Preface
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Patrick J. Coppock
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The fifteen articles
that make up this volume were all, with the exception of this preface,
presented and discussed at an international conference entitled ‘The Semiotics
of Writing: Transdisciplinary Perspectives on the Technology of Writing’, held at the
International Centre of Semiotic and Cognitive Studies of the University of
San Marino from 12-14th November 1999, with the present author as scientific
organiser. In carrying out this interesting and enjoyable task I was well
supported by the director of the Centre, Professor Patrizia Violi and her
administrative staff, Ms. Emanuela Stacchino and. Ms. Paula Cenci.[1] |
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The biggest thank-you of
all must of course be extended to our invited speakers and our other
conference participants, without whom the event would not have taken place in
the first place. Many, in spite of otherwise busy agendas, committed readily
to travel to San Marino from such distant corners of the globe as Australia,
Great Britain, Norway, Sweden and the United States to help make The
Semiotics of Writing the significant international event I believe it was.
Each added his or her own personal ‘signature’ to the proceedings
in the form of challenging and original presentations, and keen involvement
in spirited exchanges on the various themes touched upon during three intense
and stimulating days together. |
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So what was it that we
set out to do with the Semiotics of Writing? Well, the main objective for the
event was to bring together, and open up a transdisciplinary conversational
space for, eminent scholars from a broad range of research areas, all in one
way or another concerned with the theme of written communication. |
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Writing
research: A field in growth
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Starting from quite
modest beginnings as a field of empirical study in the late 1960’s and
early 1970’s (see Martin Nystrand’s article in this volume for a comprehensive
historical overview), writing research has now begun to position itself
internationally as a dynamic, pragmatic, and not least highly transdisciplinary field of inquiry,
focusing on many different forms of written communication which are studied
from the point of view of a wide range of research perspectives. More
recently, attention in the field has begun to move towards understanding the
complex relationship between the semiotic system of writing and other
semiotic or representational systems increasingly found in electronically
mediated multimodal texts: photographic images and other forms of visual art,
diagrams, animations, video and sound sequences. This shift of attention has
naturally enough been provoked by the need to address in meaningful ways the
increasing degree of blending of these different ways and means of making
meaning in texts linked in networked hypermedia systems, and the
interactional aspect of different forms of shared writing environments opened
up for by the development of new media technologies. |
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Semiotics
and cognitive science
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This growth and
diversification of the field of writing research parallels similar tendencies
in the broader and more general fields of semiotic and cognitive studies over
the last thirty years or so. Semioticians have traditionally concentrated
their energies on examining processes of meaning-making through the exchange
and interpretation of signs – an interdisciplinary and generic term
which today in practice is generally taken to mean various forms of texts
and/ or utterances, construed as situated acts of communication – as
they function in a broad range of socio-cultural contexts. Cognitive
scientists, on the other hand, have tended to concern themselves with
attempting to understand, through structured empirical forms of research, the
relationship between observable, quantifiable aspects of cognition processes
– which in practice means different forms of behaviour – and
their biological and neuro-physiological correlates. In both the
above-mentioned fields, issues relating to aspects of multimodality in
communication have been brought more and more to the fore in recent years. |
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Although sometimes seeming
to differ quite radically in their basic epistemologies and methodological
approaches, and thus still considered by some scholars and scientists as
separate, and even incommensurable, fields of inquiry, there is something
fundamental which both these domains of research share. This common ground is
a deep and passionate belief in the necessity and productivity of
transdisciplinary forms of communication, cooperation and understanding in
scientific research. As time goes on, it is becoming increasingly clear
– not least thanks to the continuing efforts of the San Marino Centre
in promoting constructive forms of dialogue between semioticians and
cognitive scientists – that vast domains of overlap and common interest
do
indeed exist across the boundaries of these two domains. This growing sense
of scientific fellowship and community in the general area of semiotic and
cognitive studies is beginning to create and exciting sense of continuity
across the two domains, traversing and transgressing any form of postulated
‘divide’ between them. Those differences in perspective and
methodology that do exist merely make for lively and constructive dialogue
and healthy controversy. As Marcello Dascal has repeatedly reminded us, truly
excellent science cannot develop and spread without healthy forms of
controversy, and the discourse dynamic in the zone of proximal development
between cognitive and semiotically oriented forms of inquiry provides just
such an area of growth. |
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As its name implies,
the International Centre for Semiotic and Cognitive Studies seeks to promote
constructive forms of synergy in the zone of proximal development between
these two highly complex fields. The Semiotics of Writing gave people a
chance to meet, present, compare and critically discuss their respective
ideas, perspectives and approaches. From this small beginning, new forms of
interdisciplinary cooperation and understanding have hopefully already begun
to grow. |
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Themes
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Some central themes
explored at The Semiotics of Writing were as follows: |
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Obviously, with such a wide range of issues and themes on our agenda,
and with a time frame of no more than three days in which to present and
discuss them, we were able to do no more than touch briefly on a few core
empirical and theoretical perspectives implicit in the above set of themes.
