we are here considering formally, as a paradox of substance, can be illustrated quickly enough by example. A soldier may be nationally motivated to kill the enemies of his country, whereas individually he is motivated by a horror of killing his own enemies. Or conversely, as a patriot he may act by the motive of sacrifice in behalf of his country, but as an individual he may want to profit' .

(Burke 1945: 21) 'The most prominent philosophic member of this family is "substance". Or at least it used to be, before John Locke greatly impaired its prestige, so that many thinkers today explicitly banish the term from their vocabularies. But there is cause to believe that, in banishing the term , far from banishing its functions one merely conceals them. Hence, from the dramatistic point of view, we are admonished to dwell upon the word, considering its embarrassments and its potentialities of transformation, so that we may detect its covert influence even in cases where it is overtly absent. Its relation to our five terms will become apparent as we proceed' .

(Burke 1945: 193) 'We have thus arrived at the transcendent realm as a realm of things "in themselves" (that is, with whatever nature they may have intrinsically, not as they are determined by the terms in which we see them). Whereat we might profitable pause to consider the grammar of the intrinsic. It is the puzzle we encountered when discussing the paradox of substance. As soon as one considers things in relation to other things, one is uncomfortably on the way to dissolving them into their context, since their relations lead beyond them. A thing in itself for instance can't be "higher" or "heavier" than something or "inside" or "outside" something, or "derived from" something, etc. For though such descriptions may apply to it, they do not apply to it purely as a thing in itself ; rather, they are contextual references, pointing beyond the thing' .

(Burke 1945: 23) 'But returning to the pun as it figures in the citation from Locke, we might point up the pattern as sharply as possible by observing that the word "substance", used to designate what a thing is , derives from a word designating something that a thing is not . That is, though used to designate something within the thing, intrinsic to it, the word etymologically refers to something outside the thing, extrinsic to it. Or otherwise put: the word in its etymological origins would refer to an attribute of the thing's context , since that which supports or underlies a thing would be a part of the thing's context. And a thing's context, being outside or beyond the thing, would be something that the thing is not' .

(Burke 1945: 52) 'Positivists who would discard the category of substance assert that the only meaningful propositions are those which are capable of scientific proof; and having thus outlawed the conveniences of a substantive rhetoric they next blandly concede that the scientific proof is not always possible actually, but must be possible "in principle" -which would leave them pretty much where they began, except that their doctrine won't allow them to admit it' .

(Burke 1945: 21-2) 'First we should note that there is, etymologically, a pun lurking behind the Latin roots. The word is often used to designate what some thing or agent intrinsically is , as per these meanings in Webster's: "the most important element in any existence; the characteristic and essential components of anything; the main part; essential import; purport". Yet etymologically "substance" is a scenic word. Literally, a person's or a thing's sub-stance would be something that stands beneath or supports the person or thing' .

(Marshall 1992: 162) 'The term text ...encompasses the continuous substance of all human signifying activities and allows us to point to something very general, namely, to whatever seems to invite interpretation or to whatever the interpreter sets up as an object for interpreting' .

supposition

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (0)

Quotes: (0)

symbol

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (0)

Quotes: (0)

synecdoche

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (0)

Quotes: (0)

syntax

Definition

See also

References: (2)

van Dijk 1977

Quotes: (3)

(van Dijk 1977: 18) 'Super-structures are organizing principles of discourse. The have a hierarchical character, roughly defining the "global syntax" of the text. By contrast, the macro-structures define the "content" of the text. In certain kinds of narrative, such as folktales, this content may be conventional ... What has been said about the conventional "genre" of narratives also holds ... for other discourse types, e.g., arguments, advertisements, newspaper reports, propaganda, and psychological papers. In all cases the constraints operate globally, both on the global syntax of the macro-structures and on their specific content' .

(Enkvist 1981: 99) 'To begin with I shall for a moment leave the larger patterns of order in the physical world and in society. Instead I shall cite a few examples from a notoriously complex area of English syntax, namely adverbial placement' .

synthesis

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (1)