[Xmca-l] Re: That on That

Mon Feb 5 02:24:38 PST 2018

David,

At the risk of bouncing off your fascinating observations at something of a tangent, I think your point, that rummaging around in the infinite regress of context may not be helpful when we are trying to understand what is going on in a conversation, underlines my point. Those traces of an interaction which are exportable, while they may be the most interesting and important if one is seeking to make generalizable observations, may not be sufficient to explain what goes on when minds meet. In 'Thinking and Speech', writing about the relationship between 'spontaneous' and 'scientific' (or 'schooled'?) concepts, Vygotsky observes that our spontaneous concepts, the fruits of our experiential sense-making, give colour and vitality to our understanding of the 'system' concepts which we learn to share with others. Without the undercurrents of different speakers different senses (smysl) the meanings which can be held in language would be no more than a labelling system. I would argue that our day to day interactions can take a huge variety of forms, understood in terms of the extent to which we are interested in what lies beneath the common form of people's words. Talk between teachers and students usually does not require or encourage a meeting of minds (although it might be a lot more effective if it did) and what is going on when singers perform a song and listeners listen to it is a whole other kettle of fish - how do you invite a listener to experience the feeling of intimacy? It may be one thing to do this when performing to people whose responses can be intimated but singing (and dancing) out into the darkness of a huge arena or to a studio camera/microphone must require a different kind of communication - so  no wonder the Supremes  (back in 1966 when the conventions for broadcasting were still quite rough around the edges) look as if they are not sure who they are looking at and singing to.

This issue, of the nature of the relationship between public/exportable and private/intimate aspects of interactions, keeps reminding me of a paper in 'Early Years' by Annica Lofdahl and Hector Prieto (http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09575140903161438) which explores the socio-political consequences of requiring Swedish nurseries to publish 'Quality Accounts', to show the world what they are doing. What this paper shows very clearly is how a focus on what can be made public serves to shift the nature of interactions between caregivers and between caregivers and children (we saw the same in the UK when the introduction of the Early Years Foundation Stage resulted in practitioners using the documentation as if it were a checklist of behaviours which they had to capture, record and document in order to provide evidence of children's progress). Some aspects of practice, which felt important to caregivers 'on the floor', were not suitable for inclusion in the Quality Accounts, either because they could not easily be documented in ways which would be meaningful outside the context ('you had to be there, man') or because they were too confidential to be broadcast abroad. What is most significant, however, is the authors observation that knowing they would have to provide an account of what they did was enough to alter caregivers' practices, leading them to prioritise more publishable kinds of interactions. I can see that this might look, from outside, like a positive transformation - helping to make caregivers more 'accountable' but I can't help feeling that a very high price may have been paid in terms of the shift from 'here-and-now' person focused interactions to more professional, 'them out there' focused behaviours. As Niels Bohr noted, you can have 'Klarheit' or you can have 'Richtigkeit' -clarity or 'rightness' - but not both - and clarity always seems more important to 'them out there'.

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: 04 February 2018 21:23
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>
Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: That on That

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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