It has been very inspiring to receive and read the very varied collection of
articles contributed by our conference participants which now make up this
volume, and I am pleased to be able to share them with you, thanks to our
excellent co-operation with Brepols. |
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Perspectives
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To give some idea of the general organisation and content of this
volume, I shall now briefly present each of our authors and their respective
contributions, while at the same time attempting to position them and their
work within the wider context of the international writing research community
which the San Marino event sought to promote. |
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Broadly speaking, three
threads in current writing research are woven into the contributions in this
volume. The first has its roots in anthropological, ethnological and
ethnographic tradition of inquiry, offering a broad perspective on literacy
development in a wider sense within a transcultural, evolutionary and
historical framework. A key figure in this tradition is Jack Goody, whose
thought and work we shall meet in some more detail a bit later on. |
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The second thread might
perhaps be characterised by the etiquette ‘literature and genre
studies’. In electing to use such an etiquette, however, we run the
risk of trying to put a highly complex field of scientific inquiry into a
tidy definitional bag, while it would probably be best left to define and
develop itself through its own doings. Another etiquette which might be
applied here, with similar risks, is ‘rhetoric studies’. But in
any case, and whatever we might choose to call it, this thread includes work
in a time-honoured tradition which aims to identify genres of written (and
spoken) discourse, and to understand what it is that makes them
‘efficient’ (or not) as forms of written (and spoken) communication.
The tradition of rhetorical inquiry can be traced back to Aristotle's Poetics and Rhetoric in the 5th
century, and appears in good health and continuing development today. A good
presentation of recent work in this tradition, including a couple of stimulating
pieces by Carolyn Miller and Anne Freadman, both of whom have contributions
in this present volume, is Aviva Freedman and Peter Medway's 1994 anthology: Genre
and the New Rhetoric. Other chapters in the present volume associated with
this tradition are those by Carol Berkenkotter and Tom Huckin. |
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The third thread is
more clearly ‘semiotic’ in tone, and even less clearly definable
in terms of ‘etiquette’ than those already mentioned. Semiotics is,
after all, a field of potentially unlimited scope. Work more or less loosely
associated with this thread combines a plurality of perspectives woven into a
web of research domains known as cultural, social and textual semiotics. Some
is rooted in the American pragmatist tradition – with the philosophy of
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) as guiding light, and William James
(1842-1910), John Dewey (1859-1952) and Charles Morris (1901-1979) as
reformers and promoters of this basic perspective. Other work is rooted in
European structuralist semiotics, with Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) and
Louis Hjelmslev (1899-1965) as main its proponent and reformer-moderniser. |
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Today we find the
structuralist tradition most strongly reflected in Greimassian textual and
narrative semiotics. But also in Hallidayian social semiotics and systemic
functional linguistics there are strong structuralist influences. The latter
school, which has grown up in the active and innovative applied linguistics
environment of southern Australia, maintains links to similar environments
all over the world, and with the critical discourse analysis community in the
north of Europe, especially in Great Britain and Scandinavia. The critical
discourse movement, being rather less formal in approach (see Martin 1998 for
some discussion of this point), has certain aspects in common with pragmatist
cultural and textual semiotics, which is predominantly interpretational in
tenor, rather than structurally oriented. In Europe at least, the interpretational tradition is
most clearly represented in strands of thought woven through Umberto
Eco’s extensive exegeses in semiotics, philosophy of language, literary
and cultural semiotics. Here, the meaning potential of mass-media and other
forms of text – seen as
culturally coded systems of signs with a powerful potential for stimulating
and maintaining processes of reinterpretation and recontextualisation –
is an object of scientific study in itself. |
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Casting a sideways
glance from here in the direction of Eastern European and Soviet traditions
of textual semiotics, we find historical and conceptual links to the Peircean
semiotic and Russian formalist traditions, as well as structuralism. Here we
recall names such as Tvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin, Boris Uspenskij, Roman
Jacobsen and Juri Lotman. In the United States, especially inspired by
Peircean pragmatism, names such as Thomas Sebeok, Richard Rorty and Stanley
Fish spring readily to mind. In the present volume work associated with this
thread is that of Kjell-Lars Berge, Patrick Coppock, Lars Evensen, Martin
