[Xmca-l] Re: That on That

[David Kellogg]

Rod:

Halliday doesn't do CA--conversation analysis. He doesn't like the fussy
transcription method, which he says only interferes with the ability to
recreate the context of situation from the written record of text. So for
example CA assumes that pauses, hiccups, restarts and so on are
omnirelevant. Sometimes they are--I think that the jerkiness of Trump's
topic management is partly realized by his pauses, hiccups, and restarts.
But often they are not. So for example if a teacher is talking to a class
of children about the Wallace Line that separates Indonesian flora and
fauna from Australian, and a messenger arrives from the principal with a
note about an upcoming air-raid drill, we have to say that the pause,
hiccup, and restart is not contextually relevant (and in fact Ruqaiya Hasan
insists that these are two completely different contexts of situation).
It's pretty easy to show that for prelinguistic children and animals,
prosody is omnirelevant (stress and intonation) and articulation (vowels
and consonants) isn't--that's why Halliday doesn't approve of using IPA to
transcribe infants. But for some forms of advanced literacy the
relationship is the other way around: when you are reading this post, for
example, you are deducing my intonation and stress from my vowels and
consonants (and punctuation) and not the other way around--that's why
Halliday thinks that CA transcription disrupts more than it adds to the
analysis.

And from this there occurs to me (because even when you are writing you are
experiencing your own words as hearer) another distinction between
Ruqaiya's "context of situation" and Vygotsky's social situation of
development. I think that the big contribution of CA to linguistics was not
the fussy transcription system, or the quaint methodological assumption
that everything we need to know in an interaction is right "there" in an
interaction and recoverable to all of the members and therefore to the
analyst. I think that their biggest contribution was to teach us to learn
to see conversation as structural cooperation rather than
functional competition. Turn-taking is supra-grammatical collaboration, and
not rhetorical survival of the fittest. The problem is that the social
situation of development really is both. It is  Vygotsky tells us, a
tension between the child and the environment: a dialectical contradiction,
even during stable periods, and a pretty ferocious form of war during some
of the critical ones. I think that the whole relationship between growth
and learning is tense in exactly this way: embryos grow but do not learn,
and adults learn but do not grow, but the great dialectical contradiction
of those little people caught in between is that children have to do both
at the same time.

One way of understanding why and how Vygotsky had to come up with concepts
like "neoformation" and "social situation of development" is to read the
kind of pedology he wrote when he didn't have these concepts yet. In
"Pedology of the Adolescent", he argues that childhood is not natural, but
invented. Humans invented childhood the way they invented language; women
weaned children early in order to go back to work or to have more children
or both, and that created a long period where children are consuming like
an adult without being able to produce like one. This, as Barbara Rogoff
would say, led to legitimate forms of peripheral participation; as Mariane
Hedigaard would say, it led to children as explorers.  At the other end of
this period, though, there is the opposite contradiction: because of
childhood, adolescents become ready to reproduce like adults long before
they are socio-culturally able to. And so...as the late, great Florence
Ballard said...."can't hurry love!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWAE9nrRhPc

(Notice how the Supremes--still adolescents themselves--are a bit torn,
when they dance, between physically interacting with each other, with the
hearer, and with themselves. It seems to me that this reflects the
indeterminate addresee of the lyrics....)

David



David Kellogg

Recent Article in *Mind, Culture, and Activity* 24 (4) 'Metaphoric,
Metonymic, Eclectic, or Dialectic? A Commentary on “Neoformation: A
Dialectical Approach to Developmental Change”'

Free e-print available (for a short time only) at

http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/YAWPBtmPM8knMCNg6sS6/full


On Sun, Feb 4, 2018 at 8:55 PM, Rod Parker-Rees <
R.Parker-Rees@plymouth.ac.uk> wrote:

> David,
>
> On the question of 'experiencing our own words', I have been interested in
> the extent to which we are also able to experience other people through our
> experience of what they do to how we speak. The various adjustments which
> we make, in the timing and rhythm of our speaking, our intonation and
> accent and even our interpersonal timing and distance, are directly and
> physically experienced and therefore available (albeit largely
> unconsciously) to our memory of what interactions with this person feel
> like. I believe (and I am sure you will know much more about this) that
> linguists vary in terms of how much of this 'instancial', situation
> specific context can or should be acknowledged in analyses of interactions.
> While much can be read from the traces of interaction which can be captured
> on paper, there is also much that is lost. Learning to read and write also
> seems to shift our attention so that what can be recorded becomes more
> significant, more thinkable and more important than the more
> person/situation specific, evanescent context which, however, may be
> particularly 'telling' when it comes to making sophisticated social
> judgements about what someone MEANT by what they said.
>
> And of course, it may be that some people's social judgments are less
> sophisticated than others'.
>
> All the best,
>
> Rod
>
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-l-bounces@
> mailman.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of David Kellogg
> Sent: 03 February 2018 00:40
> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>
> Subject: [Xmca-l] That on That
>
>  When most of us speak, we try to "home in" on context--that is, we try to
> listen to what we are saying not only from the point of view of the speaker
> but also from the point of view of the hearer--who is part of the context
> of situation--and we therefore try to elaborate, to exend, and to enhance
> what we are saying from that point of view. Because speaking is a process
> of realizing or completing thinking--not simply expressing some thought
> that exists already in the mind--this process of transition from the
> speaker's point of view to that of the hearer can be traced in the
> lexicogrammar through what Halliday calls the textual metafunction.
> There are two systems which govern the textual metafunction--which allow
> us to turn our own words into an experiencing of our own words. One is the
> system of Theme which is mostly realized in word order, and the other is
> the system of Information which is largely realized through tonic stress).
> In word order, the speaker must manage a transition from Theme (the
> starting point of the speaker) to Rheme (the endpoint, where the speaker
> hands over to the hearer. In stress, the speaker must go from unstressed
> from Given (information that is shared with the hearer) to stressed New
> (information which is being shared). The variation between "a" and "the"
> which Rod noted is just one example of this double transition: If I say
> "once upon a time there was a man (stressed); the man (unstressed) was a
> president", then "a man" is Rheme, and New iinformation in the first
> clause, but it is Theme and Given information in the second). Another
> example is the difference between "it" which can be used as Theme and as
> Given, and "that" which is used for Rheme and New: we can say "Look at
> THAT!" but we say "LOOK at it!"
> There are some interesting exceptions to this rule, though. That is, there
> are people who cannot seem to home in on context--who do not listen to
> themselves speak and do not manage to auto-adjust by taking in the hearer's
> point of view. As a consequence, they do not become more coherent as they
> speak, but less so.  Here's an example.
> "I think the me—I think it’s terrible. You wanna know the truth? I think
> it’s a disgrace. What’s going on in this country. I think it’s a disgrace.
> The memo was sent to…Congress; it was declassified; Congress will do
> whatever…they’re going to do, but I think it’s a disgrace what’s happening
> in our country. And when you look at that and you see that and so many
> other things what’s (sic) going on….uh lotta people should be ashamed of
> themselves and much worse than that. So I sent it over to Congress; they
> will do whatever they’re going to do; whatever they do is…fine; it was
> declassified and let’s see what happens. But a lot of people should be
> ashamed. Thank you very much."
> The speaker begins with the most common theme in English: "I". There is
> nothing particularly "egocentric" about this: it naturally follows on from
> the question  which the hearer just asked the speaker. But when the speaker
> arrives at the Rheme, which should be "memo", something happens. "It" is
> indicative--it should refer to the memo. So it appears that the speaker is
> saying that the memo is terrible. But that wasn't actually what the speaker
> meant. The speaker tries, heroically, to take the hearer point of view in
> the next clause, with an empty phrase "You wanna know the truth". But he
> then follows this up with a statement which, if we follow the chain of
> endoporic reference, actually says that the memo is a disgrace. In order to
> avoid this implicature, the speaker avoids "homing in" on context and
> instead makes it broader--what's going on in this country." But then back
> to the memo. You must say something about the memo, because that was what
> the question was about. So you say something that is actually entirely
> Given information--without any New at all. But the hearer is expecting
> something New. One must say something new. So "That". "That on That".
>
> David Kellogg
>
> Recent Article in *Mind, Culture, and Activity* 24 (4) 'Metaphoric,
> Metonymic, Eclectic, or Dialectic? A Commentary on “Neoformation: A
> Dialectical Approach to Developmental Change”'
>
> Free e-print available (for a short time only) at
>
> http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/YAWPBtmPM8knMCNg6sS6/full
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