[Xmca-l] Re: Saussure vs Peirce

Sun Mar 17 22:03:02 PDT 2019

Andy,

I'm not sure I understand your sense of "units"? Are the units (e.g.,
words) decomposable into units on their own? Or is their meaning also
dependent upon the whole of which they are a part? (such that the meaning
of words both make up the complex whole and are made up by teh complex
whole).  I tend to see language (along with, for that matter, Marx's
commodity and capital) as the latter but I can't quite tell if you are with
me or not.

There are further troubles when it comes to looking cross linguistically at
so-called words, e.g., with agglutinative languages where sentences are
indeed words (or vice-versa). Not to mention the potential for
smaller-than-word units to have meaning. This is a different problem from
my question about units but it is a problem for taking words-as-units
unless one isn't interested in those other languages.

Enjoying the talk about talk,
-greg

On Sun, Mar 17, 2019 at 6:29 PM Andy Blunden <andyb@marxists.org> wrote:

> Martin, I get the point, but any complex process is made up of units, many
> of them.  That's the point of using analysis by units. The excerpt you give
> is a trivial one. In general you need *all* the numerous utterances in a
> conversation to understand an extended interaction. It is like Engestrom
> who thinks when two activities interact, we have to have a new "fourth
> generation" unit, i.e., two activity systems interacting. But that is only
> because he took the activity system as a *system *not a *unit *in the
> first place.
>
> Andy
> ------------------------------
> Andy Blunden
> http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
> On 18/03/2019 9:14 am, Martin Packer wrote:
>
> Seems to me, David, that the notion that the basic unit is the pair is
> precisely what helps us understand an exchange such as:
>
> A. How are you?
> B. Fine, thanks, and you?
> A. XXX
>
> One pair is constituted by “How are you” and “Fine, thanks,” while “and
> you?” is the first part of a projected second pair. This is why one might
> have the intuition that speaker B is doing more than one thing (though I’d
> suggest 2, not 3), and that something more is expected from speaker A.
>
> Martin
>
>
>
>
> On Mar 17, 2019, at 4:17 PM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Well, Bakhtin is full of precisely the kind of sloppiness that Andy is
> deploring, Helena. So for example Bakhtin says that a whole novel can be
> considered as an utterance. You take down the book and open it. The
> novelist has something to say to you. He says it. And then you close the
> book and you put it back on the shelf.
>
> That's all very well, and it's very useful as a way of showing that
> literature is not some "state within a state": it is also made of language
> stuff, by people who have a historical existence and not just an afterlife.
> But it doesn't help Andy (or me, or my wife who studies these things full
> time) distinguish sub-units within the novel which will help us understand
> how novels are structured, how this structure has changed with their
> function, and how the very functions have changed as literature has
> evolved. And these WERE the problems which Bakhtin set himself (e.g. in
> "Novel and Epic" and elsewhere).
>
> We see the same problem from the other end (micro-rather than macroscopic)
> with the minimal pair (originally, in the work of Sacks, "adjacency pair").
> It's all very well and it's very useful as a way of understanding how
> conversations get structured as they go along, how people know when its
> their turn to talk and how they know when the rules have been broken. But
> it doesn't help us to understand, for example, why we all feel that when
> you say "How are you?" and somebody says "Fine, thanks, and you?" there
> seem to be three utterances in the second pair part, and the exchange as a
> whole doesn't seem finished, even though if we are using turns as the
> element (pair part) of the minimal pair, it really should be.
>
> Craig Brandist remarks that Bakhtin uses the term "dialogue" in so many
> different ways that he has rendered it meaningless. I think the same thing
> is true of the way he uses "utterance".
>
> David Kellogg
> Sangmyung University
>
> New Article;
>
>  David Kellogg (2019) THE STORYTELLER’S TALE: VYGOTSKY’S
> ‘VRASHCHIVANIYA’, THE ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT AND ‘INGROWING’ IN THE
> WEEKEND STORIES OF KOREAN CHILDREN, British Journal of Educational