Nystrand, Finn Bostad, Anna-Malin Karlsson and Jim Martin, while Anne
Freadman’s work very successfully manages to bridge the conceptual
space between the tradition of genre studies and pragmatism. |
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In what follows I have
tried to group my presentation of the various contributions to the present
volume loosely together with respect to potential affiliations to the three threads
of discourse mentioned above. But, as the astute reader will very quickly
understand on reading the articles themselves, there is so much overlapping
of interest and thematic matter across the whole range of research
perspectives and directions covered in these fourteen articles, that, in the
end these even quite vague content categorisations turn out in the long run
of things to be far too specific… |
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Contributors
and contributions
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Jack Goody (United Kingdom)
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As mentioned initially,
the anthropological-ethnological-ethnographic thread is probably most clearly
represented in the present volume by Jack Goody’s[2]
contribution, aptly titled in tune with the conference, The Semiotics of
Writing.
Goody is Emeritus William Wyse Professor of Social
Anthropology at St. James College, Cambridge in the UK. Carrying out
anthropological fieldwork studies in the 50’s and early 60’s in
West Africa, he began early on to interest himself in the study of writing.
Indeed, a central work in the history of writing research is a pioneering
article written together with Ian Watt in 1963, and published the same year
in Comparative Studies in Society and History – ‘The Consequences
of Literacy’. Since then, he has gone on to publish a number of
important books and articles, all of which in one way or another attempt to
frame literacy development within a broader evolutionary, socio-cultural and
historical context. Here we find a clear focus on the potential consequences
of the development of writing systems on human cognition processes, and thus
too, for how we organise everyday life in our various societies and cultures.
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In his work on writing,
Jack Goody has always given priority to trying to understand the specific
role which written communication has played in the emergence, development and
organisation of social and cultural institutions in contemporary societies:
religion, the law, commerce, bureaucracy and the state. His central works in
this vein[3]
are Literacy in Traditional Societies (edited, 1968), The
Domestication of the Savage Mind (1977), The Logic of Writing and the
Organisation of Society (1986) and The Interface between the Written and the
Oral
(1987). In recent years he has begun to interest himself more for the role
played by modes of representation other than writing in promoting or
retarding sociocultural change. This shift of focus has led him to foreground
the symbolic richness and multimodality of everyday communication, and the
ambiguities such communication is seen to involve when examined within a
historical, transcultural, perspective. This shift is most clearly reflected
in his recent Representations and Contradictions: Ambivalence towards
Images, Theatre, Fiction, Relics and Sexuality (1997). |
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Goody characteristically
refers to writing as a technology of the intellect, construing the
transition from oral culture in pre-script, pre-literate, societies, to
modern (and post-modern) literate culture in terms of how this developmental
trajectory has altered not only our own self-construals, but also our
construals of – and thus relations with – the other, and, as a
consequence of this, our construals of our communities and the shared
physical and psychosocial environments these constitute. |
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In his article he
revisits the interesting debate concerning fundamental differences between logographic writing systems such
as Chinese and Japanese, where the signifier (in Saussurian terms) is a
single character or sign complex, and alphabetic writing systems such
as English, where the signifier is a word or group of signs (characters). In
both systems, the immediate signified is a word in speech, which in turn is
associated through linguistic convention with either an action, an object, a
grammatical element or an idea. From this starting point he moves on to look
at how writing has come to function as a technology of the intellect,
through, amongst other things, development of arithmetical tables, logical
procedures (syllogisms) and listing behaviours. These have, he claims,
profoundly influenced how we categorize everyday experience, and thus how we
interact with our environment. Listing behaviour, for instance, serves both
as a memory aid and as a means of organising activities. Making shopping
lists and the construction of agendas for executive meetings are a couple of
examples that illustrate the functional and pragmatic nature of this written
genre. Goody also reflects on the fact that although the (originally
arbitrary) order in which letters of alphabetic writing systems are
structured (A-B-C-D... etc.) is not generally considered to have a specific
signifying function, the fact that there exists a conventionalised (fixed)
alphabetical order in writing systems facilitates listing and categorisation behaviours.
These must be organized in other ways (via numbering or spatial organisation)
in languages and cultures which use logographic writing systems. This in turn
affects how information in archives and databases is organized and retrieved.
The basic shapes of written characters, which are not generally considered to
have any culturally codified signifying function in alphabetic writing
systems (while doing so in the case of logographic systems), can easily come
to do so in cases where specific forms of lettering come to be used for
aesthetic, symbolic or other communicative purposes by various groups. In our
present context, the importance of paying sufficient attention to this often
neglected aspect of written communication emerges clearly in connection with
examples given by David Barton in his chapter on the letter as everyday
genre, and in Anna-Malin Karlsson’s chapter on Swedish teenage homepage
writing practices. It may, too, easily be read between the lines in
Kjell-Lars Berge and Maurizio Gnerre’s chapters which make reference
to, respectively, the notion of ‘text’, exemplified in part by
children’s’ early writing (and drawing) practices, and ephemeral
graphical body writing among South American Indian tribes. |
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Goody rounds off his
contribution with a brief excursus into the specificity of the role of
writing in the development of intentionality and mind. It seems clear, he
maintains, that writing ‘formalizes’ the semiotic system of
language. Spoken language handles easily the flux of everyday experience with
its wealth of ambiguities and overlapping experiential categories, whereas
written language handles best the development and organization of bounded
categories. Writing “creates a beginning and an end, giving rise to the
problem of how should we classify ‘anomalies’, which are only
anomalies within a written system of categories”. While David Olson has
claimed that writing (and literacy in general) facilitates the development of
attribution of belief states to others in children, and is thus central for
the development of their construals of mind (and intentionality), Goody is
more concerned with the effect of writing and literacy skills on complex
mind-body states, epitomised by the emotions. Writing about our emotions
makes them ‘visible’ in a ‘slow-motion’, careful kind
of way, he notes, allowing us to reflect upon them and develop them further. |
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Maurizio Gnerre (Italy) |
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Maurizio Gnerre[4]
is an anthropological linguist who works within a similar ethno-anthropological
perspective to Jack Goody, but with a primarily linguistic, rather than
anthropological focus. He teaches ethnolinguistics at the Institute of
Oriental Studies at the University of Naples in Italy, while most of his
ethnolinguistic research has been carried out in Southern and Central
America, since his main interest is in Amerindian languages. Several of his
publications in ethnolinguistics have appeared in the United States, Brazil
and Italy, and he has also published in Spanish: Linguagem, Escrita e
Poder
[Language, Writing and Power] (1985). He spends considerable periods of time
each year visiting Indian tribal societies in Peru and Brazil to expand his
studies of linguistic change and development in everyday contexts. |
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In his contribution, The
Semiotics Of Ephemeral Graphisms In Two South-American Indigenous Societies, Maurizio sketches out a
number of interesting reflections on ephemeral forms of writing carried out
on the human body in ritual settings among the Huni Kuin tribe, whose tribal
area spans the border zone between Peru and Brazil, and who are often known
to each other as ‘the true people’. One of his most interesting
claims he makes on the basis of his research is that the human body was, and
in many cases still is, the primary locus from, and on which, ephemeral and
semantically meaningful forms of graphical semiosis emerged. He goes on to
qualify this assertion based on a proposed opposition between two
experiential categories of ephemerality and lastingness. This seems useful, in
that it such categories ought to be readily applicable to a wide range of
communicational systems end practices, ranging from the various kinds of body
(and sand) painting practices with which Maurizio illustrates his analysis,
to practices in more contemporary settings related to the use of cosmetics,
piercing, scarring, certain types of mass-media texts, publicity and
electoral posters, web sites, hyperlinks between sites, electronic mailing
lists, and more dynamic forms of writing such as conversations in Internet
chat-rooms and MUD/MOO communities. |
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David Barton (United Kingdom)
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A third contribution in
the anthropological-ethnological-ethnographic thread is by David Barton[5].