> Studies, DOI: 10.1080/00071005.2019.1569200
> <https://doi.org/10.1080/00071005.2019.1569200>
>
>
> Some e-prints available at:
>
>
> https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/GSS2cTAVAz2jaRdPIkvj/full?target=10.1080/00071005.2019.1569200
>
>
>
>
> On Mon, Mar 18, 2019 at 1:47 AM Helena Worthen <helenaworthen@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> I find it useful to think of an utterance as bounded on two ends: on one,
>> by the utterance to which it responds, on the other, by the utterance that
>> responds to it. Thus you can discern utterances within utterances.
>> Minimally, a two -part exchange, as Martin says; maximally, a whole stream
>> of briefer utterances bounded by their prompt and response.
>>
>> Helena Worthen
>> helenaworthen@gmail.com
>>
>>
>>
>> On Mar 17, 2019, at 9:32 AM, Martin Packer <mpacker@cantab.net> wrote:
>>
>> According to conversation analysts, the minimal unit in conversation is
>> the adjacency pair: a two-part exchange in which the second utterance is
>> functionally dependent on the first.  Question-answer; greeting-greeting;
>> request-reply, and so on. An utterance, then, is both a turn and a move
>> within a conversation.  An utterance is *not* “complete in itself” - it is
>> a component in a larger organization: at least a pair, and usually a much
>> longer sequence.
>>
>> Martin
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Mar 16, 2019, at 3:11 AM, Andy Blunden <andyb@marxists.org> wrote:
>>
>> I would  have appreciated a definition of some kind of what the writer
>> actually means by "utterance." In absence of that "the word, as a
>> compressed version of the utterance" is nonsense, or at least a step
>> backwards because it obliterates a concept. Otherwise, I wouldn't mind
>> saying that the two are together the micro- and macro-units of dialogue (or
>> something having that meaning). The same as Leontyev has two units of
>> activity: action and activity, and Marx has two units of political economy:
>> commodity and capital. To theorise a complex process you always need two
>> units.
>>
>> The rest of what you have cited reminds me of what Constantin
>> Stanislavskii said about the units of an actor's performance:
>>
>> https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/seminars/stanislavskii.pdf
>>
>> Andy
>> ------------------------------
>> Andy Blunden
>> http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
>> On 16/03/2019 5:42 pm, Arturo Escandon wrote:
>>
>> Thanks for that conceptual jewel, mate.
>>
>> Let me bring here Akhutina to further show their complementariness:
>>
>> The minimal holistic unit of conversation is the utterance. An utterance,
>> unlike a sentence, is complete in itself. The utterance always carries
>> within it the marks and features of who is speaking to whom, for what
>> reason and in what situation; it is polyphonic. An utterance develops from
>> a motivation, “a volitional objective” and progresses through inner speech
>> to external speech. The prime mover of the semantic progression (from the
>> inner word that is comprehensible to me alone to the external speech that
>> he, the listener, will understand) is the comparison of my subjective,
>> evanescent sense, which I attribute to the given word, and its objective
>> (constant for both me and my listener) meaning.Thus, the major building
>> material for speech production is the living two-voice word. But polyphony
>> is a feature of the utterance as expressed in the word; the word carrying
>> personal sense is an abbreviation of the utterance. Thus, the utterance and
>> the word, as a compressed version of the utterance, are the units of speech
>> acts, communication, and consciousness.
>>
>> Best
>>
>> Arturo
>>
>>
>> --
>> Sent from Gmail Mobile
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Martin
>>
>> *"I may say that whenever I meet Mrs. Seligman or Dr. Lowie or discuss
>> matters with Radcliffe-Brown or Kroeber, I become at once aware that my
>> partner does not understand anything in the matter, and I end usually with
>> the feeling that this also applies to myself” (Malinowski, 1930)*
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>

-- 
Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology
880 Spencer W. Kimball Tower
Brigham Young University
Provo, UT 84602
WEBSITE: greg.a.thompson.byu.edu
http://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson
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