David is Professor of Language and Literacy at the Department of
Linguistics and Modern English Language (LAMEL) at the University of
Lancaster in Northern England. Together with Mary
Hamilton and Roz Ivanic he coordinates the Literacy
Research Group (LRG), which since 1983 has been developing the field of
literacy, and particularly adult literacy, as a general research area. Other
LRG group members come from the fields of linguistics, sociology, psychology,
educational research, continuing education, and English language education. The group carries out and encourages interdisciplinary
research in literacy; and promotes research in adult literacy, the
development of innovative research methods and the improvement of
communication and collaboration between researchers and practitioners.
David has worked on child language development at
Stanford University, USA, and he is especially interested in social aspects
of literacy. He has published extensively in Britain and the United
States. His publications include: Writing in the
community (1992), Literacy: an
introduction to the ecology of written language (1994), Worlds of literacy (1994), Sustaining local literacies (1994), Local Literacies: Reading and writing in one
community (1998), with Mary Hamilton, Letter
writing as a social practice (2000),
edited with Nigel Hall, and Situated Literacies, (2000), edited with Mary Hamilton and Roz Ivanic, |
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His contribution to this volume, the title echoing that of one his
recent publications, is Everyday Letter Writing: Letter Writing As A
Social Practice. In it he explores, with reference to a series of
fascinating examples, how the practice of letter-writing in everyday life
serves a wide range of social and interpersonal functions for those who
pursue it, and how this form of literacy contributes to maintaining and
modifying existing social practices. He underlines constantly the importance
of studying everyday forms of letter writing, writing by ordinary people,
since this is one of the most pervasive literate activities in human societies,
but points to a continuum running from everyday literacy-based activities of
this kind to more specialised forms of the same activities. People write,
after all, not only to one another in everyday life, they write to schools,
companies and to politicians, and they sometimes tend to divide the task of
writing such letters among different family or community members, depending
on their specific competencies and social roles. Writing (and reading)
personal letters is considered, also in practical terms, a rather different
kind of sub-activity, with different kinds of connotations, to that of
writing and reading more ‘official’ letters. David touches too,
on a series of interesting cross-cultural and historical aspects of
letter-writing, noting for instance that families in some Amish communities
write letters together, with members adding a few lines at the bottom of the
letter as it is circulated among them. In other Pacific islander communities,
letters can be seen to contain more affect that people are traditionally
allowed to display in their oral conversations. The study of everyday letter
writing as social practice, he concludes, must take account of and describe
in detail not only of the texts themselves, but also the people who write
them, the activities they associate with their letter writing, and the
various material artefacts they have appropriated for use before, during and
after the writing process. |
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Martin Nystrand (USA)
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Martin Nystrand[6]
is director of the Wisconsin branch of the
National Research Center on English Learning & Achievement (CELA)[7]
This project is run in collaboration with the University at Albany, State
University of New York, and with additional sites at the University of
Georgia and the University of Washington. Martin’s research interests
range from the history of ideas about writing, text and meaning, discourse
analysis, classroom discourse and learning, to ecological models of
instruction and learning. He is co-editor of the research journal Written
Communication. Recent books include Opening Dialogue: Understanding the Dynamics
of Language and Learning in the English Classroom; The Structure of Written
Communication: Studies in Reciprocity between Writers and Readers, and What Writers
Know: The Language, Process, and Structure of Written Discourse. |
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His contribution Culture
Supports For Empirical Research On Writing provides a thorough historical
overview of the emergence of writing research in the United States in
the1970’s as a field of empirical research. One key point that he makes
is that great ideas and visions are not enough to wreak change on their own.
There must also be nurturing contexts – cultural and disciplinary
niches – that are receptive to these ideas and give them space and time
to be tried out and developed. Taking as his point of departure the recent
success of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao as an example of
how a specific historical, social and cultural context played a vital role in
the construction of the success of this monolithic project, positioning Gehry
as “the right man with the right design in the right place at the right
time”, Martin goes on to examine how a burgeoning intellectual movement
at Harvard University in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s away
from the then dominant pedagogical, prescriptive concern for text features in
writing instruction and evaluation, and over to empirical research specifically
tailored to describe cognitive writing processes, where text processes and
the writing strategies of individuals were brought to the fore, paved the way
for the development of modern writing research. In tune with the pragmatic
thinking of John Dewey and William James a century before, the new writing
research sought to construe writing as a dynamic, meaning-making process,
within which individual thought and agency became transformed into text. This
issued in a highly productive period of writing research in the 1970’s
where a large number of case-studies were carried out in various (largely
educational) settings, providing many new insights into how individual
writers thought about and organised their own writing processes. |
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In the 1980’s yet
another new focus was brought to the field, largely due to the influence of
anthropological and ethnographical research methodologies and thinking, which
stimulated an increased interest in the social and cultural context of
writing, and their effects on individual writing processes and composition
strategies. Researchers became more attentive to how individuals managed (or
not) to tailor their writing to specific social situations and discourse
communities at different times and places, positioning themselves
intersubjectively and reciprocally in relation to various readers and
response givers. Many of these impulses are present in writing research
today, where there is still a strong focus on various kinds of identity work,
especially in studies of young people’s writing (see for instance Lars
Evensen, Kjell Lars Berge and Patrick Coppock’s chapters in this
present volume). But, as will become clear on reading several of the other
contributions in this volume (see for instance Carolyn Miller, Anna-Malin Karlsson
and Finn Bostad’s chapters), the scope of the writing research field is
now widening considerably in other directions in order to incorporate the
specific characteristics of writing carried out, increasingly
collaboratively, in and with new media. These media allow people to
co-operate with one another at a distance far more easily and more quickly
than before, and to incorporate multimodal forms of representation in the
‘texts’ they write, exchange and talk about, and there is a
growing need to understand the strategies and competencies that they are
developing in doing so. |
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Finally, bearing in
mind that, as David Barton points out in his chapter, there is already a vast
amount of writing being carried on outside of traditional institutional
settings, much of which has been little studied in systematic ways, Martin
has a vital point in his conclusion in when he notes that “Some but not
all of the voices in the new discourse about writing were conventional and
institutional, including the instructional voices of teaches and students, as
well as studies, dissertations and published articles and books. And some of
the voices were cultural and political with sources transcending the academy
itself. Taken together these voices constitute the ‘textual
space’ in which disciplinary voices have meaning and gain
authority.” |
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Lars Sigfred Evensen (Norway)
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Lars Sigfred Evensen[8]
has been worked closely with Martin Nystrand for many years in developing the
international writing research field. He is professor in Applied Linguistics
at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway. His research interests include the epistemology and the
sociology of the disciplinary field of applied linguistics; the development
of written language competence and the teaching of writing, technologies of
writing and hypermedia, text and discourse studies, interactionist
perspectives on communication and curriculum reform in the educational
system. Lars was one of the founders of The Nordic research Group for
Theoretical and Applied Text Linguistics (NORDTEXT) in the early
1980’s, and leader of the Nordic literacy project NORDWRITE, and the
associated Norwegian national literacy project DEVEL: DEVELoping Written
Language Competence. He has published extensively in Norway, Scandinavia and
internationally in the fields of applied linguistics and writing research. At
present he leads the project ICT BABEL which is part of the larger
interdisciplinary research program ICC: Information, Communication and
Competency, at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. The main
tenet of the ICT BABEL project is that successful interdisciplinary
communication is a necessary precondition for continuing innovation in
knowledge development, and the project focuses on to what degree new
information and communication technologies are able to support (or hinder)
such communication. |
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His contribution Grounding
In Interaction builds on earlier work in grounding and social interactionist theory,
and looks at innovation in language use, especially among young people. He
opens by asking the semiotically controversial question: “Would signs
still be signs without somebody to interpret them?”, and follows up by
positioning himself clearly on the ‘no’ side of this long-running
epistemological debate. From this starting point he goes on to insist that
actual people are a constitutive element of the ‘signhood’ of
signs, exemplifying his claim using some interesting materials from an
on-going action research project in which he is involved (‘Invisible
Teenagers’) which studies how young writers in secondary school learn
to argue in written prose. A central tenet of his argument is that innovation
in language comes into being first and foremost at the borders of convention.
Not only student writing, he argues, but also everyday competent written and
spoken discourse stands with “one foot placed firmly in the realm of
convention, while the other searches for the border of convention, sometimes
crossing it,”. In doing so there is a transgression of conventional norms, which creates a
virtual space with a potential for innovation in language, and thus also in
thought and action. He ends with a series of interesting reflections on the
notions of language and genre, also in scientific discourse, noting that they
cannot be construed as static objects, but are dynamic and flexible resources
that develop and change through use in immediate interaction. Linguistic and
genre convention in such a context must be seen as a resource with a
potential for continuing growth and development and not a straitjacket. |
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Kjell Lars Berge (Norway)
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Kjell-Lars Berge[9]
is professor of Nordic
Language and Literature at the
University of Oslo, Norway. His research interests range from textual science
and discourse analysis, to writing research and semiotics. He is involved in
a number of national and transnational research initiatives in Norway and other
Scandinavian countries, amongst others the Norwegian Factual Prose Project
(Norsk Saksprosaprosjekt), which is concerned with the development of a
theoretical and empirical framework for the study of factual prose texts in
Norwegian, and the KAL-project: which is an investigation into the quality of
tenth grade student examination texts in Norwegian. |
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He has titled his
contribution to this volume From Utterance to Text, Again: Theoretical
Reflections on the Notion of ‘Text’ Based on Empirical Studies of
Writing in Different Contexts. Taking as his point of departure the notion, with
which doubtless all contributors to this volume would wholeheartedly
agree, that writing is first and
foremost a way of making meaning – a form of mediation structured in a
particular kind of way, negotiated and further developed in on-going
interaction processes – he goes on to link up to the discussion of
ephemerality in Maurizio Gnerre’s article, by postulating as a
fundamental distinctive potential of writing its potential for persistency.
Whether this potential is fulfilled in practice or not – e-mail
messages and text files on computers can be after all deleted intentionally
(or not), letters and books can be burned etc. – meaning-making through
writing is essentially a way of leaving a trace in the world. As such it may
be continually recontextualised. Each time a written text is recontextualised
and reinterpreted, it comes to constitute a new trace created by the
interpreter. The act of constructing a trace can also be considered as an
utterance, a form of individual expression embedded in an intersubjective
meaning-making process. Children are generally fascinated by writing as a way
of leaving a trace, and their text-making as part of their play and identity
work constantly reflects this fact. Kjell Lars lets us examine a number of
texts made by children in pre-school and elementary school settings, as well
as a fascinating text constructed by a North American Indian chief and
members of his tribe to express their wish to develop a relationship of
mutual respect with the president of the new United States of America. All
these texts combine elements which cannot always be clearly categorised as
either ‘writing’ or ‘drawing’, but which reflect the
variety and mixity of graphical resources which authors may elect to use in
order to make salient for others aspects of their experience which they
consider pertinent. |
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From here, Kjell Lars goes
on to develop a more theoretical discussion of the general notion of text,
pointing out that it must also include forms of expression mediated as both
writing and speech. He contests David Olsen’s (Olsen 1977) distinction
between the utterance (informal oral statements) and text (written prose
statements). His argument is that spoken utterances, as potentially ephemeral
semiotic phenomena, may well be texts, but they NEED not be. In the same way,
written utterances, as potentially persistent semiotic phenomena, may well be
texts but they NEED not be. In terms of cultural semiotic theory (cf. Lotman
1990), to be CULTURALLY defined or classified as texts, spoken and written
utterances need to be considered by the community in which they are
circulated, read and interpreted, as culturally significant or valid in some
larger sense. The hows and whys of processes of cultural evaluation and
valorisation of utterances as texts (or not), the development of systems of
social and cultural norms which explicitly define such processes, and how
these norms come to change over time in response to internal and external
cultural and social pressures are the really interesting meat on the bone of
this particular discussion, but to get properly to grips with this particular
meal we shall have to leave it for other places and times, which there
hopefully will be plenty of in the not too distant future. |
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Anne Freadman (Australia)
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Anne Freadman[10]
is Associate professor in Romance Languages at the University of Queensland,
Australia. Her research interests include
theoretical problems and issues concerning key concepts in general semiotics;
the use of the concept of genre as an analytic device in the study of
particular semiotic practices; and the intersection of genre and gender. She
is currently involved in research into the concept of genre, genre and
gender, and the semiotic writings of C.S. Peirce, and is supervising work in
feminist cultural analysis (women's diaries, women's installation works),
feminist theory (especially literary), rhetoric and translation. Some of her
recent publications include Models of Genre for Language Teaching (1996); Music 'in' Peirce (1993); ... you know, the énonciation ... (1995); Feminist Literary Theory (A Question (or Two)
About Genre) (1996). |
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Her
contribution The Visit Of The Instrument Maker takes as its point of departure
an exchange of telegrams and letters between the famed American father of
pragmati(ic)ism, Charles Sanders Peirce, and the English philosopher and originator
of significs, Lady Victoria Welby. The exchange is interesting because
Peirce, excusing himself in a letter for not having replied to a telegram
some time back from Welby, does so with reference to a curious visit by an
elegant person claiming to be interested in purchasing his house, which had
been advertised by a sign outside to be for sale at the time. The visitor,
however, it subsequently emerged, was in fact a refuge from a nearby Insane
Asylum. The ageing Peirce, probably rather lonely due to being in a very a
difficult period in his professional life, and not initially realising all
the complexities of the situation, had in the course of talking to the man
discovered that they shared an interest in common, since the visitor by
profession was an instrument-maker, and the two had engaged in a lengthy
conversation. This instant rapport can be explained by the fact that Peirce
had worked for a large part of his life at the American Coastal Survey, and
was thus very interested in technologies and mathematics of precision in
measurement, and personally knew a large number of instrument-makers. Seizing
the fact that Peirce used the telling of this particular story to Welby as a
means of providing an excuse for a delay in a sequence of correspondence,
Anne goes on to use the series of exchanges between Peirce and Welby as an
example in discussing and expanding in a very useful way the notions of uptake, whereby it is
possible to construe genres as sequences of texts; mixity of genres, where genres of various
kinds can be seen as parasitic on one another; and finally, the more general
issue of exemplarity, where she discusses the interesting distinction made by
Quintillion between use of standard examples in the teaching of writing, which
encourages students to mimic the ‘typical’ in some supposed class
of genre, and the use of exemplary models, which encourages them to
discover and emulate the uniquely excellent – to find in the very best
models from the past exactly those features, writing strategies and
meaning-making resources, which made them stand out from the pack. Emulation
in this context means, then, to aspire to exemplary status, not merely to
reproduce its forms. |
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Carol Berkenkotter (USA)
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Carol Berkenkotter[11]
is professor in Rhetoric and Communication at the Department of Humanities at
Michigan Technological University. Her research interests range from genre
theory and genre analysis, to the rhetoric of science; disciplinarity and
interdisciplinarity; qualitative methodology; and cultural/historical
approaches to literacy. She has recently published a book together with Tom
Huckin, entitled Genre Knowledge in Disciplinary Communication: Cognition/
Culture/ Power (1995), and is currently working on a second book, entitled Psychiatry's
Rhetorics, on the rhetoric of the psychiatric classification. |
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Carol's contribution to
this present volume builds mainly on this latter work, and is entitled Capturing
Insanity: The Wedding of Photography and Physiognomy in the Nineteenth Century
Medical Journal Article. Here she examines in depth how photography was first
used in a, then, innovative way in Great Britain in the mid 1800’s to
support and illustrate psychiatric case reports, and also rather
disturbingly, how the lack of the possibility of direct reproduction of
photographs in printed publications at the time contributed to changing the
way in which women patients were visually represented in the final versions
of these reports. In one of the interesting cases mentioned in her article, a
young working-class woman reportedly suffering from a condition diagnosed as
‘religious melancholy’, appears in her photograph as a person to
whom we as viewers can relate – she is portrayed as an open person with
a slightly quizzical, even assertive gaze into the camera. In the lithograph
used in the publication, however, she is gazing at the floor, or perhaps a
table where there is a small pile of books on which she is resting her arm
(the books do not appear in the original photograph), seemingly complete
absorbed in her own melancholic world, with no possibility of relationship
with the viewer. |
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What for me was most
interesting about this particular example, quite apart from the fact that it
raises interesting issues about the effects of the different technologies
(photography, writing and lithography) on the representation of insanity (the
theme of the article), is that it forces us to consider to what degree the
lithographic representation was designed to be an intentional manipulation of
the ‘reality’ of the image of the person that was represented in
the photograph. Given that the lithograph most likely was an commissioned
piece of work, what instructions were given to the lithographer, and why? Was
it adapted to support more forcefully the image intended to be presented in
the written text? Was the idea to turn the person represented into a
‘standard’ rather than ‘exemplary’ model (apropos
Anne Freadman’s discussion mentioned above). Like all good examples,
also this one certainly seems to raise a lot more interesting questions for
writing researchers than those one is initially prompted to consider in one
given type of textual context. |
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